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by
Richard Rohr
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March 11 - October 31, 2019
The Gospel is simply the wisdom of those who agree to carry their part of the infinite suffering of God. Ironically, many non-Christians—I think of Anne Frank, Simone Weil, and Etty Hillesum, who were all Jewish—seemed to fully accept this vocation with greater freedom than many Christians.
It is the egoic illusion of our own perfect rightness that often allows us to crucify others.
Girard demonstrated that the scapegoat mechanism is probably the foundational principle for the formation of most social groups and cultures.
Jesus came to change our minds about God—and about ourselves—and about where goodness and evil really
in dropping our many modes of scapegoating and self-justification—we gain compassion toward ourselves and all others who suffer. It largely happens on the psychic and unconscious level, but that is exactly where all of our hurts and our will to violence lie, lodged in the primitive “lizard brain,” where we have almost no rational control.
A transformative religion must touch us at this primitive, brain-stem level, or it is not transformative at
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.
Saints are those who wake up while in this world,
They all refused to trust even their own power unless that power had first been taught and refined by powerlessness.
The “way of the cross” can never go out of style because it will surely never be in style. It never becomes the dominant consciousness anywhere.
A Dialogue with the Crucified God
JESUS SPEAKS TO YOU FROM THE CROSS
am what you do to what you could love.
YOU SPEAK BACK TO THE CRUCIFIED ONE
You are infinite in action, which makes me infinite in becoming. This is my divine possibility.
You are what we do to what we should and could love. You are what we do to one another.
Crux probat omnia
to make up all that still has to be undergone by Christ’’
the only way to spiritually hold suffering—and not let it destroy us—is to recognize that we cannot do it alone.
When I try to heroically do it alone, I slip into distractions, denials, and pretending—and I do not learn suffering’s softening lessons.
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.
Was this one of the lessons learned by Elie Wiesl and Etty Hillesom in the camps?
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 ...
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And is this, partly, how the tragic rhythm works in us?
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.
What creates such larger-than-life people?
God's enlarged place within them. Etty took refuge there so often that there was very little else there.
the Christ I have described in this book is a compelling image for this “one-lump” view of reality. In the fourteenth century, the book’s author would’ve enjoyed the last remnants of mystical holism before it was taken away by the dualistic—but also necessary—ravages of the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
Philippians, where Jesus is said to lead us through the “pattern of sin and death” so we can “take our place in the pattern of resurrection” (3:9–12).
And of course, this all emerges from Jesus’s major metaphor of the “Reign of God,” a fully collective notion,
This is a totally differnt understanndikng from discipleship days. But a step further into the teaching that Bob Mumford gave us as a departure point.
Within this worldview, we are saved not by being privately perfect, but by being “part of the body,” humble links in the great chain of history.
This view echoes the biblical concept of a covenant love that was granted to Israel as a whole,
We are now too preoccupied with the “salvation of individuals” to read history in a corporate way, and the results have been disastrous.
suspect that Western individualism has done more than any other single factor to anesthetize and even euthanize the power of the Gospel.
This is what we knew at CLC.
For five hundred years, Christian teachers defined and redefined salvation almost entirely in individualistic terms, while well-disguised social evils—greed, pride, ambition, deceit, gluttony—moved to the highest levels of power and influence, even in our churches.
Principalities and powers.
Unless we find the communal meaning and significance of the suffering of all life and ecosystems on our planet, we will continue to retreat into our individual, small worlds in our quest for personal safety and sanity. Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with.
our only task is to trust this reality “until God is all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). What a different idea of faith! “When Christ is revealed,” Paul writes to the Colossians, “and he is your life—you too will be revealed in all your glory with him” (3:4).
Once I know that all suffering is both our suffering and God’s suffering, I can better endure and trust the desolations and disappointments that come my way. I can live with fewer comforts and conveniences when I see my part in global warming. I can speak with a soft and trusting voice in the public domain if doing so will help lessen human hatred and mistrust. I can stop circling the wagons around my own group, if doing so will help us recognize our common
resurrection—from a one-time miracle in the life of Jesus that asks for assent and belief, to a pattern of creation that has always been true, and that invites us to much more than belief in a miracle.
Resurrection is just incarnation taken to its logical conclusion.
“Resurrection” is another word for change, but particularly positive change—which we tend to see only in the long run. In the short run, it often just looks like death.
the ongoing Christ life is the archetypal model for the entire pattern of creation. He is the microcosm for the whole cosmos, or the map of the whole journey, in case you need or want one.
All who hold any kind of unexplainable hope believe in resurrection, whether they are formal Christians or not,
The Wedding Banquet
Scared people remember threats and do not hear invitations!
It will really help you, Christian or not, if you can begin to see Jesus—and Christ—as coming out of Reality, naming it, giving it a face, not appearing to Reality from another world.
Our inner meaning and Christ’s outer meaning,
Or,vice-versa.
If one’s theology (view of God) does not significantly change one’s anthropology (view of humanity), it is largely what we call a “head trip.”
God might best be seen as “Reality with a personality.”*4 Through God, the world around us—everything that is—seems to be in dialogue with us, whether we enjoy it or not, whether we trust it or not.
What happened at the resurrection is that Jesus was fully revealed as the eternal and deathless Christ in embodied form. Basically, one circumscribed body of Jesus morphed into ubiquitous Light. Henceforth, light is probably the best metaphor for Christ or God.
Many do meet Divine Reality without this shortcut, and we must be honest about that. I cannot prove that Jesus is the shortcut, nor does he need me to, except through the abundant lives of those who sincerely “click on the link” and “follow the prompts.” Only “by the fruits will you know,” says Jesus (Matthew 7:16–20). People who are properly aligned with Love and Light will always see in good ways that are not obvious to the rest of us, and we still call that “enlightenment.”
