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by
Richard Rohr
God does not offer Himself to our finite beings as a thing all complete and ready to be embraced. For us, He is eternal discovery and eternal growth. The more we think we understand Him, the more he reveals himself as otherwise. The more we think we hold him, the further He withdraws, drawing us into the depths of himself.*6
Remember again, God loves you by becoming you, taking your side in the inner dialogue of self-accusation and defense. God loves you by turning your mistakes into grace, by constantly giving you back to yourself in a larger shape. God stands with you, and not against you, when you are tempted to shame or self-hatred.
The receiving of love lets us know that there was indeed a Giver. And freedom to even ask for love is the beginning of the receiving.
Any view of God as tyrannical or punitive tragically keeps us from admitting these seeming contradictions.
“My pilgrim’s progress has been to climb down a thousand ladders until I could finally reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth that I am.”
I would even say that anything said with too much bravado, overassurance, or with any need to control or impress another, is never the voice of God within you.
If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God.
We must learn how to recognize the positive flow and to distinguish it from the negative resistance within ourselves. It takes years, I think. If a voice comes from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the “Accuser,” which is the literal meaning of the biblical word “Satan.” Shaming, accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks. It is how we talk.
truth is always for the sake of love—and not an absolute end in itself, which too often becomes the worship of an ideology.
Jesus was clearly more concerned with what Buddhists call “right action” (“orthopraxy” in Christianity) than with right saying, or even right thinking.
once you come to know that, in Christ, God is forever overcoming the gap between human and divine—the Christian path becomes less about climbing and performance, and more about descending, letting go, and unlearning. Knowing and loving Jesus is largely about becoming fully human, wounds and all, instead of ascending spiritually or thinking we can remain unwounded.
God hides in the depths and is not seen as long as we stay on the surface of anything—even the depths of our sins.
Only later did saints and scholars see that Jesus and Paul had drawn upon the deepest sources of their own tradition to then totally reframe that tradition for the larger world.
What I am saying in this chapter is that there must be a way to be both here and in the depth of here. Jesus is the here, Christ is the depth of here.
When Jesus spoke the words “This is my Body,” I believe he was speaking not just about the bread right in front of him, but about the whole universe, about every thing that is physical, material, and yet also spirit-filled.
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
The Eucharist then becomes our ongoing touchstone for the Christian journey, a place to which we must repeatedly return in order to find our face, our name, our absolute identity, who we are in Christ, and thus who we are forever. 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!
Who we are in God is who we all are.
Instead, they claimed that the cross was a freely chosen revelation of Total Love on God’s part. In so doing, they reversed the engines of almost all world religion up to that point, which assumed we had to spill blood to get to a distant and demanding God.
We can do so much better, and doing so will not diminish Jesus in the least. In fact, it will allow Jesus to take on a universal and humanly appealing dimension, striking at the heart of our inability to believe in unconditional love. The cross cannot be an arbitrary and bloody sacrifice entirely dependent on a sin that was once committed by one man and one woman under a tree between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
It is not God who is violent. We are. It is not that God demands suffering of humans. We do. God does not need or want suffering—neither in Jesus nor in us.
The cross is not just a singular event. It’s a statement from God that reality has a cruciform pattern. Jesus was killed in a collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths, caught between the demands of an empire and the religious establishment of his day. The cross was the price Jesus paid for living in a “mixed” world, which is both human and divine, simultaneously broken and utterly whole. He hung between a good thief and a bad thief, between heaven and earth, inside of both humanity and divinity, a male body with a feminine soul, utterly whole and yet utterly
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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.
Following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world. To allow what God for some reason allows—and uses. And to suffer ever so slightly what God suffers eternally. Often, this has little to do with believing the right things about God—beyond the fact that God is love itself.
God saves by loving and including, not by excluding or punishing.
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.
JESUS SPEAKS TO YOU FROM THE CROSS I am what you are most afraid of: your deepest, most wounded, and naked self. I am what you do to what you could love. I am your deepest goodness and your deepest beauty, which you deny and disfigure. Your only badness consists in what you do to goodness—your own and anybody else’s. You run away from, and you even attack, the only thing that will really transform you. But there is nothing to hate or to attack. If you try, you will become a mirror image of the same. Embrace it all in me. I am yourself. I am all of creation. I am everybody and every thing.
Conformity is not the same as love; joining does not imply an actual change of heart and mind.
We are all saved in spite of our mistakes and in spite of ourselves. We are all caught up in the cosmic sweep of Divine grace and mercy.
Once I know that all suffering is both our suffering and God’s suffering, I can better endure and trust the desolations and disappointments that come my way.
It is no longer about being correct. It is about being connected. Being in right relationship is much, much better than just trying to be “right.”
Resurrection is just incarnation taken to its logical conclusion. If God inhabits matter, then we can naturally believe in the “resurrection” of the body.
If creation is “very good” (Genesis 1:31) at its very inception, how could such a divine agenda ever be undone by any human failure to fully cooperate? “Very good” sets us on a trajectory toward resurrection, it seems to me. God does not lose or fail. That is what it means to be God.
our endless attempts to prove a supernatural event are misguided from the start, because neither Christ nor Jesus is outside of our natural reality in the first place.
It will really help you, Christian or not, if you can begin to see Jesus—and Christ—as coming out of Reality, naming it, giving it a face, not appearing to Reality from another world. There is no group to join here, no need to sign on the dotted line, only a generous moment of recognition that the Inner and the Outer are one and the same—our inner meaning and Christ’s outer meaning, if you will. They mirror one another: Human anthropology matches a divine theology.
Thus we are strongly warned against such negativity in every way, and such things are called “sin” or even the state of “hell,” which is not really a geographical place but a very real state of consciousness.
St. Maximus the Confessor (580–662) put it, “God made all beings to this end, to [enjoy the same union] of humanity and divinity that was united in Christ.”
Jesus was meant to be the guarantee that divinity can indeed reside within humanity, which is always our great doubt and denial. And once that is possible, then most of our problems are already solved.
God is by definition eternal, and God is Love (1 John 4:16), which is also eternal (1 Corinthians 13:13), and this same Love has been planted in our hearts (Romans 5:5, 8:9) by the Spirit dwelling within us. Such fully Implanted Love cannot help but evolve and prove victorious, and our word for that final victory is “resurrection.”
When the message of a punishing God is so visible, dualistic, and frightening, how do you ever undo it, no matter how consoling your sermons and liturgies might be? Even worse, the many Evangelical songs about the wrath of God, along with “fire and brimstone” sermons, often did nothing but reinforce fear of God over trust in or love of God.
God’s justice makes things right at their very core, and divine love does not achieve its ends by mere punishment or retribution.
“I am telling you something that has been a secret,” Paul writes in 1 Corinthians (15:51). “We are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed.”
For Jesus to become Christ, he must surpass the bounds of space and time, ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender. Frankly, he must rise above any religion formed in his name that remains tribal, clannish, xenophobic, or exclusionary. Otherwise, he is not the “Savior of the World” (John 4:42) at all.
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 thought and language of that period led most people to ascribe final causality to God.
Nonattachment (freedom from full or final loyalties to human-made domination systems) is the best way I know of protecting people from religious zealotry or any kind of antagonistic thinking or behavior. There is nothing to be against, but just keep concentrating on the Big Thing you are for!
Did you ever notice that Jesus himself was not really that upset at the bad behavior that most of us call sin? Instead, he directed his critical attention toward people who did not think they were sinners, who could not see their own shadows or dark sides, or acknowledge their complicity in the world’s domination systems.
Evil was seen by both Jesus and Paul as corporate bondage and illusion, more than just perverse private behavior.
The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things.
The contemplative mind can see things in their depth and in their wholeness instead of just in parts. The binary mind, so good for rational thinking, finds itself totally out of its league in dealing with things like love, death, suffering, infinity, God, sexuality, or mystery in general.
The binary mind provides quick security and false comfort, but never wisdom. It thinks it is smart because it counters your idea with an opposing idea. There is usually not much room for a “reconciling third.” I see this in myself almost every day.
