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

by Richard Rohr

Brain studies have shown that we may be hardwired to focus on problems at the expense of a positive vision. The human brain wraps around fear and problems like Velcro. We dwell on bad experiences long after the fact, and spend vast amounts of energy anticipating what might go wrong in the future. Conversely, positivity and gratitude and simple happiness slide away like cheese on hot Teflon. Studies like the ones done by the neuroscientist Rick Hanson show that we must consciously hold on to a positive thought or feeling for a minimum of fifteen seconds before it leaves any imprint in the neurons. The whole dynamic, in fact, is called the Velcro/Teflon theory of the mind. We are more attracted to the problem than to the solution, you might say.

This is why I cannot abandon an Orthodox or Catholic worldview. For all of their poor formulations, they still offer humanity a foundationally positive anthropology (even though many individuals never learn about it because of poor catechesis!), and not just a moral worthiness contest, which is always unstable and insecure.

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.)

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.

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 flows unstoppably downward, around every obstacle—like water. Love and water seek not the higher place but always the lower. That’s why forgiveness is often the most powerful display of love in action. When we forgive, we acknowledge that there is, in fact, something to forgive—a mistake, an offense, an error—but instead of reverting to survival mode, we release the offending party from any need for punishment or recrimination. In so doing, we bear witness to the Ever Risen and Always Loving Christ, who is always “going ahead of you into Galilee, and that is where you will see him” (Matthew 28:7). Un-forgiveness lives in a repetitive past, which it cannot let go of. But forgiveness is a largeness of soul, without which there is no future or creative action—only the repetition of old story lines, remembered hurts, and ever-increasing claims of victimhood for all concerned.

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.

Cleaning up is a result of waking up, but most of us put the cart before the horse.

Obedience is usually about cleaning up, love is about waking up.

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.

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.

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.

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!

To ask is to open the conduit from your side. Your asking is only seconding the motion. The first motion is always from God.

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.

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.

the full journey towards wholeness must always include the negative experiences (the “cross”) that we usually reject.

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. I hope I am not doing that here. If any thought feels too harsh, shaming, or diminishing of yourself or others, it is not likely the voice of God. Trust me on that. That is simply your voice. Why do humans so often presume the exact opposite—that shaming voices are always from God, and grace voices are always the imagination? That is a self-defeating (“demonic”?) path. Yet, as a confessor and a spiritual director, I can confirm that this broken logic is the general norm. 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.

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.

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.

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. The common misunderstanding puts the cart before the horse; we think we can change a few externals while our underlying worldview often remains fully narcissistic and self-referential.

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. Like Pilate, many Christians choose to wash their hands in front of the crowd and declare themselves innocent, saying with him, “It is your concern” (Matthew 27:25). Pilate maintains his purity and Jesus pays the price.

Christ is both the Divine Radiance at the Beginning Big Bang and the Divine Allure drawing us into a positive future. We are thus bookended in a Personal Love—coming from Love, and moving toward an ever more inclusive Love. This is the Christ Omega! (Rev. 1:6)

The New Testament has a clear sense of history working in a way that is both evolutionary and positive. See, for example, Jesus’s many parables of the Kingdom, which lean heavily on the language of growth and development. His common metaphors for growth are the seed, the growing ear of corn, weeds and wheat growing together, and the rising of yeast. His parables of the “Reign of God” are almost always about finding, discovering, being surprised, experiencing reversals of expectations, changing roles and status. None of these notions are static; they are always about something new and good coming into being.

“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.

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.

All I know is that creationists and evolutionists do not have to be enemies. The evolutionists rightly want to say the universe is unfolding, while believers can rightly insist on the personal meaning of that unfolding.

Every time you take in a breath, you are repeating the pattern of taking spirit into matter, and thus repeating the first creation of Adam. And every time you breathe out, you are repeating the pattern of returning spirit to the material universe. In a way, every exhalation is a “little dying” as we pay the price of inspiriting the world. Your simple breathing models your entire vocation as a human being. You are an incarnation, like Christ, of matter and spirit operating as one. This, more than anything we believe or accomplish, is how all of us continue the mystery of incarnation in space and time—either knowingly and joyfully—or not.

You can call this grace, the indwelling Holy Spirit, or just evolution toward union (which we call “love”). God is not in competition with anybody, but only in deep-time cooperation with everybody who loves (Romans 8:28). Whenever we place one caring foot forward, God uses it, sustains it, and blesses it. Our impulse does not need to wear the name of religion at all. Love is the energy that sustains the universe, moving us toward a future of resurrection. We do not even need to call it love or God or resurrection for its work to be done.

truth is always for the sake of love—and not an absolute end in itself, which too often becomes the worship of an ideology.

Remember, the archetypal encounter between doubting Thomas and the Risen Jesus (John 20:19–28) is not really a story about believing in the fact of the resurrection, but a story about believing that someone could be wounded and also resurrected at the same time! That is a quite different message, and still desperately needed. “Put your finger here,” Jesus says to Thomas (20:27). And, like Thomas, we are indeed wounded and resurrected at the same time, all of us. In fact, this might be the primary pastoral message of the whole Gospel.

With the stones he shares existence, with plants he shares life, with animals he shares sensation, and with the angels he shares intelligence.”*1 In saying this, Bonaventure was trying to give theological weight to the deep experience of St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), who as far as we know, was the first recorded Christian to call animals and elements and even the forces of nature by familial names: “Sister, Mother Earth,” “Brother Wind,” “Sister Water,” and “Brother Fire.”

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.

Following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world. To allow what God for some reason allows—and uses. And to suffer ever so slightly what God suffers eternally. Often, this has little to do with believing the right things about God—beyond the fact that God is love itself. Those who agree to carry and love what God loves—which

When we carry our small suffering in solidarity with the one universal longing of all humanity, it helps keep us from self-pity or self-preoccupation. We know that we are all in this together, and it is just as hard for everybody else. Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don’t know it. When we can make the shift to realize this, it softens the space around our overly defended hearts. It makes it hard to be cruel to anyone. It somehow makes us one—in a way that easy comfort and entertainment never can.

A Crucified God is the dramatic symbol of the one suffering that God fully enters into with us—much more than just for us, as we were mostly trained to think.

The lone individual is far too small and insecure to carry either the “weight of glory” or the “burden of sin” on his or her own. Yet that is the impossible task we gave the individual. It will never work. It creates well-disguised religious egocentricity, because we are forced to take our single and isolated selves far too seriously—both our wonderfulness and our terribleness—which are both their own kinds of ego trips, I am afraid.

Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with.

Scared people remember threats and do not hear invitations!

God’s justice makes things right at their very core, and divine love does not achieve its ends by mere punishment or retribution.

There is nothing to be against, but just keep concentrating on the Big Thing you are for!

Evil was seen by both Jesus and Paul as corporate bondage and illusion, more than just private perverse behavior.

Remember, it is not the brand name that matters. It is that God’s heart be made available and active on this earth.

What many have begun to see is that you need to have a nondualistic, non-angry, and nonargumentative mind to process the really big issues with any depth or honesty, and most of us have not been effectively taught how to do that in practice. We were largely taught what to believe instead of how to believe. We had faith in Jesus, often as if he were an idol, more than sharing the expansive faith of Jesus, which is always humble and patient (Matthew 11:25), and can be understood only by the humble and patient.

To be forced to choose between two presented options is never to see with depth, with subtlety, or with compassion.

Mostly, we must remember that Christianity in its maturity is supremely love-centered, not information- or knowledge-centered, which is called “Gnosticism.”

Practice is standing in the flow, whereas theory and analysis observe the flow from a position of separation.

This is probably why so many resist contemplation to begin with. Because it feels more like the shedding of thoughts in general than attaining new or good ones. It feels more like just letting go than accomplishing anything, which is counterintuitive for our naturally “capitalistic” minds!

First, “take God at face value, as God is. Accept God’s good graciousness, as you would a plain, simple soft compress when sick. Take hold of God and press God against your unhealthy self, just as you are.” Second, know how your mind and will play their games: “Stop analyzing yourself or God. You can do without wasting so much of your energy deciding if something is good or bad, grace given or temperament driven, divine or human.” Third, be encouraged: “Offer up your simple naked being to the joyful being of God, for you two are one in grace, although separate by nature.” And finally: “Don’t focus on what you are, but simply that you are! How hopelessly stupid would a person have to be if he or she could not realize that he or she simply is.” Hold the soft warm compress of these loving words against your bodily self, bypass the mind and even the affections of the heart, and forgo any analysis of what you are, or are not. “Simply that you are!”

Remember that regret profits nobody. Shame is useless. Blame is surely a waste of time.