Richard Rohr’s Meditation: Beginning with Yes: The Risen Christ
Importantly, the Risen Christ is beyond any limits of space and time, as revealed in his bilocation (Luke 24:32-39); passing through doors (John 20:19); and shape-shifting into a gardener (John 20:14-18), a passer-by (Luke 24:13-35), and a wounded man that can only be recognized when Thomas touches the wounds (John 20:27f). The Risen Christ reveals a universal presence that is truly intimate with and connected to everything. The one and the many have become One in him. He reveals that we can operate as a part of the biggest ecosystem or force field possible. Paul’s metaphor for this is “The Body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12ff), where even the “weakest members are the most indispensable ones . . . and are clothed with the greatest care” (12:22f).
.. For the True Self, there is nothing to hate, reject, deny, or judge as unworthy or unnecessary. It has “been forgiven much and so it loves much” (Luke 7:47)
.. The detours of the false self were all just delaying tactics, bumps in the road, pressure points that created something new in the long run, as pressure does to carbon deep beneath the earth. God uses everything to construct this hard and immortal diamond, our core of love.
Richard Rohr Meditation: Deepening Connection
Immature religion actually stalls people at very early stages of magical, mythic, and tribal consciousness, while they are convinced they are enlightened or “saved.” Then we are more a part of the problem than offering any kind of solution.
.. Unfortunately, Christianity became another moralistic religion. It was overwhelmingly aligned with a very limited period of history (empire building through war) and a small piece of the planet (Europe), not the whole earth or any glorious destiny (Romans 8:18) for us all. Not surprisingly, many Christians ended up tragically fighting evolution—along with most early human and civil rights struggles—because we had not been taught any evolutionary notion of Christ who was forever “groaning in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22). Until the reforms of the 1960s and the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholicism was overwhelmingly tribal. Protestantism wasted too much time reacting against that tribalism—which made it tribal too. We become another version of anything we dislike or react against too strongly.
Richard Rohr Meditation: Saved by the Cross
The cross is a perfect metaphor for what I meant when I titled one of my books Everything Belongs. God is to be found in all things, even and most especially in the painful, tragic, and sinful things—exactly where we do not want to look for God. The crucifixion of the God-Man is at the same moment the worst and best thing in human history. It validates the central notion of paradox at the heart of Christianity.
The cross is saying that there is a cruciform pattern to reality. Reality is not meaningless and absurd (chaos/no patterns/nihilism), but neither is it perfectly consistent (rationalism/scientism/
fundamentalism). Reality, rather, is filled with contradictions, what Bonaventure (1221-1274) and others called “the coincidence of opposites.” [1] Bonaventure even found sacred geometry in the symbol of the cross: “For the center is lost in a circle, and it cannot be found except by two lines crossing each other at a right angle.” [2] In other words, some kind of suffering is the only way to reconcile differences. Jesus was killed on the collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths. The cross was the price Jesus paid for living in a “mixed” world that was both human and divine, simultaneously broken and utterly whole.
.. . Jesus agreed to carry the mystery of suffering and not to demand perfection of creation. He taught, in effect, that it is the “only” way to be saved. We are indeed saved by the cross—more than we realize. The people who hold the contradictions—and resolve them in themselves—are the saviors of the world.