by Richard Rohr
We are now acquiring and accessing more of the skills we need to go into the depths of things—and to find God’s spirit there. Whether they come through psychology, trained spiritual direction, the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs typology, grief and bereavement work, or other models such as Integral Theory or wilderness training,*3 these tools help us to examine and to trust interiority and depth as never before. One of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life came in 1984, during a journaling retreat led by the psychotherapist Ira Progoff. At this retreat, held in Dayton, Ohio, Progoff guided us as we wrote privately for several days on some very human but ordinary questions. I remember first dialoguing with my own body, dialoguing with roads not taken, dialoguing with concrete events and persons, dialoguing with my own past decisions, on and on.
I learned that if the quiet space, the questions themselves, and blank pages had not been put in front of me, I may never have known what was lying within me. Dr. Progoff helped me and many others access slow tears and fast prayers, and ultimately often intense happiness and gratitude, as I discovered depths within myself that I never knew were there. I still reread some of what I wrote over forty years ago for encouragement and healing. And it all came from within me!
Today we have freedom and permission and the tools to move toward depth as few people ever had in human history. What a shame it would be if we did not use them. The best way out is if we have first gone in. The only way we can trust up is if we have gone down. That had been the underlying assumption of male initiation rites since ancient times, but today, such inner journeys, basic initiation experiences, are often considered peripheral to “true religion.”
Permission to Go “In” and “Down”
If you think I am emphasizing the experiential too much, just remember that both Jesus and Paul trusted their own experience of God against the status quo of their own Jewish religion. This deep trust led Paul to oppose Peter, the supposed first Pope, “to his face” over the issue of whether Gentile converts should be required to undergo the Jewish rite of circumcision (Galatians 2:11–13). Paul and his ministry partner, Barnabas, soon repeated the same arguments to the whole leadership team of early Christianity in Jerusalem (Acts 15:1–12), and further insisted on the inclusion of the entire Gentile world (which is most of us). And they did so with no justification of authority beyond whatever it was that Paul experienced on the Damascus Road and thereafter. Paul rejecting circumcision, as he does more than once (see Galatians 5:12), would be like me denying the importance of baptism. Jesus defending his disciples’ practice of working on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:1ff.) would be like me saying that Mass on Tuesday is just as good as Mass on Sunday. (Of course, it actually is, except for the historic consensus that Sunday is the agreed-upon time for community worship.) “By what authority are you doing these things? And who gave you this authority?” the priests and elders rightly ask (Matthew 21:23) of Jesus. I must admit that I would probably have asked the same hard questions of both Jesus and Paul.
It’s no stretch to say that the New Testament faith was, in effect, written by two men who profoundly relied upon their inner experience of the ways of God despite a totally dominant consciousness that insisted otherwise. How did they get away with it? The answer is, in their lifetimes, they largely didn’t. Only later did saints and scholars see that Jesus and Paul had drawn upon the deepest sources of their own tradition to then totally reframe that tradition for the larger world. They, like all the prophets, were “radical traditionalists.” You can only reform things long term by unlocking them from inside—by their own chosen authoritative sources. Outsiders have little authority or ability to reform anything.
All traditions and traditionalists are searching for sacred objects, places, events, and people on which to found their authority, and this is normal and good. Once we find such a foundation, we make pilgrimages, write scriptures, visit tombs, create customs till they become sacrosanct traditions. We kiss holy rocks, paint art, create sacred architecture, weep with sincerity, and offer devotion to our symbol of the Absolute. But these totems, rituals, tombs (or empty tomb, in our case), and holy places are just early signposts to set us on the path. The full mystery of incarnation, on the other hand, points not just to things, but to the depth of things, the fullness of things, the soul of things, and what some have called the “angels of things.”
In his book Unmasking the Powers theologian and biblical scholar Walter Wink makes a very convincing case that this intuition about the inherent sacredness of creation is precisely what sacred texts are pointing toward when they speak of “angels.”*4 An angel, Wink believed, is the inner spirit or soul of a thing. When we honor the “angel” or soul of a thing, we respect its inner spirit. And if we learn how to pay attention to the soul of things—to see the “angels” of elements, animals, the earth, water, and skies—then we can naturally work our way back through the Great Chain of Being to the final link, whom many call God. Don’t waste your time deconstructing your primitive belief about pretty, winged creatures in flowing pastel dresses. If you do so, you are seriously missing out on what they are pointing to. We need to reconstruct, and not just continue to deconstruct. Then you will see angels everywhere.
What I am saying in this chapter is that there must be a way to be both here and in the depth of here. Jesus is the here, Christ is the depth of here. This, in my mind, is the essence of incarnation, and the gift of contemplation. We must learn to love and enjoy things as they are, in their depth, in their soul, and in their fullness. Contemplation is the “second gaze,” through which you see something in its particularity and yet also in a much larger frame. You know it by the joy it gives, which is far greater than anything it does for you in terms of money, power, or success.
Two pieces of art have given me this incarnational and contemplative insight. The first was one I saw in a Nuremberg art museum by Hans Kulmbach. It portrays the two human feet of Jesus at the very top of a large painting of the Ascension. Most of the canvas is taken up by the apostles, who are being drawn up with Christ with their eyes, as the two feet move off the top of the painting, presumably into the spiritual realms. The image had a wonderful effect on me. I too found myself looking beyond the painting toward the ceiling of the art museum, my eyes drawn elsewhere for the message. It was a real religious moment, one that simultaneously took me beyond the painting and right back into the room where I was standing. It was another instance of understanding the Christ in a collective sense, not just his ascension but also ours. Look at texts like Colossians 2:11–15 and Ephesians 2:4–6, and notice how they clearly present salvation in both the past tense and the collective sense. Why did we never notice this?
The second piece of art is a bronze statue of St. Francis, located in the upper basilica of Assisi, Italy. Created by a sculptor whose name is hidden, the statue shows Francis gazing down into the dirt with awe and wonder, which is quite unusual and almost shocking. The Holy Spirit, who is almost always pictured as descending from above, is pictured here as coming from below—even to the point of being hidden in the dirt! I’ve made sure I go see this statue whenever I return to Assisi, but I fear most people miss it, because it is small and set off to the side—just like the Christ message itself. “Truly, you are a hidden God,” Isaiah says (45:15). God is hidden in the dirt and mud instead of descending from the clouds. This is a major transposition of place. Once you know that the miracle of “Word made flesh” has become the very nature of the universe, you cannot help but be both happy and holy. What we first of all need is here!
Both these pieces of art put the two worlds together, just from different perspectives. Yet in both images, it is the Divine that takes the lead in changing places. Maybe artists have easier access to this Mystery than many theologians? The right brain often gets there faster and more easily than the left brain, and we let the left brainers take over our churches.
I doubt if you can see the imag
e of God (Imago Dei) in your fellow humans if you cannot first see it in rudimentary form in stones, in plants and flowers, in strange little animals, in bread and wine, and most especially cannot honor this objective divine image in yourself. It is a full-body tune-up, this spiritual journey. It really ends up being all or nothing, here and then everywhere.
Respect, Wonder, Reverence
This change of perspective, to bottom up and inside out, can take the form of religious language or totally secular language. Words are not the reality itself (the Ding an sich, as the Germans say). We all know respect when we see it (re-spect = to see a second time). We all know reverence because it softens our gaze. Any object that calls forth respect or reverence is the “Christ” or the anointed one for us at that moment, even though the conduit might just look like a committed research scientist, an old man cleaning up the beach, a woman going the extra mile for her neighbor, an earnest, eager dog licking your face, or an ascent of pigeons across the plaza.
All people who see with that second kind of contemplative gaze, all who look at the world with respect, even if they are not formally religious, are en Cristo, or in Christ. For them, as Thomas Merton says, “the gate of heaven is everywhere” because of their freedom to respect what is right in front of them—all the time.*5
*1 Bonaventure, Sermon I, Dom II in Quad. (IX, 215–219), trans. Zachary Hayes, “Christ Word of God and Exemplar of Humanity,” The Lord 46.1 (1996): 13.
*2 Wendell Berry, “The Wild Geese,” in Collected Poems (Berkeley: North Point Press, 1984), 155–156.
*3 Illuman.org, Outward Bound, Bill Plotkin Animas training, New Warrior Training, et cetera.
*4 Walter Wink, Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986).
*5 Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 142.
10
The Feminine Incarnation
From now on, all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
—Luke 1:48–49
I am going to take some risks in this brief chapter, but I believe it will be worthwhile because for many, this could invite the most important breakthrough of all. Since I am a man, my own perspective on the feminine is surely limited, but this is such a crucial and often ignored theme that I must invite us all to reclaim and honor female wisdom, which is often qualitatively different from male wisdom. I will draw from my own experiences with my mother (I was her favorite), sisters before and behind me, many women friends and colleagues over the years, and the very nature of some of my God encounters. I hope this perspective can invite you to trust your own experiences with the divine feminine as well. For many, it is an utterly new opening, since they always falsely assumed that God is somehow masculine.
Although Jesus was clearly of the masculine gender, the Christ is beyond gender, and so it should be expected that the Big Tradition would have found feminine ways, consciously or unconsciously, to symbolize the full Divine Incarnation and to give God a more feminine character—as the Bible itself often does.*
Whenever I go to Europe, I am always struck by how many churches bear the name of Mary, Jesus’s mother. I think I encountered a “Notre Dame of something” church in every French city I ever visited, and sometimes even two or three in one small town. Some of these churches are big and ornate, most are very old, and they usually inspire respect and devotion, even among nonbelievers. Yet even as a Catholic I sometimes wonder, Who were these Christian people who appear to have honored Mary much more than Jesus? After all, the New Testament speaks very little of Mary. No wonder the Protestant Reformation reacted so strongly against our Orthodox and Catholic preoccupation!
Why did the first fourteen hundred years of Christianity, in both the Eastern and Western churches, fall head over heels in love with this seemingly quite ordinary woman? We gave her names like Theotokos, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Notre Dame, La Virgen of this or that, Unsere Liebe Frau, Nuestra Señora, Our Mother of Sorrows, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and Our Lady of just about every village or shrine in Europe. We are clearly dealing with not just a single woman here but a foundational symbol—or, to borrow the language of Carl Jung, an “archetype”—an image that constellates a whole host of meanings that cannot be communicated logically. Nothing emerges that broadly and over so much of time if it is not grounded somehow in our collective human unconscious. One would be foolish to dismiss such things lightly.
In the mythic imagination, I think Mary intuitively symbolizes the first Incarnation—or Mother Earth, if you will allow me. (I am not saying Mary is the first incarnation, only that she became the natural archetype and symbol for it, particularly in art, which is perhaps why the Madonna is still the most painted subject in Western art.) I believe that Mary is the major feminine archetype for the Christ Mystery. This archetype had already shown herself as Sophia or Holy Wisdom (see Proverbs 8:1ff., Wisdom 7:7ff.), and again in the book of Revelation (12:1–17) in the cosmic symbol of “a Woman clothed with the sun and standing on the moon.” Neither Sophia nor the Woman of Revelation is precisely Mary of Nazareth, yet in so many ways, both are—and each broadens our understanding of the Divine Feminine.
Jung believed that humans produce in art the inner images the soul needs in order to see itself and to allow its own transformation. Just try to count how many paintings in world art museums, churches, and homes show a wonderfully dressed woman offering for your admiration—and hers—a usually naked baby boy. What is the very ubiquity of this image saying on the soul level? I think it looks something like this:
The first incarnation (creation) is symbolized by Sophia-Incarnate, a beautiful, feminine, multicolored, graceful Mary.
She is invariably offering us Jesus, God incarnated into vulnerability and nakedness.
Mary became the Symbol of the First Universal Incarnation.
She then hands the Second Incarnation on to us, while remaining in the background; the focus is always on the child.
Earth Mother presenting Spiritual Son, the two first stages of the Incarnation.
Feminine Receptivity, handing on the fruit of her yes.
And inviting us to offer our own yes.
There is a wholeness about this that many find very satisfying to the soul.
I hope you will not write this line of thinking off as trendy feminism, or simply an attempt to address the concerns of those who have left Christianity because of the sins of patriarchy, or the church’s failure to recognize and honor a feminine understanding of God. We always had the feminine incarnation, in fact it was the first incarnation, and even better, it moved toward including all of us! Mary is all of us both receiving and handing on the gift. We liked her precisely because she was one of us—and not God!
I think Christians of the first thousand years understood this on an intuitive and allegorical level. But by the time of the much-needed Protestant Reformation, all we could see was “but she is not God.” Which is entirely true. But we could no longer see in wholes, and see that even better, “She is us!” That is why we loved her, probably without fully understanding why. (Much of the human race can more easily imagine unconditional love coming from the feminine and the maternal more than from a man.) I have to say this!
In the many images of Mary, humans see our own feminine soul. We needed to see ourselves in her, and say with her “God has looked upon me in my lowliness. From now on, all generations will call me blessed” (Luke 1:48).
I do realize the dangers here, and I acknowledge that for all practical purposes many Catholics divinized Mary, probably out of sentimentality. All the same, I invite you to consider the deeper and more subtle message. I have often said that many Catholics have a poor theology of Mary but an excellent psychology: Humans like, need, and trust our mothers to give us gifts, to nurture
us, and always to forgive us, which is what we want from God. My years of work with men’s groups have convinced me of it. In fact, the more macho and patriarchal a culture, the greater its devotion to Mary. I once counted eleven images of Mary in a single Catholic church in Texas cowboy country. I see that as a culture trying unconsciously, and often not very successfully, to balance itself out. In the same way, Mary gives women in the Catholic church a dominant feminine image to counterbalance all the males parading around up front!