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

by Richard Rohr

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.

Reflections like these—especially considering the circumstances—make Etty a profound expression for us of complete wholeness, or what St. Bonaventure called the “coincidence of opposites.” How does anyone achieve such a holding together of opposites—things like inner acceptance and outer resistance, intense suffering and perfect freedom, my little self and an infinite God, sensuality and intense spirituality, the need to blame somebody and the freedom to blame nobody? Etty Hillesum demonstrated this ability like few people I have ever studied. Either such people are the cutting edge of human consciousness and civilization, or they are mentally deranged. They surely far transcend any formal religion. Etty Hillesum is but one example of another function of the Christ: a universally available “voice” that calls all things to become whole and true to themselves. God’s two main tools in this direction, from every appearance, seem to be great love and great suffering—and often great love that invariably leads to great suffering.

God seems to send us on the path toward our own wholeness not by eliminating the obstacles, but by making use of them.

Yet Jung was neither an atheist nor anti-Christian. He insisted that each of us has an inner “God Archetype,” or what he termed the “whole-making instinct.” The God Archetype is the part of you that drives you toward greater inclusivity by deep acceptance of the Real, the balancing of opposites, simple compassion toward the self, and the ability to recognize and forgive your own shadow side. 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. 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.

Wholeness for Jung was about harmony and balancing, a holding operation more than an expelling operation. But he recognized that such consciousness was costly, because humans prefer to deal with the tensions of life by various forms of denial, moralizing, addiction, or projection.

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! As Joan of Arc brilliantly replied when the judge accused her of being the victim of her own imagination, “How else would God speak to me?”

The inner voice so honored by Hillesum and Jung is experienced as the deepest and usually hidden self, where most of us do not go. It truly does speak at a level “beneath” rational consciousness, a place where only the humble—or the trained—know how to go.

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.

This is why saints like Augustine, Teresa of Avila, and Carl Jung seem to fully equate the discovery of their own souls with the very discovery of God. 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. Isn’t that what we all want?

This is how I came to know God

If you can trust and listen to this inner divine image, this whole-making instinct, or what I called in an earlier book your “True Self,”*5 you will be moving forward with your best, your largest, your kindest, your most inclusive self. (I should also add “your most compassionately dissatisfied self,” because the soul’s journey invites us to infinite depth that we can never fully plumb!)

Spiritual satisfactions feed on themselves, grow by themselves, create wholeness, and are finally their own reward.

Spiritual satisfactions will often be communicated to us in material, embodied, and ecstatic forms, however. Embodiment is good and necessary, so don’t dismiss it too quickly as “the flesh.” The difference is in how we encounter these forms. If we can be satisfied to enjoy them, observe them, participate in them, they give us ongoing joy. They are fingers pointing at the moon. But once we try to possess, capture, or “own” the moon, or any material thing, pulling it inside our own ego control, it is somehow polluted.

In fact, far from consuming spiritual gifts for yourself alone, you must receive all words of God tenderly and subtly, so that you can speak them to others tenderly and with subtlety. 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.

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. God is supremely nonviolent, and I have learned that from the saints and mystics that I have read and met and heard about. That many holy people cannot be wrong.

Jesus quite clearly believed in change. In fact, the first public word out of his mouth was the Greek imperative verb metanoeite, which literally translates as “change your mind” or “go beyond your mind” (Matthew 3:2, 4:17, and Mark 1:15). Unfortunately, in the fourth century, St. Jerome translated the word into Latin as paenitentia (“repent” or “do penance”), initiating a host of moralistic connotations that have colored Christians’ understanding of the Gospels ever since. The word metanoeite, however, is talking about a primal change of mind, worldview, or your way of processing—and only by corollary about a specific change in behavior.

This misunderstanding contributed to a puritanical, externalized, and largely static notion of the Christian message that has followed us to this day. Faith became about external requirements that could be enforced, punished, and rewarded, much more than an actual change of heart and mind, which Jesus describes as something that largely happens “in secret, where your Father who sees all that is done in secret can reward you” (Matthew 6:4, 6, 18). Jesus invariably emphasized inner motivation and intention in his moral teaching. He made religion about interior change and “purity of heart” (Matthew 5:8), rather than anything people can see, or anything that will produce any social payoff or punishment. This refines religion at the very point where it’s most likely to become corrupt and manipulative.

In religion, though, many prefer magical, external, one-time transactions instead of the universal pattern of growth and healing through loss and renewal. This universal pattern is the way that life perpetuates itself in ever-new forms—ironically, through various kinds of death.