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by
Richard Rohr
Read between
March 11 - October 31, 2019
your core connection with a larger field.
the first incarnation was the moment described in Genesis 1, when God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the light inside of everything.
light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.
instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world.
But God loves things by becoming them.
Or "in becoming them"
“There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11),
Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ’s historical manifestation in time.
Jesus is a Third Someone, not just God and not just man, but God and human together.
Jesus and Christ give us a God who is both personal and universal.
Jesus is a map for the time-bound and personal level of life, and Christ is the blueprint for all time and space and life itself.
the notion of faith that emerged in the West was much more a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs, rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good.
Faith, hope, and love are the very nature of God, and thus the nature of all Being.
Each of these Three Great Virtues must always include the other two in order to be authentic: love is always hopeful and faithful, hope is always loving and faithful, and faith is always loving and hopeful.
simple and commonsense that it is hard to teach. It is mostly a matter of unlearning, and learning to trust your Christian common sense,
Without Jesus, the sheer scale and significance of our deep humanity is just too much, and too good, for our ordinary minds to imagine. But when we rejoin Jesus with Christ, we can begin a Big Imagining and a Great Work.
I believe the Christ Mystery specifically applies to thingness, materiality, physicality. I do not think of concepts and ideas as Christ. They might well communicate the Christ Mystery, as I will try to do here, but “Christ” for me refers to ideas that have specifically “become flesh” (John 1:14).
Jesus of Nazareth in his lifetime did not normally talk in the divine “I AM” statements, which are found seven times throughout John’s Gospel.
John’s Gospel, dated somewhere between A.D. 90 and 110, the voice of Christ steps forward to do almost all of the speaking.
“God was consistent in working through one man to reveal himself everywhere, as well as through the other parts of His creation, so that nothing was left devoid of his Divinity and his self-knowledge…so that ‘the whole universe was filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters fill the sea.’ ” *2 This whole book could be considered nothing
What is "the knowledge of God"?
God is Relationship itself, a dynamism of Infinite Love between Divine Diversity,
God’s infinite love has always included all that God created from the very beginning
What we call the “soul” of every creature could easily be seen as the self knowledge of God in that creature!
God’s impossible acceptance of ourselves is easier to grasp if we first recognize it in the perfect unity of the human Jesus with the divine Christ. Start with Jesus, continue with yourself, and finally expand to everything else.
Every resurrection story seems to strongly affirm an ambiguous—yet certain—presence in very ordinary settings,
We Catholics call this a “sacramental” theology, where the visible and tactile are the primary doorway to the invisible.
it always starts with what many wisely call the “scandal of the particular.”
light is less something you see directly, and more something by which you see all other things.
In Jesus Christ, God’s own broad, deep, and all-inclusive worldview is made available to us. That might just be the whole point of the Gospels. You have to trust the messenger before you can trust the message,
If you pay attention to the text, you’ll see that John offers a very evolutionary notion of the Christ message. Note the active verb that is used here: “The true light that enlightens every person was coming (erxomenon) into the world” (1:9).
In him was life and that life was the light of all mankind (1:4)
…"children born not of natural descent NOR of human decision, or a husband's will, but t born of God." (1:13)
Incarnation did not just happen two thousand years ago. It has been working throughout the entire arc of time, and will continue.
A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else.
The intended teleios.
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.
Explains Matt15:26-27 and Mark 7:27-28. Canaanite woman seeking healing for her daughter. Also Matt 8:5, the centurion.
these "outsiders" sought healing for those they loved, though their faith in Christ. Jesus saw and heard their inclusion.
(Read Wisdom 11:23–12:2 for a humdinger of a Scripture in this regard.)
But Wisdom 12:10-11 calls a race of people "cursed" and "evil."
To be loved by Jesus enlarges our heart capacity. To be loved by the Christ enlarges our mental capacity.
Really? I wonder if this distinction is true.
A truly transformative God—for both the individual and history—needs to be experienced as both personal and universal.
Why, oh why, do Christians allow these temporary costumes, or what Thomas Merton called the “false self,” to pass for the substantial self, which is always “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3)?
Because it is more protective, in the light of our agreement and complicity with the world system.
When your isolated “I” turns into a connected “we,” you have moved from Jesus to Christ.
Paul’s story we find the archetypal spiritual pattern, wherein people move from what they thought they always knew to what they now fully recognize.
“God revealed his Son in me” (Galatians 1:16).
“Examine yourselves to make sure you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you acknowledge that Jesus Christ is really in you? If not, you have failed the test”
the Christ must first of all be acknowledged within before he can be recognized without as Lord and Master.
When you can honor and receive your own moment of sadness or fullness as a gracious participation in the eternal sadness or fullness of God, you are beginning to recognize yourself as a participating member of this one universal Body. You are moving from I to We.
“There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11).
we might call it the “collective unconscious.”
We might. But Rohr's description of the term would fall far short of CGJ's
Salvation for Paul is an ontological and cosmological message (which is solid) before it ever becomes a moral or psychological one (which is always unstable).
by the Good News, which has been preached to every creature under heaven, and of which I Paul have become the servant”
Paul does nkit claim thst he did all the preaching,just thst he was a participant in doing so.
I have never been separate from God, nor can I be, except in my mind.
“I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be” (John 14:3),
Jesus can hold together one group or religion. Christ can hold together everything.
This is not heresy, universalism, or a cheap version
