by Richard Rohr
Humans were fashioned to love people more than principles, and Jesus fully exemplified this pattern. But many seem to prefer loving principles—as if you really can do such a thing. Like Moses, we each need to know our God “face to face” (Exodus 33:11, Numbers 12:8). Note how Jesus said, “God is not a God of the dead but of the living for to him all people are alive!” (Luke 20:39). In my opinion, his aliveness made it so much easier for people to trust their own aliveness and thus relate to God, because like knows like. Some call it morphic resonance. C. S. Lewis, in giving one of his books the truly wonderful title Till We Have Faces, made this same evolutionary point.
The truly one, holy, catholic, and undivided church has not existed for a thousand years now, with many tragic results. We are ready to reclaim it again, but this time around we must concentrate on including—as Jesus clearly did—instead of excluding—which he never did. The only people that Jesus seemed to exclude were precisely those who refused to know they were ordinary sinners like everyone else. The only thing he excluded was exclusion itself. Do check me out on that, and you might see that I am correct.
Think about what all of this means for everything we sense and know about God. After the incarnation of Jesus, we could more easily imagine a give-and-take God, a relational God, a forgiving God. Strobe light revelations of Christ, which Bruno Barnhart calls the “Christ Quanta”*5 were already seen and honored in the deities of Native religions, the Atman of Hinduism, the teachings of Buddhism, and the Prophets of Judaism. Christians had a very good model and messenger in Jesus, but many outliers actually came to the “banquet” more easily, as Jesus often says in his parables of the resented and resisted banquet (Matthew 22:1–10, Luke 14:7–24), where “the wedding hall was filled with guests, both good and bad alike” (Matthew 22:10). What are we to do with such divine irresponsibility, such endless largesse, such unwillingness on God’s part to build walls, circle wagons, or create unneeded boundaries?
We must be honest and humble about this: Many people of other faiths, like Sufi masters, Jewish prophets, many philosophers, and Hindu mystics, have lived in light of the Divine encounter better than many Christians. And why would a God worthy of the name God not care about all of the children? (Read Wisdom 11:23–12:2 for a humdinger of a Scripture in this regard.) Does God really have favorites among his children? What an unhappy family that would create—and indeed, it has created. Our complete and happy inclusion of the Jewish scriptures inside of the Christian canon ought to have served as a structural and definitive statement about Christianity’s movement toward radical inclusivity. How did we miss that? No other religion does that.
Remember what God said to Moses: “I AM Who I AM” (Exodus 3:14). God is clearly not tied to a name, nor does he seem to want us to tie the Divinity to any one name. This is why, in Judaism, God’s statement to Moses became the unspeakable and unnameable God. Some would say that the name of God literally cannot be “spoken.”*6 Now that was very wise, and more needed than we realized! This tradition alone should tell us to practice profound humility in regard to God, who gives us not a name, but only pure presence—no handle that could allow us to think we “know” who God is or have him or her as our private possession.
The Christ is always way too much for us, larger than any one era, culture, empire, or religion. Its radical inclusivity is a threat to any power structure and any form of arrogant thinking. Jesus by himself has usually been limited by the evolution of human consciousness in these first two thousand years, and held captive by culture, by nationalism, and by Christianity’s own cultural captivity to a white, bourgeois, and Eurocentric worldview. Up to now, we have not been carrying history too well, because “there stood among us one we did not recognize,” “one who came after me, because he existed before me” (John 1:26, 30). He came in mid-tone skin, from the underclass, a male body with a female soul, from an often hated religion, and living on the very cusp between East and West. No one owns him, and no one ever will.
Loving Jesus, Loving Christ
To be loved by Jesus enlarges our heart capacity. To be loved by the Christ enlarges our mental capacity. We need both a Jesus and a Christ, in my opinion, to get the full picture. A truly transformative God—for both the individual and history—needs to be experienced as both personal and universal. Nothing less will fully work. If the overly personal (even sentimental) Jesus has shown itself to have severe limitations and problems, it is because this Jesus was not also universal. He became cozy and we lost the cosmic. History has clearly shown that worship of Jesus without worship of Christ invariably becomes a time- and culture-bound religion, often ethnic or even implicitly racist, which excludes much of humanity from God’s embrace.
I fully believe, however, that there has never been a single soul who was not possessed by the Christ, even in the ages when Jesus was not. Why would you want your religion, or your God, to be any smaller than that?
For you who have felt angered or wounded or excluded by the message of Jesus or Christ as you have heard it, I hope you sense an opening here—an affirmation, a welcome that you may have despaired of ever hearing.
For you who have hoped to believe in God or a divinized world, but never been able to “believe” in the way belief is typically practiced—does this vision of Jesus the Christ help? If it helps you to love and to hope, then it is the true religion of Christ. No circumscribed group can ever claim that title!
For you who have loved Jesus—perhaps with great passion and protectiveness—do you recognize that any God worthy of the name must transcend creeds and denominations, time and place, nations and ethnicities, and all the vagaries of gender, extending to the limits of all we can see, suffer, and enjoy? You are not your gender, your nationality, your ethnicity, your skin color, or your social class. Why, oh why, do Christians allow these temporary costumes, or what Thomas Merton called the “false self,” to pass for the substantial self, which is always “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3)? It seems that we really do not know our own Gospel.
You are a child of God, and always will be, even when you don’t believe it.
This is why and how Caryll Houselander could see Christ in the faces of total strangers. This is why I can see Christ in my dog, the sky, and all creatures, and it’s why you, whoever you are, can experience God’s unadulterated care for you in your garden or kitchen, your husband or wife, an ordinary beetle, a fish in the darkest sea that no human eye will ever observe, and even in those who do not like you, and those who are not like you.
This is the illuminating light that enlightens all things, making it possible for us to see things in their fullness. When Christ calls himself the “Light of the World” (John 8:12), he is not telling us to look just at him, but to look out at life with his all-merciful eyes. We see him so we can see like him, and with the same infinite compassion.
When your isolated “I” turns into a connected “we,” you have moved from Jesus to Christ. We no longer have to carry the burden of being a perfect “I” because we are saved “in Christ,” and as Christ. Or, as we say too quickly but correctly at the end of our official prayers: “Through Christ, Our Lord, Amen.”
*1 See the extensive research on this term in Walter Wink’s The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of Man (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002).
*2 Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi 45.
*3 Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond, xxi–xxii, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013), and the “mosaic” of metaphors in Appendix B.
*4 Richard Rohr, Just This, 7 (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2018), “Awe and Surrendering to It,” 2018.
*5 Bruno Barnhart, Second Simplicity: The Inner Shape of Christianity (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1999), part 2, chap. 7.
*6 Richard Rohr, The Naked Now (New York: Crossroad, 2009), ch. 2. In fact, the holy name YHWH is most appropriately breathed rather than spoken, and
we all breathe the same way.
3
Revealed in Us—as Us
To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.
—Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day
If you’ve spent time in church, you’ve probably heard the story of Saul’s conversion, as told in the book of Acts. It actually appears three times throughout the book (9:1–19, 22:5–16, 26:12–18), to make sure we don’t miss how pivotal and newsworthy it must have been, and still is.
For years, Saul had savagely persecuted those who followed the way of Jesus. He was on his way to Damascus to do just that when, suddenly, he was struck down and blinded by what the text refers to as “light.” Then, out of that light, he heard a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”
Saul responded, “Who are you?”
And the reply came, “I am Jesus, and you are persecuting me.”
The deep and abiding significance of Saul’s encounter is that he hears Jesus speak as if there’s a moral equivalence between Jesus and the people Saul is persecuting. The voice twice calls the people “me”! From that day forward, this astounding reversal of perspective became the foundation for Paul’s evolving worldview and his exciting discovery of “the Christ.” This fundamental awakening moved Saul from his beloved, but ethnic-bound, religion of Judaism toward a universal vision of religion, so much so that he changed his Hebrew name to its Latin form, Paul. Later, he calls himself the “apostle” and “servant” to the very people he once disparaged as “pagans,” “Gentiles,” or “the nations” (Ephesians 3:1, Romans 11:13).
Paul, or perhaps a student under his training, says that he was “given knowledge of a mystery” (Ephesians 3:2) that revealed “how comprehensive God’s wisdom really is according to a plan from all eternity” (3:10). He describes the experience as being like if scales had fallen from his eyes, so that “he could see again” (Acts 9:18).
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).
For the rest of his life, Paul became obsessed with this “Christ.” “Obsessed” is not too strong a word. In his letters, Paul rarely, if ever, quotes Jesus himself directly. Rather, he writes from a place of trustful communication with the Divine Presence who blinded him on the road. Paul’s driving mission was “to demonstrate that Jesus was the Christ” (Acts 9:22b), which is why we are called “Christians” to this day, and not Jesuits!
Describing the encounter in his letter to the Galatians, Paul writes a most telling line. He does not say “God revealed his Son to me” as you might expect. Instead, he says, “God revealed his Son in me” (Galatians 1:16). This high degree of trust, introspection, self- knowledge, and self-confidence was quite unusual at that time. In fact, we will hardly see anything comparable till Augustine’s Confessions, written around A.D. 400, where the author describes the inner life with a similar interest and precision. In my opinion, this is why the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity did not make much of Paul—he was so interior and psychological, and civilization was still so extroverted and literal. Except for the rare Augustine, and many of the Catholic mystics and hermits, it took more widespread literacy and the availability of the written word in the sixteenth century to move us toward a more interior and introspective Christianity, both for good and for ill.*1
After his soul-blindness lifted, Paul recognized his true identity as a “chosen instrument” of the Christ, whose followers he used to persecute (Acts 9:15). In a move that could’ve seemed presumptuous, he presents himself as one of the twelve apostles, and even dares to take on both the Jewish leaders of his day and the leaders of the new Christian movement (Galatians 2:11–14, Acts 15:1–11)despite having no official role or legitimacy in either group. As far as I know, this self-ordination—not by lineage or appointment, but by divine validation—is unprecedented in these two sacred traditions, except for the few who were called “prophets” or “chosen ones.” Either Paul was a total narcissist or he really was “chosen.” This is the inherently unstable, even dangerous, role of true prophets. By definition, they do not represent the system, but draw their authority directly from the Source in order to critique the system. (Though true prophets are somewhat rare, and Paul never applies that word to himself.)
But let’s note Paul’s primary criterion for authentic faith, which is quite extraordinary: “Examine yourselves to make sure you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you acknowledge that Jesus Christ is really in you? If not, you have failed the test” (2 Corinthians 13:5–6). So simple it’s scary! Paul’s radical incarnationalism sets a standard for all later Christian saints, mystics, and prophets. He knew that the Christ must first of all be acknowledged within before he can be recognized without as Lord and Master. (Forgive the male signifiers, but the sentence was too important to be complicated by qualifications!) God must reveal himself in you before God can fully reveal himself to you. Morphic resonance again.
It’s important to remember that Paul, like us, never knew Jesus in the flesh. Like him, we only know the Christ through observing and honoring the depth of our own human experience. When you can honor and receive your own moment of sadness or fullness as a gracious participation in the eternal sadness or fullness of God, you are beginning to recognize yourself as a participating member of this one universal Body. You are moving from I to We.
Thus Paul shows the rest of us that we too can know Christ’s infinitely available presence through our own inner mental dialogue, or the natural law, which is “engraved on our hearts.” Quite daringly, he declares that even so-called pagans, “who do not possess the law…can be said to be the law” (see Romans 2:14–15). This is surely why he spoke to the well-educated Athenians of “The Unknown God…whom you already worship without knowing it” (Acts 17:23). Paul likely inherited this idea from the prophet Jeremiah, who dared to offer a “new covenant” (31:31) to God’s people. But this idea remained largely undeveloped until a natural law was sought out by the moral theologians of the last century—and now in Pope Francis’s strong understanding of individual conscience. It is still a shock to many.
But Paul merely took incarnationalism to its universal and logical conclusions. We see that in his bold exclamation “There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11). If I were to write that today, people would call me a pantheist (the universe is God), whereas I am really a panentheist (God lies within all things, but also transcends them), exactly like both Jesus and Paul.
En Cristo
Paul summarizes his corporate understanding of salvation with his shorthand phrase “en Cristo,” using it more than any single phrase in all of his letters: a total of 164 times. En Cristo seems to be Paul’s code word for the gracious, participatory experience of salvation, the path that he so urgently wanted to share with the world. Succinctly put, this identity means humanity has never been separate from God—unless and except by its own negative choice. All of us, without exception, are living inside of a cosmic identity, already in place, that is driving and guiding us forward. We are all en Cristo, willingly or unwillingly, happily or unhappily, consciously or unconsciously.
Paul seemed to understand that the lone individual was far too small, insecure, and short-lived to bear either the “weight of glory” or the “burden of sin.” Only the whole could carry such a cosmic mystery of constant loss and renewal. Paul’s knowledge of “in Christ” allowed him to give God’s universal story a name, a focus, a love, and a certain victorious direction so that coming generations could trustingly jump on this cosmic and collective ride.
I hope that you will lea
rn and enjoy the full meaning of that short, brilliant phrase, because it is crucial for the future of Christianity, which is still trapped in a highly individualistic notion of salvation that ends up not looking much like salvation at all. All of us, without exception, are living inside of a common identity, already in place, that is driving and guiding us forward. Paul calls this bigger Divine identity the “mystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made en Cristo from the very beginning” (Ephesians 1:9). Today, we might call it the “collective unconscious.”
Every single creature—the teen mother nursing her child, every one of the twenty thousand species of butterflies, an immigrant living in fear, a blade of grass, you reading this book—all are “in Christ” and “chosen from the beginning” (Ephesians 1:3, 9). What else could they be? Salvation for Paul is an ontological and cosmological message (which is solid) before it ever becomes a moral or psychological one (which is always unstable). Pause and give that some serious thought, if you can.
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)? Paul affirms that he has done this very thing when he says, “Never let yourself drift away from the hope promised by the Good News, which has been preached to every creature under heaven, and of which I Paul have become the servant” (Colossians 1:23). Did he really talk to and convince “every creature under heaven” in his short lifetime? Surely not, but he did know that he had announced to the world the deepest philosophical ground of things by saying that it all was in Christ—and he daringly believed that this truth would eventually stick and succeed.
