by Richard Rohr
The Christian truth, and Jesus as its spokesman, is the worldview that got me started, that formed me and thrilled me, even though the very tangent that it sent me on made me often critical of much of organized Christianity. In some ways, that is totally as it should be, because I was able to criticize organized religion from within, by its own Scriptures, saints, and sources, and not by merely cultural, unbelieving, or rational criteria. That is probably the only way you can fruitfully criticize anything, it seems to me. You must unlock spiritual things from the inside, and not by throwing rocks from outside, which is always too easy and too self-aggrandizing.
Eventually I found myself held inside Christianity's inherent tensions. Catholicism became for me, and I think as it has for many, a crucible and thus a unified field. Which is why it is very hard to be a “former” Catholic, once you really get its incarnational and inherently mystical worldview. I here use Einstein's term “unified field” to describe that single world of elementary forces, principles, and particles that he assumed held together the entire universe of space-time. Einstein said that he spent his life looking for this unified field.
Although its vision is often time bound and its vocabulary very “in house” (if you don't use our words, and our definitions of those words, many Catholics hardly know how to talk to you), I still find that Big Picture Catholicism is often precisely that—very “catholic” and all embracing—with room for head, heart, body, soul, and history. For all its failures, it is no surprise that the Catholic worldview (note that I am not saying the “Roman” worldview) continues to produce Teilhard de Chardins, Mother Teresas, Thomas Mertons, Edith Steins, Cesar Chavezes, Cory Aquinos, Mary Robinsons, Rowan Williamses, Desmond Tutus, and Dorothy Days. I like to call it “incarnational mysticism.” Once you get it, there is no going backward, because nothing is any better.
The pedestrian and everyday church has remained a cauldron of transformation for me by holding me inside both the dark and the light side of almost everything, and by teaching me nondualistic thinking to survive. It has also shown me that neither I nor the churches themselves really live much of the real Gospel—at least enough to actually change our present lifestyles! It is just too big a message. Refusing to split and deny reality keeps me in regular touch with my own shadow self, and much more patient with the rather evident shadow of the church. I see the exact same patterns in every other group, so my home base is as good a place to learn shadowboxing as anywhere else, and often better than most. Intellectual rigor, a social conscience (at least on paper), and a mystical vision are there for the taking. Catholicism is the “one true church” only when it points beyond itself to the “one true Mystery,” and offers itself as the training ground for both human liberation and divine union. Many other religious groups do the same, however, and sometimes much better.
All Creation “Groans” (Romans 8:22)
Creation itself, the natural world, already “believes” the Gospel, and lives the pattern of death and resurrection, even if unknowingly. The natural world “believes” in necessary suffering as the very cycle of life: just observe the daily dying of the sun so all things on this planet can live, the total change of the seasons, the plants and trees along with it, the violent world of animal predators and prey. My own sweet black Lab, Venus, today killed a little groundhog, and brought it to me expecting approval. How could she think this was wonderful when I thought it was terrible? She dropped it with disappointment when she saw my eyes. Only the human species absents itself from the agreed-on pattern and the general dance of life and death. What Venus had done would be disastrous only if I want to be perfectly rational and “progressive.”
Necessary suffering goes on every day, seemingly without question. As I write this in the deserts of Arizona, I just read that only one saguaro cactus seed out of a quarter of a million seeds ever makes it even to early maturity, and even fewer after that. Most of nature seems to totally accept major loss, gross inefficiency, mass extinctions, and short life spans as the price of life at all. Feeling that sadness, and even its full absurdity, ironically pulls us into the general dance, the unified field, an ironic and deep gratitude for what is given—with no necessity and so gratuitously. All beauty is gratuitous. So whom can we blame when it seems to be taken away? Grace seems to be at the foundation of everything.
This creative tension between wonderful and terrible is named so well by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as only poets can. Even the long title of his poem reveals his acceptance of the ever-changing flow of Heraclites and also his trust in the final outcome: “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.”
Flesh fade, and mortal trash
fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.1
The resolution of earthly embodiment and divinization is what I call incarnational mysticism. As has been said many times, there are finally only two subjects in all of literature and poetry: love and death. Only that which is limited and even dies grows in value and appreciation; it is the spiritual version of supply and demand. If we lived forever, they say, we would never take life seriously or learn to love what is. I think that is probably true. Being held long and hard inside limits and tension, incarnate moments—crucibles for sure—allows us to search for and often find “the reconciling third” or the unified field beneath it all. “The most personal becomes the most universal,” Chardin loved to say.
Reality, creation, nature itself, what I call the “the First Body of Christ,” has no choice in the matter of necessary suffering. It lives the message without saying yes or no to it. It holds and resolves all the foundational forces, all the elementary principles and particles within itself—willingly it seems. This is the universe in its wholeness, the “great nest of being,” including even the powerless, invisible, and weak parts that have so little freedom or possibility. “The Second Body of Christ,” the formal church, always has the freedom to say yes or no. That very freedom allows it to say no much of the time, especially to any talk of dying, stumbling, admitting mistakes, or falling. We see this rather clearly in the recent financial and sexual scandals of the church. Yet God seems ready and willing to wait for, and to empower, free will and a free “yes.” Love only happens in the realm of freedom.
Yet I know that I avoid this daily dying too. The church has been for me a broad education and experience in passion, death, and resurrection by forcing me to go deep in one place. It, and the Franciscans, still offer me an accountability community for what I say I believe, which I find is necessary if I am to live with any long-term integrity. The Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa said the same. Over many years now, the practical church has given me the tools and the patience that allow me to try to fill what Parker Palmer calls “the tragic gap,” as almost nothing else does. Both the church's practice and its Platonic pronouncements create tragic gaps for any person with an operative head and a beating heart. But remember, even a little bit of God is well worth loving, and even a little bit of truth and love goes a long way. The church has given me much more than a little bit. Like all limited parents, it has been a “good enough” church, and thus has taught me how to see that goodness everywhere, even in other limit situations, as Karl Jaspers called them. But in the end, “Only God is good,” as Jesus said to the rich young man.
So the church is both my greatest intellectual and moral problem and my most consoling home. She is both pathetic whore and frequent bride. There is still a marvelous marriage with such a bride, and many whores do occasionally become brides too. In a certain but real sense, the church itself is the first cross that Jesus is crucified on, as we limit, mangle, and try to control the always too big message. All the churches seem to crucify Jesus again and again by their inability to receive his whole
body, but they often resurrect him too. I am without doubt a microcosm of this universal church.
The church has never persecuted me or limited me in any way—quite the contrary, which is really quite amazing. Maybe that is the only reason I can talk this way, I hope without rancor or agenda. She has held me, and yet also held me at arm's length, which is more than enough holding. The formal church has always been a halfhearted bride for me, while the Franciscans have been considerably better. The Gospel itself is my full wedding partner. It always tells me the truth, and loves me through things till I arrive somewhere new and good and much more spacious.
So I offer this personal apologia for those of you who perhaps are wondering why I quote Jesus so much. You might be saying, “Does it really matter?” or “Does it have to be in the Bible to be true?” Well, I quote Jesus because I still consider him to be the spiritual authority of the Western world, whether we follow him or not. He is always spot-on at the deeper levels and when we understand him in his own explosive context. One does not even need to believe in his divinity to realize that Jesus is seeing at a much higher level than most of us.
For some of you, my quoting Jesus is the only way you will trust me; for others, it gives you more reasons to mistrust me, but I have to take both risks. If I dared to present all of these ideas simply as my ideas, or because they match modern psychology or old mythology, I would be dishonest. Jesus for me always clinches the deal, and I sometimes wonder why I did not listen to him in the first place.
Not surprisingly, many of the findings of modern psychology, anthropology, and organizational behavior give us new windows and vocabulary into Jesus' transcendent message. As you can see, I love to make use of these many tools. Let's look at one example of something that surely seems like entirely unnecessary suffering, which is said in a way that many people have not been prepared to hear if it were not for the findings of modern psychology and the behavioral sciences.
“Hating” Family
In this heading, I am talking about those most problematic lines at the beginning of this chapter, in which Jesus talks about “leaving” or even “hating” mother, father, sister, brother, and family. Everything in us says that he surely cannot mean this, but if you are talking about moving into the second half of life, where we are about to go, he is in fact directing us correctly and courageously.
First of all, do you recognize that he is actually undoing the fourth commandment of Moses, which tells us to “honor your father and mother”? This commandment is necessary for the first half of life, and, one hopes, it can be possible forever. As we move into the second half of life, however, we are very often at odds with our natural family and the “dominant consciousness” of our cultures. It is true more often than I would have ever imagined. Many people are kept from mature religion because of the pious, immature, or rigid expectations of their first-half-of-life family. Even Jesus, whose family thought he was “crazy” (Mark 3:21), had to face this dilemma firsthand. The very fact that the evangelist would risk associating the word “crazy” with Jesus shows how Jesus was surely not following the expected and mainline script for his culture or his religion.
One of the major blocks against the second journey is what we would now call the “collective,” the crowd, our society, or our extended family. Some call it the crab bucket syndrome—you try to get out, but the other crabs just keep pulling you back in. What passes for morality or spirituality in the vast majority of people's lives is the way everybody they grew up with thinks. Some would call it conditioning or even imprinting. Without very real inner work, most folks never move beyond it. You might get beyond it in a negative sense, by reacting or rebelling against it, but it is much less common to get out of the crab bucket in a positive way. That is what we want here. Jesus uses quite strong words to push us out of the family nest and to name a necessary suffering at the most personal, counterintuitive, and sentimental level possible.
It takes a huge push, much self-doubt, and some degree of separation for people to find their own soul and their own destiny apart from what Mom and Dad always wanted them to be and do. To move beyond family-of-origin stuff, local church stuff, cultural stuff, flag-and-country stuff is a path that few of us follow positively and with integrity. The pull is just too great, and the loyal soldier fills us with appropriate guilt, shame, and self-doubt, which, as we said earlier, feels like the very voice of God.
So Jesus pulls no punches, saying you must “hate” your home base in some way and make choices beyond it. I am happy he said this, or I would never have had the courage to believe how it might be true. It takes therapists years to achieve the same result and reestablish appropriate boundaries from wounding parents and early authority figures, and to heal the inappropriate shame in those who have been wounded. We all must leave home to find the real and larger home, which is so important that we will develop it more fully in the next chapter. The nuclear family has far too often been the enemy of the global family and mature spiritual seeking.
Perhaps it has never struck you how consistently the great religious teachers and founders leave home, go on pilgrimage to far-off places, do a major turnabout, choose downward mobility; and how often it is their parents, the established religion at that time, spiritual authorities, and often even civil authorities who fight against them. Read the biographies of Hindu sadhus, Buddha, Ashoka, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Jesus, Sufi saints, Francis, Clare, and the numerous hermits and pilgrims of Cappadocia, Mt. Athos, and Russia. You will see that this pattern is rather universal. Instead of our “Don't leave home without it” mentality, the spiritual greats' motto seems to be “Leave home to find it!” And of course, they were never primarily talking just about physical home, but about all the validations, securities, illusions, prejudices, smallness—and hurts too—that home and family always imply.
Of course, to be honest and consistent, one must ask if “church family” is not also a family that one has to eventually “hate” in this very same way, and with the same scandal involved as hating the natural family. (We will address this in a later chapter under the rubric of “emerging Christianity.”)
I encourage you to reread the epigraphs at the beginning of this chapter. They are pretty strong, almost brutal, by contemporary standards; but they make very clear that there is a necessary suffering that cannot be avoided, which Jesus calls “losing our very life,” or losing what I and others call the “false self.” Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real. “How much false self are you willing to shed to find your True Self?” is the lasting question.2 Such necessary suffering will always feel like dying, which is what good spiritual teachers will tell you about very honestly. (Alcoholics Anonymous is notoriously successful here!) If your spiritual guides do not talk to you about dying, they are not good spiritual guides!
Your True Self is who you objectively are from the beginning, in the mind and heart of God, “the face you had before you were born,” as the Zen masters say. It is your substantial self, your absolute identity, which can be neither gained nor lost by any technique, group affiliation, morality, or formula whatsoever. The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find “the pearl of great price” that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.
Chapter 7
Home and Homesickness
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For another union, a deeper communion
—T. S. ELIOT, “EAST COKER”
So now we move toward the goal, the very purpose of human life, “another intensity…a deeper communion,” as Eliot calls it, that which the container is meant to hold, support, and foster. Not the
fingers pointing to the moon, but the moon itself—and now including the dark side of the moon too. The fullness and inner freedom of the second half of life is what Homer seemed unable to describe. Perhaps he was not there himself yet, perhaps too young, yet he intuited its call and necessity. It was too “dark” for him perhaps, but he did point toward a further journey, and only then a truly final journey home. The goal in sacred story is always to come back home, after getting the protagonist to leave home in the first place! A contradiction? A paradox? Yes, but now home has a whole new meaning, never imagined before. As always, it transcends but includes one's initial experience of home.
The archetypal idea of “home” points in two directions at once. It points backward toward an original hint and taste for union, starting in the body of our mother. We all came from some kind of home, even a bad one, that always plants the foundational seed of a possible and ideal paradise. And it points forward, urging us toward the realization that this hint and taste of union might actually be true. It guides us like an inner compass or a “homing” device. In Homer's Odyssey, it is the same home, the island Ithaca, that is both the beginning and the end of the journey. Carl Jung, who so often says things concisely, offers this momentous insight: “Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which themselves are one.”1 That is precisely what I want to say here.
Somehow the end is in the beginning, and the beginning points toward the end. We are told that even children with a sad or abusive childhood still long for “home” or “Mother” in some idealized form and still yearn to return to it somehow, maybe just to do it right this time. What is going on there? Agreeing with Jung, I believe that the One Great Mystery is revealed at the beginning and forever beckons us forward toward its full realization. Most of us cannot let go of this implanted promise. Some would call this homing device their soul, and some would call it the indwelling Holy Spirit, and some might just call it nostalgia or dreamtime. All I know is that it will not be ignored. It calls us both backward and forward, to our foundation and our future, at the same time. It also feels like grace from within us and at the same time beyond us. The soul lives in such eternally deep time. Wouldn't it make sense that God would plant in us a desire for what God already wants to give us? I am sure of it.
