Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Path of Descent
Going Up the Down Escalator
Thursday, October 20, 2016
As Christianity evolved in the centuries following Jesus’ death and resurrection, it naturally drew ideas from the surrounding Mediterranean culture. Roman and Greek mythology and philosophy used a great deal of Promethean, heroic, ascent images. The ego is naturally attracted to heroic language. To the ego, heroism feels like the way to go to God. No wonder Christian martyrs were immediately canonized. We placed our focus on the heroic instead of the transformative, on achieving rather than serving.
If the Promethean is heroic expression, stoic spirituality is heroic repression. We thought depriving ourselves or doing something contrary to nature, will, or body would somehow please God, whereas it only made us feel “strong” and significant. Jesus never advocates either asceticism or heroism. In fact, Jesus says, “John the Baptist came along fasting and living an ascetic life and you were upset with him. Now I come along eating and drinking and you don’t like me either” (see Matthew 11:18-19). Jesus is neither a rigorist nor a legalist. He is scandalously free from these ego games!
We must acknowledge that much of Christian spirituality comes from other sources than Jesus’ teaching. That’s not necessarily wrong, but we have to admit when we’re listening to Western culture rather than Jesus. The ideas and practices we usually associate with religion are not at all what Jesus emphasizes. Jesus is the most unlikely founder of a religion. Religion normally begins by making a distinction between the pure and the impure, the good and the bad. Yet Jesus does the opposite: he finds God among the impure instead of among the pure! He entertains the lost sheep instead of comforting those who think they are not lost.
Humans are so hardwired to think dualistically, to divide the pure from the impure, that in spite of Jesus’ clear example and teaching, Christianity went right back to the same old pattern. The ego desperately wants to feel pure, saved, moral, significant, and superior. We cannot allow God to come down to us, which is the meaning of the Incarnation (see Philippians 2:5-8); we think we’ve got to go up to God. We’re usually going up the down escalator! And we miss Jesus on the way—as he de-escalates into our so very ordinary world.
Gateway to Silence: The way up is down.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Path of Descent (CAC: 2003), disc 3 (CD, MP3 download); and
Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 80-81.-------
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Path of Descent
A Clod of Earth
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
The path of descent involves letting go of our self-image, our titles, our public image. I think this is one of the many meanings of the First Commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3). What is at stake here is not just false images of God (which mostly serve our purposes), but also comfortable images of ourselves. That’s probably what the saints meant when they said we have to move to the place of faith, to the place of self-forgetfulness, of nothingness, which ironically is the place of abundance!
The German Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart (c. 1260—c. 1328) said in essence that the spiritual life has more to do with subtraction than with addition. But in the capitalistic West, we keep trying to climb higher up the ladder of spiritual success. Some Buddhists call it spiritual materialism or spiritual consumerism. We’ve turned the Gospel into a matter of addition instead of subtraction. When we are so full of ourselves, we have no room—and no need—for God or others, or otherness in general.
When C. G. Jung was an old man, one of his students read John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he asked Jung, “What has your pilgrimage really been?” Jung answered: “In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.” [1] That’s a free man. We aren’t really free until we’re free from ourselves: our ego, our reputation, our self-image, our need to be right, our need to be successful, our need to have everything under control, even our need to be loved by others—or to think of ourselves as loving.
The word “human” comes from the Latin humus, which means earth. Being human means acknowledging that we’re made from the earth and will return to the earth. For a few years we dance around on the stage of life and have the chance to reflect a little bit of God’s glory. We are earth that has come to consciousness. If we discover this power in ourselves and know that we are God’s creatures, that we come from God and return to God, that’s enough. As a human, I’m just a tiny moment of consciousness, a small part of creation, a particle that reflects only a fragment of God’s glory. And yet that’s enough.
In the words of St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022):
What I have seen is the totality recapitulated as One,
Received not in essence but by participation.
It is just as if you lit a flame from a live flame:
It is the entire flame you receive. [2]
It’s really that simple. If we have not experienced that connection, knowing that we are indeed a fragment of the Great Flame, we will most certainly need to accumulate more and more outer things as substitutes for self-worth. This, of course, is the great spiritual illusion. We needn’t acquire what we already have. Our value comes from our inherent participation in God.
Gateway to Silence: The way up is down.References:
[1] C. G. Jung Letters, Volume 1, selected and edited by Gerhard Adler in collaboration with Aniela Jaffe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), footnote 8, p. 19.
[2] J. Koder, Syméon le Nouveau Théologien: Hymnes, Sources Chrétiennes (Éditions du Cerf, Paris: 1969), 157-158.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 168-169, 172-173.-------
“Mystery isn’t something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand! There is no point at which you can say, ‘I’ve got it.’ Always and forever, mystery gets you!” —Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation
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Center for Action and Contemplation
Center for Action and Contemplation
1823 Five Points Road South West (physical)
PO Box 12464 (mailing)
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87195, United States
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Center for Action and Contemplation
Center for Action and Contemplation
1823 Five Points Road South West (physical)
PO Box 12464 (mailing)
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87195, United States
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