by Richard Rohr
If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God.
Try doing this for yourself—maybe even out loud. It only comes with practice. One recent holy man who came to visit me put it this way, “We must listen to what is supporting us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging us. We must listen to what is alive in us.” I personally was so trained not to trust those voices that I think I often did not hear the voice of God speaking to me, or what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.” Yes, a narcissistic person can and will misuse such advice, but a genuine God lover will flourish inside such a dialogue. That is the risk that God takes—and we must take—for the sake of a fruitful love relationship with God. It takes so much courage and humility to trust the voice of God within. Mary fully personifies such trust in her momentous and free “Let It Be” to the Archangel Gabriel (Luke 1:38), and she was an uneducated teenage Jewish girl.
Most Christians have been taught to hate or confess our sin before we’ve even recognized its true shape. But if you nurture hatred toward yourself, it won’t be long before it shows itself as hatred toward others. This is garden-variety Christianity, I am afraid, but it comes at a huge cost to history. Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society. In fact, “fast-food religion” and the so-called prosperity gospel are some of the very best ways to actually avoid God—while talking about religion almost nonstop.
We must learn how to recognize the positive flow and to distinguish it from the negative resistance within ourselves. It takes years, I think. If a voice comes from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the “Accuser,” which is the literal meaning of the biblical word “Satan.” Shaming, accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks. It is how we talk. God is supremely nonviolent, and I have learned that from the saints and mystics that I have read and met and heard about. That many holy people cannot be wrong.
*1 Etty Hillesum, Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–43 (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing, 2002), 488.
*2 Ibid, 608.
*3 Ibid, 520.
*4 C. G. Jung Letters, vol. 1, selected and edited by Gerhard Adler (London: Routledge, 1972), 19, n. 8.
*5 Rohr, Immortal Diamond.
*6 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 1. 38.42, in Readings in Classic Rhetoric (New York: Routledge, 2008), 184.
7
Going Somewhere Good
I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already blazing.
—Luke 12:49
Up to now, we’ve focused largely on describing a universal and deeper reality at the heart of all things. We have named this transcendent reality the Christ Mystery, which reveals itself in the incarnations of nature, the Jesus of history, and even you and me. This Christ passionately and relentlessly loves us in a highly personalized way, wooing us toward wholeness in a vocabulary unique to each soul.
In this chapter, we stand back to ask, But where is this all going? If “Christ in you” is the starting point, what is the end goal for all of us, and—for that matter—the cosmos in its entirety? Is our “late, great planet earth” really headed toward Armageddon? In these fractious, unmoored, and disillusioned times, I can hardly think of more relevant concerns.
To arrive at ultimate outcomes, I begin with the promise of change, and also the nature of change, which I describe later as moving from order to disorder and finally reorder (Appendix II).
The Inner Process of Change
Jesus’s daring notion of casting fire upon the earth, cited in the epigraph, is one of my favorite metaphors. I love the image of fire, not for its seeming destructiveness, but as a natural symbol for transformation—literally, the changing of forms. Farmers, forestry workers, and Native peoples know that fire is a renewing force, even as it also can be destructive. We in the West tend to see it as merely destructive (which is probably why we did not understand the metaphors of hell or purgatory).
Jesus quite clearly believed in change. In fact, the first public word out of his mouth was the Greek imperative verb metanoeite, which literally translates as “change your mind” or “go beyond your mind” (Matthew 3:2, 4:17, and Mark 1:15). Unfortunately, in the fourth century, St. Jerome translated the word into Latin as paenitentia (“repent” or “do penance”), initiating a host of moralistic connotations that have colored Christians’ understanding of the Gospels ever since. The word metanoeite, however, is talking about a primal change of mind, worldview, or your way of processing—and only by corollary about a specific change in behavior. The common misunderstanding puts the cart before the horse; we think we can change a few externals while our underlying worldview often remains fully narcissistic and self-referential.
This misunderstanding contributed to a puritanical, externalized, and largely static notion of the Christian message that has followed us to this day. Faith became about external requirements that could be enforced, punished, and rewarded, much more than an actual change of heart and mind, which Jesus describes as something that largely happens “in secret, where your Father who sees all that is done in secret can reward you” (Matthew 6:4, 6, 18). Jesus invariably emphasized inner motivation and intention in his moral teaching. He made religion about interior change and “purity of heart” (Matthew 5:8), rather than anything people can see, or anything that will produce any social payoff or punishment. This refines religion at the very point where it’s most likely to become corrupt and manipulative.
The inner process of change is fundamental to everything, even our bodies. Think about it: What if the next wound to your body could never be healed? Having undergone several surgeries myself, I was consoled by the way my body always took care of itself over time. The miracle of healing came from the inside; all I had to do was wait and trust. In religion, though, many prefer magical, external, one-time transactions instead of the universal pattern of growth and healing through loss and renewal. This universal pattern is the way that life perpetuates itself in ever-new forms—ironically, through various kinds of death. This pattern disappoints and scares most of us, but less so biologists and physicists; they seem to understand the pattern better than many clergy, who think death and resurrection is just a doctrinal statement about Jesus.
I am afraid many of us have failed to honor God’s always unfolding future and the process of getting there, which usually includes some form of dying to the old. In practical effect, we end up resisting and opposing the very thing we want. The great irony is that we have often done this in the name of praying to God, as though God would protect us from the very process that refines us!
God protects us into and through death, just as the Father did with Jesus. When this is not made clear, Christianity ends up protecting and idealizing the status quo—or even more, the supposedly wonderful past—at least insofar as it preserves our privilege. Comfortable people tend to see the church as a quaint antique shop where they can worship old things as substitutes for eternal things.
There is no such thing as a nonpolitical Christianity. To refuse to critique the system or the status quo is to fully support it—which is a political act well disguised. Like Pilate, many Christians choose to wash their hands in front of the crowd and declare themselves innocent, saying with him, “It is your concern” (Matthew 27:25). Pilate maintains his purity and Jesus pays the price. Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it. There is no pedestal of perfect purity to stand on, and striving for it is an ego game anyway. Yet the Pilate syndrome is quite common among bona fide Christians, often taking the form of excluding those they consider sinners.
Jesus himself strongly rejects this love of the pas
t and one’s private perfection, and he cleverly quotes Isaiah (29:13) to do it: “In vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as if they were doctrines” (Matthew 15:9). Many of us seem to think that God really is “back there,” in the good ol’ days of old-time religion when God was really God, and everybody was happy and pure. Such is the illusion of many people attracted to religion, and it is quite popular at many “megachurches” today. All change is private and interior, and any outer critique of systems, one’s privilege, one’s nation, or one’s religion is out of the question. When Jesus first announced “change your mind,” he immediately challenged his apostles to leave both their jobs and their families (see Mark 1:20, Matthew 4:22). The change of mind had immediate and major social implications, leading young Jewish men to call two solidly conservative sacred cows—occupation and family—into full question. He did not tell them to attend the synagogue more often or to believe that he was God. Have you ever noted that Jesus never once speaks glowingly of the nuclear family, careers, or jobs? Check it out.
How God Keeps Creation Both Good and New
So, as we bring Part I of this book to a close, let’s talk about how God keeps creation both good and new—which means always going somewhere even better. I know some Christians might be hesitant about this, but the helpful word here is “evolution.” God keeps creating things from the inside out, so they are forever yearning, developing, growing, and changing for the good. This is the fire he has cast upon the earth, the generative force implanted in all living things, which grows things both from within—because they are programmed for it—and from without—by taking in sun, food, and water.
If we see the Eternal Christ Mystery as the symbolic Alpha Point for the beginning of what we call “time,” we can see that history and evolution indeed have an intelligence, a plan, and a trajectory from the very start. The Risen Christ, who appears in the middle of history, assures us that God is leading us somewhere good and positive, all crucifixions to the contrary. God has been leading us since the beginning of time, but now God includes us in the process of unfolding (Romans 8:28–30). This is the opportunity offered us as humans, and those who ride this Christ train are meant to be the “New Humanity” (Ephesians 2:15b). Christ is both the Divine Radiance at the Beginning Big Bang and the Divine Allure drawing us into a positive future. We are thus bookended in a Personal Love—coming from Love, and moving toward an ever more inclusive Love. This is the Christ Omega! (Rev. 1:6)
Maybe you personally do not feel a need for creation to have any form, direction, or final purpose. After all, many scientists do not seem to ask such ultimate questions. Evolutionists observe the evidence and the data, and say the universe is clearly unfolding and expanding, although they do not know the final goal. But Christians believe the final goal does have a shape and meaning—which is revealed from the way creation began in “very goodness!” Everything that rises does seem to converge. The biblical symbol of the Universal and Eternal Christ standing at both ends of cosmic time was intended to assure us that the clear and full trajectory of the world we know is an unfolding of consciousness with “all creation groaning in this one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22).
The New Testament has a clear sense of history working in a way that is both evolutionary and positive. See, for example, Jesus’s many parables of the Kingdom, which lean heavily on the language of growth and development. His common metaphors for growth are the seed, the growing ear of corn, weeds and wheat growing together, and the rising of yeast. His parables of the “Reign of God” are almost always about finding, discovering, being surprised, experiencing reversals of expectations, changing roles and status. None of these notions are static; they are always about something new and good coming into being.
Why do I think this is so important? Frankly, because without it we become very impatient with ourselves and others, particularly in the setbacks. Humans and history both grow slowly. We expect people to show up at our doors fully transformed and holy before they can be welcomed in. But growth language says it is appropriate to wait, trusting that metanoeite, or change of consciousness, can only come with time—and this patience ends up being the very shape of love. Without it, church becomes the mere enforcing of laws and requirements. “Pastors,” instead of serving as caretakers of God’s lambs and sheep, are told they should be guards, word police, and dealers in holy antiques. Without an evolutionary worldview, Christianity does not really understand, much less foster, growth or change. Nor does it know how to respect and support where history is heading.
The Story Line of Grace
I am looking at a sign here in my office right now that says, LIFE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE PERFECT TO BE WONDERFUL. The steps toward maturity, it seems, are always and necessarily immature. What else could they be? Good moms and dads learned that a long time ago, and Cardinal John Henry Newman brilliantly captured it when he wrote that “to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.”*1
Anything called “Good News” needs to reveal a universal pattern that can be relied upon, and not just clannish or tribal patterns that might be true on occasion. This is probably why Christianity’s break with ethnic Judaism was inevitable, although never intended by either Jesus or Paul, and why by the early second century Christians were already calling themselves “catholics” or “the universals.” At the front of their consciousness was a belief that God is leading all of history somewhere larger and broader and better for all of humanity. Yet, after Jesus and Paul—except for occasional theologians like Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, Maximus the Confessor, and Francis of Assisi—the most widely accepted version of Christianity had little to do with the cosmos or creation, nature or even history. Our beliefs did not generally talk about the future, except in terms of judgment and apocalypse. This is no way to guide history forward; no way to give humanity hope, purpose, direction, or joy.
That is the limited and precarious position Christianity puts itself in when it allows itself to be too tied to any culture-bound Jesus, any expression of faith that does not include the Eternal Christ. Without a universal story line that offers grace and caring for all of creation, Jesus is kept small, and seemingly inept. God’s care must be toward all creatures, or God ends up not being very caring at all, making things like water, trees, animals, and history itself accidental, trivial, or disposable. But grace is not a late arrival, an occasional add-on for a handful of humans, and God’s grace and life did not just appear a few thousand years ago, when Jesus came and a few lucky humans found him in the Bible. God’s grace cannot be a random problem solver doled out to the few and the virtuous—or it is hardly grace at all! (See Ephesians 2:7–10 if you want the radical meaning of grace summed up in three succinct verses.)
What if we recovered this sense of God’s inherent grace as the primary generator of all life? And that it does its job from the inside out!
Traces of Goodness
A few years ago, the host of a Scandinavian talk show asked Richard Dawkins, the English biologist and militant atheist, “What is the most common misconception about evolution?” Dawkins’s response was “That it is a theory of random chance. It obviously can’t be a theory of random chance. If it was a theory of random chance, it couldn’t possibly explain why all animals and plants are so beautifully…well designed.” Dawkins noted that even Darwin himself didn’t believe in random chance. “What Darwin did was to discover the only known alternative to random chance, which [he thought] was natural selection.”*2
Yes, he actually said that! Dawkins is leaving the door fully open for what some call “intelligent design,” but let’s not fight about the wording. As a result of this fight, many educated people no longer want to talk with religious people, or use our phraseology. Thus the dead-ended culture wars we are involved in today where each side is entrenched behind symbolic words.
All I know is that creationists and evolutionists do not have to b
e enemies. The evolutionists rightly want to say the universe is unfolding, while believers can rightly insist on the personal meaning of that unfolding. We give the phenomenon of life and matter a positive and certain end point, which we call “resurrection,” while also accounting for lots of suffering and death along the way, which we call “crucifixion.” That is, indeed, a momentous and grand vision, and it explains a lot, but it also carries so much extra baggage that I can see why rational and scientifically minded folks usually resist it.
Yet to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead is actually not a leap of faith. Resurrection and renewal are, in fact, the universal and observable pattern of everything. We might just as well use nonreligious terms like “springtime,” “regeneration,” “healing,” “forgiveness,” “life cycles,” “darkness,” and “light.” If incarnation is real, then resurrection in multitudinous forms is to be fully expected. Or to paraphrase that earlier statement attributed to Albert Einstein, it is not that one thing is a miracle, but that the whole thing is a miracle!
This point is worth sitting with for a few moments.
Every time you take in a breath, you are repeating the pattern of taking spirit into matter, and thus repeating the first creation of Adam.
And every time you breathe out, you are repeating the pattern of returning spirit to the material universe. In a way, every exhalation is a “little dying” as we pay the price of inspiriting the world.
