Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Oneing
Unitive Consciousness: Beyond Gender
Wednesday, 19 November 2014
Julian of Norwich sometimes refers to God as Father and sometimes refers to Jesus as Mother. Gender means almost nothing to her because she is beyond that. There’s something deeper than gender. As alluring and as important as gender is, as it is our metaphor held in our body, it is not our ontological identity. It is not our foundational, essential truth. Your gender is not the True Self. It’s part of the False Self. That’s what Jesus is referring to when he says, “…in heaven, they neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Mark 12:25). But because gender is so deep in our early conditioning, in many of our lives we cling to it until the very end.
Male and female are most different at their most immature levels and most alike at their most mature levels. When you have matured to the point where you are beyond the dualisms that our dualistic minds have imposed on reality, then you know you are children of the resurrection. You are children of light and there is no male or female, as both Paul and the Gospel of Thomas say. People who already begin to experience such unity in this world will usually find it very easy to be compassionate toward lesbian, gay, and transgendered people, because they know that the True Self, who we objectively are in God, is prior and superior to any issues of gender, culture, or sexuality. Gender is important, but it is still an “accidental” part of the human person and not its substance.
The object and goal of all spirituality is finally the same for all genders: union, divine love, inner aliveness, soul abundance, forgiveness of offenses, and generous service to the neighbor and the world. Here “there is no distinction…between male and female” (Galatians 3:28). Mature Christian spirituality leads us toward such universals and essentials. Yet people invariably divide and argue about nonessentials!
Gratefully, Christ “holds all things in unity…the fullness is found in him, and all things are reconciled through him and for him, everything in heaven and on earth” (Colossians 1:17, 19-20)—including everything sexual that seems to always be unwhole or split in halves (sectare=to cut or divide).
Adapted from God as Us: The Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine, disc 6 (CD, DVD, MP3 download); and Unitive Consciousness: Beyond Gender (This book is out of print; however, an e-book version is available, published by Franciscan Media in various digital formats.)
Gateway to Silence: We are one in God.
"Surrendering to Union" for Thursday, 20 November 2014 - We must fully recognize that mystics like Francis and Clare were speaking from this place of conscious, chosen, and loving union with God, and such union was realized by surrendering to it and not by any achieving of it!
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Oneing
Surrendering to Union
Thursday, 20 November 2014
We must fully recognize that mystics like Francis and Clare were speaking from this place of conscious, chosen, and loving union with God, and such union was realized by surrendering to it and not by any achieving of it! Surrender to Another, participation with another, and divine union will be experienced as the same thing. Once we are in this union, I can look out from a much fuller Reality with eyes beyond and larger than my own. This is precisely what it means to “live in Christ” (en Christo), to pray “through Christ,” or to do anything “in the name of God.”
Such a letting go of our own small vantage point is the core of what we mean by conversion, but also what we mean by Franciscan “poverty.” Poverty is not just a life of simplicity, humility, restraint, or even lack. Poverty is when we recognize that myself—by itself—is largely powerless and ineffective. John’s Gospel puts it quite strongly when it says that a branch that does not abide in Jesus “is withered and useless” (John 15:6). The transformed self, living in union, no longer lives in shame or denial of its weakness, but even rejoices because it does not need to pretend that it is any more than it actually is—which is now more than enough!
Cynthia Bourgeault, who is on the CAC’s Living School faculty and who masterfully teaches kenosis and “non-clinging,” says, “There comes a point where each of us must step outside even those places of our most intense wounding and our most intense identification to just return to our virgin soul,” which is to live in full contentment and peace in this place of non-self-definition or self-assertion. What freedom!
Adapted from Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, pages 70-71; and God as Us: The Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine (CD, DVD, MP3 download)
Gateway to Silence: We are one in God.
"God Is in Our Deepest Self" for Friday, 21 November 2014 - The goal of Christianity (and any mature religion) is for you to be able to experience your unity with yourself, with creation, with neighbor, with enemy, and with God in this world.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Oneing
God Is in Our Deepest Self
Friday, 21 November 2014
Little by little we overcome the splits from everything, so in the end there’s just One. God is in all things and all things are in God. The goal of Christianity (and any mature religion) is for you to be able to experience your unity with yourself, with creation, with neighbor, with enemy, and with God in this world. God is never far away. God is not as transcendent as we first imagine. God is now humble, with us, indwelling, on our side, and for us more than we are for ourselves. God is not found in distant glory, but in humility, where we are all living our oh-so-humble lives. This awareness totally repositions the spiritual journey. Now the goal is poverty, not affluence. Now the goal is God's full cosmos and not tribal churchiness. Now the goal is the bottom, not the top. We stop ranking vertically and we start connecting horizontally.
In the Incarnation God “emptied himself” (Philippians 2:7), came to the bottom, and henceforth it was to be apparent that God is found at the bottom of things and on the hidden inside of things. Surprise of surprises—that is the last place most of us would look for God: inside of things and even less, inside of ourselves! True Transcendence is no longer transcendent the way we feared and suspected, but within! Dignity was inherent to creation from the beginning. That was supposed to be the Eureka discovery of the Christian religion.
As James Finley, one of CAC’s Living School faculty members, puts it in his book Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, “If we draw close to the roots of our existence, to the naked being of our self, we will find ourselves at that point where God and ourselves unite in ontological communion” (p. 136). His famous novice master, Thomas Merton, called it le point vierge (the virginal point) where the soul is untouched and untouchable by anyone except the perfect love of God. Wow! That is enough to convert anyone.
Adapted from an unpublished talk, “Franciscan Mysticism”
Gateway to Silence: We are one in God.
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