by Richard Rohr
Your simple breathing models your entire vocation as a human being. You are an incarnation, like Christ, of matter and spirit operating as one. This, more than anything we believe or accomplish, is how all of us continue the mystery of incarnation in space and time—either knowingly and joyfully—or not.
If divine incarnation has any truth to it, then resurrection is a foregone conclusion, and not a one-time anomaly in the body of Jesus, as our Western understanding of the resurrection felt it needed to prove—and then it couldn’t. The Risen Christ is not a one-time miracle but the revelation of a universal pattern that is hard to see in the short run.
The job for believers is to figure out not the how or the when of resurrection, but just the what! Leave the how and the when to science and to God. True Christianity and true science are both transformational worldviews that place growth and development at their centers. Both endeavors, each in its own way, cooperate with some Divine Plan, and whether God is formally acknowledged may not be that important. As C. G. Jung inscribed over his doorway, Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit, “Invoked or not invoked, God is still present.”*3
God has worked anonymously since the very beginning—it has always been an inside and secret sort of job.
The Spirit seems to work best underground. When aboveground, humans start fighting about it.
You can call this grace, the indwelling Holy Spirit, or just evolution toward union (which we call “love”). God is not in competition with anybody, but only in deep-time cooperation with everybody who loves (Romans 8:28). Whenever we place one caring foot forward, God uses it, sustains it, and blesses it. Our impulse does not need to wear the name of religion at all.
Love is the energy that sustains the universe, moving us toward a future of resurrection. We do not even need to call it love or God or resurrection for its work to be done.
*1 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1845), 39.
*2 Richard Dawkins, “Richard Dawkins on Skavlan,” Skavlan, YouTube, December 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3oae0AOQew.
*3 G. G. Jung, Letters: 1951–1961, vol. 2, ed. G. Adler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 611.
8
Doing and Saying
…Born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate…
—The Apostles’ Creed
If you worship in one of the more liturgical Christian traditions, you probably know the opening words of the Apostles’ Creed by heart:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended into hell…
But have you ever noticed the huge leap the creed makes between “born of the Virgin Mary” and “suffered under Pontius Pilate”? A single comma connects the two statements, and falling into that yawning gap, as if it were a mere detail, is everything Jesus said and did between his birth and his death! Called the “Great Comma,” this gap certainly invites some serious questions. Did all the things Jesus said and did in those years not count for much? Were they nothing to “believe” in? Was it only his birth and death that mattered? Does the gap in some way explain Christianity’s often dismal record of imitating Jesus’s actual life and teaching?
There are other glaring oversights in the creeds. Believed to be the earliest formal declaration of Christian belief, the Apostles’ Creed does not once mention love, service, hope, the “least of the brothers and sisters,” or even forgiveness—anything, actually, that is remotely actionable. It’s a vision and philosophy statement with no mission statement, as it were. Twice we are reminded that God is almighty, yet nowhere do we hear mention that God is also all suffering or all vulnerable (although it does declare that Jesus “suffered…, died, and was buried”). With its emphasis on theory and theology, but no emphasis on praxis—the creed set us on a course we are still following today.
The Apostles’ Creed, along with the later Nicene Creed, is an important document of theological summary and history, but when the crowd at my parish mumbles hurriedly through its recitation each Sunday, I’m struck by how little usefulness—or even interest—the creeds seem to bring as guides for people’s daily, practical behavior. I hope I am wrong, but I doubt it.
Both creeds reveal historic Christian assumptions about who God is and what God is doing. They reaffirm a static and unchanging universe, and a God who is quite remote from almost everything we care about each day. Furthermore, they don’t show much interest in the realities of Jesus’s own human life—or ours. Instead, they portray what religious systems tend to want: a God who looks strong and stable and in control. No “turn the other cheek” Jesus, no hint of a simple Christ-like lifestyle is found here.
You might wonder why I’m bothering you with this bit of historical and theological trivia. Here is the reason:
When our tradition chose an imperial Christ who lives inside the world of static and mythic proclamations, it framed Christian belief and understanding in a very small box. The Christ of these creeds is not tethered to earth—to a real, historical, flesh-and-blood Jesus of Nazareth. Instead, it is mostly mind with little heart, all spirit and almost no flesh or soul. Is our only mission to merely keep announcing our vision and philosophy statement? Sometimes it has seemed that way. This is what happens when power and empire take over the message.
Did you know that the first seven Councils of the Church, agreed upon by both East and West, were all either convened or formally presided over by emperors? This is no small point. Emperors and governments do not tend to be interested in an ethic of love, or service, or nonviolence (God forbid!), and surely not forgiveness unless it somehow helps them stay in power.
For all who have tried to know Jesus without Christ, many of the core church teachings offered a disembodied Christ without any truly human Jesus, which was the norm for centuries in doctrine and in art. Art is the giveaway of what people really believe at any one time. It bears repeating what John Dominic Crossan demonstrated in his masterful study about Eastern and Western images of the Resurrection; we had two extremely different theologies of its very meaning. The West declared, “Jesus rose from the dead” as an individual; the Eastern church saw it in at least three ways: the trampling of hell, the corporate leading out of hell, and the corporate uplifting of humanity with Christ.*1 That is a quite different message. But after 1054 we had little knowledge of each other, since each considered the other side heretical. Perhaps this was the worst historical result of our dualistic (noncontemplative) thinking and practice. All that remained in the Western church was the one line in that same Apostles’ Creed, “He descended into hell,” but no one really was sure what that meant.
In the second half of this book, I’d like to consider how an understanding of the Christ can revolutionize how we practice our faith, in ways big and small. For me, mere information is rarely helpful unless it also enlightens and “amorizes” your life. In Franciscan theology, truth is always for the sake of love—and not an absolute end in itself, which too often becomes the worship of an ideology. In other words, any good idea that does not engage the body, the heart, the physical world, and the people around us will tend to be more theological problem solving and theory than any real healing of people and institutions—which ironically is about all Jesus does! The word “healing” did not return to mainline Christian vocabulary until the 1970s,*2 and even then it was widely resisted, which I know from my own experience. In the Catholic tradition, we had pushed healing off till the very last hour of life and called the Sacrament “Extreme Unction,” apparently not aware that Jesus provided free health care in the middle of life for people who were suffering, and it was not just an “extreme” measure to get them into the next world.
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br /> You wouldn’t guess this from the official creeds, but after all is said and done, doing is more important than saying. Jesus was clearly more concerned with what Buddhists call “right action” (“orthopraxy” in Christianity) than with right saying, or even right thinking. You can hear this message very clearly in his parable of the two sons in Matthew 21:28–31: One son says he won’t work in the vineyard, but then does, while the other says he will go, but in fact doesn’t. Jesus told his listeners that he preferred the one who actually goes although saying the wrong words, over the one who says the right words but does not act. How did we miss that?
Humanity now needs a Jesus who is historical, relevant for real life, physical and concrete, like we are. A Jesus whose life can save you even more than his death. A Jesus we can practically imitate, and who sets the bar for what it means to be fully human. And a Christ who is big enough to hold all creation together in one harmonious unity.
In the remaining pages of this book, allow me to offer you such a Jesus and such a Christ.
*1 Crossan, Resurrecting Easter, especially 153ff.
*2 Francis McNutt, Healing (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1974). I worked with Francis in the 1970s and witnessed many levels of healing with my own eyes. Just as in the Gospels, it caused much fear, pushback, and denial from the “faithful.”
9
Things at Their Depth
One day the religion of Christ will take another step forward on earth. It will embrace the whole man [sic], all of him, not just half as it does now in embracing only the soul.
—Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco
As I watch Catholics receive communion at Mass, I notice that some, after taking the bread and wine, turn toward the altar or the sacred box that reserves the bread and bow or genuflect as a gesture of respect—as if the Presence were still over there. In those moments, I wonder if they have missed what just happened! Don’t they realize that the Eucharist was supposed to be a full transference of identity to them? They themselves are now the living, moving tabernacle, just like the Ark of the Covenant. Is this too much for them to imagine? Does it seem presumptuous and impossible? It appears so.
Likewise, I have known many Evangelicals who “received Jesus into their hearts” but still felt the need to “get saved” again every Friday night. Did they not believe that a real transformation happened if they made a genuine surrender and reconnected to their Source? Most of us understandably start the journey assuming that God is “up there,” and our job is to transcend this world to find “him.” We spend so much time trying to get “up there,” we miss that God’s big leap in Jesus was to come “down here.” So much of our worship and religious effort is the spiritual equivalent of trying to go up what has become the down escalator.
I suspect that the “up there” mentality is the way most people’s spiritual search has to start. But once the real inner journey begins—once you come to know that in Christ, God is forever overcoming the gap between human and divine—the Christian path becomes less about climbing and performance, and more about descending, letting go, and unlearning. Knowing and loving Jesus is largely about becoming fully human, wounds and all, instead of ascending spiritually or thinking we can remain unwounded. (The ego does not like this fundamental switch at all, so we keep returning to some kind of performance principle, trying to climb out of this messy incarnation instead of learning from it. This is most early-stage religion.)
Jesus offered the world a living example of fully embodied Love that emerged out of our ordinary, limited life situations. For me, this is the real import of Paul’s statement that Jesus was “born of a woman under the Law” (Galatians 4:4). In Jesus, God became part of our small, homely world and entered into human limits and ordinariness—and remained anonymous and largely invisible for his first thirty years. Throughout his life, Jesus himself spent no time climbing, but a lot of time descending, “emptying himself and becoming as all humans are” (Philippians 2:7), “tempted in every way that we are” (Hebrews 4:15) and “living in the limitations of weakness” (Hebrews 5:2). In this chapter, I would like to consider such a path, and what it means for you and me.
The Divine Map
Jesus walked, enjoyed, and suffered the entire human journey, and he told us that we could and should do the same. His life exemplified the unfolding mystery in all of its stages—from a hidden, divine conception, to a regular adult life full of love and problems, punctuated by a few moments of transfiguration and enlightenment, and all leading to glorious ascension and final return. As Hebrews 4:15 says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but we have one who was like us in every way, experienced every temptation, and never backtracked” (my translation). We do not need to be afraid of the depths and breadths of our own lives, of what this world offers us or asks of us. We are given permission to become intimate with our own experiences, learn from them, and allow ourselves to descend to the depth of things, even our mistakes, before we try too quickly to transcend it all in the name of some idealized purity or superiority. God hides in the depths and is not seen as long as we stay on the surface of anything—even the depths of our sins.
Remember, the archetypal encounter between doubting Thomas and the Risen Jesus (John 20:19–28) is not really a story about believing in the fact of the resurrection, but a story about believing that someone could be wounded and also resurrected at the same time! That is a quite different message, and still desperately needed. “Put your finger here,” Jesus says to Thomas (20:27). And, like Thomas, we are indeed wounded and resurrected at the same time, all of us. In fact, this might be the primary pastoral message of the whole Gospel.
Earlier, I wrote that great love and great suffering (both healing and woundedness) are the universal, always available paths of transformation, because they are the only things strong enough to take away the ego’s protections and pretensions. Great love and great suffering bring us back to God, with the second normally following the first, and I believe this is how Jesus himself walked humanity back to God. It is not just a path of resurrection rewards, but always a path that includes death and woundedness.
St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) taught that, “As a human being Christ has something in common with all creatures. With the stones he shares existence, with plants he shares life, with animals he shares sensation, and with the angels he shares intelligence.”*1 In saying this, Bonaventure was trying to give theological weight to the deep experience of St. Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), who as far as we know, was the first recorded Christian to call animals and elements and even the forces of nature by familial names: “Sister, Mother Earth,” “Brother Wind,” “Sister Water,” and “Brother Fire.”
Francis was fully at home in this created world. He saw all things in the visible world as endless dynamic and operative symbols of the Real, a theater and training ground for a heaven that is already available to us in small doses in this life. What you choose now, you shall have later seems to be the realization of the saints. Not an idyllic hope for a later heaven but a living experience right now.
We cannot jump over this world, or its woundedness, and still try to love God. We must love God through, in, with, and even because of this world. This is the message Christianity was supposed to initiate, proclaim, and encourage, and what Jesus modeled. We were made to love and trust this world, “to cultivate it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15), but for some sad reason we preferred to emphasize the statement that comes three verses later, which seems to say that we should “dominate” the earth (1:28), where within one generation we become killers of our brothers (Genesis 4:8). I wonder if this is not another shape of our original sin. God “empties himself” into creation (Philippians 2:7), and then we humans spent most of history creating systems to control and subdue that creation for our own purposes and profit, reversing the divine pattern.
Do not
think I am talking about believing only what you can see with your eyes, or proposing mere materialism. I am talking about observing, touching, loving the physical, the material, the inspirited universe—in all of its suffering state—as the necessary starting place for any healthy spirituality and any true development. Death and resurrection, not death or resurrection. This is indeed the depth of everything. To stay on the surface of anything is invariably to miss its message—even the surface meaning of our sinfulness.
Jesus invited Thomas and all doubters into a tangible kind of religion, a religion that makes touching human pain and suffering the way into both compassion and understanding. For most of us, the mere touching of another’s wound probably feels like an act of outward kindness; we don’t realize that its full intended effect is to change us as much as it might change them (there is no indication that Jesus changed, only Thomas). Human sympathy is the best and easiest way to open the heart space and to make us live inside our own bodies. God never intended most human beings to become philosophers or theologians, but God does want all humans to represent the very Sympathy and Empathy of God. And it’s okay if it takes a while to get there.
Our central message again bears repeating: God loves things by becoming them. We love God by continuing the same pattern.
Always and Only the Incarnation
Christianity’s unique trump card is always and forever incarnation. This is why the only heresies that have been condemned in every century under different names are those that sought to deny the Incarnation, or undermine it with heady spiritualism or pious romanticism. This tendency was generically called “Gnosticism,” and I sometimes wonder if the church condemned it so much because we unconsciously knew how heady and Gnostic we ourselves were. “Condemn it over there instead of own it over here” is the operative and common policy of institutions of power. But as the poet and wisdom figure Wendell Berry loves to tell us, “What we need is here.”*2 Humanity has grown tired of grand, overarching societal plans like communism and Nazism, and of disembodied spiritualities that allow no validation or verification in experience. Too often they hide an agenda of power and control, obfuscating and distracting us from what is right in front of us. This is exactly what we do when we make the emphasis of Jesus’s Gospel what is “out there” as opposed to what is “in here.” For example, insisting on a literal belief in the virgin birth of Jesus is very good theological symbolism, but unless it translates into a spirituality of interior poverty, readiness to conceive, and human vulnerability, it is largely a “mere lesson memorized” as Isaiah puts it (29:13). It “saves” no one. Likewise, an intellectual belief that Jesus rose from the dead is a good start, but until you are struck by the realization that the crucified and risen Jesus is a parable about the journey of all humans, and even the universe, it is a rather harmless—if not harmful—belief that will leave you and the world largely unchanged.