Center for Action and Contemplation - Sunday, 23 February 2014 - Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Naked without Shame"

Center for Action and Contemplation - Sunday, 23 February 2014 - Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Naked without Shame"
The Bible has us begin in “the Garden” where Adam and Eve walk in easy proximity with God and where they “know no shame” (Genesis 2:25).
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
"Leaving the Garden"
"Naked without Shame"
Sunday, February 23, 2014
The Bible has us begin in “the Garden” where Adam and Eve walk in easy proximity with God and where they “know no shame” (Genesis 2:25). But soon they split (“subject-object split”). “Their eyes are opened, and they realize they are naked and sew fig leaves to cover themselves” (3:7). Even though God refuses to see them as objects, and says, “Who told you that you were naked?” (3:11), they have begun to hide from God (3:8-9), and really from one another, and probably from themselves. They start scapegoating (3:12-13), fearing (3:10), and seeking “to be like gods” (3:5), and the only sin does not seem like a sin at all, but a virtue: “to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (2:17). Our lust for certitude and our need to be right is what keeps us in conflict. All this sets the plot for the entire Bible, and in many ways for all religion.
You could say that, from then on, the whole Bible is trying to return us to the Garden, where God knows and loves us, and we have learned that we are always beginners, perpetual Adams and Eves. By the end of the Bible (Revelation 21-22) the New Jerusalem descends, and there is no need for any temple because the temple is finally seen to be the embodied world. It is one big River of Life and endless Trees of Life (22:1-2), where “God lives among humans” (21:3). But for all the intervening books, just like our own lives, we fight this, we retrench, deny, run, oppose, and only occasionally surrender to such a momentous truth. God is seldom “found” because we do not know exactly where or how to look.
Biblically, when we are found by God, we have always “undergone an operation.” The Bible might be described as a rather comprehensive listing of the possible, probable, and needed operations.
Adapted from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 21
Gateway to Silence:
Life is one good thing!
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