by Richard Rohr
196. See 1 Corinthians 13:5.
197. See, for example, Romans 1:18 (niv, nkjv, kjv); Ephesians 5:6 (niv, nkjv, kjv).
198. See Peter Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015).
199. Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Cincinnati, Ohio: St. Anthony’s Messenger Press/Franciscan Media, 2010).
200. Richard Rohr, Falling Upward (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011).
201. Here are but a few examples: First, in Luke 4:18–19 (niv), when Jesus reads from the Isaiah scroll, beginning with, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor…” and ending his reading with “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” he leaves off “and the day of vengeance of our God” as it is in the original passage. (See Isaiah 61:1–2.) Then, rather than proclaim foreigners as the enemies and objects of God’s vengeance, Jesus turns around and praises faithful foreigners from Zarephath and Syria, while reproaching the attitudes of his own fellow “chosen” people. The people become so angry at his selective reading that they try to throw him off a cliff! (See Luke 4:25–30.) For more examples like this, see Michael Hardin’s The Jesus Driven Life: Reconnecting Humanity with Jesus, rev. and exp. edition (Lancaster, PA: JDL Press, 2013), particularly chapter 2, “How Jesus Read His Bible.” For a powerful, semi-fictionalized telling, see Jack Miles’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (New York: Knopf, 2001). Additionally, in Matthew 5, in Jesus’ well-known Sermon on the Mount, he begins a series of teachings with, “You have heard that it was said…,” summarizing a key, accepted part of the Law, and contrasting it with “But I say to you…,” bringing his own—often subversive—take on it. For more on the sweepingly different vision of Jesus’ most well-known message, see my own Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1996). For still more examples, see Matthew 12:1–8 and John 5:1–23.
202. See Matthew 2:1–12.
203. See Luke 10:25–37 for the parable of the Good Samaritan; see John 4:4–41 for the account of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, wherein they discuss some of the theological differences between Orthodox Jews and heterodox Samaritans, with Jesus ultimately pointing to a place of Spirit and reality that transcends both of their social and spiritual locations.
204. See John 1:1–5; 1 John 1:1–3.
205. See Acts 17:16–34.
206. See Ephesians 4:4–6.
207. See Acts 17:28 for the key phrase in Paul’s message.
208. Compare the development of the idea of logos beginning with the sixth-century BCE philosopher Heracleitus through Jesus’ first-century CE context. For a very basic overview, see www.britannica.com/topic/logos.
209. See John 3:8.
210. The concept of God as the “negative space” from which all creation pours forth is a rich dimension worthy of a book of its own. For just a taste, try out exercise number 5, “Seeing (in the Dark),” in the appendix of this book.
211. See Exodus 20:7.
212. See Richard Rohr, The Naked Now (Crossroad, New York, 2009), particularly chapter 2.
213. This is why the work of initiation in the world today owes an ongoing debt of gratitude to these indigenous and First Nations peoples; to witness a breathtaking look at Christ’s incarnation from an indigenous, initiatory perspective, read The Four Vision Quests of Jesus by Steven Charleston (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2015).
214. See Sandra Schneiders, Women and the Word (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), 50ff.
215. Exodus 3:14 (jb; niv; nkjv).
216. See the vision in Ezekiel 47:1–12.
217. See Romans 8:19–25.
218. See Romans 8:19–30.
219. See, for example, Genesis 13:15; Exodus 32:13.
220. See Matthew 7:7–8. See also 1 John 5:14–15.
221. See Luke 1:46–55 for Mary’s prayer and Matthew 26:36–46 for Jesus’ prayer.
222. See, for example, John 5:19.
223. “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17 nkjv, kjv).
224. See Acts 2:1–13.
225. Hafiz, The Gift: Poems by Hafiz, trans. Daniel Ladinsky (New York: Penguin Compass, 1999), front matter, 203.
226. John of Ruysbroeck, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, trans. C. A. Wynschenk Dom, ed. Evelyn Underhill (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library), 213, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ruysbroeck/adornment.pdf.
227. Adam Clayton, Dave Evans, Paul David Hewson, Larry Mullen, and Angelique Kidjo (U2), “Mysterious Ways,” Achtung Baby, Universal Music Publishing Group, 1991.
228. See Colossians 1:20.
229. For an excellent short meditation on John 14:6—one of Jesus’ most controversial statements in Scripture—see brianmclaren.net/emc/archives/McLaren%20-%20John%2014.6.pdf.
230. See http://www.earlychurchtexts.com/public/augustine_sermon_272_eucharist.htm. I first saw a translation of this passage cited in Rebecca Ann Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2009), 144. This book is a fresh, breathtaking look at the first thousand years of church history from “below.” See savingparadise.net.
231. John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 15.
232. See Matthew 5–7.
233. See Romans 5:20–21.
234. See Acts 26:14.
235. Matthew 10:40; see also Mark 9:37; Luke 10:16; John 13:20.
236. Matthew Fox, trans. and ed., Meditations with Meister Eckhart (Rochester, VT: Bear and Company, 1983), 129.
237. Theodore Roethke, “The Rose,” The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (New York, Anchor Books, 1974). Originally published by Doubleday and Company, 1961.
238. See Bonaventure’s classic text Journey of the Mind into God (Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum).
239. See Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Scribner, 1958).
240. To explore this topic further, see Richard Rohr, “Hell, No!” (2015), CD or MP3 (www.cac.org.).
241. Karl Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. William V. Dych (London: Darton, Longman & Todd/New York: Seabury, 1978), 226.
242. Frank Viola, Reimagining Church: Pursuing the Dream of Organic Christianity (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2008), 35.
243. See Colossians 1:15–20.
244. John 1:14 (msg).
245. Walter Brueggemann, An Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009), 103.
246. See Rohr, Eager to Love, chapter 8, and Rohr, Things Hidden, chapter 9.
247. The appellation “little Christs” was first used in semi-mockery by non-believing townspeople in Antioch within a few decades after Christ’s ascension. See the account in Acts 11:19–26.
248. See 2 Corinthians 2:14 and Romans 8:29.
249. Derek Patmore, ed., The Rod, the Root and the Flower (Tacoma, Washington: Angelico Press, 2013), 111.
250. See, for example, Hosea 6:3.
251. See Matthew 7:7–8.
252. See, for example, Psalm 25:4.
253. Since Scripture depicts God as so relational, and so frequently changing the Divine mind in response to interaction with our prayers, wishes, and actions, it is stunning that certain the
ological systems are in such denial about it. See this sampling of passages compiled by Greg Boyd: Exodus 32:14; 33:1–3, 14; Deuteronomy 9:13–29; 1 Kings 21:21–29; 1 Chronicles 21:15; Jeremiah 26:2–3; Ezekiel 4:9–15; Amos 7:1–6; and Jonah 3:10. For a brief summary of these passages, see reknew.org/2015/04/doesgodchangehismind.
Part III
The Holy Spirit
Wholly Reconciling
The Spirit’s passion is to bring her anointing of humanity in Jesus to full and personal and abiding expression in us [as unique persons], and not only in us personally, but in our relationship with the Father through the Son, and in our relationships with one another, and indeed with the earth and all creation….254
Until the whole cosmos is a living sacrament of the great dance of the triune God.255
Let’s make part III a very short section of the book, shall we? That way you might remember it, or open to it haphazardly and read it.
As long as we thought of God as a Being, or what I am calling a noun, then this Being could clearly choose to be loving on occasion, but also not loving.
But what if the very shape of Being is first of all communion? The very nature of Being is love; or, as Teilhard de Chardin expressed, “the [very] physical structure of the universe is love.”256
Being is an active verb, and God is an event of communion? Could it be true?
God does not decide to love, therefore, and God’s love can never be determined by the worthiness or unworthiness of the object. But God is Love itself.257 God cannot not love, because love is the nature of God’s very being.
In Scholastic philosophy, as I mentioned earlier, we were taught that the three universal qualities of naked being (“the Transcendentals”) are that being is always:
good
true
beautiful
When these three are apprehended together, we also experience the radical oneness of all being.
We have just described the Holy Spirit, who sustains and heals all things into Love by slowly unveiling the inherent goodness, truth, and beauty in everything.
The Divine Energy
You can now reread the prologue to John’s gospel,258 and every time you see the term “Word,” or Logos, substitute Relationship or Blueprint, instead, and it will really help you get the message. “In the beginning was the Relationship,” or “In the beginning was the Blueprint.” It crescendos in when the text might be translated as “And the Blueprint took shape,” or “the Relationship became visible,”259 which is enacted when the Spirit descends on Jesus and a Voice is heard: “You are my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.”260 This exact model of relationship is then intended to be passed on to us in what Jesus calls the “baptism in the Holy Spirit.”261
Remember, the Holy Spirit is the love relationship between the Father and the Son. It is this relationship itself that is gratuitously given to us! Or better, we are included inside this love. Wow. This is salvation in one wonderful snapshot.
And this same relationship shows itself in other myriad forms, such as endless animals and wildflowers, mountains and trees, every cultural attempt at art and science and medicine, all positive street theatre, and every movement for renewal. Every one of these manifestations expresses this endless desire to create new forms of life and externalized love. All things good, true, and beautiful are baptized in the one, same Spirit.262
The Holy Spirit shows herself as the central and healing power of absolute newness and healing in our relationship with everything else. Early-twentieth-century Anglican mystic Evelyn Underhill defined mysticism as “the art of union with Reality”;263 the Holy Spirit is the artist painting this union through us!
Any staying in relationship, any insistence on connection, is always the work of the Spirit, who warms, softens, mends, and renews all the broken, cold places in and between things. The Holy Spirit is always “the third force” happening between any two dynamics. Invisible but powerful, willing to be anonymous, she does not care who gets the credit for the wind from nowhere, the living water that we take for granted, or the bush that always burns and is never consumed.
Within creation, you can say that God the Holy Spirit has two almost opposing tasks. First, the Spirit simply wants to be continuously multiplying, in ever-new forms of creativity and life. They say two-thirds of life forms are underneath the sea, and no human eye has ever seen one-third of them. “What is a life form without us to see it?” we self-centered humans might imagine. Their worth is not dependent on our knowing about them! As the psalms say in so many ways, “the heavens proclaim the glory of God.”264
In fact, the vast majority of animals and flowers that ever existed have never been observed by a human eye. They form the universal circle of praise: simply by existing, not by doing anything right, everything offers praise to God. Everything! By being, simply being. This is the foundation. If you want to be a contemplative, that’s all you need to know; everything, in being itself, is giving pure glory to God.
I have to quote the familiar poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins where he says this so perfectly:
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces:
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.265
That’s the mystery. It’s the circle completing itself.
Now, our great and terrible gift is this: we’re the only ones who can put a jam in the spokes of this circle of praise. If Gerald Manley Hopkins is my favorite poet, Annie Dillard is probably my favorite writer. Allow me to quote her, too: “We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other.… Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house.”266
To withhold praise, and instead stand to the side in critique, dismissal, judgment, and categorization, sorting what is not worthy of praise—this is not the divine indwelling. This is not the image of God. This is, instead, precisely what it means to live in a state of evil or sin.
As I said, this Spirit has two jobs. First, she creates diversity, as exemplified in the metaphor of wind—just breathing out ever-new life in endlessly diverse forms.
But then the Spirit has another job: that of the Great Connector—of all those very diverse things! All this pluriform life, the Spirit keeps in harmony and “mutual deference”267—“so there shall be one Christ, loving Himself,” as Augustine daringly put it.268 The True Seer enjoys One Giant Ecosystem of revolving and evolving love. This seeing and this enjoying is the work of the Spirit within us. This image kindles as a burning bush that is not consumed, and is stoked as descending tongues of fire, creating mobile temples of people from all nations,269 speaking a universal language of love that allows them to understand one another’s diverse languages. What a great symbol on so many levels!
Fire both melts and dissolves the boundaries between relationships so we can stop hiding behind our names, our labels, our definitions and descriptions. Another word for this consuming fire is, of course, love. And if there has been one constant identification with the Spirit, it’s precisely been the Holy Spirit as love in its implanted form—it is probably what we mean by the soul of every single thing. Unless the whole has meaning, it is very hard to give the parts much significance. When the whole is good and connected, all the parts rise by cosmic association.
How can this fire work in our bodies? Twentieth-century, African-American philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman—a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. and many other social-change agents—writes this:
; This is a living world; life is alive, and as expressions of life we, too, are alive and sustained by the characteristic vitality of life itself. God is the source of the vitality, the life, of all living things. His energy is available to plants, to animals, and to our own bodies if the conditions are met. Life is a responsible activity. What is true for our bodies is also true for mind and spirit. At these levels God is immediately available to us if the door is opened to Him. The door is opened by yielding to Him that nerve center where we feel consent or the withholding of it most centrally. Thus, if a man makes his deliberate self-conscious intention the offering to God of his central consent and obedience, then he becomes energized by the living Spirit of the living God.270
As we grow in conscious awareness of this Spirit, and practice her presence in acts of giving and receiving with all creation, the fire of burning bush and descending tongues will increasingly fill all creation—not in destruction, as Jesus’ apprentices once begged him to unleash on their enemies271 in echoes of the hot-headed prophet Elijah,272 but instead as a purifying fire that we fall into.
Everything Is Holy Now
Once you learn to take your place inside the circle of praise and mutual deference, all meaningful distinctions between secular and sacred, natural and supernatural, fall away. In the Divine Economy, all is useable, even our mistakes and our sin. This message shouts from the cross, and we still did not hear it!