by Richard Rohr
Sin is any cutting or limiting of that circuit. And we all sin now and then.
But an occasional power outage can help you appreciate how much you need unearned love and deeply rely upon it. Failure is part of the deal!
Moving in the Divine Two-Step
Let me offer a further quotation from Teilhard’s Divine Milieu, remembering that humans do not tend to get invested in things unless those things somehow include them:
God does not offer Himself to our finite beings as a thing all complete and ready to be embraced. For us, He is eternal discovery and eternal growth. The more we think we understand Him, the more he reveals himself as otherwise. The more we think we hold him, the further He withdraws, drawing us into the depths of himself.*5
This so fits my own experience of God. The divine-human love affair really is a reciprocal dance. Sometimes, in order for us to step forward, the other partner must step a bit away. The withdrawal is only for a moment, and its purpose is to pull us toward him or her—but it doesn’t feel like that in the moment. It feels like our partner is retreating. Or it just feels like suffering.
God creates the pullback too, “hiding his face” as it was called by so many mystics and Scriptures. God creates a vacuum that God alone can fill. Then God waits to see if we will trust our God partner to eventually fill the space in us, which now has grown even more spacious and receptive. This is the central theme of darkness, necessary doubt, or what the mystics called “God withdrawing his love.” They knew that what feels like suffering, depression, uselessness—moments when God has withdrawn—these moments are often deep acts of trust and invitation to intimacy on God’s part. (That this is so poorly understood was revealed when the world was shocked to discover that Mother Teresa had many years of darkness and what looked to the secular world like depression. It was anything but.)
I must be honest with you here about my own life. For the last ten years I have had little spiritual “feeling,” neither consolation nor desolation. Most days, I’ve had to simply choose to believe, to love, and to trust. The simple kindness and gratitude of good people produces a momentary “good feeling” in me, but even this goodness I do not know how to hold on to. It slides off my consciousness like that cheese on a Teflon pan!
But God rewards me for letting him reward me.
This is the divine two-step that we call grace:
I am doing it, and yet I am not doing it;
It is being done unto me, and yet by me too.
Yet God always takes the lead in the dance, which we only recognize over time.
What kind of God would only push from without, and never draw from within? Yet this is precisely the one-sided God that most of us were offered, and that much of the world has now rejected.
When we speak of Christ, we are speaking of an ever-growing encounter, and never a fixed package that is all-complete and must be accepted as is. On the inner journey of the soul we meet a God who interacts with our deepest selves, who grows the person, allowing and forgiving mistakes. It is precisely this give-and-take, and knowing there will be give-and-take, that makes God so real as a Lover. God unfolds your personhood from within through a constant increase in freedom—even freedom to fail. Love cannot happen in any other way. This is why Paul shouts in Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free!” (Galatians 5:1).
Remember again, God loves you by becoming you, taking your side in the inner dialogue of self-accusation and defense. God loves you by turning your mistakes into grace, by constantly giving you back to yourself in a larger shape. God stands with you, and not against you, when you are tempted to shame or self-hatred. If your authority figures never did that for you, it can be hard to feel it or trust it.*6 But you must experience this love at a cellular level at least once. (Remember, the only thing that separates you from God is the thought that you are separate from God!)
Every attempt to describe any and every action, or seeming inaction, of God will always be relational, interpersonal, and loving—and totally inclusive of you. In light of the Christ Mystery, this unifying love by which the entire material world is governed, we learn that God can never be experienced apart from your best interests being involved. Hard to imagine, isn’t it? Those who doubt it have never asked for it, or needed love enough to ask for it. Those who ask, always know and thus receive (Matthew 7:7). “If you, evil as you are, know how to give your children what is good, how much more will the heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him” (7:11). Human loves are the trial runs. Divine love is always the goal. But it can only build on all the stepping-stones of human relationships—and then it includes them all!
The receiving of love lets us know that there was indeed a Giver.
And freedom to even ask for love is the beginning of the receiving.
Thus Jesus can rightly say, “If you ask, you will receive” (Matthew 7:7–8).
To ask is to open the conduit from your side.
Your asking is only seconding the motion.
The first motion is always from God.
*1 I wrote about this at length in Adam’s Return (New York: Crossroad, 2004).
*2 Richard Rohr, Falling Upward (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011).
*3 Eloi Leclerc, The Wisdom of the Poor One of Assisi, trans. Marie-Louise Johnson (Pasadena, CA: Hope Publishing House, 1992), 72.
*4 See also Romans 8:28–29, where Paul says that it is “co-operators” who “become true images of his Son, so that Jesus might be the eldest of many brothers [and sisters].”
*5 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Divine Milieu (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 139.
*6 This certainly is not helped by the fact that threats and punishment were the rather universal method of parenting until very recently.
6
A Sacred Wholeness
Truly, my life is one long hearkening unto myself and unto others, and unto God.
—Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life
Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who was killed at Auschwitz in 1943, provides all of us with an important example of a non-Christian witness to the universal Christ Mystery. Before being imprisoned by the Nazis, Etty had been a quite modern woman, as unafraid of life, of her sexuality and other sensual pleasures, as she finally was of death. Yet, although she wasn’t a Christian, she was highly spiritual in the best sense of that term. She was an utter realist, devoid of self-pity, and with an almost impossible freedom from need to blame, hate, or project her inner anxiety elsewhere.
Without desiring to patronize her, I would identify Etty as a person Karl Rahner would’ve called an “anonymous Christian,” someone who unravels the underlying mystery of incarnation better than most Christians I know. Such folks are much more common than Christians imagine, although they do not need that appellation.
As the Nazis began their campaign of genocide and Etty’s future became more and more uncertain, she addressed God repeatedly in her diaries, regarding him not as an external savior, but as a power she could nurture and feed inside of her. She honored and loved this very power in his seeming powerlessness (which is the precise meaning of the crucified Jesus). Just listen to the power of these words to God:
Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.*1
In another place, a letter to a close friend from the Westerbork transit camp not long before she was sent to Auschwitz, she writes from that foundational place of faith, hope, and love that I talked about in the last chapter:
[In] spite of everything you always end up with the same conviction: life is good after all, it’s not God’s fault that things go awry sometimes, the cause lies in ourselves. And that’s what stays with me, even now, even when I’m ab
out to be packed off to Poland with my whole family.*2
And, in yet another place, she incomprehensibly writes as if she is a different species of human being:
Those two months behind barbed wire have been the two richest and most intense months of my life, in which my highest values were so deeply confirmed. I have learnt to love Westerbork.*3
Reflections like these—especially considering the circumstances—make Etty a profound expression for us of complete wholeness, or what St. Bonaventure called the “coincidence of opposites.” How does anyone achieve such a holding together of opposites—things like inner acceptance and outer resistance, intense suffering and perfect freedom, my little self and an infinite God, sensuality and intense spirituality, the need to blame somebody and the freedom to blame nobody? Etty Hillesum demonstrated this ability like few people I have ever studied. Either such people are the cutting edge of human consciousness and civilization, or they are mentally deranged. They surely far transcend any formal religion.
Etty Hillesum is but one example of another function of the Christ: a universally available “voice” that calls all things to become whole and true to themselves. God’s two main tools in this direction, from every appearance, seem to be great love and great suffering—and often great love that invariably leads to great suffering.
The supreme irony of life is that this voice of Christ works through—and alongside of—what always seems like unwholeness and untruth! God insists on incorporating the seeming negative. There is no doubt that God allows suffering. In fact, God seems to send us on the path toward our own wholeness not by eliminating the obstacles, but by making use of them. Most of the novels, operas, and poems ever written seem to have this same message in one way or another, yet it still comes as a shock and a disappointment when we experience it in our own little lives. But apart from love and suffering, both of which are always underserved, I see no other way that humans would recalibrate, reset, or change course. Why would we?
The Whole-Making Instinct
Carl Jung (1875–1961), the famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was highly critical of his Christian heritage because he did not find much transformation—what he called “whole making”—in the Christians he knew. Instead, he saw a religious tradition that had become externally focused, moralistic, and ineffective in actually changing people or cultures. His own father and five uncles were Swiss Reformed ministers, and Jung found them to be unhappy and unhealthy men. I am not sure what his exact evidence for this perception was, but clearly it was disillusioning to Jung. He did not want to end up like the religious men in his life.
Yet Jung was neither an atheist nor anti-Christian. He insisted that each of us has an inner “God Archetype,” or what he termed the “whole-making instinct.” The God Archetype is the part of you that drives you toward greater inclusivity by deep acceptance of the Real, the balancing of opposites, simple compassion toward the self, and the ability to recognize and forgive your own shadow side. For Jung, wholeness was not to be confused with any kind of supposed moral perfection, because such moralism is too tied up with ego and denial of the inner weakness that all of us must accept. I deeply agree with him.
In his critique of his father and uncles, Jung recognized that many humans had become reflections of the punitive God they worshiped. A forgiving God allows us to recognize the good in the supposed bad, and the bad in the supposed perfect or ideal. Any view of God as tyrannical or punitive tragically keeps us from admitting these seeming contradictions. It keeps us in denial about our true selves, and forces us to live on the surface of our own lives. If God is a shaming figure, then most of us naturally learn to deny, deflect, or pass on that shame to others. If God is torturer in chief, then a punitive and moralistic society is validated all the way down. We are back into problem-solving religion instead of healing and transformation.
Wholeness for Jung was about harmony and balancing, a holding operation more than an expelling operation. But he recognized that such consciousness was costly, because humans prefer to deal with the tensions of life by various forms of denial, moralizing, addiction, or projection. By the 1930s, Jung said there was so much repressed, denied, and projected shadow material in Europe, the supposedly Christian continent, that another Great War was almost inevitable. Tragically, his prediction ended up being fully correct.
I do not think Jung would have been exposed to my distinction between Jesus and Christ. More likely, he would have used the two words interchangeably, as have most people up to now. But if I read him correctly, his God Archetype can teach us something important about the Christ Mystery, and our participation in it. He understood that the full journey towards wholeness must always include the negative experiences (the “cross”) that we usually reject. In that, Jung was more Christian than the critics who called him anti-Christian.
The Voice That Is Great Within Us
To follow their own paths to wholeness, both Etty Hillesum and Carl Jung trusted in and hearkened to the voice of God in their deepest Selves. Many educated and sophisticated people are not willing to submit to indirect, subversive, and intuitive knowing, which is probably why they rely far too much on external law and ritual behavior to achieve their spiritual purposes. They know nothing else that feels objective and solid. Intuitive truth, that inner whole-making instinct, just feels too much like our own thoughts and feelings, and most of us are not willing to call this “God,” even when that voice prompts us toward compassion instead of hatred, forgiveness instead of resentment, generosity instead of stinginess, bigness instead of pettiness. But think about it: If the incarnation is true, then of course God speaks to you through your own thoughts! As Joan of Arc brilliantly replied when the judge accused her of being the victim of her own imagination, “How else would God speak to me?”
Many of us have been trained to write off these inner voices as mere emotion, religious conditioning, or psychological manipulation. Perhaps they sometimes are, but often they are not. God talk seems beneath the dignity of the modern and postmodern person. Ironically, this is half right. The inner voice so honored by Hillesum and Jung is experienced as the deepest and usually hidden self, where most of us do not go. It truly does speak at a level “beneath” rational consciousness, a place where only the humble—or the trained—know how to go.
At one point, Jung wrote, “My pilgrim’s progress has been to climb down a thousand ladders until I could finally reach out a hand of friendship to the little clod of earth that I am.”*4 Jung, a supposed unbeliever, knew that any authentic God experience takes a lot of humility and a lot of honesty. The proud cannot know God because God is not proud, but infinitely humble. Remember, only like can know like! A combination of humility and patient seeking is the best spiritual practice of all.
And this is where embracing the Christ Mystery becomes utterly practical. Without the mediation of Christ, we will be tempted to overplay the distance and the distinction between God and humanity. But because of the incarnation, the supernatural is forever embedded in the natural, making the very distinction false. How good is that? This is why saints like Augustine, Teresa of Avila, and Carl Jung seem to fully equate the discovery of their own souls with the very discovery of God. It takes much of our life, much lived experience, to trust and allow such a process. But when it comes, it will feel like a calm and humble ability to quietly trust yourself and trust God at the same time. Isn’t that what we all want?
If you can trust and listen to this inner divine image, this whole-making instinct, or what I called in an earlier book your “True Self,”*5 you will be moving forward with your best, your largest, your kindest, your most inclusive self. (I should also add “your most compassionately dissatisfied self,” because the soul’s journey invites us to infinite depth that we can never fully plumb!) As Augustine says, “A temporal thing is loved before we have it, and it grows worthless when we gain it, for it does not satisfy the soul�
��but the eternal is more ardently loved the more it is acquired….The soul will find the eternal even more valuable after once tasting it.”*6 I am quite sure this is what drove Etty Hillesum ever deeper and ever forward, and allowed her to follow a very sensual, even sexual experience in the bedroom with prayers of adoration on the bathroom floor, all within the same half hour.
Spiritual satisfactions feed on themselves, grow by themselves, create wholeness, and are finally their own reward. Material satisfactions, while surely not bad, have a tendency to become addictive, because instead of making you whole, they repeatedly remind you of how incomplete, needy, and empty you are. As alcoholics often say, your “addiction makes you need more and more of what is not working.” Spiritual satisfactions will often be communicated to us in material, embodied, and ecstatic forms, however. Embodiment is good and necessary, so don’t dismiss it too quickly as “the flesh.” The difference is in how we encounter these forms. If we can be satisfied to enjoy them, observe them, participate in them, they give us ongoing joy. They are fingers pointing at the moon. But once we try to possess, capture, or “own” the moon, or any material thing, pulling it inside our own ego control, it is somehow polluted. Social scientists say that the excitement that surrounds the opening of a physical gift fades within a very few minutes.
In fact, far from consuming spiritual gifts for yourself alone, you must receive all words of God tenderly and subtly, so that you can speak them to others tenderly and with subtlety. I would even say that anything said with too much bravado, overassurance, or with any need to control or impress another, is never the voice of God within you. I hope I am not doing that here. If any thought feels too harsh, shaming, or diminishing of yourself or others, it is not likely the voice of God. Trust me on that. That is simply your voice. Why do humans so often presume the exact opposite—that shaming voices are always from God, and grace voices are always the imagination? That is a self-defeating (“demonic”?) path. Yet, as a confessor and a spiritual director, I can confirm that this broken logic is the general norm.
