Richard Rohr's Meditation: "The Law and Grace" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Friday, 18 March 2016

 Richard Rohr's Meditation: "The Law and Grace" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Friday, 18 March 2016


Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Three Little Girls, Juarez, Mexico, 2009. CAC archives.
"Paul: Week 2"
"The Law and Grace"
Friday, March 18, 2016
Paul's letters to the Romans and Galatians are a tour de forceon the pure meaning of grace and the serious limitations of morality and religion to lead you to God. "Cursed be the law," Paul even says (Galatians 3:13). No wonder he has been called a "moral anarchist" by people who are still seeking any well-disguised path of "self-realization." But it seems Christianity has paid little heed to Paul's revolutionary message, or even to Jesus who says six times in a row, "The law says, but I say!" (Matthew 5:21-45). Both Jesus and Paul knew that rules and requirements were just to get you seriously engaged with the need for grace and mercy; they were never an end in themselves(read Romans 7:7ff).
"If you keep the law, the law will keep you," we students were told on the first day in the seminary. As earnest young men anxious to succeed, we replied, "Yes, Father!" We knew how to survive in any closed system. I'm afraid we spent so much time in that world that it became the whole agenda. Canon Law was quoted much more often to us than the Sermon on the Mount before the reforms of Vatican II, and now the young priests are being taught in much the same way as I was. A strong emphasis on law and order makes for a sane boarding school, or an organized anything, for that matter. I really get that. It probably made it much easier for the professors to get a good night's sleep with one hundred twenty young men next door. But it isn't anywhere close to the Gospel. The Gospel was not made to help organizations run smoothly. The full Gospel actually creates necessary dilemmas for the soul much more than resolving the organizational problems of institutions. Fortunately, the Gospel is also a profound remedy for any need to rebel or be an iconoclast.
We come to God not by doing it right but, surprise of surprises, we come to God by doing it wrong. We are justified not by good works, but by faith in an Infinite Mercy that we call grace. It has nothing to do with past performance or future plans for an eternal nest egg. All it requires is a deep act of confidence in a loving God. It is so hard to believe that this imperfect, insignificant creature that I am could somehow bear the eternal mystery. God can only grow bigger as we grow smaller, as John the Baptist put it (John 3:30). If we try to grow bigger by any criteria except divine mercy itself we only grow in love with our own image in a self-created mirror. That is normally called narcissism.
How could God love me so unconditionally, we all ask? This was Paul's struggle as well, and it led him to his cataclysmic conclusion. God loved Paul in his unworthiness, "while he was yet a sinner" as he puts it (Romans 5:8). Therefore he did not have to waste the rest of his life trying to become worthy or prove his worthiness, to himself or to others.
We seem to think God will love us if we change. Paul clearly knows that God loves us so we can change. The only people who change, who are transformed, are people who feel safe, who feel their dignity, and who feel loved. When you feel loved, when you feel safe, and when you know your dignity, you just keep growing! That's what loving people do for one another--offer safe relationships in which we can change. This kind of love is far from sentimental; it has real power. In general, you need a judicious combination of safety and necessary conflict to keep moving forward in life.
Paul has fallen in love with a God who has loved him "for nothing." For the rest of his life, Paul is happy to give God all the credit and he stops trying to validate himself by any means whatsoever. This creates a very different kind of person, someone who is utterly free. Paul knows that "the gift far outweighed the fall" (Romans 5:15) and he lives inside the gift all his remaining days. He never looks back to law or religion for his self-validation, but becomes the ultimate reformer of all self-serving religion, not just Judaism and Christianity. At least Judaism has been honest about its dislike of Paul. Christians have pretended we love him while overwhelmingly ignoring his revolutionary and life changing insights.
Gateway to Silence: Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.[1 Corinthians 13:7]
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, St. Paul: The Misunderstood Mystic (CAC: 2014), CD, MP3 download; and Great Themes of Paul: Life as Participation (Franciscan Media: 2002), disc 7 (CD).
Living and Dying in Grace
A webcast with Kathleen Dowling Singh and Richard Rohr
LIVE: Tuesday, April 12, 2016
4:30-6:00 p.m. US Mountain Daylight Time
These masterful teachers speak about the grace in dying--both in our small daily deaths to the false self and in our final breaths.
Register for as little as $1 at cac.org.
Registration for the webcast includes access to the replay, which will be made available through Sunday, May 15, 2016, starting shortly after the live broadcast. Register no later than 4:00 p.m. US MDT, on April 12, 2016, to participate in the live webcast and/or to view the replay. You must register online, prior to the webcast, to gain access to the replay. Registration for the webcast must be completed online. CAC is unable to make registrations for webcasts by phone.
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 Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Vulnerability--Even in God!" 
Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Thursday, 17 March 2016


Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Three Little Girls, Juarez, Mexico, 2009. CAC archives.
"Paul: Week 2"
"Vulnerability--Even in God!"
Thursday, March 17, 2016
Paul's encounter with the Eternal Christ on the Damascus Road must have sparked his new and revolutionary consciousness. He recognized that he had been chosen by God even "while breathing murderous threats" (Acts 9:1), and that the God who chose him was a crucified God and not an "Omnipotent" or an "Almighty" God. In fact, Paul only uses the word "Almighty" for God once (2 Corinthians 6:18), and then he is quoting the Hebrew Scriptures. This is quite significant considering his tradition and training. Paul's image of God was instead someone crucified outside the city walls in the way a slave might be killed, and not of a God appearing on heavenly clouds. Christ was not the strong, powerful, military Messiah that the Jews had been waiting for throughout their history. He was in fact quite the opposite. This was Jesus' great revelation, surprise, and a scandal that we have still not comprehended. God is not what we thought God could or should be!
Paul, like few others, read his own tradition honestly and recognized that Yahweh consistently chose the weak to confound the strong (1 Corinthians 1:17-31). He saw this in Israel itself, the barren wives of the patriarchs, the boy David forgotten in the fields, the rejected prophets, and finally Jesus on the cross. This becomes Paul's revolutionary understanding of wisdom that is still offensive and even disgusting to much of the world and even the church. Only vulnerability allows all change, growth, and transformation to happen--even in God.Who would have imagined this?
Paul's view of himself, of God, and of reality itself was completely turned on its head. He had to re-image how divine power worked and how humans changed. All he knew for sure at the beginning was that it was not what anyone expected. Paul went off to "Arabia" for some time to test his ideas against what he thought he was taught, to slowly allow the full metamorphosis of his soul. (Is this not the necessary path for all of us?) Only later does Paul have the courage to confront Peter and James in Jerusalem (Galatians 1:16-21), and then a full fourteen years later he tells Peter "to his face" that Peter is wrong (2:11) for imposing non-essentials on people that only give them an incorrect understanding of their correctness or righteousness. (Apparently Peter, the first Pope, was himself fallible, and he too had to learn how to be wrong to grow up!)
It takes all of us a long time to move from power to weakness, from glib certitude to vulnerability, from meritocracy to the ocean of grace. Strangely enough, this is especially true for people raised in religion. In Paul's letters, he consistently idealizes not power but powerlessness, not strength but weakness, not success but the cross. It's as if he's saying, "I glory when I fail and suffer because now I get to be like Jesus--the naked loser--who turned any notion of God on its head." Now the losers can win, which is just about everybody.
The revelation of the death and resurrection of Jesus forever redefines what success and winning mean, and it is not what any of us wanted or expected. On the cross, God is revealed as vulnerability itself (the Latin word vulnus means wound). The path to holiness is so different than any of us would have wished or imagined; and yet after the fact, we will all recognize that it was our littleness and wrongness that kept the door to union and love permanently wedged open every day of our life. In fact, there is no way to close it.
Gateway to Silence: Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.[1 Corinthians 13:7]
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Great Themes of Paul: Life as Participation(Franciscan Media: 2002), disc 3 (CD).
Living and Dying in Grace
A webcast with Kathleen Dowling Singh and Richard Rohr
LIVE: Tuesday, April 12, 2016
4:30-6:00 p.m. US Mountain Daylight Time
These masterful teachers speak about the grace in dying--both in our small daily deaths to the false self and in our final breaths.
Register for as little as $1 at cac.org.
Registration for the webcast includes access to the replay, which will be made available through Sunday, May 15, 2016, starting shortly after the live broadcast. Register no later than 4:00 p.m. US MDT, on April 12, 2016, to participate in the live webcast and/or to view the replay. You must register online, prior to the webcast, to gain access to the replay. Registration for the webcast must be completed online. CAC is unable to make registrations for webcasts by phone.---------------------
Center for Action and Contemplation
Center for Action and Contemplation

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