The Universal Christ

by Richard Rohr

  Finally, Paul is trying to create some “audiovisual aids” for this big message, which he calls “churches” (a term used by Jesus only twice, in Matthew 16:18 and 18:17). He needs living and visible models of this new kind of life—to show that the Christ people really are different from mass consciousness—people who “can be innocent and genuine…and can shine like stars among a deceitful and underhanded brood” (Philippians 2:15). In his thinking, we were supposed to live inside of an alternative society, almost a utopia, and from such fullness go out to “the world.” Instead, we created a model whereby people live almost entirely in the world, fully invested in its attitudes toward money, war, power, and gender—and sometimes “go to church.” I am not sure this is working! People like the Amish, the Bruderhof, Black churches, and members of some Catholic religious Orders probably have a better chance of actually maintaining an alternative consciousness, but most of the rest of us end up thinking and operating pretty much like our surrounding culture. Surely foreseeing this, Paul intended that his new people “live in the church,” as it were—and from that solid base go out to the world. We still have it all backward, living fully in the worldly systems and occasionally going to church.

  Many people, however, are now finding this kind of solidarity in think tanks, support groups, prayer groups, study groups, projects building houses for the poor, healing circles, or mission organizations. So perhaps without fully recognizing it, we are often heading in the right direction these days. We are creating many para-church organizations, and some new studies claim that if we look at the statistics, we will see that Christians are not leaving Christianity as much as they are realigning with groups that live Christian values in the world, instead of just gathering to again hear the readings, recite the creed, and sing songs on Sunday. In that sense, actual Christian behavior might just be growing more than we think.

  Remember, it is not the brand name that matters.

  It is that God’s heart be made available and active on this earth.

  The direct result of the preaching of the Gospel is, surprisingly, “secularism,” where the message has become the mission itself and not just the constant forming of the team. The important thing is that God’s work gets done, and not that our group or any group gets the credit. I do encounter Christians who are living their values almost every day, and more and more are just doing it (“orthopraxy”), without all the hype about how right they are (“orthodoxy”). Training instead of teaching, as today’s coaches often put it.

  Just as the Universal Christ moved forward for billions of years without any name at all, so the Still-Evolving Christ continues to do the same. God is quite obviously very humble and patient, and will get the job done without us as his cheerleaders. If God can use a woman with seven devils and a murderous religious zealot to be his primary witnesses, then we had best ask, What were they witnessing to? It was not just some new ideas, it was a new lifestyle, a life energy, a worldview that really believed in “liberty and justice for all.”

  * Rohr, Falling Upward.

  16

  Transformation and Contemplation

  The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things.

  —Mechtild of Magdeburg (1212–1282)

  If we’ve been kept from appreciating a cosmic notion of Christ up to now, it has not been because of bad will, ignorance, or obstinacy. It’s because we have tried to understand a largely nondual notion with the dualistic mind that dominates Western rationalism and scientism. That will never work. Most of us were not told that we needed to install “software” different from the either-or, problem-solving, all-or-nothing mind that we use to get us through the day. Only early Christianity, and many mystics along the way, tended to understand that contemplation is actually a different way of processing our experience—a radically different way of seeing—which most of us have to be taught.

  Such seers were almost always marginalized, like dear Mechtild quoted in the epigraph, whom you may have never heard of. We canonized many of these people after they died, once they were no longer so much of a threat, but many in their lifetimes had to marginalize themselves in forests, practices of silence, hermitages, and monasteries for their own sanity, I suspect. Garden-variety Christianity was quite content with a God figure to worship, and they called him Jesus, with no strong interest in what he really represented for humanity.

  As we’ve seen in the preceding pages, Christ’s much larger, universe-spanning role was described quite clearly in—and always in the first chapters of—John’s Gospel, Colossians, Ephesians, Hebrews, and 1 John, and shortly thereafter in the writings of the early Eastern Fathers, as well as many mystics along the way. But our noncontemplative minds did not notice that these writers processed reality differently than we do—in fact, very differently. Eventually, such inherently argumentative Christianity jumped the tracks even further. It set us on a very limited “rational” way of knowing that just didn’t provide a wide enough lens to process those scriptures or ancient contemplative teachings. It was like trying to see the universe with a too-small telescope. We kept ourselves so busy trying to process the idea of Jesus as the personal incarnation of God, and a God that an empire (East or West!) could make use of, that we had little time or readiness to universalize that message to all “flesh” (John 1:14), much less all of creation (Romans 8:18–23). And surely there was no room for “sinners” or outsiders of almost any sort—which was of course the exact opposite of Jesus’s message and mission. Our small empires and our small minds needed a self-serving God and a domesticated Jesus who could be used for ethnic purposes.

  This is where a contemplative way of knowing must come to the rescue and allow us to comprehend a cosmic notion of Christ and a nontribal notion of Jesus. It will also help us know that it was not just ill will that kept us from the Gospel, but actually a lack of mindfulness and capacity for presence (along with our cultural captivity to power, money, and war, of course).

  The contemplative mind can see things in their depth and in their wholeness instead of just in parts. The binary mind, so good for rational thinking, finds itself totally out of its league in dealing with things like love, death, suffering, infinity, God, sexuality, or mystery in general. It just keeps limiting reality to two alternatives and thinks it is smart because it chooses one! This is no exaggeration.*1 The two alternatives are always exclusionary, usually in an angry way: things are either totally right or totally wrong, with me or against me, male or female, Democrat or Republican, Christian or pagan, on and on and on. The binary mind provides quick security and false comfort, but never wisdom. It thinks it is smart because it counters your idea with an opposing idea. There is usually not much room for a “reconciling third.” I see this in myself almost every day.

  In our time, I have been encouraged to see a rediscovery of the broad and deep contemplative mind, which for the first two thousand years of Christianity had largely been limited to monks and mystics. This rediscovery has been the heart of our purpose at the Center for Action and Contemplation, and the core of my teaching over the past forty years. It is not our metaphysics (“what is real”) that is changing, but our epistemology—how we think we know what is real. For that, we can thank a combination of insights from psychology, therapy, spiritual direction, history, and Eastern religions, along with the rediscovery of the Western and Christian contemplative tradition, starting with Thomas Merton in the 1960s. Now this new epistemology is exploding all over the world, and in all denominations—helping us to so much better understand our own metaphysics! What an irony and surprise.

  Frankly, a new humility is emerging in Christianity as we begin to recognize our many major mistakes in the past, especially our tragic treatment of indigenous people in almost all the nations that Christians colonized, along with our silence about and full complicity with slavery, destructive consumerism, ap
artheid, white privilege, the devastation of the planet, homophobia, classism, and the Holocaust. Our dualistic logic allowed us to justify almost anything the corporate ego desired. Now we are a little less arrogant about our ability to understand—much less to actually live—this “one, true religion” of ours. And our critics are not about to let us forget our past mistakes. The harsh judgments of humanity against the actual performance of Christianity are with us for the rest of history. All people need to do is Google, and they will know what really seems to have happened.

  It is never a black-and-white story, although our dualistic minds (on either side!) want to make it so. You can, however, know the dark side and history of Christianity and still happily be a Christian. (I count myself among this group!) But it takes a contemplative or nondual mind, which does not allow you denial but teaches you integration, reconciliation, and forgiveness. You must build your tent somewhere in this world, and there is no pedestal of purity on which to stand apart and above. “Blood cries out from” every plot of land on this earth (Genesis 4:10). It is only our egos that want and demand such superiority. Religion tends to start with “purity codes” of one type or another, but it must not end there.

  Add to this knowledge of history a growing knowledge of human development, stages of consciousness, unique cultural starting points, different typologies, like the Myers-Briggs, Spiral Dynamics, and the Enneagram. All of these are giving us a much more honest and helpful understanding of ourselves and one another. When we stop our calculating minds long enough to look critically at how we know, it is like putting a wide-angle, color lens into what used to be a small, black-and-white camera. We can begin to understand that the Christ Mystery is not something we need to prove or even can prove, but a broad field that we can recognize for ourselves when we see in a contemplative way, which often will seem more symbolic and intuitive than merely rational, a more non-dual mystery than anything that offers us mere binary choices as a false shortcut to wisdom.

  What many have begun to see is that you need to have a nondualistic, non-angry, and nonargumentative mind to process the really big issues with any depth or honesty, and most of us have not been effectively taught how to do that in practice. We were largely taught what to believe instead of how to believe. We had faith in Jesus, often as if he were an idol, more than sharing the expansive faith of Jesus, which is always humble and patient (Matthew 11:25), and can be understood only by the humble and patient. That’s what I hope to address in the rest of this chapter and the next.

  Love and Suffering as Ways of Knowing

  I hope you will forgive me for beginning this section with a rather absolute statement. In the practical order of life, if we have never loved deeply or suffered deeply, we are unable to understand spiritual things at any depth. Any healthy and “true” religion is teaching you how to deal with suffering and how to deal with love. And if you allow this process with sincerity, you will soon recognize that it is actually love and suffering that are dealing with you. Like nothing else can! Even God has to use love and suffering to teach you all the lessons that really matter. They are his primary tools for human transformation.

  You probably did not realize it at the time, but whenever you were in that honeymoon stage of a new love, you were temporarily enjoying a kind of unitive, nondual, or contemplative mind. During that graced period you had no time for picking fights or being irritated by nonessentials; you were able to overlook offenses, and even forgive your sisters and brothers and maybe even your parents. Mothers think that their sons with new girlfriends have been reborn! They are actually kind, and pick up their clothes; they even say hello and pardon me. I always loved giving pre-marriage instructions because the engaged couples were usually living in a highly teachable time, and nodded in agreement at everything I said. So little pushback.

  Conversely, in the days, weeks, and years after a great grief, loss, or death of someone close to you, you often enter that same unitive mind, but now from another doorway. The magnitude of the tragedy puts everything else in perspective, and a simple smile from a checkout girl seems like a healing balm to your saddened soul. You have no time for or interest in picking fights, even regarding the stuff that used to bother you. It seems to take a minimum of a year to get back to “normal” after the loss of anyone you were deeply bonded to, and many times you never get back to “normal.” You are reconfigured forever. Often this is the first birth of compassion, patience, and even love, as the heart is softened and tenderized through sadness, depression, and grief. These are privileged portals into depth and truth.

  But how do we retain these precious fruits over the long haul? Love and suffering lead us toward the beginnings of a contemplative mind if we submit to them at all, and many of us do submit to them for a while. Too often, though, most of us soon return to dualistic inner argumentation and our old tired judgments, trying to retake control. Most of us leave this too-naked garden of Adam and Eve and enter instead into the fighting and competing world of Cain and Abel. Then we “settle in the land of Nod [or wandering], East of Eden” (Genesis 4:16), before we find ourselves longing and thirsting for what we once tasted in Eden. Perhaps we need to wander for a while to find the path—or before we want it real bad.

  If we have some good teachers, we will learn to develop a conscious nondual mind, a choiceful contemplation, some spiritual practices or disciplines that can return us to unitive consciousness on an ongoing and daily basis. Whatever practice it is, it must become “our daily bread.” That is the consensus of spiritual masters through the ages. The general words for these many forms of practice (“rewiring”) are “meditation,” “contemplation,” any “prayer of quiet,” “centering prayer,” “chosen solitude,” but it is always some form of inner silence, symbolized by the Jewish Sabbath rest. Every world religion—at the mature levels—discovers some forms of practice to free us from our addictive mind, which we take as normal. No fast-food religion, or upward-bound Christianity, ever goes there and thus provides little real nutrition to sustain people through the hard times, infatuations, trials, idolatries, darkness, and obsessions that always eventually show themselves. Some of us call today’s form of climbing religion the “prosperity gospel,” which is quite common among those who still avoid great love and great suffering. It normally does not know what to do with darkness, and so it always projects darkness elsewhere. Can you not think of many examples immediately?

  Starting in the 1960s, our increased interaction with Eastern religions in general, and Buddhism in particular, helped us recognize and rediscover our own very ancient Christian contemplative tradition. Through Cistercians like Thomas Merton and later Thomas Keating, Christians realized that we had always had these teachings ourselves, but they had slipped into obscurity, and they played almost no part in our sixteenth-century Reformations, or in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. In fact, quite the contrary. Almost all the thinking on all sides has been highly dualistic and divisive, and thus violent, in the last five hundred years. There were no major nonviolent revolutions till the middle of the twentieth century.

  When Western civilization set out on its many paths of winning, accomplishment, and conquest, the contemplative mind seemed uninteresting or even counterproductive to our egoic purposes. The contemplative mind got in the way of our left-brain philosophy of progress, science, and development, which were very good and necessary in their own way—but not for soul knowledge. What we lost was almost any notion of paradox, mystery, or the wisdom of unknowing and unsayability—which are the open-ended qualities that make biblical faith so dynamic, creative, and nonviolent. But we insisted on “knowing,” and even certain knowing! All the time and every step of the way! This is no longer the enlightening path of Abraham, Moses, Mary, or Jesus. It is a rather late and utterly inadequate form of religion, and probably why so very many today (half the Western populations?) say they are now “spiritual but not religious.” I cannot fault them for
that; yet again, I hear remnants of the old dualistic mind.

  So Why This Interest in Buddhism?

  I am convinced that in many ways Buddhism and Christianity shadow each other. They reveal each other’s blind spots. In general, Western Christians have not done contemplation very well, and Buddhism has not done action very well. Although in recent decades we are seeing the emergence of what is called “Engaged Buddhism,” which we have learned from teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama. There is a reason that most art shows Jesus with his eyes open and Buddha with his eyes closed. In the West, we have largely been an extroverted religion, with all the superficiality that represents; and the East has largely produced introverted forms of religion, with little social engagement up to now. Taking the risk of overgeneralization, I will say that we did not understand the human mind or heart very well, and they did not understand service or justice work very well. Thus we produced rigid capitalism and they often fell into ideological communism. Both religions tried to breathe with one lung—and that is not good breathing. Or better said, you can’t just inhale and you can’t just exhale.

  At its best, Western Christianity is dynamic and outflowing. But the downside is that this entrepreneurial instinct often caused it to either be subsumed by or totally trample on the cultures we entered—instead of transforming them at any deeper levels. We became a formal and efficient religion that felt that its job was to tell people what to see instead of how to see. It sort of worked for a while, but it no longer does, in my opinion.