by Richard Rohr
I have never been separate from God, nor can I be, except in my mind. I would love for you to bring this realization to loving consciousness! In fact, why not stop reading now, and just breathe and let it sink in. It is crucial that you know this experientially and at a cellular level—which is, in fact, a real way of knowing just as much as rational knowing. Its primary characteristic is that it is a non-dual and thus an open-ended way of knowing, which does not close down so quickly and so definitively as dualistic thought does.*2
Regrettably, Christians have not protected this radical awareness of oneness with the divine. Paul’s brilliant understanding of a Corporate Christ, and thus our cosmic identity, was soon lost as early Christians focused more and more on Jesus alone and even apart from the Eternal Flow of the Trinity, which is finally theologically unworkable.*3 Christ forever keeps Jesus firmly inside the Trinity, not a mere later add-on or a somewhat arbitrary incarnation. Trinitarianism keeps God as Relationship Itself from the very beginning, and not a mere monarch.
To legitimate our new religion in the Roman Empire, Christians felt that we had to prove that Jesus was independently divine. After the Council of Nicaea (325), Jesus was independently said to be “consubstantial” with God, and after the Council of Chalcedon (451), the church agreed on a philosophical definition of Jesus’s humanity and divinity as being united as one in him. All true, but such oneness largely remained distant academic theory because we did not draw out the practical and wonderful implications. As a rule, we were more interested in the superiority of our own tribe, group, or nation than we were in the wholeness of creation. Our view of reality was largely imperial, patriarchal, and dualistic. Things were seen as either for us or against us, and we were either winners or losers, totally good or totally bad—such a small self and its personal salvation always remained our overwhelming preoccupation up to now. 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.
Perhaps the primary example of our lack of attention to the Christ Mystery can be seen in the way we continue to pollute and ravage planet earth, the very thing we all stand on and live from. Science now appears to love and respect physicality more than most religion does! No wonder that science and business have taken over as the major explainers of meaning for the vast majority of people today (even many who still go to church). We Christians did not take this world seriously, I am afraid, because our notion of God or salvation didn’t include or honor the physical universe. And now, I am afraid, the world does not take us seriously.
Hope cannot be had by the individual if everything is corporately hopeless.
It is hard to heal individuals when the whole thing is seen as unhealable.
We are still trying to paddle our way out of this whirlpool, and with a very small paddle! Only with a notion of the Preexisting Christ can we recover where this Jesus was “coming from” and where he is leading us—which is precisely into the “bosom of the Trinity” (John 1:18). “I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be” (John 14:3), the Christ has promised. That might just be the best and most succinct description of salvation there is in the whole New Testament.
A Paradigm Shift
In scientific and cultural thinking, the term “paradigm shift” describes a major switch in one’s assumptions or viewpoint. We hear the term much less often in the world of religion, where groups assume they are dealing with eternal and unchangeable absolutes. But ironically, a religious paradigm shift was exactly what Jesus and Paul were initiating in their day—so much so that their way of seeing became a whole new religion, whether that is what they intended or not. We now call this two-thousand-year-old paradigm shift from Judaism “Christianity.”
History is still waiting for the Christian mind to “shift” back to what has always been true since the initial creation, which is the only thing that will ever make it a universal (or truly catholic) religion. The Universal Christ was just too big an idea, too monumental a shift for most of the first two thousand years. Humans prefer to see things in anecdotal and historical parts, even when such a view leads to incoherence, alienation, or hopelessness.
Every religion, each in its own way, is looking for the gateway, the conduit, the Sacrament, the Avatar, the finger that points to the moon. We need someone to model and exemplify the journey from physical incarnation, through a rather ordinary human existence, through trials and death, and into a Universal Presence unlimited by space and time (which we call “resurrection”). Most of us know about Jesus walking this journey, but far fewer know that Christ is the collective and eternal manifestation of the same—and that “the Christ” image includes all of us and every thing. Paul was overwhelmed by this recognition, and it became the core of his entire message. My hope is that this paradigm shift will become just as obvious to you.
Jesus can hold together one group or religion. Christ can hold together everything.
In fact, Christ already does this; it is we who resist such wholeness, as if we enjoy our arguments and our divisions into parts. Yet throughout the Scriptures, we were given statements like these:
“When everything is reconciled in him…God will be all in all.” (1 Corinthians 15:28)
“There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything.” (Colossians 3:11)
“All fullness is found in him, through him all things are reconciled, everything in heaven and everything on earth.” (Colossians 1:19–20)
This is not heresy, universalism, or a cheap version of Unitarianism. This is the Cosmic Christ, who always was, who became incarnate in time, and who is still being revealed. We would have helped history and individuals so much more if we had spent our time revealing how Christ is everywhere instead of proving that Jesus was God.
But big ideas take time to settle in.
A Fully Participatory Universe
I cannot help but think that future generations will label the first two thousand years of Christianity “early Christianity.” They will, I believe, draw out more and more of the massive implications of this understanding of a Cosmic Christ. They will have long discarded the notion of Christian salvation as a private evacuation plan that gets a select few humans into the next world. The current world has been largely taken for granted or ignored, unless it could be exploited for our individual benefit. Why would people with such a belief ever feel at home in heaven? They didn’t even practice for it! Nor did they learn how to feel at home on earth.
(In calling out the limitations of this kind of gospel, I’m speaking primarily to privileged, mostly white Christians in the Northern Hemisphere. I don’t for a minute forget how hard most people’s lives have been in almost all of history. Life has been, and remains, “a vale of tears” for countless millions, and I can surely understand why only the hope of a better world gave these brothers and sisters reason to put one foot in front of the other and live another day.)
No doubt you’re aware that many traditional Christians today consider the concept of universal anything—including salvation—heresy. Many do not even like the United Nations. And many Catholics and Orthodox Christians use the lines of ethnicity to determine who’s in and who’s out. I find these convictions quite strange for a religion that believes that “one God created all things.” Surely God is at least as big and mysterious as what we now know the shape of the universe to be—a universe that is expanding at ever faster speeds, just like the evolution of consciousness that has been proceeding for centuries. How can anyone read the whole or even a small part of John 17 and think either Christ or Jesus is about anything other than unity and union? “Father, may they all be one,” Christ says in verse 21, repeating this same desire and intention in many ways in the full prayer. I suspect God gets wh
at God prays for!
Along with en Cristo, Paul loves to use words like “wisdom,” “secret,” “hidden plan,” and “mystery.” He uses them so many times, we probably jump over them quickly, assuming we know what he means. Most of us assume he’s talking about Jesus, which is partly right. But the direct meaning of Paul’s secret mystery is the Christ we are talking about in this book. For Paul, Christ is “that mystery which for endless ages has been kept secret” (Romans 16:25–27). And a well-kept secret it still remains for most Christians.
As St. Augustine would courageously put it in his Retractions: “For what is now called the Christian religion existed even among the ancients and was not lacking from the beginning of the human race.”*4 Think about that: Were Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, Mayans and Babylonians, African and Asian civilizations, and the endless Native peoples on all continents and isolated islands for millennia just throwaways or dress rehearsals for “us”? Is God really that ineffective, boring, and stingy? Does the Almighty One operate from a scarcity model of love and forgiveness? Did the Divinity need to wait for Ethnic Orthodox, Roman Catholics, European Protestants, and American Evangelicals to appear before the divine love affair could begin? I cannot imagine!
Creation exists first of all for its own good sake; second to show forth God’s goodness, diversity, and beneficence; and then for humans’ appropriate use. Our small, scarcity-based worldview is the real aberration here, and I believe it has largely contributed to the rise of atheism and the “practical atheism” that is the actual operative religion of most Western countries today. The God we’ve been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.
Great Love and Great Suffering
You might wonder how, exactly, primitive peoples and pre-Christian civilizations could’ve had access to God. I believe it was through the universal and normal transformative journeys of great love and great suffering,*5 which all individuals have undergone from the beginnings of the human race. Only great love and great suffering are strong enough to take away our imperial ego’s protections and open us to authentic experiences of transcendence. The Christ, especially when twinned with Jesus, is a clear message about universal love and necessary suffering as the divine pattern—starting with the three persons of the Trinity, where God is said to be both endlessly outpouring and self-emptying. Like three revolving buckets on a waterwheel, this process keeps the Flow flowing eternally—inside and outside of God, and in one positive direction.
Just because you do not have the right word for God does not mean you are not having the right experience. From the beginning, YHWH let the Jewish people know that no right word would ever contain God’s infinite mystery. The God of Israel’s message seems to be, “I am not going to give you any control over me, or else your need for control will soon extend to everything else.” Controlling people try to control people, and they do the same with God—but loving anything always means a certain giving up of control. You tend to create a God who is just like you—whereas it was supposed to be the other way around. Did it ever strike you that God gives up control more than anybody in the universe? God hardly ever holds on to control, if the truth be told. We do. And God allows this every day in every way. God is so free.
Any kind of authentic God experience will usually feel like love or suffering, or both. It will connect you to Full Reality at ever-new breadths, and depths “until God will be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). Our circles of belonging tend to either expand or constrict as life goes on. (At least that is what I’ve observed through working with people as a counselor, spiritual director, and confessor.) Our patterns of relating, once set, determine the trajectories for our whole lives. If we are inherently skeptical and suspicious, the focus narrows. If we are hopeful and trusting, the focus continues to expand.
Let me repeat again a point that has been so clarifying and foundational for me: The proof that you are a Christian is that you can see Christ everywhere else. This is what we saw in Caryll Houselander’s experience on the train, and in Jesus when he pointed to divinity in “the least of the brothers and sisters” (Matthew 25:40) and even in the so-called bad thief who was crucified next to him (Luke 23:43). Authentic God experience always expands your seeing and never constricts it. What else would be worthy of God? In God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more. The more you transcend your small ego, the more you can include. “Unless the single grain of wheat dies, it remains just a single grain. But if it does, it will bear much fruit,” Jesus Christ says (John 12:24).
When you look your dog in the face, for example, as I often looked at my black Labrador, Venus, I truly believe you are seeing another incarnation of the Divine Presence, the Christ. When you look at any other person, a flower, a honeybee, a mountain—anything—you are seeing the incarnation of God’s love for you and the universe you call home.
Pause to focus on an incarnation of God’s love apparent near you right now. You must risk it!
I hope a larger understanding is dawning for you. Anything that draws you out of yourself in a positive way—for all practical purposes—is operating as God for you at that moment. How else can the journey begin? How else are you drawn forward, now not by idle beliefs but by inner aliveness? God needs something to seduce you out and beyond yourself, so God uses three things in particular: goodness, truth, and beauty. All three have the capacity to draw us into an experience of union.
You cannot think your way into this kind of radiant, expansive seeing. You must be caught in a relationship of love and awe now and then, and it often comes slowly, through osmosis, imitation, resonance, contemplation, and mirroring. The Christ is always given freely, tossed like a baton from the other side. Our only part in the process is to reach out and catch it every now and then.
For Paul and for ordinary mystics like you and me, the kind of seeing I’m describing is a relational and reciprocal experience, in which we find God simultaneously in ourselves and in the outer world beyond ourselves. I doubt if there is any other way. Presence is never self-generated, but always a gift from another, and faith is always relational at the core. Divine seeing cannot be done alone, but only as one consciousness interfaces with another, and the two parties volley back and forth, meeting subject to subject. Presence must be offered and given, evoked and received. It can happen in a physical gesture, a quiet word or smile, a meal shared with someone we care for, where we are suddenly enlivened by a force larger than the two of us.
It is so important to taste, touch, and trust such moments. Words and complex rituals almost get in the way at this point. All you can really do is return such Presence with your own presence. Nothing to believe here at all. Just learn to trust and draw forth your own deepest experience, and you will know the Christ all day every day—before and after you ever go to any kind of religious service. Church, temple, and mosque will start to make sense on whole new levels—and at the same time, church, temple, and mosque will become totally boring and unnecessary. I promise you both will be true, because you are already fully accepted and fully accepting.
*1 Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” Harvard Theological Review 56, no. 3 (1963), 199–215. This scholarly work is for me key to understanding how the last five hundred years largely misunderstood and individualized Paul’s message. N. T. Wright will take the point even further in his marvelous and monumental study of Paul.
*2 Rohr, The Naked Now, and Just This (cac.org, 2017), a book of brief spiritual prompts and practices. Both develop this key idea.
*3 Rohr, The Divine Dance.
*4 Augustine, The Retractions, trans. M. Inez Bogan, R.S.M., The fathers of the Church (Baltimore: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), 52.
*5 Rohr, The Naked Now, ch. 16.
4
Original Goodness
> Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes…
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
In the backyard of our Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico, a massive 150-year-old Rio Grande cottonwood tree spreads its gnarled limbs over the lawn. New visitors are drawn to it immediately, standing in its shade, looking upward into its mighty boughs. An arborist once told us that the tree might have a mutation that causes the huge trunks to make such circuitous turns and twists. One wonders how it stands so firmly, yet the cottonwood is easily the finest work of art that we have at the center, and its asymmetrical beauty makes it a perfect specimen for one of our organization’s core messages: Divine perfection is precisely the ability to include what seems like imperfection. Before we come inside to pray, work, or teach any theology, its giant presence has already spoken a silent sermon over us.
Have you ever had an encounter like this in nature? Perhaps for you, it occurred at a lake or by the seashore, hiking in the mountains, in a garden listening to a mourning dove, even at a busy street corner. I am convinced that when received, such innate theology grows us, expands us, and enlightens us almost effortlessly. All other God talk seems artificial and heady in comparison.
Native religions largely got this, as did some scriptures. (See Daniel 3:57–82, or Psalms 98, 104, and 148.) In Job 12:7–10, and most of Job 38–39, Yahweh praises many strange animals and elements for their inherently available wisdom—the “pent up sea,” the “wild ass,” the “ostrich’s wing”—reminding the human that he or she is part of a much greater ecosystem, which offers lessons in all directions. “Is it by your wisdom,” God asks, “that the hawk soars, and spreads its wings to the south?” The obvious answer is no.
