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by
Richard Rohr
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March 11 - October 31, 2019
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.
With its emphasis on theory and theology, but no emphasis on praxis—the creed set us on a course we are still following today.
they portray what religious systems tend to want: a God who looks strong and stable and in control.
When our tradition chose an imperial Christ who lives inside the world of static and mythic proclamations, it framed Christian belief and understanding in a very small box.
This is what happens when power and empire take over the message.
how an understanding of the Christ can revolutionize how we practice our faith, in ways big and small.
One day the religion of Christ will take another step forward on earth. It will embrace the whole man [sic], all of him, not just half as it does now in embracing only the soul. —Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco
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!
great love and great suffering (both healing and woundedness) are the universal, always available paths of transformation, because they are the only things strong enough to take away the ego’s protections and pretensions.
We must love God through, in, with, and even because of this world.
observing, touching, loving the physical, the material, the inspirited universe—in all of its suffering state—as the necessary starting place for any healthy spirituality and any true development.
God loves things by becoming them. We love God by continuing the same pattern.
All traditions and traditionalists are searching for sacred objects, places, events, and people on which to found their authority, and this is normal and good.
But these totems, rituals, tombs (or empty tomb, in our case), and holy places are just early signposts to set us on the path. The full mystery of incarnation, on the other hand, points not just to things, but to the depth of things, the fullness of things, the soul of things, and what some have called the “angels of things.” In
The transition to Presence is not always an easy one to make.
there must be a way to be both here and in the depth of here. Jesus is the here, Christ is the depth of here.
Contemplation is the “second gaze,” through which you see something in its particularity and yet also in a much larger frame.
it is the Divine that takes the lead in changing places.
Any object that calls forth respect or reverence is the “Christ” or the anointed one for us at that moment,
???
reclaim and honor female wisdom, which is often qualitatively different from male wisdom.
The first incarnation (creation) is symbolized by Sophia-Incarnate, a beautiful, feminine, multicolored, graceful Mary. She is invariably offering us Jesus, God incarnated into vulnerability and nakedness. Mary became the Symbol of the First Universal Incarnation. She then hands the Second Incarnation on to us, while remaining in the background; the focus is always on the child. Earth Mother presenting Spiritual Son, the two first stages of the Incarnation. Feminine Receptivity, handing on the fruit of her yes. And inviting us to offer our own yes. There is a wholeness about this that many
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Humans like, need, and trust our mothers to give us gifts, to nurture us, and always to forgive us, which is what we want from God.
the more macho and patriarchal a culture, the greater its devotion to Mary.
There is a shadow side to this phenomenon: the restruction of cwomen to virgin/whore identities.
Mary is the archetype of how to receive what God is doing and hand it on to others.
Presence is a unique capacity that includes body, heart, mind, and whatever we mean by “soul.”
Only presence can know presence. And our real presence can know Real Presence.
Presence is always reciprocal, or it is not presence at all.
true ritual offers an alternative universe, where the shadow is named (think of a true Eucharist). In the church, I am afraid we mostly have ceremonies.
The bread and the wine together are stand-ins for the very elements of the universe, which also enjoy and communicate the incarnate presence.
woman on staff at our center that she believes women’s menstrual cycles have given women, in particular, an experiential and cellular understanding of this experience. Because they shed blood monthly for the sake of life, and also give blood and water at birth, just as Jesus did on the cross (John 19:34). Of course! This “water and blood” had always struck me as strange symbolism. But maybe not for a woman, who knows the price of birth.
we don’t talk about the Mystery anymore; we begin to chew on it.
the Eucharist should operate like a stun gun,
there is Real Presence in the bread and wine. For me, if we sacrifice Reality in the elements, we end up sacrificing the same Reality in ourselves.
The Eucharist tells us that, in some mysterious way, we are God having a human experience!
Eucharist is the Incarnation of Christ taken to its final shape and end—the very elements of the earth itself.
For most of Christian history, no single consensus prevailed on what it means when Christians say, “Jesus died for our sins,” but in recent centuries one theory did take over. It was often referred to as the “penal substitutionary atonement theory,” especially once it was developed after the Reformation.
The early church never heard of this; at best they had some idea of “ransom” from the many biblical metaphors.
I hope to address how our commonly accepted atonement theory—especially as accomplished through the life, suffering, and death of Jesus—led to some serious misunderstandings of Jesus’s role and Christ’s eternal purpose, reaffirmed our narrow notion of retributive justice, and legitimated a notion of “good and necessary violence” all the way down.
Salvation became a one-time transactional affair between Jesus and his Father, instead of an ongoing transformational lesson for the human soul and for all of history.
Anthropologically speaking, these words and assumptions reflect a magical or what I call “transactional” way of thinking.
this way of thinking loses its power as people and cultures grow up and seek actual changes in their minds and hearts. Then, transformational thinking tends to supplant transactional thinking.
It’s time for Christianity to rediscover the deeper biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation and reconciliation and not punishment.
The History of a Theory
in the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury wrote a paper called Cur Deus Homo? or “Why Did God Become a Human?”
The Franciscans, however, led by John Duns Scotus (1266–1308), refused to see the Incarnation, and its final denouement on the cross, as a mere reaction to sin. Instead, they claimed that the cross was a freely chosen revelation of Total Love on God’s part.
Love cannot be bought by some “necessary sacrifice”; if it could, it would not and could not work its transformative effects. Try loving your spouse or children that way, and see where it gets you.
Notions of sacrifice keep us in the retributive justice framework and outside of the essential Gospel of grace and undeserved love.
The cross is not just a singular event. It’s a statement from God that reality has a cruciform pattern.
The people who hold the contradictions and resolve them in themselves are the saviors of the world. They are the only real agents of transformation, reconciliation, and newness.
A Christian is invited, not required to accept and live the cruciform shape of all reality.
But: Matt 16:24: "Whoever wants to be my disciple Must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."
also 10:38, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23 ("daily"), 14:27
The context is both invitation and requirement
Jesus Nation
Unfortumate phrase which borrows the very structure Jesus rejected to describe a group
