Everything is also fragmented and fighting this very process of reunification. For Christians, this resistance is symbolized by the cross. There is a cruciform shape to reality, it seems, and loss precedes all renewal ..
.. there can be no infilling unless there is first of all a self-emptying
Richard Rohr: One Great Act of Giving Birth
In his letter to the church in Rome, Paul writes: “From the beginning until now, the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth” (Romans 8:22, JB)
.. Just that line should be enough to justify the theory of evolution for Christians. Wouldn’t it make sense that God would give such autonomy and freedom and grace to creation to continue self-creating, just as any mother or father desires for their children?
.. Creation did not happen once by a flick of the divine hand and now it’s slowly winding down toward Armageddon and tragic Apocalypse (which is the hopeless universe inside of which many fundamentalists live). Creation is in fact a life-generating process that’s still happening and winding up!
.. The common Christian understanding that Jesus came to save us by a cosmic evacuation plan is really very individualistic, petty, and even egocentric. It demands no solidarity with anything except oneself. We whittled the great Good News down into what Jesus could do for us personally and privately, rather than God inviting us to participate in God’s universal creative work.
.. Instead of believing that Jesus came to personally fulfill you privately, how about trusting that you are here to fulfill Christ?
.. You are a part of this movement of an ever-growing Cosmic Christ that is coming to be in this “one great act of giving birth.”
Richard Rohr: Abstract to Personal
At the top of the hourglass are ideas of God too big for the human mind to grasp. We start with the Trinity, with God as
love and relationship. Creation happens in, through, and for the pre-existent Christ, the second person of the Trinity.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth. —Colossians 1:15-16
.. This grew into the notion of the eternal wisdom that was eventually going to leap “down” from heaven, into the human and time-limited realm. The eternal wisdom was personified as Sophia, the divine feminine, as we see in the Book of Proverbs and the Book of Wisdom. It is a compassionate abstraction of Divine Reality, but not yet personable and personal.
.. In the Book of Daniel, the pre-existent Christ moves toward greater personification with the notion of the “son of man,” the phrase Jesus most frequently uses to identify himself.
.. Though so much of life is filled with suffering, disappointment, disillusionment, absurdity, and dying, God will turn all of our crucifixions into resurrections.
Richard Rohr Meditation: Love Is the Nature of Being
Love is the very meaning of Creation. Many of the Fathers and Mothers of the Church, along with many of the saints and mystics throughout history, said that God created because, frankly, God needed something to love and something that could love God freely in return. I imagine if you have children you’ve experienced this. When you welcomed your child into this world, your fondest desire, perhaps at an unconscious level, was just to love this little one in every way possible. Hidden behind that is the deep desire that “someday my child will love me back in the same way that I have loved him or her.” There’s nothing wrong with that. Of course, the very way you love your children becomes their empowerment to love you back.
.. At the heart of Scotus’ theology was the doctrine of the primacy of Christ. God is absolutely free and therefore if he [sic] creates it is because he wants to create. He wants to create in order to reveal and communicate his goodness and love to another. Because God loves, he wills that his creation should also be infused by love.
.. The incarnation in Scotus’ theology is the whole purpose of creation. Christ is the masterpiece of love in the midst of a creation designed for love, not a divine plumber come to fix the mess of original sin. [2]
In other words, we settled for Plan B, or Jesus as a mere problem solver after we messed up. The Good News is that the Christ is Plan A from the very beginning, and Jesus came along much later to make it all visible and loveable and attractive. Salvation is a historical, social, and universal notion, which is made very clear already by the Jewish prophets. But we made Jesus very small and then the good news of salvation became very small too.