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by
Richard Rohr
Read between
April 18 - April 24, 2022
As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of.*4 Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing “contemplation.”
Contemplation is waiting patiently for the gaps to be filled in, and it does not insist on quick closure or easy answers. It never rushes to judgment, and in fact avoids making quick judgments because judgments have more to do with egoic, personal control than with a loving search for truth.
But God loves things by becoming them. God loves things by uniting with them, not by excluding them.
Our faith became a competitive theology with various parochial theories of salvation, instead of a universal cosmology inside of which all can live with an inherent dignity.
Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ’s historical manifestation in time. Jesus is a Third Someone, not just God and not just man, but God and human together.
Faith, hope, and love are the very nature of God, and thus the nature of all Being. Such goodness cannot die. (Which is what we mean when we say “heaven.”)
Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual,
The world no longer trusts Christians who “love Jesus” but do not seem to love anything else.
If I were to write that today, people would call me a pantheist (the universe is God), whereas I am really a panentheist (God lies within all things, but also transcends them), exactly like both Jesus and Paul.
We would have helped history and individuals so much more if we had spent our time revealing how Christ is everywhere instead of proving that Jesus was God.
The current world has been largely taken for granted or ignored, unless it could be exploited for our individual benefit. Why would people with such a belief ever feel at home in heaven? They didn’t even practice for it! Nor did they learn how to feel at home on earth.
As St. Augustine would courageously put it in his Retractions: “For what is now called the Christian religion existed even among the ancients and was not lacking from the beginning of the human race.”*4 Think about that: Were Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, Mayans and Babylonians, African and Asian civilizations, and the endless Native peoples on all continents and isolated islands for millennia just throwaways or dress rehearsals for “us”? Is God really that ineffective, boring, and stingy? Does the Almighty One operate from a scarcity model of love and forgiveness? Did the Divinity need to
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The God we’ve been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.
You tend to create a God who is just like you—whereas it was supposed to be the other way around.
The proof that you are a Christian is that you can see Christ everywhere else.
God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more.
Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes. —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
how you do anything is how you do everything.
As John’s First Letter says, quite directly, “Anyone who says he loves God and hates his brother [or sister] is a liar” (4:20). In the end, either you love everything or there is reason to doubt that you love anything.
But if you nurture hatred toward yourself, it won’t be long before it shows itself as hatred toward others. This is garden-variety Christianity, I am afraid, but it comes at a huge cost to history.
Comfortable people tend to see the church as a quaint antique shop where they can worship old things as substitutes for eternal things.
Jesus was clearly more concerned with what Buddhists call “right action” (“orthopraxy” in Christianity) than with right saying, or even right thinking. You can hear this message very clearly in his parable of the two sons in Matthew 21:28–31: One son says he won’t work in the vineyard, but then does, while the other says he will go, but in fact doesn’t. Jesus told his listeners that he preferred the one who actually goes, although saying the wrong words, over the one who says the right words but does not act. How did we miss that?
That’s why people in the first thousand years loved her so much. In Mary, we see that God must never be forced on us, and God never comes uninvited.
Most of us in the American Catholic church feel that the culture of faith was passed on to us much more from the nuns than from the priests. Feminine power is deeply relational and symbolic—and thus transformative—in ways that men cannot control or even understand. I suspect that is why we fear it so much.
As St. Augustine said, we must feed the body of Christ to the people of God until they know that they are what they eat, and they are what they drink!*1
We are not just humans having a God experience. The Eucharist tells us that, in some mysterious way, we are God having a human experience!
Christians are meant to be the visible compassion of God on earth more than “those who are going to heaven.”
He did not come to change God’s mind about us. It did not need changing. Jesus came to change our minds about God—and about ourselves—and about where goodness and evil really lie.
The crucifixion of Jesus—whom we see as the Son of God—was a devastating prophecy that humans would sooner kill God than change themselves.
Unless we find the communal meaning and significance of the suffering of all life and ecosystems on our planet, we will continue to retreat into our individual, small worlds in our quest for personal safety and sanity. Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with.
We have always made it hard for God to give away God—for free!
“Love could not bear that.”
Threats of hell are unfortunately more memorable to people than promises of heaven.
Christians have largely read him as if he was focused on what it takes for individuals to “go to heaven” and avoid hell. But Paul never once talks about our notion of hell! Most people fail to notice that. He would have agreed with Jesus, I think, that humans are punished by their sins more than for their sins. Goodness is its own reward, and evil is its own punishment—although
The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things. —Mechtild of Magdeburg (1212–1282)
