The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe

by Richard Rohr

For the planet and for all living beings to move forward, we can rely on nothing less than an inherent original goodness and a universally shared dignity. Only then can we build, because the foundation is strong, and is itself good.

If our postmodern world seems highly subject to cynicism, skepticism, and what it does not believe in, if we now live in a post-truth America, then we “believers” must take at least partial responsibility for aiming our culture in this sad direction. The best criticism of the bad is still the practice of the better.

To move beyond our small-minded uniformity, we have to extend ourselves outward, which our egos always find a threat, because it means giving up our separation, superiority, and control.

Love is a paradox. It often involves making a clear decision, but at its heart, it is not a matter of mind or willpower but a flow of energy willingly allowed and exchanged, without requiring payment in return. Divine love is, of course, the template and model for such human love, and yet human love is the necessary school for any encounter with divine love. If you’ve never experienced human love—to the point of sacrifice and forgiveness and generosity—it will be very hard for you to access, imagine, or even experience God’s kind of love. Conversely, if you have never let God love you in the deep and subtle ways that God does, you will not know how to love another human in the deepest ways of which you are capable.

The Crucified and Risen Christ uses the mistakes of the past to create a positive future, a future of redemption instead of retribution. He does not eliminate or punish the mistakes. He uses them for transformative purposes. People formed by such love are indestructible. Forgiveness might just be the very best description of what God’s goodness engenders in humanity.

I think humans prefer magical religion, which keeps all the responsibility on God performing or not performing. Whereas mature and transformational religion asks us to participate, cooperate, and change. The divine dance is always a partnered two-step.

You might say that the Eternal Christ is the symbolic “superconductor” of the Divine Energies into this world. Jesus ramps down the ohms so we can handle divine love and receive it through ordinary human mediums.

Grace is just the natural loving flow of things when we allow it, instead of resisting it. Sin is any cutting or limiting of that circuit. And we all sin now and then. But an occasional power outage can help you appreciate how much you need unearned love and deeply rely upon it. Failure is part of the deal!

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.*5

On the inner journey of the soul we meet a God who interacts with our deepest selves, who grows the person, allowing and forgiving mistakes. It is precisely this give-and-take, and knowing there will be give-and-take, that makes God so real as a Lover. God unfolds your personhood from within through a constant increase in freedom—even freedom to fail. Love cannot happen in any other way.

Every attempt to describe any and every action, or seeming inaction, of God will always be relational, interpersonal, and loving—and totally inclusive of you. In light of the Christ Mystery, this unifying love by which the entire material world is governed, we learn that God can never be experienced apart from your best interests being involved.

Human loves are the trial runs. Divine love is always the goal. But it can only build on all the stepping-stones of human relationships—and then it includes them all!

The supreme irony of life is that this voice of Christ works through—and alongside of—what always seems like unwholeness and untruth! God insists on incorporating the seeming negative. There is no doubt that God allows suffering. In fact, God seems to send us on the path toward our own wholeness not by eliminating the obstacles, but by making use of them.

A forgiving God allows us to recognize the good in the supposed bad, and the bad in the supposed perfect or ideal. Any view of God as tyrannical or punitive tragically keeps us from admitting these seeming contradictions. It keeps us in denial about our true selves, and forces us to live on the surface of our own lives. If God is a shaming figure, then most of us naturally learn to deny, deflect, or pass on that shame to others. If God is torturer in chief, then a punitive and moralistic society is validated all the way down. We are back into problem-solving religion instead of healing and transformation.

Many educated and sophisticated people are not willing to submit to indirect, subversive, and intuitive knowing, which is probably why they rely far too much on external law and ritual behavior to achieve their spiritual purposes. They know nothing else that feels objective and solid. Intuitive truth, that inner whole-making instinct, just feels too much like our own thoughts and feelings, and most of us are not willing to call this “God,” even when that voice prompts us toward compassion instead of hatred, forgiveness instead of resentment, generosity instead of stinginess, bigness instead of pettiness. But think about it: If the incarnation is true, then of course God speaks to you through your own thoughts!

The proud cannot know God because God is not proud, but infinitely humble. Remember, only like can know like! A combination of humility and patient seeking is the best spiritual practice of all.

Without the mediation of Christ, we will be tempted to overplay the distance and the distinction between God and humanity. But because of the incarnation, the supernatural is forever embedded in the natural, making the very distinction false.

It takes much of our life, much lived experience, to trust and allow such a process. But when it comes, it will feel like a calm and humble ability to quietly trust yourself and trust God at the same time.

Spiritual satisfactions feed on themselves, grow by themselves, create wholeness, and are finally their own reward. Material satisfactions, while surely not bad, have a tendency to become addictive, because instead of making you whole, they repeatedly remind you of how incomplete, needy, and empty you are.

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.

Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society. In fact, “fast-food religion” and the so-called prosperity gospel are some of the very best ways to actually avoid God—while talking about religion almost nonstop.

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.

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.

Humans and history both grow slowly. We expect people to show up at our doors fully transformed and holy before they can be welcomed in. But growth language says it is appropriate to wait, trusting that metanoeite, or change of consciousness, can only come with time—and this patience ends up being the very shape of love. Without it, church becomes the mere enforcing of laws and requirements. “Pastors,” instead of serving as caretakers of God’s lambs and sheep, are told they should be guards, word police, and dealers in holy antiques. Without an evolutionary worldview, Christianity does not really understand, much less foster, growth or change. Nor does it know how to respect and support where history is heading.

That is the limited and precarious position Christianity puts itself in when it allows itself to be too tied to any culture-bound Jesus, any expression of faith that does not include the Eternal Christ. 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. But grace is not a late arrival, an occasional add-on for a handful of humans, and God’s grace and life did not just appear a few thousand years ago, when Jesus came and a few lucky humans found him in the Bible. God’s grace cannot be a random problem solver doled out to the few and the virtuous—or it is hardly grace at all!

If divine incarnation has any truth to it, then resurrection is a foregone conclusion, and not a one-time anomaly in the body of Jesus, as our Western understanding of the resurrection felt it needed to prove—and then it couldn’t. The Risen Christ is not a one-time miracle but the revelation of a universal pattern that is hard to see in the short run.

There are other glaring oversights in the creeds. Believed to be the earliest formal declaration of Christian belief, 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. It’s a vision and philosophy statement with no mission statement, as it were.

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. Furthermore, they don’t show much interest in the realities of Jesus’s own human life—or ours. Instead, they portray what religious systems tend to want: a God who looks strong and stable and in control. No “turn the other cheek” Jesus, no hint of a simple Christ-like lifestyle is found here.

Humanity now needs a Jesus who is historical, relevant for real life, physical and concrete, like we are. A Jesus whose life can save you 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.

One day the religion of Christ will take another step forward on earth. It will embrace the whole man [sic], all of him, not just half as it does now in embracing only the soul. —Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

So much of our worship and religious effort is the spiritual equivalent of trying to go up what has become the down escalator.

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.

In Jesus, God became part of our small, homely world and entered into human limits and ordinariness—and remained anonymous and largely invisible for his first thirty years. Throughout his life, Jesus himself spent no time climbing, but a lot of time descending, “emptying himself and becoming as all humans are” (Philippians 2:7), “tempted in every way that we are” (Hebrews 4:15) and “living in the limitations of weakness” (Hebrews 5:2).

We do not need to be afraid of the depths and breadths of our own lives, of what this world offers us or asks of us. We are given permission to become intimate with our own experiences, learn from them, and allow ourselves to descend to the depth of things, even our mistakes, before we try too quickly to transcend it all in the name of some idealized purity or superiority. 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.

We cannot jump over this world, or its woundedness, and still try to love God. We must love God through, in, with, and even because of this world. This is the message Christianity was supposed to initiate, proclaim, and encourage, and what Jesus modeled.

I wonder if this is not another shape of our original sin. God “empties himself” into creation (Philippians 2:7), and then we humans spent most of history creating systems to control and subdue that creation for our own purposes and profit, reversing the divine pattern.

Do not think I am talking about believing only what you can see with your eyes, or proposing mere materialism. I am talking about observing, touching, loving the physical, the material, the inspirited universe—in all of its suffering state—as the necessary starting place for any healthy spirituality and any true development. Death and resurrection, not death or resurrection. This is indeed the depth of everything. To stay on the surface of anything is invariably to miss its message—even the surface meaning of our sinfulness.

God never intended most human beings to become philosophers or theologians, but God does want all humans to represent the very Sympathy and Empathy of God.

insisting on a literal belief in the virgin birth of Jesus is very good theological symbolism, but unless it translates into a spirituality of interior poverty, readiness to conceive, and human vulnerability, it is largely a “mere lesson memorized” as Isaiah puts it (29:13). It “saves” no one.

The best way out is if we have first gone in. The only way we can trust up is if we have gone down. That had been the underlying assumption of male initiation rites since ancient times, but today, such inner journeys, basic initiation experiences, are often considered peripheral to “true religion.”

We find our understanding of God moving inwards rather then out!

You can only reform things long term by unlocking them from inside—by their own chosen authoritative sources. Outsiders have little authority or ability to reform anything.

All traditions and traditionalists are searching for sacred objects, places, events, and people on which to found their authority, and this is normal and good. Once we find such a foundation, we make pilgrimages, write scriptures, visit tombs, create customs till they become sacrosanct traditions. We kiss holy rocks, paint art, create sacred architecture, weep with sincerity, and offer devotion to our symbol of the Absolute. But these totems, rituals, tombs (or empty tomb, in our case), and holy places are just early signposts to set us on the path. The full mystery of incarnation, on the other hand, points not just to things, but to the depth of things, the fullness of things, the soul of things, and what some have called the “angels of things.”

I doubt if you can see the image of God (Imago Dei) in your fellow humans if you cannot first see it in rudimentary form in stones, in plants and flowers, in strange little animals, in bread and wine, and most especially cannot honor this objective divine image in yourself. It is a full-body tune-up, this spiritual journey. It really ends up being all or nothing, here and then everywhere.

All people who see with that second kind of contemplative gaze, all who look at the world with respect, even if they are not formally religious, are en Cristo, or in Christ. For them, as Thomas Merton says, “the gate of heaven is everywhere” because of their freedom to respect what is right in front of them—all the time.*5

In the mythic imagination, I think Mary intuitively symbolizes the first Incarnation—or Mother Earth, if you will allow me. (I am not saying Mary is the first incarnation, only that she became the natural archetype and symbol for it, particularly in art, which is perhaps why the Madonna is still the most painted subject in Western art.) I believe that Mary is the major feminine archetype for the Christ Mystery.

The Mary symbol brought together the two disparate worlds of matter and spirit, feminine mother and masculine child, earth and heaven, whether we like it or not.

Like the Christ Mystery itself, the deep feminine often works underground and in the shadows, and—from that position—creates a much more intoxicating message. While church and culture have often denied the Divine Feminine roles, offices, and formal authority, the feminine has continued to exercise incredible power at the cosmic and personal levels.

After the sixteenth century, when Westerners became more rational and literate, most of us stopped thinking symbolically, allegorically, or typologically. But in so doing, we lost something quite important in our spiritual, intuitive, and nonrational understanding of God and ourselves. We narrowed the field considerably and actually lessened the likelihood of inner religious experience. The Bible became an excuse for not learning how literature “works.” Catholics were on symbolic overload; Protestants reacted and became symbolically starved.

Life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die. —W. H. Auden, “For the Time Being”

I have come to realize that, in offering his body, Jesus is precisely giving us his full bodily humanity more than his spiritualized divinity! “Eat me,” he shockingly says, eating being such a fundamental bodily action, more basic and primitive than thinking or talking. The very fleshly humanity that Paul later presents negatively in his usage, Jesus presents positively.