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by
Richard Rohr
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July 2 - July 10, 2021
For Jung, wholeness was not to be confused with any kind of supposed moral perfection, because such moralism is too tied up with ego and denial of the inner weakness that all of us must accept. I deeply agree with him.
In his critique of his father and uncles, Jung recognized that many humans had become reflections of the punitive God they worshiped.
Joan of Arc is frequently credited with this brilliant reply when the judge accused her of being the victim of her own imagination: “How else would God speak to me?”
Jung wrote, “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.”*5
As alcoholics often say, your “addiction makes you need more and more of what is not working.”
Why do humans so often presume the exact opposite—that shaming voices are always from God, and grace voices are always the imagination?
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.
What is "grace?" I would ask what "testing the spirits" looks like for Rohr, but I think he just told us.
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.”
There is no such thing as a nonpolitical Christianity. To refuse to critique the system or the status quo is to fully support it—which is a political act well disguised.
True or too binary?
Derek Kubilus liked this
Have you ever noted that Jesus never once speaks glowingly of the nuclear family, careers, or jobs?
The steps toward maturity, it seems, are always and necessarily immature.
Without a universal story line that offers grace and caring for all of creation, Jesus is kept small, and seemingly inept. God’s care must be toward all creatures, or God ends up not being very caring at all, making things like water, trees, animals, and history itself accidental, trivial, or disposable.
have you ever noticed the huge leap the creed makes between “born of the Virgin Mary” and “suffered under Pontius Pilate”? A single comma connects the two statements, and falling into that yawning gap, as if it were a mere detail, is everything Jesus said and did between his birth and his death!
the Apostles’ Creed does not once mention love, service, hope, the “least of the brothers and sisters,” or even forgiveness—anything, actually, that is remotely actionable.
Both creeds reveal historic Christian assumptions about who God is and what God is doing. They reaffirm a static and unchanging universe, and a God who is quite remote from almost everything we care about each day.
No.
Is our only mission to merely keep announcing our vision and philosophy statement?
mere information is rarely helpful unless it also enlightens and “amorizes” your life.
Humanity now needs a Jesus who is historical, relevant for real life, physical, and concrete, like we are; a Jesus whose life can save us even more than his death; a Jesus we can practically imitate, and who sets the bar for what it means to be fully human; and a Christ who is big enough to hold all creation together in one harmonious unity.
Francis MacNutt, Healing (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1974). I worked with Francis in the 1970s and witnessed many levels of healing with my own eyes.
once the real inner journey begins—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.
St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) taught that, “As a human being Christ has something in common with all creatures. With the stones he shares existence, with plants he shares life, with animals he shares sensation, and with the angels he shares intelligence.”
the mere touching of another’s wound probably feels like an act of outward kindness; we don’t realize that its full intended effect is to change us as much as it might change them (there is no indication that Jesus changed, only Thomas).
We need to reconstruct, and not just continue to deconstruct. Then you will see angels everywhere.
Any object that calls forth respect or reverence is the “Christ” or the anointed one for us at that moment,
Illuman.org, Outward Bound, Bill Plotkin’s Animas training, New Warrior Training, et cetera.
Nothing emerges that broadly and over so much time if it is not grounded somehow in our collective human unconscious. One would be foolish to dismiss such things lightly.
I have often said that many Catholics have a poor theology of Mary but an excellent psychology:
My years of work with men’s groups have convinced me of it. In fact, the more macho and patriarchal a culture, the greater its devotion to Mary.
women are most naturally imaged as the receivers of the Divine Gift:
?
note the rather universal pronoun “our”—always “Our Lady,” never “my Lady.”
“Our Lord” or “Our Father.” I never hear official liturgical prayers speak of “my Jesus” or “my Lord.”
Life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die. —W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being”
Presence is always reciprocal, or it is not presence at all.
if we sacrifice Reality in the elements, we end up sacrificing the same Reality in ourselves. As Flannery O’Connor once declared: “Well, if it is just a symbol, to hell with it!”
a centrifugal force that will finally pull everything back into itself—exactly as many physicists predict will happen to the universe the moment it finally stops expanding.
I thought this was debunked
Our predestination to glory is prior by nature to any notion of sin. —John Duns Scotus, OFM
reaffirmed our narrow notion of retributive justice, and legitimated a notion of “good and necessary violence” all the way down.
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 word “scapegoat” came from the phrase “escaping goat,” used in early English translations of the Bible.)
The scapegoat mechanism, our ability to hate ourselves in others and attack, is too seductive and too difficult for most people to recognize. It must be opposed anew by every generation and every culture.
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. Yet the God-Man suffers our rejection willingly so something bigger can happen.
I hate and fear the very things that will save me.
I thank you, Brother Jesus, for becoming a human being and walking the full journey with me. Now I do not have to pretend that I am God.
I thank you for being willing to be considered imperfect, wrong, and strange, so I do not have to be perfect or right, or idealize the so-called normal.
American politics felt vacuous, delusional, empty—and thus vain—a foundation on which it’s impossible to build a civilization. And yet large numbers, including 82 percent of white Evangelicals and 52 percent of white Catholics, seemed to think blatant racism and rather universal mean-spiritedness were somehow like the Jesus they loved so much.
For me, and I can only say for me, it deeply helped to think back to Venus’s eyes, and name all of this suffering and sadness as the one sadness of God.
If suffering, even unjust suffering (and all suffering is unjust), is part of one Great Mystery, then I am willing—and even happy sometimes—to carry my little portion. But I must know that it is somehow helping someone or something, and that it matters in the great scheme of things.
Even Martin Luther’s needed “justification by faith” sent us on a five-hundred-year battle for the private soul of the individual,*3 thus leaving us with almost no care for the earth, society, the outsider, or the full Body of Christ. This is surely one reason why Christianity found itself incapable of critiquing social calamities like Nazism, slavery, and Western consumerism.
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.
Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West.”
