by Richard Rohr
I just cannot let anybody love me “for nothing.” I insist on being worthy and deserving. And then I demand the same of others too. Yet your arms remain outstretched and embracing to all the world.
You alone, Christ Jesus, refuse to be a crucifier, even at the cost of being crucified. You never play the victim or call for any vengeance, but only breathe a universal forgiveness upon the universe from this crucified place—your upside-down throne.
We humans so often hate ourselves, but we mistakenly kill you and others instead.
You always knew we would do this, didn’t you? And you accepted it.
Now you invite me out of this endless cycle of illusion and violence toward myself and toward anybody else.
I want to stop crucifying your blessed flesh, this blessed humanity, this holy mother earth.
I thank you, Brother Jesus, for becoming a human being and walking the full journey with me. Now I do not have to pretend that I am God.
This is more than enough and more than good, just to know we are doing it together.
I thank you for becoming finite and limited, so I do not have to pretend that I am infinite or limitless.
I thank you for becoming small and inferior, so I do not have to pretend that I am big and superior to anybody.
I thank you for holding our shame and nakedness so boldly and so publicly, so I do not need to hide or deny our human reality.
I thank you for accepting exclusion and expulsion, being crucified “outside the walls” and allowing me to know that I will meet you exactly there.
I thank you for “becoming sin,” so I do not need to deny my own failures, and can recognize that even my mistakes are the truest and most surprising path to love.
I thank you for becoming weak, so I do not have to pretend to be strong.
I thank you for being willing to be considered imperfect, wrong, and strange, so I do not have to be perfect or right, or idealize the so-called normal.
I thank you for not being loved or liked by so many, so I do not have to try so hard to be loved and liked by anybody.
I thank you for being considered a failure, so I do not have to pretend or even try to be a “success.”
I thank you for allowing yourself to be considered wrong by the standards of both state and religion, so I do not have to be right anywhere.
I thank you for being poor in every way, so I do not have to seek being rich in any way.
I thank you, Brother Jesus, for being all of the things that humanity despises and fears, so I can fully accept myself—and everyone else—in and through you!
Crucified Jesus, I thank you for revealing all these things to me in one great image of insight and mercy. Yes, what the medieval mystics said is true, Crux probat omnia—“The cross legitimates/proves/uses everything.” (Stay with this Christian maxim until it make sense to you.)
I want to love you in this form, Brother Jesus. I need to love you in this way, or I will never be free or happy in this world.
You and I, Brother Jesus, we are the same.
*1 Mary Beth Ingham, Scotus for Dunces (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2003), 75ff.
*2 René Girard, The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: Crossroad, 1996).
13
It Can’t Be Carried Alone
There is one Body, one Spirit, and you were all called into one and the same hope….
And each one of us has been given his own share of grace, as Christ allotted it.
—Ephesians 4:4, 7
For the last few years, I have had to stop watching the evening news because I could not bear to see any more women and children running for their lives in Syria or babies starving in Africa. It all made me deeply heartsick and even nauseous. I did not like being human. Then my country entered into an election cycle where words seemed to lose all meaning. It was about illusion and naked ambition on all sides. American politics felt vacuous, delusional, empty—and thus vain—a foundation on which it’s impossible to build a civilization. And yet large numbers, including 82 percent of white Evangelicals and 52 percent of white Catholics, seemed to think blatant racism and rather universal mean-spiritedness were somehow like the Jesus they loved so much. My heart ached for something solid and real. How could this be happening?
Then, days before I began writing this book, I learned that I would have to put down my fifteen-year-old black Lab because she was suffering from an inoperable cancer. Venus had been giving me a knowing and profoundly accepting look for weeks, but I did not know how to read it. Deep down, I did not want to know. After her diagnosis, every time I looked at her, she gazed up at me with those same soft and fully permissive eyes, as if to say, “It is okay, you can let me go. I know it is my time.” But she patiently waited until I too was ready.
I cried off and on for a month after Venus’s death, especially when I saw another dog, or pronounced her name. But in those weeks before she died, Venus somehow communicated to me that all sadness, whether cosmic, human, or canine, is one and the same. Somehow, her eyes were all eyes, even God’s eyes, and the sadness she expressed was a divine and universal sadness. I wondered if God might have an easier time using animals to communicate who God is, since they do not seem as willful and devious as we are. Still, I thought, was this all a projection, a mere product of sentiment and imagination?
A short time later, these ideas crystallized for me while I was on retreat writing this book. A friend had dropped off a DVD of the critically acclaimed movie Lion, thinking I needed a break from my work. Grudgingly, I gave in to some lowly entertainment! As I followed the heartbreaking, true story of an East Indian boy and his lifelong search for himself and his family, my sadness reached a tipping point, and I began heaving with tears. The lament “Life is so unfair” overwhelmed me! There, in the solitude of my retreat, I fell into a kind of deep despair. Nothing meant anything for hours and into days. I just wanted off the boat of humanity.
In that moment, I was not sad about any one thing, but about everything. The tragedies I had witnessed in the previous months all piled up and overflowed into one big, clumped-together sadness and suffering that I couldn’t escape. It is what my friend William Paul Young calls the “Great Sadness,” a pain so huge and so deep, it feels as though it will never end. And yet the sadness was focused not on one particular issue but on all of them at once.
For me, and I can only say for me, it deeply helped to think back to Venus’s eyes, and name all of this suffering and sadness as the one sadness of God. Then I did not have to hold it alone. And I learned I could not hold it alone, but it was a shared experience—which gave me great consolation. In some deeply illogical and nonrational way, I identified with what Paul writes at the beginning of Colossians: “It makes me happy to suffer for you, as I am suffering now, and in my own body to do what I can to make up all that still has to be undergone by Christ’’ (Colossians 1:24).
I am no masochist, and I surely have no martyr complex, but I do believe that the only way out of deep sadness is to go with it and through it. Sometimes I wonder if this is what we mean when we lift up the chalice of wine at the Eucharist and say, “Through him, with him, and in him.” I wonder if the only way to spiritually hold suffering—and not let it destroy us—is to recognize that we cannot do it alone. When I try to heroically do it alone, I slip into distractions, denials, and pretending—and I do not learn suffering’s softening lessons. But when I can find a shared meaning for something, especially if it allows me to love God and others in the same action, God can get me through it. I begin to trust the ambiguous process of life.
When we carry our small suffering in solidarity with the one universal longing of all humanity, it helps keep us from self-pity or self-preoccupation. We know that we are all in this together, and it is just as hard for everybody else. Almost all people are carrying a
great and secret hurt, even when they don’t know it. When we can make the shift to realize this, it softens the space around our overly defended hearts. It makes it hard to be cruel to anyone. It somehow makes us one—in a way that easy comfort and entertainment never can.
Some mystics even go so far as to say that individual suffering doesn’t exist at all—and that there is only one suffering, it is all the same, and it is all the suffering of God. The image of Jesus on the cross somehow communicates that to the willing soul. A Crucified God is the dramatic symbol of the one suffering that God fully enters into with us—much more than just for us, as we were mostly trained to think.
If suffering, even unjust suffering (and all suffering is unjust), is part of one Great Mystery, then I am willing—and even happy sometimes—to carry my little portion. But I must know that it is somehow helping someone or something, and that it matters in the great scheme of things. Etty Hillesum, whom we met earlier, truly believed her suffering was also the suffering of God. She even expressed a deep desire to help God carry some of it. Such freedom and such generosity of spirit are almost unimaginable to me. What creates such larger-than-life people? Their altruism is hard to understand by almost any psychological definition of the human person.
“One Lump”
In the fourteenth century, the inspired, anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing taught that God in Christ dealt with sin, death, forgiveness, salvation “all in one lump.” It is a most unusual, even homely phrase, but for me, this corporate and even mystical reading of divine history contributes toward the unitive vision we are seeking, as we try to understand the Universal Christ. Jesus by himself looks like an individual, albeit a divine individual, but the Christ I have described in this book is a compelling image for this “one-lump” view of reality. In the fourteenth century, the book’s author would’ve enjoyed the last remnants of mystical holism before it was taken away by the dualistic—but also necessary—ravages of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. He reflected the more Eastern church understanding of the resurrection as a universal phenomenon, and not just the lone Jesus rising from the dead and raising his hands as if he just scored a touchdown, as is depicted in most Western art—and even in a giant mosaic that looms over the University of Notre Dame’s football stadium. (“Touchdown Jesus,” we used to call it.)
I am convinced that the Gospel offers us a holistic, “all in one lump” understanding of things. Once you have a similar breakthrough, you will see this idea everywhere in Pauline passages, expressed in different ways: “in that one body he condemned sin” (Romans 8:3); “He experienced death for all humankind” (Hebrews 2:19); he has done suffering and sacrifice “once and for all” (Hebrews 7:28); or the embodiment language of Philippians, where Jesus is said to lead us through the “pattern of sin and death” so we can “take our place in the pattern of resurrection” (3:9–12). And of course, this all emerges from Jesus’s major metaphor of the “Reign of God,” a fully collective notion, which some scholars say is just about all that he talks about. Until we start reading the Jesus story through the collective notion that the Christ offers us, I honestly think we miss much of the core message, and read it all in terms of individual salvation, and individual reward and punishment. Society will remain untouched.
I think this collective notion is what Christians were trying to verbalize when they made a late addition to the ancient Apostles’ Creed, “I believe in the communion of saints.” They were offering us this new idea that the dead are at one with the living, whether they’re our direct ancestors, the saints in glory, or even the so-called souls in purgatory. The whole thing is one, just at different stages, all of it loved corporately by God (and, one hopes, by us). Within this worldview, we are saved not by being privately perfect, but by being “part of the body,” humble links in the great chain of history. This view echoes the biblical concept of a covenant love that was granted to Israel as a whole, and never just to one individual like Abraham, Noah, or David. This is absolutely clear in the text; and to ignore it is to miss a major and crucial message. Christians as late as the 1500s still saw it that way, but I cannot imagine us adding such a statement to the creed in today’s religious landscape. We are now too preoccupied with the “salvation of individuals” to read history in a corporate way, and the results have been disastrous. The isolated individual is now left fragile and defensive, adrift in a huge ocean of others who are also trying to save themselves—and not the whole. Christianity is now more of a contest, or even an ego trip, than a proclamation of divine victory and love.
I suspect that Western individualism has done more than any other single factor to anesthetize and even euthanize the power of the Gospel. Salvation, heaven, hell, worthiness, grace, and eternal life all came to be read through the lens of the separate ego, crowding God’s transformative power out of history and society. Even Martin Luther’s needed “justification by faith” sent us on a five-hundred-year battle for the private soul of the individual.* Thus leaving us with almost no care for the earth, society, the outsider, or the full Body of Christ. This is surely one reason why Christianity found itself incapable of critiquing social calamities like Nazism, slavery, and Western consumerism. For five hundred years, Christian teachers defined and redefined salvation almost entirely in individualistic terms, while well-disguised social evils—greed, pride, ambition, deceit, gluttony—moved to the highest levels of power and influence, even in our churches.
The lone individual is far too small and insecure to carry either the “weight of glory” or the “burden of sin” on his or her own. Yet that is the impossible task we gave the individual. It will never work. It creates well-disguised religious egocentricity, because we are forced to take our single and isolated selves far too seriously—both our wonderfulness and our terribleness—which are both their own kinds of ego trips, I am afraid.
One side effect of our individualized reading of the Gospel is that it allows the clergy great control over individual behavior, via threats and rewards. Obedience to authorities became the highest virtue in this framework, instead of love, communion, or solidarity with God or others, including the marginalized.
We recognized hierarchical or vertical accountability but almost no lateral accountability to one another—as Jesus hoped for the world when he prayed that we “all might be one” (John 17:21). A corporate reading of the Gospel gives hope and justice to history, but less control over individuals, which is probably why clergy who do the preaching don’t like it too much and thus don’t preach it too much.
I saw this in my own experience of pre–Vatican II Catholicism and seminary. In those days, I’m afraid, the only admired and promoted virtues were obedience and loyalty to the church. No one taught us how to love very well, or to be loyal to humanity as a whole—at least from the pulpit. Nor were most of my professors very loving men, if I would be honest. They were often ordained because they could pass academic tests, not because they were pastors or prophets or people people. They were trained to be joiners, believers, and loyalists more than servants of the mystery of God. Churchmen more than Gospel men. Conformity is not the same as love; joining does not imply an actual change of heart and mind. Few taught us how to be the Sympathy of God or Compassion for the World, and this experience has seemed true in varying degrees in every denomination I have worked with.
Unless we find the communal meaning and significance of the suffering of all life and ecosystems on our planet, we will continue to retreat into our individual, small worlds in our quest for personal safety and sanity. Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with. Think about that.
One Life, One Death, One Suffering
The Universal Christ is trying to communicate at the deepest intuitive level that there is only One Life, One Death, and One Suffering on this earth. We are all invited to ride the one wave, which is the
only wave there is. Call it Reality, if you wish. But we are all in this together.
Consider how a “one-lump” awareness of reality upends so many of our current religious obsessions. Our arguments about private worthiness; reward and punishment; gender, race, and class distinctions; private possessions, all the things that make us argue and compete, largely become a waste of time and an illusion. All these lived arguments depend on some type of weighing, measuring, counting, listing, labeling, and comparing. The Gospel, by contrast, is about learning to live and die in and with God—all our warts included and forgiven by an Infinite Love. The true Gospel democratizes the world.
We are all saved in spite of our mistakes and in spite of ourselves.
We are all caught up in the cosmic sweep of Divine grace and mercy.
And we all must learn to trust the Psalmist’s prayer: “Not to us, not to us, O Lord, but to your name be the glory” (Psalm 115:1).
The freeing, good news of the Gospel is that God is saving and redeeming the Whole first and foremost, and we are all caught up in this Cosmic Sweep of Divine Love. The parts—you and me and everybody else—are the blessed beneficiaries, the desperate hangers-on, the partly willing participants in the Whole. Paul wrote that our only task is to trust this reality “until God is all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). What a different idea of faith! “When Christ is revealed,” Paul writes to the Colossians, “and he is your life—you too will be revealed in all your glory with him” (3:4). Unless and until we can enjoy this, so much of what passes for Christianity will amount to little more than well-disguised narcissism and self-referential politics. We see this phenomenon playing out in the de facto values of people who strongly identify as Christian. Often they are more racist, classist, and sexist than non-Christians. “Others can carry the burden and the pain of injustice, but not my group,” they seem to say.
