Love

A Warning to Religion from the Garden of Eden – Richard Rohr

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The sin warned against at the very beginning of the Bible is “to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). It does not sound like that should be a sin at all, does it? But the moment I sit on my throne, where I know with certitude who the good guys and the bad guys are, then I’m capable of great evil—while not thinking of it as evil! I have eaten of a dangerous tree, according to the Bible. Don’t judge, don’t label, don’t rush to judgment. You don’t usually know other people’s real motives or intentions. You hardly know your own.

The author of the classic book The Cloud of Unknowing says that first, you have to enter into “the cloud of forgetting. Forget all your certitudes, all your labels, all your explanations, whereby you’ve put this person in this box, determined this group is going to heaven, decided this race is superior to that race. Just forget it. It’s largely a waste of time. It’s usually your ego projecting itself, announcing itself, and protecting itself. It has little to do with objective reality or real love of the truth. If the world and the world’s religions do not learn this kind of humility and patience very soon, I think we’re in historical trouble.

+Adapted from Beginner’s Mind (Recording).

The Sin of Exclusion – Richard Rohr

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Those at the edge of any system and those excluded from any system ironically and invariably hold the secret for the conversion and wholeness of that very group. They always hold the feared, rejected, and denied parts of the group’s soul. We see, therefore, why the church was meant to be that group that constantly went to the edges, to the least of the brothers and sisters, and even to the enemy. Jesus was not just a theological genius; he was also a psychological and sociological genius. Therefore, when any church defines itself by exclusion of anybody, it is always wrong. It is avoiding its only vocation, which is to be the Christ. The only groups that Jesus seriously critiques are those who include themselves and exclude others from the always-given grace of God.

Only as the People of God receive the stranger, the sinner, and the immi-grant, those who don’t play our game our way, do we discover not only the hidden, feared, and hated parts of our own souls, but also the fullness of Jesus himself. We need them for our own conversion.

The church is always converted when the outcasts are re-invited back into the temple. We see this in Jesus’s common action of sending marginalized people that he has healed back into the village, back to their family, or back to the Temple to show themselves to the priests. It is not just for their re-inclusion and acceptance, but actually for the group itself to be renewed.

+ Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 28.

Incarnationalism – Richard Rohr

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Whenever the human and the divine coexist, at the same time, in the same person, you have Christianity. I don’t know that it finally matters what Scriptures you read, liturgies you attend, or moral positions you hold about this or that, as much as it is how you live trustfully inside of God’s one world. This creates honest people, people who don’t waste time proving they’re right, superior, or saved. They just try to live and love the daily mystery that they are in the loving presence of God. “God comes to you disguised as your life,” as Paula D’Arcy proclaimed the first time we taught together. Imagine that!

There are basically four worldviews: (1) reality is just matter, (2) reality is just spirit, (3) through religion and morality, you can work to put matter and spirit together (the most common religious position), and (4) the material world has always been the place where Spirit is revealed. You cannot put them together–they already are together, as in Jesus. Only the fourth position, incarnationalism, deserves to be called authentic Christianity. It has little to do with the right rituals, only the right reality.

+ Adapted from Great Themes of Paul: Life as Participation (Recording).

Spacious Silence Allows a Spacious God

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This is one good thing that silence and waiting have taught me: Our lives are always useable by God. We need not always be effective, but only transparent and vulnerable. Then we are instruments, no matter what we do.

Silence is the ability to trust that God is acting, teaching, and using us-even before we perform or after our seeming failures. Silence is the necessary space around things that allows them to develop and flourish without our pushing.

God takes it from there, and there is not much point in comparing who is better, right, higher, lower, or supposedly saved. We are all partial images, slowly coming into focus, as long as we allow and filter the Light and Love of God, which longs to shine through us-as us!

+Adapted from Contemplation in Action, p. 134. By Richard Rohr

Mercy, Justice, and Walking Humbly – Richard Rohr

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“You have been told, O mortal, what is good and what YHWH requires of you: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” —Micah 6:8

Scholar and retreat leader Megan McKenna deepens our understanding of God’s desire for us through the prophet Micah. For McKenna, Micah’s simple and challenging verse reveals the essence of what the prophets are about:

According to God, this is life. This is the call of the prophets in a nutshell, the meat at the heart of their very existence. The words used are significant: “Do justice”—the Hebrew word mishpat means more than specific acts of justice. It defines God’s order in the world; it is the covenant guide for living in community; and it is the memory of God’s words and deeds past and present and the people’s response in gratitude toward one another. In a word it says, Be the Torah; do God’s justice; imitate God in your life.…

“Do justice” means to be faithful as God is faithful, holy as God is holy, to set those in bondage free, to hear compassionately the cries of those in slavery, to do for one’s neighbor what God has so graciously done for you. It is the teaching of the Torah, the source of abundant life. These two words—Do justice—point to the way of God and simply say: walk in it! Whatever the concept of justice might be, it is only by doing acts of justice, by solidly standing with those in need of justice, and by resisting injustice that justice can become a reality.

The second demand is “Love mercy” (or “Love tenderly”). The Hebrew word hesed, compassion, means coming to the rescue of the poor, the outcast, the alien, the slave, the powerless, hearing the cries of those in misery, giving love that is faithful, sustaining, enduring. It is the way God loves [God’s] people, and God’s people are to return that love by loving one another. This urgent command shoots right to the heart of every individual and to the community. [1]

Howard Thurman (1899–1981) asks what it means to walk humbly with God, the third of God’s requirements to Micah:

How do you walk humbly with God? How do you? How do you walk humbly with anybody?… [By] coming to grips with who I am, what I am as accurately and as fully as possible: a clear-eyed appraisal of myself. And in the light of the dignity of my own sense of being I walk with God step by step as [God] walks with me. This is I, with my weaknesses and my strength, with my abilities and my liabilities; this is I, a human being myself! And it is that that God salutes. So that the more I walk with God and God walks with me, the more I come into the full-orbed significance of who I am and what I am. That is to walk humbly with God. [2]

[1] Megan McKenna, Prophets: Words of Fire (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001), 129–130.

[2] Howard Thurman, “The Message of Micah,” August 17, 1952, in Moral Struggle and the Prophets, ed. Peter Eisenstadt and Walter Earl Fluker (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2020), 196–197. Note: minor edits made for inclusive language.

GOD DOES NOT LOVE US BECAUSE WE ARE GOOD; WE ARE GOOD BECAUSE GOD LOVES US – Richard Rohr

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The great thing about God’s love is that it’s not determined by the object.

God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good.

It takes our whole lives for that to sink in, along with lots of trials and testing of divine love, because that’s not how human love operates.

Human love is largely determined by the attractiveness of the object.

When someone is nice, good, not high-maintenance, physically attractive, important, or has a nice personality, we find it much easier to give ourselves to them or to “like” them. That’s just the way we humans operate.

We naturally live in what I call the meritocracy of quid pro quo. We must be taught by God and grace how to live in an economy of grace. Divine love is a love that operates in a quite unqualified way, without making distinctions between persons and seemingly without such a thing as personal preference. Anyone who receives divine love feels like God’s favorite in that moment! We don’t even have the capacity to imagine such a notion until we have received it! Divine love is received by surrender instead of any performance principle whatsoever.

+Adapted from Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate…

Seeing God in All Things (Recording).

From Me to We

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Father Richard makes a distinction between first-half-of-life and second-half-of-life spirituality:  

Most cultures are first-half-of-life cultures, and even sadder, most organized religions almost necessarily sell a first-half-of-life spirituality. In the first half of life, it is all about me: How can I be important? How can I be safe? How can I make money? How can I look attractive? And, in the Christian scenario, how can I think well of myself and go to heaven? How can I be on moral high ground? These are all ego questions; they are not the questions of the soul. It is still well-disguised narcissism, or even sanctified narcissism, which is surely the worst kind.  

I’m sad to say, I think many Christians have never moved beyond these survival and security questions. Even “wanting to go to heaven” is language for securing my future, not a shared future, or a common future for humanity; religion becomes a private insurance plan for that future. It’s still all about me, but piously disguised. It’s not really about love at all! 

Any sense of being part of a cosmos, a historical sweep, or that God is doing something bigger and better than simply saving individual souls (my soul in particular), is largely of no interest. This becomes apparent in the common disinterest of so many when it comes to Earth care, building real community, simple living, and almost all peace and justice issues. For many Christians—stuck in the first half of life—all that is important is their private moral superiority and spiritual “safety,” which is somehow supposed to “save” them. It creates what I am now calling a “cult of innocence,” not any real human or divine solidarity. [1]   

Once God and grace move us to the second half of life, religion becomes much more a mystical matter rather than a moral matter. Then it’s about union with all and participation in and with God. Indeed, this is the work of true religion: to help us transition from stage to stage, toward ever-deeper union with God and all things.  

Those who fall into the safety net of silence find that it is not at all a fall into individualism. True prayer or contemplation is instead a leap into commonality and community. We know that what we are experiencing can only be held by the Whole and we are not alone anymore. We are merely a part, and as such a very grateful and totally satisfied part. This is “the peace the world cannot give” (see John 14:27).  

Real silence moves us from knowing things to perceiving a Presence that imbues all things. Could this be God? When we begin to experience a mutuality between ourselves and all things, we have begun to understand the nature of Spirit. God refuses to be known as any kind of object, but only as a mutuality.

[1] The phrase “cult of innocence” was coined in a tweet by author and pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, and is explored in depth in Brian McLaren’s new book Do I Stay Christian?.  

Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2016), 87–88, 208.

The River of Grace – Richard Rohr

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Father Richard teaches that a practice of contemplation carries us into the “Big River” of God’s love and enables us to release our fears.  

Grace and mercy teach us that we are all much larger than the good or bad stories we tell about ourselves or one another. Our small, fear-based stories are usually less than half true, and therefore not really “true” at all. They’re usually based on hurts and unconscious agendas that persuade us to see and judge things in a very selective way. They’re not the whole You, not the Great You, and therefore not where Life can really happen. No wonder the Spirit is described as “flowing water” and as “a spring inside you” (John 4:10–14) or as a “river of life” (Revelation 22:1–2).  

I believe that faith might be precisely that ability to trust the Big River of God’s providential love, which is to trust its visible embodiment (the Christ), the flow (the Holy Spirit), and the source itself (the Creator). This is a divine process that we don’t have to change, coerce, or improve. We just need to allow it and enjoy it. That takes immense confidence in God, especially when we’re hurting. Often, we feel ourselves get panicky and quickly want to make things right. We lose our ability to be present and go up into our heads and start obsessing. At that point we’re not really feeling or experiencing things in our hearts and bodies. We’re oriented toward making things happen, trying to push or even create our own river. Yet the Big River is already flowing through us and each of us is only one small part of it. 

Faith does not need to push the river precisely because it is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing; we are already in it. This is probably the deepest meaning of “divine providence.” So do not be afraid. We have been proactively given the Spirit by a very proactive God.  

Ask yourself regularly, “What am I afraid of? Does it matter? Will it matter in the great scheme of things? Is it worth holding on to?” We have to ask whether it is fear that keeps us from loving. Grace will lead us into such fears and emptiness, and grace alone can fill them, if we are willing to stay in the void. We mustn’t engineer an answer too quickly. We mustn’t get settled too fast. We all want to manufacture an answer to take away our anxiety and settle the dust. To stay in God’s hands, to trust, means that we usually have to let go of our attachments to feelings—which are going to pass away anyway. People of deep faith develop a high tolerance for ambiguity and come to recognize that it is only the small self that needs certitude or perfect order all the time. The Godself is perfectly at home in the River of Mystery.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2003), 142–144. 

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The Call – Richard Woehrmann

It’s not the day on the
calendar that makes the
New Year new, it’s when
the old year dies that the new
year gets born. It’s when the
ache in your heart breaks
open, when new love makes
every cell in your body
align. It’s when your baby
is born, it’s when your
father and mother die. It’s
when the new Earth is
discovered and it’s the
ground you’re standing on.
The old year is all that is
broken, the ash left from all
those other fires you made;
the new year kindles from
your own spark, catches flame
and consumes all within
that is old, withered and dry.
The New Year breaks out
when the eye sees anew,
when the heart breathes open
locked rooms, when your
dead branches burst into
blossom, when the Call comes
with no doubt that it’s
calling to you.

Nothing Stands Alone – 2022 Daily Meditations

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I have been reading these daily meditations from the Center for Action and Contemplation for over five year now. It is usually, the first thing I read every morning. What a great way to start the day! This year’s theme is perfect for this COVID chaos period. I hope you will join me on this journey – since indeed – Nothing Stands Alone.

Grace and Peace,

Brian

In the 2022 Daily Meditations, Father Richard Rohr invites you on a journey of understanding God as Relationship—with ourselves, each other, and the earth—through the theme of Nothing Stands Alone.

What could happen if we embraced the idea of God as relationship—with ourselves, each other, and the earth? Could salvation simply be the willingness to remain in loving relationship with all creation? We will explore these questions and more in the 2022 theme for Daily Meditations, Nothing Stands Alone.

Over the next twelve months we will explore how relationship itself invites us to experience God’s presence in ourselves and each other. Fr. Richard calls this “participating in the wholeness of the Body of Christ.”

“Our sense of disconnection is only an illusion. Nothing human can stop the flow of divine love; we cannot undo the eternal pattern even by our worst sin.”

–RICHARD ROHR

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