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

by Richard Rohr

Anything that draws you out of yourself in a positive way—for all practical purposes—is operating as God for you at that moment.

How else can the journey begin? How else are you drawn forward, now not by idle beliefs but by inner aliveness? 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.

For Paul and for ordinary mystics like you and me, the kind of seeing I’m describing is a relational and reciprocal experience, in which we find God simultaneously in ourselves and in the outer world beyond ourselves. I doubt if there is any other way. Presence is never self-generated, but always a gift from another, and faith is always relational at the core. Divine seeing cannot be done alone, but only as one consciousness interfaces with another, and the two parties volley back and forth, meeting subject to subject. Presence must be offered and given, evoked and received. It can happen in a physical gesture, a quiet word or smile, a meal shared with someone we care for, where we are suddenly enlivened by a force larger than the two of us.

God is not bound by the human presumption that we are the center of everything, and creation did not actually demand or need Jesus (or us, for that matter) to confer additional sacredness upon it. From the first moment of the Big Bang, nature was revealing the glory and goodness of the Divine Presence; it must be seen as a gratuitous gift and not a necessity.

Jesus came to live in its midst, and enjoy life in all its natural variations, and thus be our model and exemplar. Jesus is the gift that honored the gift, you might say.

And how can we imagine God as caring about us if God does not care about everything else too?

But once we become aware of the generous, creative Presence that exists in all things natural, we can receive it as the inner Source of all dignity and worthiness. Dignity is not doled out to the worthy. It grounds the inherent worthiness of things in their very nature and existence.

St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) taught that to work up to loving God, start by loving the very humblest and simplest things, and then move up from there.

In the end, either you love everything or there is reason to doubt that you love anything. This one love and one loveliness was described by many medieval theologians and others as the “Great Chain of Being.” The message was that if you failed to recognize the Presence in any one link of the chain, the whole sacred universe would fall apart. It really was “all or nothing.”

The divine pattern is set: Doing must be balanced out by not-doing, in the Jewish tradition called the “Sabbath Rest.” All contemplation reflects a seventh-day choice and experience, relying on grace instead of effort. Full growth implies timing and staging, acting and waiting, working and not working.

The true and essential work of all religion is to help us recognize and recover the divine image in everything. It is to mirror things correctly, deeply, and fully until all things know who they are. A mirror by its nature reflects impartially, equally, effortlessly, spontaneously, and endlessly. It does not produce the image, nor does it filter the image according to its perceptions or preferences. Authentic mirroring can only call forth what is already there.

there is a divine mirror that might be called the very “Mind of Christ.” The Christ mirror fully knows and loves us from all eternity, and reflects that image back to us.

Do you then also see the lovely significance of John’s statement “It is not because you do not know the truth that I write to you, but because you know it already” (1 John 1:21)? He is talking about an implanted knowing in each of us—an inner mirror, if you will. Today, many would just call it “consciousness,” and poets and musicians might call it the “soul.” The prophet Jeremiah would call it “the Law written in your heart” (31:33), while Christians would call it the “Indwelling Holy Spirit.” For me, these terms are largely interchangeable, approaching the same theme from different backgrounds and expectations.

Our inherent “likeness to God” depends upon the objective connection given by God equally to all creatures, each of whom carries the divine DNA in a unique way. Owen Barfield called this phenomenon “original participation.” I would also call it “original blessing” or “original innocence” (“unwoundedness”).*2

Whatever you call it, the “image of God” is absolute and unchanging. There is nothing humans can do to increase or decrease it. And it is not ours to decide who has it or does not have it, which has been most of our problem up to now. It is pure and total gift, given equally to all.

But after Augustine, most Christian theologies shifted from the positive vision of Genesis 1 to the darker vision of Genesis 3—the so-called fall, or what I am calling the “problem.” Instead of embracing God’s master plan for humanity and creation—what we Franciscans still call the “Primacy of Christ”—Christians shrunk our image of both Jesus and Christ, and our “Savior” became a mere Johnny-come-lately “answer” to the problem of sin, a problem that we had largely created ourselves. That’s a very limited role for Jesus. His death instead of his life was defined as saving us! This is no small point. The shift in what we valued often allowed us to avoid Jesus’s actual life and teaching because all we needed was the sacrificial event of his death. Jesus became a mere mop-up exercise for sin, and sin management has dominated the entire religious story line and agenda to this day. This is no exaggeration.

Just as goodness is inherent and shared, so it seems with evil. And this is, in fact, a very merciful teaching. Knowledge of our shared wound ought to free us from the burden of unnecessary—and individual—guilt or shame, and help us to be forgiving and compassionate with ourselves and with one another.

The theology of mistrust and suspicion has manifested itself in all kinds of misguided notions: a world always in competition with itself; a mechanical and magical understanding of baptism; fiery notions of hell; systems of rewards and punishments, shaming and exclusion of all wounded individuals (variously defined in each century); beliefs in the superiority of skin color, ethnicity, or nation.

The Christian story line must start with a positive and overarching vision for humanity and for history, or it will never get beyond the primitive, exclusionary, and fear-based stages of most early human development.

The only way, then, to increase authentic spirituality is to deliberately practice actually enjoying a positive response and a grateful heart. And the benefits are very real. By following through on conscious choices, we can rewire our responses toward love, trust, and patience. Neuroscience calls this “neuroplasticity.” This is how we increase our bandwidth of freedom, and it is surely the heartbeat of any authentic spirituality.

Paul again gives us an answer. He says, “There are only three things that last, faith, hope, and love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). In Catholic theology we called these three essential attitudes the “theological virtues,” because they were a “participation in the very life of God”—given freely by God, or “infused” into us at our very conception. In this understanding, faith, hope, and love are far more defining of the human person than the “moral virtues,” the various good behaviors we learn as we grow older.

From the very beginning, faith, hope, and love are planted deep within our nature—indeed they are our very nature (Romans 5:5, 8:14–17). The Christian life is simply a matter of becoming who we already are (1 John 3:1–2, 2 Peter 1:3–4). But we have to awaken, allow, and advance this core identity by saying a conscious yes to it and drawing upon it as a reliable and Absolute Source.*4 Again, image must become likeness.

In other words, we matter. We do have to choose to trust reality and even our physicality, which is to finally trust ourselves. Our readiness to not trust ourselves is surely one of our recurring sins. Yet so many sermons tell us to never trust ourselves, to only trust God. That is far too dualistic. How can a person who does not trust himself know how to trust at all? Trust, like love, is of one piece. (By the way, at this point in history, “trust” is probably a much more helpful and descriptive word than “faith,” a notion that has become far too misused, intellectualized, and even banal.)

A trust in inner coherence itself. “It all means something!” (Faith) A trust that this coherence is positive and going somewhere good (Hope) A trust that this coherence includes me and even defines me (Love)

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.

Love, which might be called the attraction of all things toward all things, is a universal language and underlying energy that keeps showing itself despite our best efforts to resist it.

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.

Love is constantly creating future possibilities for the good of all concerned—even, and especially, when things go wrong. Love allows and accommodates everything in human experience, both the good and the bad, and nothing else can really do this. Nothing. Love flows unstoppably downward, around every obstacle—like water. Love and water seek not the higher place bu...

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.

Religion, at its best, helps people to bring this foundational divine love into ever-increasing consciousness. In other words, it’s more about waking up than about cleaning up. Early-stage religion tends to focus on cleaning up, which is to say, determining who meets the requirements for moral behavior and religious belief. But Jesus threw a wrench into this whole machinery by refusing to enforce or even bother with what he considered secondary issues like the Sabbath, ritual laws, purity codes, membership requirements, debt codes, on and on. He saw they were only “human commandments,” which far too often took the place of love.

This is why love and growth demand discernment, not enforcement.

Mere obedience is far too often a detour around actual love. Obedience is usually about cleaning up, love is about waking up.

All of us need someone or something to connect our hearts with our heads. Love grounds us by creating focus, direction, motivation, even joy—and if we don’t find these things in love, we usually will try to find them in hate.

This is the God Instinct, which we might just call the “need to adore.” It is the need for one overarching focus, direction, and purpose in life, or what the Hebrew Scriptures describe as “one God before you” (Exodus 20:3). Parenting and family are the primary school for the love instinct, and always will be. They serve as the basic container, in which the soul, the heart, the body, and even the mind can flourish.

Or as the 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.”*3

Of course, adoration is finally the response to something Perfect. But the genius of love is that it teaches us how to give ourselves to imperfect things too. Love, you might say, is the training ground for adoration.

God is not in competition with reality, but in full cooperation with it. All human loves, passions, and preoccupations can prime the pump, and only in time do most of us discover the first and final Source of those loves. God is clearly humble and does not seem to care who or what gets the credit.

Whatever elicits the flow for you—in that moment and encounter, that thing is God for you!

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.

To complete the circuit of Divine Love, we often need a moment of awe, a person who evokes that electric conductivity, something we can deeply respect, or even call “Father” or “Mother” or “Lover” or just “beautiful.” Only then do we find the courage and confidence to complete God’s circuit from our side. This is why people know they do not fully choose love; they fall into it, allow it, and then receive its strong charge. The evidence that you are involved in this flow will often seem two-sided. You are simultaneously losing control and finding it.

Similarly, as I look at the things and people I have tried to love in my life, I would have to say, “They made me do it!” It was the inherent goodness, inner beauty, vulnerability, deep honesty, or generosity of spirit from the other side that drew me out of myself and toward them. In a very real sense, I did not initiate love toward them. Rather, it was taken from me! It was pulled out of me—by them.

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!

Let me offer a further quotation from Teilhard’s Divine Milieu, remembering that humans do not tend to get invested in things unless those things somehow include them: 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

God creates the pullback too, “hiding his face” as it was called by so many mystics and Scriptures. God creates a vacuum that God alone can fill. Then God waits to see if we will trust our God partner to eventually fill the space in us, which now has grown even more spacious and receptive. This is the central theme of darkness, necessary doubt, or what the mystics called “God withdrawing his love.” They knew that what feels like suffering, depression, uselessness—moments when God has withdrawn—these moments are often deep acts of trust and invitation to intimacy on God’s part.

But God rewards me for letting him reward me. This is the divine two-step that we call grace: I am doing it, and yet I am not doing it; It is being done unto me, and yet by me too. Yet God always takes the lead in the dance, which we only recognize over time.

When we speak of Christ, we are speaking of an ever-growing encounter, and never a fixed package that is all-complete and must be accepted as is. 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.

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. If your authority figures never did that for you, it can be hard to feel it or trust it.*6 But you must experience this love at a cellular level at least once. (Remember, the only thing that separates you from God is the thought that you are separate from God!)

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!