More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Richard Rohr
Read between
March 11 - October 31, 2019
“God [in Christ] became the bearer of flesh [for a time] so that humanity could become the bearer of Spirit forever.”*8 This was the Great Exchange.
Creation is the first and probably the final Bible, Incarnation is already Redemption, Christmas is already Easter, and Jesus is already Christ.
How you get there is where you arrive.
the phrase “descended into hell” was problematic, confusing, and based on mythological language.
if Christ indeed went there, he could have done nothing but undo the place; he would have stopped its functioning, just as he did when he “harrowed” the money changers in the temple.
Hell and Christ cannot coexist, he seems to say.
Top-down worldviews can’t resist the tidy dualisms of an in-and-out, us-and-them worldview.
Infinite love, mercy, and forgiveness are hard for the human mind to even imagine, so most people seem to need a notion of hell to maintain their logic of retribution, just punishment, and a just world, as they understand it.
God does not need hell, but we sure seem to.
The systems of this world are inherently argumentative, competitive, dualistic, based on a scarcity model of God, mercy, and grace. They confuse retribution—what is often little more than crass vengeance—with the biblically evolved notions of healing, forgiveness, and divine mercy.
God’s justice makes things right at their very core, and divine love does not achieve its ends by mere punishment or retribution.
As long as you operate inside any scarcity model, there will never be enough God or grace to go around. Jesus came to undo our notions of scarcity and tip us over into a worldview of absolute abundance—or what he would call the “Kingdom of God.” The Gospel reveals a divine world of infinity, a worldview of enough and more than enough. Our word for this undeserved abundance is “grace”:
Jesus’s major theme of the Reign of God is saying, “Only God can do such infinite imagining, so trust the Divine Mind.”
Magdalene and Paul guide and direct the Christian experience in truly helpful ways toward both Jesus and Christ, but from opposite sides.
“Do not touch me” or “Do not cling to me” (John 20:17a). Why would he suddenly give such a cold response? The answer lies in an understanding of the Eternal Christ.
He was saying that the Christ is untouchable in singular form because he is omnipresent in all forms
Like Mary, we must somehow hear our name pronounced, must hear ourselves being addressed and regarded by Love, before we can recognize this Christ in our midst.
took a woman who first loved Jesus personally to build the bridge from Jesus to Christ.
we don’t learn how to send people on inner journeys or love journeys, the whole religious project will continue to fall apart, because we have no living witnesses of a transformed life.
