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Facebook is an easy way to share Fr. Richard's meditations with friends.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Photograph by mercucio2.
"Scripture: Week 1"
"From the Specific to the Universal"
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
The Israelites gradually learned the transformative power of God's action in their lives, as we see often in Isaiah and so many of the prophets. What formed a prophet was their ability to really trust that Yahweh was actively and practically involved in the ordinary history of the Jewish people. One has to wonder where such confidence came from.
Yes, as the rain and the snow come down from the heavens and do not return without watering the earth, making it yield and giving growth to provide seed for the sower and bread for the eating, so the word that goes from my mouth does not return to me empty, without carrying out my will and succeeding in what it was sent to do. --Isaiah 55:10-11
Israel's history is the womb for the world's initial sense of divine incarnation (God's practical involvement in this world). In other words, they saw the patterns and connected the dots so well, that they could trust the same would continue to happen all the time and everywhere. The love and presence of God, when it is planted in fertile soil, will always have an exponential yield. In gradually accepting the daring initiative of actual intimacy from God, the Hebrew people became a true community of faith. It was not so much that God loved Israel more than all the other peoples of the earth, but somehow they were a people who learned how to hear and trust God's initiatives better than almost anybody else. That is their eternal glory and privilege! So they were in the best position to hand the message of divine intimacy on to the rest of the world. They produced a worldview in which a Jesus could emerge.
The Hebrew Scriptures--what Christians unfortunately call the "Old" Testament (implying it is out of date)--were assembled over two thousand years of history. The New Testament or Christian Scriptures include the four Gospels, the Book of Acts, the many letters of Paul, John, Peter, James and others, and the Book of Revelation. These twenty-seven books of the Christian Scriptures were probably written over a period of a mere one hundred years of history. Yet together they have defined Western spirituality and even culture.
Catholic Bibles include forty-six books. Some of these are "apocryphal" and their inclusion in the canon of Scripture has often been debated. These books include First and Second Maccabees, Tobias, Judith, Esther, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and parts of Daniel, which our Protestant brothers and sisters do not include. In essence, the foundational message is the same no matter which version of the Bible we accept.
The fact that Christians include the Hebrew Scriptures as part of our Bible should show us that Christianity was never intended to be an exclusionary religion. We include another religion's Scripture in our own Christian Scriptures--as two thirds of our Bible! Jesus, who was an observant Jew, brilliantly thin-sliced his own tradition and sacred texts, giving us a truly expert lens by which to discover the deepest Hebrew wisdom. And Jesus'very selective interpretation of his own Scriptures represents the interpretive key.
In the stories of the Hebrew people we see Yahweh, the God of Israel, gradually showing God's Self to be the hope and the promise of all those who search for more. The principle of incarnation is this: start with the concrete, the specific, the personal--and then universalize from there. God is saving us as one people and, as Pope Francis has made clear, God's covenant with Israel is permanent and enduring (Romans 11:1f) and never out of date. What was true for them is true for all.
Gateway to Silence: Astonish me with your love.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos, Great Themes of Scripture: Old Testament (Franciscan Media: 1988), 1-3.
Innocence, a new issue of Oneing
"I do believe that we come from God and are returning to God, but we need a softening of the heart in order to see again and find our way home. I know of no way for hearts to be softened other than by a combination of love and suffering." --Ruth Patterson
This issue of CAC's spiritual literary journal features Richard Rohr, Diarmuid O'Murchu, Catherine Dowling, Enrique Lamadrid, and others.
Purchase the limited-edition publication at store.cac.org.
---------------------
Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Order, Disorder, Reorder" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United
States for Tuesday, 23 February 2016
Did you know CAC is on Facebook? "Like" our page and join the conversation.
Facebook is an easy way to share Fr. Richard's meditations with friends.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Photograph by mercucio2.
"Scripture: Week 1"
"Order, Disorder, Reorder" for Tuesday, February 23, 2016
The Bible reveals the development of human consciousness and human readiness for a Divine Love Affair. The differences between earlier and later Scriptures clearly show an evolution of human capacity, comprehension, and depth of experience. Jesus, for me, represents the mature image of what God is doing in history. In Israel's growth as a people we see the pattern of what happens to every individual and to every community that sets out on the journey of faith. Israel is the "womb of the Incarnation," for it is in their history that the whole drama is set in motion. Jesus fully grows up inside that womb. And we must grow up too. Little by little, human consciousness is prepared to see how God loves and liberates us. But we will face plenty of resistance, revealed in the constant hostility to Jesus even and most especially from religious people, ending in the very "killing of God."
There are many models of human and spiritual development. We could describe three stages as Simple Consciousness, Complex Consciousness (both "fight and flight"), and Non-Dual Consciousness ("the unitive way" or "third way"). More recently, I have been calling the developmental stages Order > Disorder > Reorder. In short, I see this pattern in the Bible and in human lives:
1. Order: We begin with almost entirely tribal thinking, mirroring the individual journey, which starts with an egocentric need for "order" and "self." Only gradually do we move toward inclusive love.
2. Disorder: We slowly recognize the invitation to a "face to face" love affair through the biblical dialogue of election, failure, sin, and grace, which matures the soul. This is where we need wisdom teachers to guide us through our "disorder."
3. Reorder: Among a symbolic few, there is a breakthrough to unitive consciousness (for example, figures like Abraham and Sarah, Moses, David, the Psalmists, many of the prophets, Job, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Jesus, and Paul). This is also what some call enlightenment or salvation.
Conservatives normally get trapped in the first stage, progressives are trapped in the second, and only a minority of either group seem to get to the third. The last stage is considered dangerous to people in the first stage, and rather unknown and invisible to people in the second stage. If you are not trained in a trust of both love and mystery, and also some ability to hold anxiety and paradox, all of which allow the divine entry into the soul, you will not proceed very far on the spiritual journey. In fact, you will often run back to stage one when the going gets rough in stage two. The great weakness of much Western spirituality is that there is little understanding of the necessity of darkness and "not knowing" (which is the transformative alchemy of faith). This is what keeps so much religion at stage one.
Thus the biblical tradition, and Jesus in particular, praises faith even more often than love. Why? Because faith is that patience with mystery that allows you to negotiate the stages of life and move toward non-egocentric love. As both John of the Cross and Gerald May point out in their own descriptions of "the dark night of the soul," God teaches the soul most profoundly through darkness--and not just light! We only need enough light to be able to trust the darkness. Trials and darkness teach us how to trust in a very practical way that a good God is guiding us. I don't need to be perfectly certain before I take the next step. Now I can trust that even my mistakes will be used in my favor, if I allow them to be. This is a wonderful way to grow in human love too, by the way. Darkness, mistakes, and trials are the supreme teachers. Success really teaches you nothing; it just feels good.
Love is the source and goal, faith is the slow process of getting there, and hope is the willingness to move forward without resolution and closure. And these are indeed, "the three things that last" (1 Corinthians 13:13). People who have these gifts--faith, hope, and love--are indestructible.
Gateway to Silence: Astonish me with your love.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 54-55.
Last chance to register!
The Franciscan Way: Beyond the Bird Bath
a self-paced, online course
March 9-April 26, 2016
Explore Richard Rohr's formative tradition--the radical Franciscan vision of simplicity, justice, and inclusivity. Discover the courageous heart of Franciscanism and a love that knows no boundaries.
The Franciscan Way course features exclusive video teachings by Fr. Richard that are unavailable elsewhere.
Learn more and register at cac.org.
Registration for The Franciscan Way closes February 24, 2016, or as soon as the course fills, whichever comes first.
---------------------
Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Backward" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Monday, 22 February 2016
Did you know CAC is on Facebook? "Like" our page and join the conversation.
Facebook is an easy way to share Fr. Richard's meditations with friends.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Photograph by mercucio2.
"Scripture: Week 1"
"Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Backward" for Monday, February 22, 2016
Life itself is always three steps forward and two steps backward. We get the point and then we lose or doubt it. In that, the biblical text mirrors our own human consciousness and journey. Our job is to see where the three steps forward texts are heading (invariably toward mercy, simplicity, inclusion, nonviolence, and trust) and to spot the two steps backward texts (which are usually about vengeance, exclusion, a rather petty and insecure god, law over grace, incidentals over substance, and technique over actual relationship).
The Bible is an anthology of many books. It is a record ofpeople's experience of God's self-revelation. It is an account of our very human experience of the divine intrusion into history. The book did not fall from heaven in a pretty package. It was written by people trying to listen for and to God. I believe that the Spirit was guiding the listening and writing process. We must also know that humans always see "through a glass darkly . . . and all knowledge is imperfect" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Prayer and patience surrounding such human words will keep us humble and searching for the true Living Word, which is exactly how the Spirit always teaches (1 Corinthians 2:10,13). This is what it means to know something "contemplatively."
We must trust that there is a development of the human capacity for divine wisdom and human response inside the Bible. We must be honest and recognize that things like polygamy, slavery, genocide, torture, racism, sexism, stoning, and mutilation of sinners--things that are often fully accepted in the ancient text--become more intolerable as the text matures. God does not change, so much as we do. If believers cannot begin to be honest about this, we are going to lose most future generations to any sincere or faith-filled reading of the Bible. Far too many have already thrown the Bible out when they really did not need to. But they had no good teachers to guide them.
Woven throughout these developing ideas are what I call "the Great Themes of Scripture." (This was the title of my very first recordings in 1973.) I try to mine these timeless, essential themes from the text. My approach is almost so simple, it is hard to teach. It is what I call the "Jesus hermeneutic." (Hermeneutic is a method of interpretation.) My approach is, quite simply, to interpret and use the Bible the way that Jesus did.
When we get to the Risen Jesus, there is nothing to be afraid of in God. Jesus' very breath is identified with forgiveness and the Divine Shalom (see John 20:20-23). If the Risen Jesus is the full and trustworthy unveiling of the nature of God, then we live in a safe and love-filled universe. It is not that God has changed, or that the Hebrew God is a different God than the God of Jesus; it is that we are growing up as we move through the texts and deepen our experience. Stay with the text and with your inner life with God, and your capacity for God will increase and deepen.
Just as the Bible takes us through many stages of consciousness and history, it takes us individually a long time to move beyond our need to be dualistic, judgmental, accusatory, fearful, blaming, egocentric, and earning--and to see as Jesus sees. The Bible itself is a "text in travail," according to Rene Girard's fine insight. It mirrors and charts our own human travail. It will offer both the mature and the immature responses to almost everything. In time, you will almost naturally recognize the difference between the text moving forward toward the mercy, humility, and inclusivity of Jesus and when the text is regressing into arrogance, exclusion, and legalism. Even a child can see the difference, but an angry or power-hungry person will not. They will favor the regressive and violent passage every time.
Gateway to Silence: Astonish me with your love.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 12-13;
and Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos, The Great Themes of Scripture: Old Testament, (Franciscan Media: 1988), 1.
Last chance to register!
The Franciscan Way: Beyond the Bird Bath
a self-paced, online course
March 9-April 26, 2016
Explore Richard Rohr's formative tradition--the radical Franciscan vision of simplicity, justice, and inclusivity. Discover the courageous heart of Franciscanism and a love that knows no boundaries.
The Franciscan Way course features exclusive video teachings by Fr. Richard that are unavailable elsewhere.
Learn more and register at cac.org.
Registration for The Franciscan Way closes February 24, 2016, or as soon as the course fills, whichever comes first.
---------------------
Richard Rohr's Meditation: "A New Experience" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Sunday, 21 February 2016
Did you know CAC is on Facebook? "Like" our page and join the conversation.
Facebook is an easy way to share Fr. Richard's meditations with friends.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Photograph by mercucio2.
"Scripture: Week 1"
"A New Experience" for Sunday, February 21, 2016
"Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible."[Eugene Ionesco [1]]
The British-American author D. H. Lawrence said, "The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences." New ideas are not a problem. The world "can pigeon-hole any idea," Lawrence said, "but it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience." [2] A true inner experience changes us, and human beings do not like to change.
The biblical revelation is inviting us into a new experience and a new way of seeing. Evolved human consciousness seems to be more ready to accept the divine invitation, but have no doubt, the Gospel is a major paradigm shift, and there will always be "an equal and opposite reaction" and resistance to such things as simplicity, nonviolence, restorative justice, and inclusivity.
A major problem is that theologians and the Church have presented the Bible as a collection of mental ideas about which we can be right or wrong. This traps us in a dualistic and argumentative mind, which is a pretty pathetic pathway to Great Truth. Many people don't expect from the Bible anything good or anything really new, which is how we translate the very word "Gospel"--good news. So we first of all need mature people who can read texts with wider eyes, and not just people who want quick and easy answers by which they can affirm their ideas and self-made identities. The marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is for the sake of a love-affair between God and the soul, and not to create an organizational plan for any particular religion. The Gospel is about our transformation into God (theosis), and not about mere intellectual assurance or "small-self" coziness. It is more a revolution in consciousness than a business model for the buying and selling of God as a product.
Some scholars, interestingly enough, have said that Jesus came to end religion. That's not as bad as it might sound. Archaic religion was usually an attempt to assure people that nothing new or surprising would happen, and that the gods could be controlled. Most people want their lives and history to be entirely predictable and controllable, and the best way to do that is to try to manipulate the gods. Low-level religion basically teaches humans what spiritual buttons to push to keep our lives and God predictable. This kind of religion initially appeals to our lowest levels of egocentric motivation (security and group status) instead of moving us to our highest (generosity and trust). Jesus had a hard job cut out for him!
For most of human history, God was not a likable, much less lovable, character. That's why every "theophany" (an event where God breaks through into the human realm) in the Bible begins with the same words: "Do not be afraid." People have too often been afraid of God--and afraid of themselves as a result. When God appeared on the scene, most people did not see it as good news, but as bad news with fearful questions arising: Who has to die now? Who needs to be punished? By and large, before the biblical revelation, most of humanity did not expect love, much less intimate love, from God. Even today, most humans feel that any notion of a Divine Lover is quite distant, arbitrary, and surely impossible to enjoy or expect.
This fear-based pattern is so ingrained in our hardwiring that in the two thousand years since the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, not much has really changed--except in a rather small percentage of humanity which is still growing toward a critical mass (Romans 8:18f). In my experience, most people still fear or try to control God instead of learning to trust and return the love of a very loving God. When one party has all the power--which is most people's very definition of God--all you can do is fear and try to control.
The only way this can be changed is for God, from God's side, to change the power equation and invite us into a world of mutuality and vulnerability. Our living image of that power change is Jesus! In him, God took the initiative to overcome our fear and our need to manipulate God and made intimate Divine relationship possible. During the next two weeks I'll explore how we can trace the thread of God's loving-kindness throughout Scripture--which is simultaneously a history of humanity's resistance, denial, and rejection of that very loving-kindness, reaching its climax in the crucifixion of Jesus. This movement both forward and backward is the story line of the whole Bible.
Gateway to Silence: Astonish me with your love.
References:
[1] As quoted by Rosette C. Lamont, Ionesco: A Collection of Critical Essays(Prentice-Hall: 1973), 167.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Shearsman Books: 2011), 41.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 7-10;
and New Great Themes of Scripture (Franciscan Media: 2012), disc 1 (CD).
Last chance to register!
The Franciscan Way: Beyond the Bird Bath
a self-paced, online course
March 9-April 26, 2016
Explore Richard Rohr's formative tradition--the radical Franciscan vision of simplicity, justice, and inclusivity. Discover the courageous heart of Franciscanism and a love that knows no boundaries.
The Franciscan Way course features exclusive video teachings by Fr. Richard that are unavailable elsewhere.
Learn more and register at cac.org.
Registration for The Franciscan Way closes February 24, 2016, or as soon as the course fills, whichever comes first.
Did you know CAC is on Facebook? "Like" our page and join the conversation.
Facebook is an easy way to share Fr. Richard's meditations with friends.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Photograph by mercucio2.
"Scripture: Week 1"
"Order, Disorder, Reorder" for Tuesday, February 23, 2016
The Bible reveals the development of human consciousness and human readiness for a Divine Love Affair. The differences between earlier and later Scriptures clearly show an evolution of human capacity, comprehension, and depth of experience. Jesus, for me, represents the mature image of what God is doing in history. In Israel's growth as a people we see the pattern of what happens to every individual and to every community that sets out on the journey of faith. Israel is the "womb of the Incarnation," for it is in their history that the whole drama is set in motion. Jesus fully grows up inside that womb. And we must grow up too. Little by little, human consciousness is prepared to see how God loves and liberates us. But we will face plenty of resistance, revealed in the constant hostility to Jesus even and most especially from religious people, ending in the very "killing of God."
There are many models of human and spiritual development. We could describe three stages as Simple Consciousness, Complex Consciousness (both "fight and flight"), and Non-Dual Consciousness ("the unitive way" or "third way"). More recently, I have been calling the developmental stages Order > Disorder > Reorder. In short, I see this pattern in the Bible and in human lives:
1. Order: We begin with almost entirely tribal thinking, mirroring the individual journey, which starts with an egocentric need for "order" and "self." Only gradually do we move toward inclusive love.
2. Disorder: We slowly recognize the invitation to a "face to face" love affair through the biblical dialogue of election, failure, sin, and grace, which matures the soul. This is where we need wisdom teachers to guide us through our "disorder."
3. Reorder: Among a symbolic few, there is a breakthrough to unitive consciousness (for example, figures like Abraham and Sarah, Moses, David, the Psalmists, many of the prophets, Job, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Jesus, and Paul). This is also what some call enlightenment or salvation.
Conservatives normally get trapped in the first stage, progressives are trapped in the second, and only a minority of either group seem to get to the third. The last stage is considered dangerous to people in the first stage, and rather unknown and invisible to people in the second stage. If you are not trained in a trust of both love and mystery, and also some ability to hold anxiety and paradox, all of which allow the divine entry into the soul, you will not proceed very far on the spiritual journey. In fact, you will often run back to stage one when the going gets rough in stage two. The great weakness of much Western spirituality is that there is little understanding of the necessity of darkness and "not knowing" (which is the transformative alchemy of faith). This is what keeps so much religion at stage one.
Thus the biblical tradition, and Jesus in particular, praises faith even more often than love. Why? Because faith is that patience with mystery that allows you to negotiate the stages of life and move toward non-egocentric love. As both John of the Cross and Gerald May point out in their own descriptions of "the dark night of the soul," God teaches the soul most profoundly through darkness--and not just light! We only need enough light to be able to trust the darkness. Trials and darkness teach us how to trust in a very practical way that a good God is guiding us. I don't need to be perfectly certain before I take the next step. Now I can trust that even my mistakes will be used in my favor, if I allow them to be. This is a wonderful way to grow in human love too, by the way. Darkness, mistakes, and trials are the supreme teachers. Success really teaches you nothing; it just feels good.
Love is the source and goal, faith is the slow process of getting there, and hope is the willingness to move forward without resolution and closure. And these are indeed, "the three things that last" (1 Corinthians 13:13). People who have these gifts--faith, hope, and love--are indestructible.
Gateway to Silence: Astonish me with your love.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 54-55.
Last chance to register!
The Franciscan Way: Beyond the Bird Bath
a self-paced, online course
March 9-April 26, 2016
Explore Richard Rohr's formative tradition--the radical Franciscan vision of simplicity, justice, and inclusivity. Discover the courageous heart of Franciscanism and a love that knows no boundaries.
The Franciscan Way course features exclusive video teachings by Fr. Richard that are unavailable elsewhere.
Learn more and register at cac.org.
Registration for The Franciscan Way closes February 24, 2016, or as soon as the course fills, whichever comes first.
---------------------
Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Backward" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Monday, 22 February 2016
Did you know CAC is on Facebook? "Like" our page and join the conversation.
Facebook is an easy way to share Fr. Richard's meditations with friends.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Photograph by mercucio2.
"Scripture: Week 1"
"Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Backward" for Monday, February 22, 2016
Life itself is always three steps forward and two steps backward. We get the point and then we lose or doubt it. In that, the biblical text mirrors our own human consciousness and journey. Our job is to see where the three steps forward texts are heading (invariably toward mercy, simplicity, inclusion, nonviolence, and trust) and to spot the two steps backward texts (which are usually about vengeance, exclusion, a rather petty and insecure god, law over grace, incidentals over substance, and technique over actual relationship).
The Bible is an anthology of many books. It is a record ofpeople's experience of God's self-revelation. It is an account of our very human experience of the divine intrusion into history. The book did not fall from heaven in a pretty package. It was written by people trying to listen for and to God. I believe that the Spirit was guiding the listening and writing process. We must also know that humans always see "through a glass darkly . . . and all knowledge is imperfect" (1 Corinthians 13:12). Prayer and patience surrounding such human words will keep us humble and searching for the true Living Word, which is exactly how the Spirit always teaches (1 Corinthians 2:10,13). This is what it means to know something "contemplatively."
We must trust that there is a development of the human capacity for divine wisdom and human response inside the Bible. We must be honest and recognize that things like polygamy, slavery, genocide, torture, racism, sexism, stoning, and mutilation of sinners--things that are often fully accepted in the ancient text--become more intolerable as the text matures. God does not change, so much as we do. If believers cannot begin to be honest about this, we are going to lose most future generations to any sincere or faith-filled reading of the Bible. Far too many have already thrown the Bible out when they really did not need to. But they had no good teachers to guide them.
Woven throughout these developing ideas are what I call "the Great Themes of Scripture." (This was the title of my very first recordings in 1973.) I try to mine these timeless, essential themes from the text. My approach is almost so simple, it is hard to teach. It is what I call the "Jesus hermeneutic." (Hermeneutic is a method of interpretation.) My approach is, quite simply, to interpret and use the Bible the way that Jesus did.
When we get to the Risen Jesus, there is nothing to be afraid of in God. Jesus' very breath is identified with forgiveness and the Divine Shalom (see John 20:20-23). If the Risen Jesus is the full and trustworthy unveiling of the nature of God, then we live in a safe and love-filled universe. It is not that God has changed, or that the Hebrew God is a different God than the God of Jesus; it is that we are growing up as we move through the texts and deepen our experience. Stay with the text and with your inner life with God, and your capacity for God will increase and deepen.
Just as the Bible takes us through many stages of consciousness and history, it takes us individually a long time to move beyond our need to be dualistic, judgmental, accusatory, fearful, blaming, egocentric, and earning--and to see as Jesus sees. The Bible itself is a "text in travail," according to Rene Girard's fine insight. It mirrors and charts our own human travail. It will offer both the mature and the immature responses to almost everything. In time, you will almost naturally recognize the difference between the text moving forward toward the mercy, humility, and inclusivity of Jesus and when the text is regressing into arrogance, exclusion, and legalism. Even a child can see the difference, but an angry or power-hungry person will not. They will favor the regressive and violent passage every time.
Gateway to Silence: Astonish me with your love.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 12-13;
and Richard Rohr and Joseph Martos, The Great Themes of Scripture: Old Testament, (Franciscan Media: 1988), 1.
Last chance to register!
The Franciscan Way: Beyond the Bird Bath
a self-paced, online course
March 9-April 26, 2016
Explore Richard Rohr's formative tradition--the radical Franciscan vision of simplicity, justice, and inclusivity. Discover the courageous heart of Franciscanism and a love that knows no boundaries.
The Franciscan Way course features exclusive video teachings by Fr. Richard that are unavailable elsewhere.
Learn more and register at cac.org.
Registration for The Franciscan Way closes February 24, 2016, or as soon as the course fills, whichever comes first.
---------------------
Richard Rohr's Meditation: "A New Experience" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Sunday, 21 February 2016
Did you know CAC is on Facebook? "Like" our page and join the conversation.
Facebook is an easy way to share Fr. Richard's meditations with friends.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Photograph by mercucio2.
"Scripture: Week 1"
"A New Experience" for Sunday, February 21, 2016
"Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible."[Eugene Ionesco [1]]
The British-American author D. H. Lawrence said, "The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences." New ideas are not a problem. The world "can pigeon-hole any idea," Lawrence said, "but it can't pigeon-hole a real new experience." [2] A true inner experience changes us, and human beings do not like to change.
The biblical revelation is inviting us into a new experience and a new way of seeing. Evolved human consciousness seems to be more ready to accept the divine invitation, but have no doubt, the Gospel is a major paradigm shift, and there will always be "an equal and opposite reaction" and resistance to such things as simplicity, nonviolence, restorative justice, and inclusivity.
A major problem is that theologians and the Church have presented the Bible as a collection of mental ideas about which we can be right or wrong. This traps us in a dualistic and argumentative mind, which is a pretty pathetic pathway to Great Truth. Many people don't expect from the Bible anything good or anything really new, which is how we translate the very word "Gospel"--good news. So we first of all need mature people who can read texts with wider eyes, and not just people who want quick and easy answers by which they can affirm their ideas and self-made identities. The marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is for the sake of a love-affair between God and the soul, and not to create an organizational plan for any particular religion. The Gospel is about our transformation into God (theosis), and not about mere intellectual assurance or "small-self" coziness. It is more a revolution in consciousness than a business model for the buying and selling of God as a product.
Some scholars, interestingly enough, have said that Jesus came to end religion. That's not as bad as it might sound. Archaic religion was usually an attempt to assure people that nothing new or surprising would happen, and that the gods could be controlled. Most people want their lives and history to be entirely predictable and controllable, and the best way to do that is to try to manipulate the gods. Low-level religion basically teaches humans what spiritual buttons to push to keep our lives and God predictable. This kind of religion initially appeals to our lowest levels of egocentric motivation (security and group status) instead of moving us to our highest (generosity and trust). Jesus had a hard job cut out for him!
For most of human history, God was not a likable, much less lovable, character. That's why every "theophany" (an event where God breaks through into the human realm) in the Bible begins with the same words: "Do not be afraid." People have too often been afraid of God--and afraid of themselves as a result. When God appeared on the scene, most people did not see it as good news, but as bad news with fearful questions arising: Who has to die now? Who needs to be punished? By and large, before the biblical revelation, most of humanity did not expect love, much less intimate love, from God. Even today, most humans feel that any notion of a Divine Lover is quite distant, arbitrary, and surely impossible to enjoy or expect.
This fear-based pattern is so ingrained in our hardwiring that in the two thousand years since the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, not much has really changed--except in a rather small percentage of humanity which is still growing toward a critical mass (Romans 8:18f). In my experience, most people still fear or try to control God instead of learning to trust and return the love of a very loving God. When one party has all the power--which is most people's very definition of God--all you can do is fear and try to control.
The only way this can be changed is for God, from God's side, to change the power equation and invite us into a world of mutuality and vulnerability. Our living image of that power change is Jesus! In him, God took the initiative to overcome our fear and our need to manipulate God and made intimate Divine relationship possible. During the next two weeks I'll explore how we can trace the thread of God's loving-kindness throughout Scripture--which is simultaneously a history of humanity's resistance, denial, and rejection of that very loving-kindness, reaching its climax in the crucifixion of Jesus. This movement both forward and backward is the story line of the whole Bible.
Gateway to Silence: Astonish me with your love.
References:
[1] As quoted by Rosette C. Lamont, Ionesco: A Collection of Critical Essays(Prentice-Hall: 1973), 167.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Shearsman Books: 2011), 41.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 7-10;
and New Great Themes of Scripture (Franciscan Media: 2012), disc 1 (CD).
Last chance to register!
The Franciscan Way: Beyond the Bird Bath
a self-paced, online course
March 9-April 26, 2016
Explore Richard Rohr's formative tradition--the radical Franciscan vision of simplicity, justice, and inclusivity. Discover the courageous heart of Franciscanism and a love that knows no boundaries.
The Franciscan Way course features exclusive video teachings by Fr. Richard that are unavailable elsewhere.
Learn more and register at cac.org.
Registration for The Franciscan Way closes February 24, 2016, or as soon as the course fills, whichever comes first.
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Center for Action and Contemplation
Center for Action and Contemplation
Center for Action and Contemplation
1823 Five Points Road SW (physical)
PO Box 12464 (mailing)
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87195, United States
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