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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Richard Rohr
Our faith became a competitive theology with various parochial theories of salvation, instead of a universal cosmology inside of which all can live with an inherent dignity.
Faith, hope, and love are the very nature of God, and thus the nature of all Being.
Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.
St. Athanasius (296–373), wrote when the church had a more social, historical, and revolutionary sense of itself: “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
we have faith in Christ so we can have the faith of Christ.
The world no longer trusts Christians who “love Jesus” but do not seem to love anything else.
Christ is the light that allows people to see things in their fullness. The precise and intended effect of such a light is to see Christ everywhere else. In fact, that is my only definition of a true Christian. A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail you, always demand more of you, and give you no reasons to fight, exclude, or reject anyone.
To be loved by Jesus enlarges our heart capacity. To be loved by the Christ enlarges our mental capacity.
To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything. —Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day
In 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. The pattern reveals itself earlier in the Torah when Jacob “wakes from his sleep” on the rock at Bethel and says, in effect, “I found it, but it was here all the time! This is the very gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:16–17).
Christianity, which is still trapped in a highly individualistic notion of salvation that ends up not looking much like salvation at all.
Did you ever notice that in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus tells the disciples to proclaim the Good News to “all creation” or “every creature,” and not just to humans (16:15)?
This is surely how our religion became so focused on obedience and conformity, instead of on love in any practical or expanding sense. Without a Shared and Big Story, we all retreat into private individualism for a bit of sanity and safety.
