by Richard Rohr
God is not bound by the human presumption that we are the center of everything, and creation did not actually demand or need Jesus (or us, for that matter) to confer additional sacredness upon it. From the first moment of the Big Bang, nature was revealing the glory and goodness of the Divine Presence; it must be seen as a gratuitous gift and not a necessity. Jesus came to live in its midst, and enjoy life in all its natural variations, and thus be our model and exemplar. Jesus is the gift that honored the gift, you might say.
Strangely, many Christians today limit God’s provident care to humans, and very few of them at that. How different we are from Jesus, who extended the divine generosity to sparrows, lilies, ravens, donkeys, the grasses of the fields (Luke 12:22), and even “the hairs of the head” (Matthew 10:29). No stingy God here! (Although he did neglect the hairs of my head.) But what stinginess on our side made us limit God’s concern—even eternal concern—to just ourselves? And how can we imagine God as caring about us if God does not care about everything else too? If God chooses and doles out his care, we are always insecure and unsure whether we are among the lucky recipients. But once we become aware of the generous, creative Presence that exists in all things natural, we can receive it as the inner Source of all dignity and worthiness. Dignity is not doled out to the worthy. It grounds the inherent worthiness of things in their very nature and existence.
The Great Chain of Being
St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) taught that to work up to loving God, start by loving the very humblest and simplest things, and then move up from there. “Let us place our first step in the ascent at the bottom, presenting to ourselves the whole material world as a mirror, through which we may pass over to God, who is the Supreme Craftsman,” he wrote. And further, “The Creator’s supreme power, wisdom and benevolence shine forth through all created things.”*1
I encourage you to apply this spiritual insight quite literally. Don’t start by trying to love God, or even people; love rocks and elements first, move to trees, then animals, and then humans. Angels will soon seem like a real possibility, and God is then just a short leap away. It works. In fact, it might be the only way to love, because how you do anything is how you do everything. As John’s First Letter says, quite directly, “Anyone who says he loves God and hates his brother [or sister] is a liar” (4:20). In the end, either you love everything or there is reason to doubt that you love anything. This one love and one loveliness was described by many medieval theologians and others as the “Great Chain of Being.” The message was that if you failed to recognize the Presence in any one link of the chain, the whole sacred universe would fall apart. It really was “all or nothing.”
God did not just start talking to us with the Bible or the church or the prophets. Do we really think that God had nothing at all to say for 13.7 billion years, and started speaking only in the latest nanosecond of geological time? Did all history prior to our sacred texts provide no basis for truth or authority? Of course not. The radiance of the Divine Presence has been glowing and expanding since the beginning of time, before there were any human eyes to see or know about it. But in the mid-nineteenth century, grasping for the certitude and authority the church was quickly losing in the face of rationalism and scientism, Catholics declared the Pope to be “infallible,” and Evangelicals decided the Bible was “inerrant,” despite the fact that we had gotten along for most of eighteen hundred years without either belief. In fact, these claims would have seemed idolatrous to most early Christians.
Creation—be it planets, plants, or pandas—was not just a warm-up act for the human story or the Bible. The natural world is its own good and sufficient story, if we can only learn to see it with humility and love. That takes contemplative practice, stopping our busy and superficial minds long enough to see the beauty, allow the truth, and protect the inherent goodness of what it is—whether it profits me, pleases me or not.
Every gift of food and water, every act of simple kindness, every ray of sunshine, every mammal caring for her young, all of it emerged from this original and intrinsically good creation. Humans were meant to know and enjoy this ever-present reality—a reality we too often fail to praise, or maybe worse, ignore and take for granted. As described in Genesis, the creation unfolds over six days, implying a developmental understanding of growth. Only the seventh day has no motion of it. The divine pattern is set: Doing must be balanced out by not-doing, in the Jewish tradition called the “Sabbath Rest.” All contemplation reflects a seventh-day choice and experience, relying on grace instead of effort. Full growth implies timing and staging, acting and waiting, working and not working.
All the other sentient beings also do their little things, take their places in the cycle of life and death, mirroring the eternal self-emptying and eternal infilling of God, and somehow trusting it all—as did my dog Venus when she gazed at me, then looked straight ahead and humbly lowered her nose to the ground as we put her to sleep. Animals fear attack, of course, but they do not suffer the fear of death. Whereas many have said that the fear and avoidance of death is the one absolute in every human life.
If we can recognize that we belong to such a rhythm and ecosystem, and intentionally rejoice in it, we can begin to find our place in the universe. We will begin to see, as did Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God.
Original Goodness, Not Original Sin
The true and essential work of all religion is to help us recognize and recover the divine image in everything. It is to mirror things correctly, deeply, and fully until all things know who they are. A mirror by its nature reflects impartially, equally, effortlessly, spontaneously, and endlessly. It does not produce the image, nor does it filter the image according to its perceptions or preferences. Authentic mirroring can only call forth what is already there.
But we can enlarge this idea of mirroring to give us another way to understand our key themes in this book. For example, there is a divine mirror that might be called the very “Mind of Christ.” The Christ mirror fully knows and loves us from all eternity, and reflects that image back to us. I cannot logically prove this to you, but I do know that people who live inside of this resonance are both happy and healthy. Those who do not resonate and reciprocate with things around them only grow in loneliness and alienation, and invariably tend toward violence in some form, if only toward themselves.
Do you then also see the lovely significance of John’s statement “It is not because you do not know the truth that I write to you, but because you know it already” (1 John 1:21)? He is talking about an implanted knowing in each of us—an inner mirror, if you will. Today, many would just call it “consciousness,” and poets and musicians might call it the “soul.” The prophet Jeremiah would call it “the Law written in your heart” (31:33), while Christians would call it the “Indwelling Holy Spirit.” For me, these terms are largely interchangeable, approaching the same theme from different backgrounds and expectations.
In that same letter, John puts it quite directly: “My dear people, we are already the children of God, and what we are to be in the future is still to be revealed, and when it is revealed—all we will know is that we are like God, for we shall finally see God as he really is!” (3:2). And who is this God that we will finally see? It is somehow Being Itself, for God is the one, according to Paul, “in whom we live and move and have our [own] being, as indeed some of your own writers have said ‘We are all his children’ ” (Acts 17:28).
Our inherent “likeness to God” depends upon the objective connection given by God equally to all creatures, each of whom carries the divine DNA in a unique way. Owen Barfield called this phenomenon “original participation.” I would also call it “original blessing” or “original innocence” (“unwoundedness”).*2
Whatever you call it, the “image of God” is absolute and unchanging. There is nothing humans can do to increase or dec
rease it. And it is not ours to decide who has it or does not have it, which has been most of our problem up to now. It is pure and total gift, given equally to all.
But this picture was complicated when the concept of original sin entered the Christian mind.
In this idea—first put forth by Augustine in the fifth century, but never mentioned in the Bible—we emphasized that human beings were born into “sin” because Adam and Eve “offended God” by eating from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” As punishment, God cast them out of the Garden of Eden. This strange concept of original sin does not match the way we usually think of sin, which is normally a matter of personal responsibility and culpability. Yet original sin wasn’t something we did at all; it was something that was done to us (passed down from Adam and Eve). So we got off to a bad start.
By contrast, most of the world’s great religions start with some sense of primal goodness in their creation stories. The Judeo-Christian tradition beautifully succeeded at this, with the Genesis record telling us that God called creation “good” five times in Genesis 1:10–22, and even “very good” in 1:31. The initial metaphor for creation was a garden, which is inherently positive, beautiful, growth-oriented, a place to be “cultivated and cared for” (2:15), where humans could walk naked and without shame.
But after Augustine, most Christian theologies shifted from the positive vision of Genesis 1 to the darker vision of Genesis 3—the so-called fall, or what I am calling the “problem.” Instead of embracing God’s master plan for humanity and creation—what we Franciscans still call the “Primacy of Christ”—Christians shrunk our image of both Jesus and Christ, and our “Savior” became a mere Johnny-come-lately “answer” to the problem of sin, a problem that we had largely created ourselves. That’s a very limited role for Jesus. His death instead of his life was defined as saving us! This is no small point. The shift in what we valued often allowed us to avoid Jesus’s actual life and teaching because all we needed was the sacrificial event of his death. Jesus became a mere mop-up exercise for sin, and sin management has dominated the entire religious story line and agenda to this day. This is no exaggeration.
In one way, the doctrine of “original sin” was good and helpful in that it taught us not to be surprised at the frailty and woundedness that we all carry. Just as goodness is inherent and shared, so it seems with evil. And this is, in fact, a very merciful teaching. Knowledge of our shared wound ought to free us from the burden of unnecessary—and individual—guilt or shame, and help us to be forgiving and compassionate with ourselves and with one another. (There is usually a bright side to every poor theological formulation, if we are willing to look for it.)
Yet historically, the teaching of original sin started us off on the wrong foot—with a no instead of a yes, with a mistrust instead of a trust. We have spent centuries trying to solve the “problem” that we’re told is at the heart of our humanity. But if you start with a problem, you tend to never get beyond that mind-set.
From Augustine’s theological no, the hole only got deeper. Martin Luther portrayed humans as a “pile of manure,” John Calvin instituted his now-infamous doctrine of “total depravity,” and poor Jonathan Edwards famously condemned New Englanders as “sinners in the hands of an angry God.” No wonder Christians are accused of having a negative anthropology!
The theology of mistrust and suspicion has manifested itself in all kinds of misguided notions: a world always in competition with itself; a mechanical and magical understanding of baptism; fiery notions of hell; systems of rewards and punishments, shaming and exclusion of all wounded individuals (variously defined in each century); beliefs in the superiority of skin color, ethnicity, or nation.
All of this was done in the name of the one who said that he did not come “for the righteous” or the “virtuous,” but for “sinners” (Luke 15:1–7, Mark 2:17, Luke 5:32), and to give us “life, and life abundantly” (John 10:10). This will never work, and it never did!
When we start with a theology of sin management administered by a too-often elite clergy, we end up with a schizophrenic religion. We end up with a Jesus who was merciful while on earth, but who punishes in the next world. Who forgives here but not later. God in this picture seems whimsical and untrustworthy even to the casual observer. It may be scary for Christians to admit these outcomes to ourselves, but we must. I believe this is a key reason why people do not so much react against the Christian story line, like they used to; instead, they simply refuse to take it seriously.
To begin climbing out of the hole of original sin, we must start with a positive and generous cosmic vision. Generosity tends to feed on itself. I have never met a truly compassionate or loving human being who did not have a foundational and even deep trust in the inherent goodness of human nature.
The Christian story line must start with a positive and overarching vision for humanity and for history, or it will never get beyond the primitive, exclusionary, and fear-based stages of most early human development. We are ready for a major course correction.
Holding on to a Positive Vision
Brain studies have shown that we may be hardwired to focus on problems at the expense of a positive vision. The human brain wraps around fear and problems like Velcro. We dwell on bad experiences long after the fact, and spend vast amounts of energy anticipating what might go wrong in the future. Conversely, positivity and gratitude and simple happiness slide away like cheese on hot Teflon. Studies like the ones done by the neuroscientist Rick Hanson show that we must consciously hold on to a positive thought or feeling for a minimum of fifteen seconds before it leaves any imprint in the neurons. The whole dynamic, in fact, is called the Velcro/Teflon theory of the mind. We are more attracted to the problem than to the solution, you might say.*3
I encourage you not to simply take me at my word. Watch your own brain and emotions. You will quickly see there is a toxic attraction to the “negative,” whether it’s a situation at work, a bit of incriminating gossip you overheard, or a sad development in the life of a friend. True freedom from this tendency is exceedingly rare, since we are ruled by automatic responses most of the time. The only way, then, to increase authentic spirituality is to deliberately practice actually enjoying a positive response and a grateful heart. And the benefits are very real. By following through on conscious choices, we can rewire our responses toward love, trust, and patience. Neuroscience calls this “neuroplasticity.” This is how we increase our bandwidth of freedom, and it is surely the heartbeat of any authentic spirituality.
Most of us know that we can’t afford to walk around fearing, hating, dismissing, and denying all possible threats and all otherness. But few of us were given practical teaching in how to avoid this. It is interesting that Jesus emphasized the absolute centrality of inner motivation and intention more than outer behavior, spending almost half of the Sermon on the Mount on this subject (see Matthew 5:20–6:18). We must—yes, must—make a daily and even hourly choice to focus on the good, the true, and the beautiful. A wonderful description of this act of the will is found in Philippians 4:4–9, where Paul writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always [italics added].” If you’re tempted to write this off as idyllic “positive thinking,” remember that Paul wrote this letter while literally in chains (1:17). How did he pull this off? You might call it “mind control.” Many of us just call it “contemplation.”
So how do we first see and then practice this “Original Goodness”?
Paul again gives us an answer. He says, “There are only three things that last, faith, hope, and love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). In Catholic theology we called these three essential attitudes the “theological virtues,” because they were a “participation in the very life of God”—given freely by God, or “infused” into us at our very conception. In this understanding, faith, hope, and love are far more defining of the human person than the “moral virtues,” the va
rious good behaviors we learn as we grow older. This is why I cannot abandon an Orthodox or Catholic worldview. For all of their poor formulations, they still offer humanity a foundationally positive anthropology (even though many individuals never learn about it because of poor catechesis!), and not just a moral worthiness contest, which is always unstable and insecure.
From the very beginning, faith, hope, and love are planted deep within our nature—indeed they are our very nature (Romans 5:5, 8:14–17). The Christian life is simply a matter of becoming who we already are (1 John 3:1–2, 2 Peter 1:3–4). But we have to awaken, allow, and advance this core identity by saying a conscious yes to it and drawing upon it as a reliable and Absolute Source.*4 Again, image must become likeness. And even a good theology will have a hard time making up for a bad anthropology. If the human person is a “pile of manure,” even the “snow of Christ” only covers it and does not undo it.
But our saying yes to such implanted faith, hope, and love plays a crucial role in the divine equation; human freedom matters. Mary’s yes seemed to be essential to the event of incarnation (Luke 1:38). God does not come uninvited. God and grace cannot enter without an opening from our side, or we would be mere robots. God does not want robots, but lovers who freely choose to love in return for love. And toward that supreme end, God seems quite willing to wait, cajole, and entice.
In other words, we matter. We do have to choose to trust reality and even our physicality, which is to finally trust ourselves. Our readiness to not trust ourselves is surely one of our recurring sins. Yet so many sermons tell us to never trust ourselves, to only trust God. That is far too dualistic. How can a person who does not trust himself know how to trust at all? Trust, like love, is of one piece. (By the way, at this point in history, “trust” is probably a much more helpful and descriptive word than “faith,” a notion that has become far too misused, intellectualized, and even banal.)
