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by
Richard Rohr
Read between
July 2 - July 10, 2021
I saw too the reverence that everyone must have for a sinner; instead of condoning his sin, which is in reality his utmost sorrow, one must comfort Christ who is suffering in him. And this reverence must be paid even to those sinners whose souls seem to be dead, because it is Christ, who is the life of the soul, who is dead in them; they are His tombs, and Christ in the tomb is potentially the risen Christ….
Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.
indeed, through the years to come I would have to seek for Him, and usually I would find Him in others—and still more in myself—only through a deliberate and blind act of faith.
not just Jesus of Nazareth
"just" Jesus of Nazareth?
After the Western church separated from the East in the Great Schism of 1054,
Why this date for Rohr?
What if Christ is a name for the transcendent within of every “thing” in the universe?
Isn't this subtly removing Israel by removing her Messiah?
the Full and Big Tradition, by which I mean the perennial tradition,
Huxley
to reground Christianity as a natural religion and not one simply based on a special revelation, available only to a few lucky enlightened people.
?
I call that kind of deep and calm seeing “contemplation.” The essential function of religion is to radically connect us with everything. (Re-ligio = to re-ligament or reconnect.) It is to help us see the world and ourselves in wholeness, and not just in parts. Truly enlightened people see oneness because they look out from oneness, instead of labeling everything as superior and inferior, in or out. If you think you are privately “saved” or enlightened, then you are neither saved nor enlightened, it seems to me!
This self-disclosure of whomever you call God into physical creation was the first Incarnation (the general term for any enfleshment of spirit),
So squishy on terms
But instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world.
Nope
Christians got pretty sloppy in their thinking.
Ironic: 'sloppy' is exactly the thinking here
The Divine has never seemed very worried about us getting his or her exact name right (see Exodus 3:14).
Facepalm
This whole book could be considered nothing more than a footnote to these words of Athanasius!
Athanasius would disagree
the “Second Coming of Christ,” which was unfortunately read as a threat (“Wait till your dad gets home!”), whereas it should more accurately be spoken of as the “Forever Coming of Christ,” which is anything but a threat. In fact, it is the ongoing promise of eternal resurrection
A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail you, always demand more of you, and give you no reasons to fight, exclude, or reject anyone.
The point of the Christian life is not to distinguish oneself from the ungodly, but to stand in radical solidarity with everyone and everything else.
male body with a female soul,
??
In my opinion, this is why the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity did not make much of Paul—he was so interior and psychological, and civilization was still so extroverted and literal.
??
Either Paul was a total narcissist or he really was “chosen.”
Like him, we only know the Christ through observing and honoring the depth of our own human experience.
No
Pope Francis’s strong understanding of individual conscience.
JPII, B16, and deep in Catholic moral theology
I am really a panentheist (God lies within all things, but also transcends them), exactly like both Jesus and Paul. En
Paul calls this bigger Divine identity the “mystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made en Cristo from the very beginning” (Ephesians 1:9–10). Today, we might call it the “collective unconscious.”
Nooo
Perhaps the primary example of our lack of attention to the Christ Mystery can be seen in the way we continue to pollute and ravage planet earth, the very thing we all stand on and live from. Science now appears to love and respect physicality more than most religion does! No wonder that science and business have taken over as the major explainers of meaning for the vast majority of people today (even many who still go to church). We Christians did not take this world seriously, I am afraid, because our notion of God or salvation didn’t include or honor the physical universe. And now, I am
...more
cannot help but think that future generations will label the first two thousand years of Christianity “early Christianity.”
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?
the Flow
So the Flow is actually God? An attribute? Love?
You tend to create a God who is just like you—whereas it was supposed to be the other way around.
I see a New Age Franciscan's image. What God am I making?
Derek Kubilus liked this
Pause to focus on an incarnation of God’s love apparent near you right now.
Anything that draws you out of yourself in a positive way—for all practical purposes—is operating as God for you at that moment.
God needs something to seduce you out and beyond yourself, so God uses three things in particular: goodness, truth, and beauty. All three have the capacity to draw us into an experience of union.
through osmosis, imitation, resonance, contemplation, and mirroring.
Church, temple, and mosque will start to make sense on whole new levels—and at the same time, church, temple, and mosque will become totally boring and unnecessary.
Where is community in Rohr's vision?
Jesus is the gift that honored the gift, you might say.
Do we really think that God had nothing at all to say for 13.7 billion years, and started speaking only in the latest nanosecond of geological time? Did all history prior to our sacred texts provide no basis for truth or authority? Of course not. The radiance of the Divine Presence has been glowing and expanding since the beginning of time, before there were any human eyes to see or know about it.
Creation—be it planets, plants, or pandas—was not just a warm-up act for the human story or the Bible. The natural world is its own good and sufficient story, if we can only learn to see it with humility and love.
Owen Barfield called this phenomenon “original participation.”
first put forth by Augustine in the fifth century, but never mentioned in the Bible—we
Questionable
people do not so much react against the Christian story line, like they used to; instead, they simply refuse to take it seriously.
I have never met a truly compassionate or loving human being who did not have a foundational and even deep trust in the inherent goodness of human nature.
At this point, at least in the United States, it appears that our cultural meaning has pretty much shrunk down to this: It is all about winning. Then, once you win, it becomes all about consuming. I can discern no other underlying philosophy in the practical order of American life today.
French friar Eloi Leclerc (1921–2016) beautifully paraphrased Francis: “If we knew how to adore, then nothing could truly disturb our peace. We would travel through the world with the tranquility of the great rivers. But only if we know how to adore.”
In the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s healings, we find a striking lack of logic to who gets healed and who doesn’t.
Jesus is able to complete the circuit of divine electricity in certain people, healing them physically sometimes, but always spiritually.
God loves you by turning your mistakes into grace, by constantly giving you back to yourself in a larger shape.
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. Thus Jesus can rightly say, “If you ask, you will receive” (Matthew 7:7–8). To ask is to open the conduit from your side. Your asking is only seconding the motion. The first motion is always from God.
Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.*1
[In] spite of everything you always end up with the same conviction: life is good after all, it’s not God’s fault that things go awry sometimes, the cause lies in ourselves. And that’s what stays with me, even now, even when I’m about to be packed off to Poland with my whole family.
His own father and five uncles were Swiss Reformed ministers, and Jung found them to be unhappy and unhealthy men. I am not sure what his exact evidence was for this perception, but clearly it was disillusioning to Jung. He did not want to end up like the religious men in his life.
