Just This: Prompts and Practices for Contemplation

by Richard Rohr

Each creature is thus not merely one member of a genus and species, but a unique aspect of the infinite Mystery of God. God is continuously choosing each created thing specifically to exist, moment by moment. This teaching alone made Scotus a favorite of mystics and poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Merton, who considered themselves “Scotists”—as I do too. You cannot know something spiritually by saying it is a not-that; you can only know it by meeting it in its precise and irreplaceable thisness and honoring it there. Each individual act of creation is a once-ineternity choice on God’s part. The direct implication of this truth is that love must precede all true knowledge. Spiritual knowledge is to know things subject to subject (I-Thou), whereas rational knowing is to know things subject to object (I-it). There is, of course, a place for both; but most have never been told about how to know things center to center and subject to subject, instead of just subject to object.