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

by Richard Rohr

The truly one, holy, catholic, and undivided church has not existed for a thousand years now, with many tragic results. We are ready to reclaim it again, but this time around we must concentrate on including—as Jesus clearly did—instead of excluding—which he never did. The only people that Jesus seemed to exclude were precisely those who refused to know they were ordinary sinners like everyone else. The only thing he excluded was exclusion itself. Do check me out on that, and you might see that I am correct.

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)

An eagerness and readiness to love is the ultimate freedom and future. When you’ve been included in the spaciousness of divine love, there is just no room for human punishment, vengeance, rash judgment, or calls for retribution. We certainly see none of this small-mindedness in the Risen Christ after his own rejection, betrayal, and cruel death; we don’t see it even from his inner circle, or in the whole New Testament. I really cannot imagine a larger and more spacious way to live. Jesus’s death and resurrection event was a game changer for history, and it is no surprise that we date our calendar from his lifetime.

This is very true. Why not call for justice?

What kind of God would only push from without, and never draw from within? Yet this is precisely the one-sided God that most of us were offered, and that much of the world has now rejected.

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.

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?”

Jung, a supposed unbeliever, knew that any authentic God experience takes a lot of humility and a lot of honesty. The proud cannot know God because God is not proud, but infinitely humble.

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?

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.

“We must listen to what is supporting us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging us. We must listen to what is alive in us.”

Most Christians have been taught to hate or confess our sin before we’ve even recognized its true shape. But if you nurture hatred toward yourself, it won’t be long before it shows itself as hatred toward others. This is garden-variety Christianity, I am afraid, but it comes at a huge cost to history.

Jesus told his listeners that he preferred the one who actually goes although saying the wrong words, over the one who says the right words but does not act. How did we miss that?