by Richard Rohr
Copyright © 2019 by Center for Action and Contemplation, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Convergent Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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CONVERGENT BOOKS and its open book colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Unless otherwise stated, Richard Rohr uses his own translation and/or paraphrase of Scripture. Father Richard draws from a variety of English translations including the Jerusalem Bible (JB), New American Standard Bible (NASB), New English Translation (NET), J. B. Phillips New Testament (Phillips), Revised Standard Version (RSV), and The Message. CAC practice is to reference chapter and verse for scriptural sources, but not to identify precise translations.
“Love After Love” from The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 by Derek Walcott, selected by Glyn Maxwell. Copyright © 2014 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9781524762094
Ebook ISBN 9781524762100
Cover design by Sarah Horgan
Cover photograph: (sunset) Menset Photography/Getty Images; (star texture) Ievgenii Volyk/iStock/Getty Images
v5.4
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I dedicate this book to my beloved fifteen-year-old black Lab, Venus, whom I had to release to God while beginning to write this book. Without any apology, lightweight theology, or fear of heresy, I can appropriately say that Venus was also Christ for me.
The only really absolute mysteries in Christianity are the self-communication of God in the depths of existence—which we call grace, and in history—which we call Christ.
—Fr. Karl Rahner, Jesuit priest and theologian, 1904–1984
I do not worship matter. I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honoring that matter which works my salvation.
—St. John Damascene, 675–753
No despair of ours can alter the reality of things, nor stain the joy of the cosmic dance, which is always there.
—Thomas Merton, 1915–1968
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Before We Begin
Part 1: Another Name for Every Thing
1: Christ Is Not Jesus’s Last Name
2: Accepting That You Are Fully Accepted
3: Revealed in Us—as Us
4: Original Goodness
5: Love Is the Meaning
6: A Sacred Wholeness
7: Going Somewhere Good
Part 2: The Great Comma
8: Doing and Saying
9: Things at Their Depth
10: The Feminine Incarnation
11: This Is My Body
12: Why Did Jesus Die?
13: It Can’t Be Carried Alone
14: The Resurrection Journey
15: Two Witnesses to Jesus and Christ
16: Transformation and Contemplation
17: Beyond Mere Theology: Two Practices
Epilogue
Afterword: Love After Love
Appendixes: Mapping the Soul’s Journey to God
Appendix I: The Four Worldviews
Appendix II: The Pattern of Spiritual Transformation
Bibliography
Before We Begin
In her autobiography, A Rocking-Horse Catholic, the twentieth-century English mystic*1 Caryll Houselander describes how an ordinary underground train journey in London transformed into a vision that changed her life. I share Houselander’s description of this startling experience because it poignantly demonstrates what I will be calling the Christ Mystery, the indwelling of the Divine Presence in everyone and everything since the beginning of time as we know it:
I was in an underground train, a crowded train in which all sorts of people jostled together, sitting and strap-hanging—workers of every description going home at the end of the day. Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them—but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too, here in this underground train; not only the world as it was at that moment, not only all the people in all the countries of the world, but all those people who had lived in the past, and all those yet to come.
I came out into the street and walked for a long time in the crowds. It was the same here, on every side, in every passer-by, everywhere—Christ.
I had long been haunted by the Russian conception of the humiliated Christ, the lame Christ limping through Russia, begging His bread; the Christ who, all through the ages, might return to the earth and come even to sinners to win their compassion by His need. Now, in the flash of a second, I knew that this dream is a fact; not a dream, not the fantasy or legend of a devout people, not the prerogative of the Russians, but Christ in man….
I saw too the reverence that everyone must have for a sinner; instead of condoning his sin, which is in reality his utmost sorrow, one must comfort Christ who is suffering in him. And this reverence must be paid even to those sinners whose souls seem to be dead, because it is Christ, who is the life of the soul, who is dead in them; they are His tombs, and Christ in the tomb is potentially the risen Christ….
Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. It is not the foolish sinner like myself, running about the world with reprobates and feeling magnanimous, who comes closest to them and brings them healing; it is the contemplative in her cell who has never set eyes on them, but in whom Christ fasts and prays for them—or it may be a charwoman in whom Christ makes Himself a servant again, or a king whose crown of gold hides a crown of thorns. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life.
After a few days the “vision” faded. People looked the same again, there was no longer the same shock of insight for me each time I was face to face with another human being. Christ was hidden again; indeed, through the years to come I would have to seek for Him, and usually I would find Him in others—and still more in myself—only through a deliberate and blind act of faith.
The question for me—and for us—is, Who is this “Christ” that Caryll Houselander saw permeating and radiating from all her fellow passengers? Christ for her was clearly not just Jesus of Nazareth but something much more immense, even cosmic, in significance. How that is so, and why it matters, is the subject of this book. Once encountered, I believe this vision has the power to radically alter what we believe, how we see others and relate to them, our sense of how big God might be, and our understanding of what the Creator is doing in our world.
Does that sound like too much to hope for? Look back at the words Houselander uses as she strains to capture the sheer scope of what changed for her after her vision:
Everywhere—Christ
Realization of oneness
Reverence
Every kind of life has meaning
Every life has an influence on every other kind of life
Who wouldn’t want to experience such things? And if Houselander’s vision seems to us today somehow exotic, it certainly wouldn’t have to early Christians. The revelation of the Risen Christ as ubiquitous and eternal was clearly affirmed in the Scriptures (Colossians 1, Ephesians 1, John 1, Hebrews 1) and in the early church, when the euphoria of the Christian faith was still creative and expanding. In our time, however, this deep mode of seeing must be approached as something of a reclamation project. When the Western church separated from the East in the Great Schism of 1054, we gradually lost this profound understanding of how God has been liberating and loving all that is. Instead, we gradually limited the Divine Presence to the single body of Jesus, when perhaps it is as ubiquitous as light itself—and uncircumscribable by human boundaries.
We might say that the door of faith closed on the broadest and most beautiful understanding of what early Christians called the “Manifestation,” the Epiphany, or most famously, the “Incarnation”—and also its final and full form, which we still call the “Resurrection.” But the Eastern and Orthodox churches originally had a much broader understanding of both of these, an insight that we in the Western churches, both Catholic and Protestant, are now only beginning to recognize. This is surely what John meant when he wrote in his Gospel, “The word became flesh” itself (John 1:14), using a universal and generic term (sarx) instead of referring to a single human body.*2 In fact, the lone word “Jesus” is never mentioned in the Prologue! Did you ever notice that? “Jesus Christ” is finally mentioned, but not until the second to last verse.
We cannot overestimate the damage that was done to our Gospel message when the Eastern (“Greek”) and Western (“Latin”) churches split, beginning with their mutual excommunication of each other’s patriarchs in 1054. We have not known the “one, holy, undivided” church for over a thousand years.
But you and I can reopen that ancient door of faith with a key, and that key is the proper understanding of a word that many of us use often, but often too glibly. That word is Christ.
What if Christ is a name for the transcendent within of every “thing” in the universe?
What if Christ is a name for the immense spaciousness of all true Love?
What if Christ refers to an infinite horizon that pulls us from within and pulls us forward too?
What if Christ is another name for everything—in its fullness?
I believe that is what the “Big Tradition” has been trying to say, maybe without even knowing it. But most of us were never exposed to the Full and Big Tradition, by which I mean the perennial tradition, the wisdom of the entire Body of Christ—and specifically for this book, the integration of the self-correcting themes that are constantly recurring and reaffirming one another in Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and the many brands of Protestantism. I know that is a huge goal, but do we have any choice now? If we emphasize the real essentials of faith, and not the accidentals, it is actually not so hard to do.
If you will allow me in the pages to come, I want to be your guide in exploring these questions about Christ and the shape of reality for each of us. It’s a quest that has fascinated and inspired me for over fifty years. In keeping with my Franciscan tradition, I want to ground a conversation of such immense scale in the stuff of earth so that we can follow it like a trail of crumbs through the forest: from nature; to a newborn child with his mother and father in a lowly stable; to a woman alone on a train; and finally, to the meaning and mystery in a name that might also be ours.
If my own experience is any indication, the message in this book can transform the way you see and the way you live in your everyday world. It can offer you the deep and universal meaning that Western civilization seems to lack and long for today. It has the potential to reground Christianity as a natural religion and not one simply based on a special revelation, available only to a few lucky enlightened people.
But to experience this new understanding, we must often proceed by indirection, by waiting, and by the practice of attentiveness. Especially as we begin, you must allow some of the words in this book to remain partially mysterious, at least for a while. I know this can be dissatisfying and unsettling to our egoic mind, which wants to be in control every step of the way. Yet this is precisely the contemplative way of reading and listening, and thus being drawn forward into a much Larger Field.
As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of. Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing “contemplation.”
The essential function of religion is to radically connect us with everything. (Re-ligio = to re-ligament or reconnect.) It is to help us see the world and ourselves in wholeness, and not just in parts. Truly enlightened people see oneness because they look out from oneness, instead of labeling everything as superior and inferior, in or out. If you think you are privately “saved” or enlightened, then you are neither saved nor enlightened, it seems to me!
A cosmic notion of the Christ competes with and excludes no one, but includes everyone and everything (Acts 10:15, 34) and allows Jesus Christ to finally be a God figure worthy of the entire universe. In this understanding of the Christian message, the Creator’s love and presence are grounded in the created world, and the mental distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” sort of falls apart. As Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” In the pages ahead, I will opt for the latter!
Although my primary background is in philosophy and scriptural theology, I will draw on the disciplines of psychology, science, history, and anthropology to enrich the text. I don’t want this to be a strictly “theological” book if I can help it, even though it has lots of explicit theology in it. Jesus did not come to earth so theologians alone could understand and make their good distinctions, but so that “they all may be one” (John 17:21). He came to unite and “to reconcile all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth” (Colossians 1:19). Every woman or man on the street—or riding a train—should be able to see and enjoy this!
Throughout the book, you will find sentences or groups of sentences set off a bit from the paragraphs. Like these, related to our story above:
Christ is everywhere.
In Him every kind of life has a meaning and a solid connection.
I intend these pauses in the text as invitations for you to linger with an idea, to focus on it until it engages your body, your heart, your awareness of the physical world around you, and most especially your core connection with a larger field. Sit with each italicized sentence and, if need be, read it again until you feel its impact, until you can imagine its larger implications for the world and for history and for you. (In other words, until “the word becomes flesh” for you!) Don’t jump too quickly to the next line.
In the monastic tradition, this practice of lingering and going to the depths of a text is called “Lectio Divina.” It is a contemplative way of reading that goes deeper than the mental comprehension of words, or using words to give answers, or solve immediate problems or concerns. Contemplation is waiting patiently for the gaps to be filled in, and it does not insist on quick closure or easy answers. It never rushes to judgment, and in fact avoids making quick judgments because judgments have more to do with egoic, personal control than with a loving search for truth.
And that will be the practice for you and for me as we work our way together toward an understanding of a Christ who is much more than Jesus’s last name.
*1 When I use the wo
rd “mystic” I am referring to experiential knowing instead of just textbook or dogmatic knowing. The difference tends to be that the mystic sees things in their wholeness, their connection, their universal and divine frame, instead of just their particularity. Mystics get the whole gestalt in one picture, as it were, and thus they often bypass our more sequential and separated way of seeing the moment. In this, they tend to be closer to poets and artists than to linear thinkers. Obviously, there is a place for both, but since the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there has been less and less appreciation of such seeing in wholes. The mystic was indeed considered an “eccentric” (off center), but maybe mystics are the most centered of all?
*2 John Dominic Crossan makes this point rather convincingly in Resurrecting Easter (San Fransciso: HarperOne, 2018), a study of how differently Eastern and Western art understood and depicted the Resurrection. We delayed the publication of this book so I could include his artistic, historic, and archaeological evidence for what I am trying to say theologically.
1
Christ Is Not Jesus’s Last Name
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
—Genesis 1:1–3
Across the thirty thousand or so varieties of Christianity, believers love Jesus and (at least in theory) seem to have no trouble accepting his full humanity and his full divinity. Many express a personal relationship with Jesus—perhaps a flash of inspiration of his intimate presence in their lives, perhaps a fear of his judgment or wrath. Others trust in his compassion, and often see him as a justification for their worldviews and politics. But how might the notion of Christ change the whole equation? Is Christ simply Jesus’s last name? Or is it a revealing title that deserves our full attention? How is Christ’s function or role different from Jesus’s? What does Scripture mean when Peter says in his very first address to the crowds after Pentecost that “God has made this Jesus…both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36)? Weren’t they always one and the same, starting at Jesus’s birth?
