The Universal Christ

by Richard Rohr

  Foundationally, we must find a prayer form that actually invades our unconscious, or nothing changes at any depth. Usually this will be some form of centering prayer, walking meditation, inner practices of letting go, shadow work, or deliberately undergoing a longer period of silence (as I did while writing the first draft of this book, thirty-five days largely alone and quiet). Whatever you choose, it will feel more like unlearning than learning, more like surrendering than accomplishing. This is probably why so many resist contemplation to begin with. Because it feels more like the shedding of thoughts in general than attaining new or good ones. It feels more like just letting go than accomplishing anything, which is counterintuitive for our naturally “capitalistic” minds! This is our age-old resistance to the descending kind of religion.

  The human need for physical, embodied practices is not new. Across Christian history, the “Sacraments,” as Orthodox and Catholics call them, have always been with us. Before the age of literacy emerged, in the sixteenth century, things like pilgrimage, prayer beads, body prostrations, bows and genuflections, “blessing oneself” with the sign of the cross, statues, sprinkling things with holy water, theatrical plays and liturgies, incense and candles all allowed the soul to know itself through the outer world, which we have in this book dared to call “Christ.” These outer images serve as mirrors of the Absolute, which can often bypass the mind. Anything is a sacrament if it serves as a Shortcut to the Infinite, but it will always be hidden in something that is very finite.

  In 1969 I was sent as a deacon to work at Acoma Pueblo, an ancient Native American community in western New Mexico. When I got there, I was amazed to discover that many Catholic practices had direct Native American counterparts. I saw altars in the middle of the mesas covered with bundles of prayer sticks. I noted how the people of Acoma Pueblo sprinkled corn pollen at funerals just as we did holy water, how what we were newly calling “liturgical dance” was the norm for them on every feast day. I observed how mothers would show their children to silently wave the morning sunshine toward their faces, just as we learn to “bless ourselves” with the sign of the cross, and how anointing people with smoldering sage was almost exactly what we did with incense at our Catholic High Masses. All these practices have one thing in common: they are acted out, mimed, embodied expressions of spirit. The soul remembers them at an almost preconscious level because they are lodged in our muscle memory and make a visual impact. The later forms of rational Protestantism had a hard time understanding this.

  So let’s try a practice leading to embodied knowing. I discovered an especially good one in The Book of Privy Counseling, a lesser-known classic written by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. I especially like this practice because it is so simple, and for me so effective, even in the middle of the night when I awake and cannot get back to sleep during what some call the “hour of the wolf,” between 3:00 and 6:00 a.m. when the psyche is most undefended. (Others simply call it “insomnia”!) I warn you: this pattern gets worse as you grow older, so you will do yourself a favor to learn the following practice early! I have summarized the author’s exact words for our very practical purpose here. This is my paraphrase:

  Practice I: Simply That You Are

  First, “take God at face value, as God is. Accept God’s good graciousness, as you would a plain, simple soft compress when sick. Take hold of God and press God against your unhealthy self, just as you are.”

  Second, know how your mind and will play their games:

  “Stop analyzing yourself or God. You can do without wasting so much of your energy deciding if something is good or bad, grace given or temperament driven, divine or human.”

  Third, be encouraged:

  “Offer up your simple naked being to the joyful being of God, for you two are one in grace, although separate by nature.”

  And finally: “Don’t focus on what you are, but simply that you are! How hopelessly stupid would a person have to be if he or she could not realize that he or she simply is.”

  Hold the soft warm compress of these loving words against your bodily self, bypass the mind and even the affections of the heart, and forgo any analysis of what you are, or are not.

  “Simply that you are!”

  I like this practice because it can become a very embodied experience of what we’ve been talking about in this whole book. Your own body—in its naked being, with no “doing” involved—becomes the place of revelation and inner rest. Christ becomes “despiritualized.”

  Practice II: All Physical Reality as a Mirror

  Having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the Soul.

  —Walt Whitman

  As I have often said, salvation is not a question of if but when. Once you see with God’s eyes, you will see all things and enjoy all things in proper and full perspective. Some put this off till the moment of death or even afterward (“purgatory” was our strange word for this). Salvation, for me, is simply to have the “mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), which Paul describes as “making the world, life and death, the present and the future—all your servants—because you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God” (1 Corinthians 3:23).

  Everything finally belongs, and you are a part of it.

  This knowing and this enjoying are a good description for salvation.

  I want to close this book with an extended Mirror Meditation I once wrote. The goal of this meditation is to rewire you—both in your mind and in your body—to see all things in God, and God in all things. I find that if you practice this kind of seeing regularly, it will soon become an entire way of life, in which the natural and physical world can work as a daily mirror for you, revealing parts of yourself that you might not know otherwise, revealing the deep patterns of things, and most of all, showing that what we say about the Christ is true: the outer world is a sacrament of God.

  Read this meditation slowly, in parts or as a whole. If you notice that a particular line is speaking to you at some depth, pause and reflect on it until the feeling passes. Don’t mistake this sensation for your own thoughts or mere brain chemistry. Instead, receive it as the flow of Divine Love.

  THE DIVINE MIRROR

  A mirror receives and reflects back what it sees.

  It does not judge, adjust, or write commentary.

  We are the ones who do that.

  A mirror simply reveals.

  And invites responsibility.

  A mirror, the sun, and God are all the same.

  They are all there, fully shining forth.

  Their very nature is light, love, and infinite giving.

  You can’t offend them or make them stop shining.

  You can only choose to stop receiving and enjoying.

  As soon as you look, you will see they are there!

  And fully radiating.

  And always have been.

  And their message is constant, good, and life giving.

  There are only the lookers and the non-lookers,

  Those who receive and those who do not receive.

  When we learn to love anyone or anything,

  It is because they have somehow, if just for a moment,

  Mirrored us truthfully yet compassionately to ourselves.

  And we grab on to it! Why wouldn’t we?

  In this resonance, we literally “come to life.”

  But have no doubt, it is an allowing from our side.

  And such pure, unfiltered Presence,

  Is accessed only by presence in return.

  Nothing more is needed.

  Presence comes to us from Christ’s side,

  And then presence from our side knows what it needs to know.

  If that mirror is withdrawn for any reason,


  It causes sadness, emptiness, or even anger.

  We are normally disoriented, even heartbroken for a while.

  We die in some way. But why?

  Because we only know ourselves in another’s eyes,

  We receive our identity—all of it—good and bad,

  From another.

  The other both creates us and saves us.

  “No man is an island, entire of itself,” says the poet John Donne.

  This is what we call the pure gift of holiness!

  Or, if you prefer, wholeness.

  We are always a giving, a resonance, never a possession of our own.

  The universe is relational at every level, and even between levels.

  Relationship is the core and foundational shape of Reality,

  Mirroring our Trinitarian God (Genesis 1:26–27).

  Every object serves as a mirror, another kind of presence.

  You can find such mirrors in all of nature, in animals,

  In your parents, lovers, children, books, pictures, movies,

  And even in what some call “God.”

  Remember, “God” is just a word for Reality—with a Face!

  And occasionally Interface (which some call “prayer” or “love”).

  God is a mirror big enough to receive everything,

  And every single part of you,

  Just as it is, rejecting nothing, adjusting nothing,

  Often,

  For the sake of an even deeper love.

  We will experience a kind of Universal Forgiveness.

  A Divine Sympathy for all of Reality.

  Or what some have called the “Divine Pity.”

  And it will even fall on us.

  Whatever is fully received in this Mirror is by that very fact “redeemed.”

  And all is received whether we believe it or not.

  You do not have to see the sun to know that it is still shining.

  If your Divine Mirror cannot fully receive you in this way,

  Then it is certainly not God.

  Remember that regret profits nobody.

  Shame is useless.

  Blame is surely a waste of time.

  All hatred is a diversionary tactic, a dead end.

  God always sees and loves God in you.

  It seems like God has no choice.

  This is God’s eternal and unilateral contract with the soul.

  If you cannot allow yourself to be fully mirrored in this way,

  You will never fully know who you are, much less enjoy who you are.

  Nor will you know the heart of God.

  Any loving gaze that we can dare to receive can start the Flow:

  Creation itself, animals, humans, all are the divine gaze

  If we allow them to be.

  “The knowledge that I once had was imperfect,

  but then I shall know as fully as I am known” (1 Corinthians 12:12b).

  One day, the mirror will reflect in both directions,

  And we will see over there what was allowed in here.

  This is full-access seeing—and being seen:

  Most have named it “heaven”

  And it begins now.

  Let this Divine Mirror fully receive you.

  All of you.

  And you never need be lonely again.

  Epilogue

  You can take my word for it too that Greece, Egypt, ancient India and ancient China, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflections of this beauty in art and science, what I have seen of the inner recesses of the human hearts where religious belief is unknown, all these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ’s hands as his captive.

  —Simone Weil

  Afterword: Love After Love

  Our unveiled gaze receives and reflects the brightness of God until we are gradually turned into the image that we reflect.

  —2 Corinthians 3:18

  I first encountered Derek Walcott’s poem “Love After Love” on the very day the West Indian poet died: March 17, 2017, just as I was beginning to write this book. Back in the early 1970s, Walcott’s birthplace, the island of St. Lucia, was the first place outside the continental United States where I was invited to preach the Gospel. In fact, I met him at my conference there, which he was humbly attending! We at the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati soon sent four of our young members to work among the poor in St. Lucia, two black and two white, two women and two men. It changed their lives. The beautiful island and people always seemed enchanted to me, and they are still enchanting in my memory. Now you will know another reason why:

  LOVE AFTER LOVE

  The time will come

  when, with elation,

  you will greet yourself arriving

  at your own door, in your own mirror,

  and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

  and say, sit here. Eat.

  You will love again the stranger who was your self.

  Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

  to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

  all your life, whom you ignored

  for another, who knows you by heart.

  Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

  the photographs, the desperate notes,

  peel your own image from the mirror.

  Sit. Feast on your life.

  I hope this book has helped you to experience—and to know—that the Christ, you, and every “stranger” are all the same gazing.

  APPENDIXES

  Mapping the Soul’s Journey to God

  In the two appendixes that follow, I present schemas that may help those who still wonder about how to frame and understand the Universal Christ described in this book.

  Appendix I examines the importance of worldviews, presenting four foundational ones in very simplified form, and an explanation of why I am opting for the fourth.

  Appendix II describes a universal process of spiritual transformation, including both deconstruction and reconstruction. Even inside an incarnational worldview, we grow by passing beyond some perfect order, through a usually painful and seemingly unnecessary disorder, to an enlightened reorder or “resurrection.”

  APPENDIX I

  The Four Worldviews

  Each one of us operates out of an implicit worldview, a set of assumptions that are usually not conscious, and therefore are difficult to observe, much less evaluate. Your worldview is not what you look at. It is what you look out from or look through. It is thus taken for granted, largely unconscious, and in great part it determines what you see—and what you don’t see at all. If your implicit worldview is that there is only the external, material universe, you will quite naturally see things that way without any ability to critique it. If your worldview is exclusively that of a Methodist Christian, you will overlay that Methodism on everything without realizing it—which might benefit your full experience but also might limit it. The important thing is that you know what your preferences and biases are, because there is no such thing as an unbiased worldview. When you acknowledge your filters, you can compensate for them.

  I have concluded that there are four basic worldviews, though they might be expressed in many ways and are not necessarily completely separate. Some people represent the best of all of them, or combine several somehow, allowing them to cross religious, intellectual, and ethnic boundaries. There are good things about all four of them, and none of them is completely wrong or completely right, but one of them is by far the most helpful.

  Those who hold the material worldview believe that the outer, visible universe is the ultimate and “real” worl
d. People of this worldview have given us science, engineering, medicine, and much of what we now call “civilization.” The material worldview has obviously produced much good, but in the last couple of centuries it has come to so dominate most developed countries that it is often presumed to be the only possible and fully adequate worldview. A material worldview tends to create highly consumer-oriented and competitive cultures, which are often preoccupied with scarcity, since material goods are always limited.

  The spiritual worldview characterizes many forms of religion and some idealistic philosophies that recognize the primacy and finality of spirit, consciousness, the invisible world behind all manifestations. It can be seen in Platonic thought; various forms of Gnosticism (which posits that salvation comes through knowledge); some schools of psychology; in the forms of spirituality called “esoteric” or “New Age”; and in the many interior-focused or spiritualized forms of all religions, including much of Christianity. This worldview is partially good too, because it maintains the reality of the spiritual world, which many materialists deny. But taken too far it can become ethereal and disembodied, disregarding ordinary human needs and denying the need for good psychology, anthropology, or societal issues of peace and justice. The spiritual worldview, taken too seriously, has little concern for the earth, the neighbor, or justice, because it considers this world largely as an illusion.

  Those holding what I call the priestly worldview are generally sophisticated, trained, and experienced people and traditions that feel their job is to help us put matter and Spirit together. They are the holders of the law, the scriptures, and the rituals; they include gurus, ministers, therapists, and sacred communities. People of the priestly worldview help us make good connections that are not always obvious between the material and spiritual worlds. But the downside is that this view assumes that the two worlds are actually separate and need someone to bind them back together (which is the meaning of the word “religion”: re-ligio, or re-ligament, and also the root meaning of the term “yoga”). That need to reunite is partially real, of course, but belief in it creates status differences and often more religious codependents and consumers than sincere seekers. It describes what most of us think of as organized religion and much of the self-help world. It often gets involved with buying and selling in the temple, to use a New Testament metaphor. Not surprisingly, the consumers of this worldview fall on a continuum from very healthy to not so healthy, and its “priests” vary from excellent mediators to mere charlatans.