Missionary Renegade: Richard Rohr's Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation for Week Forty-seven in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Friday, 23 November 2018 "Death and Resurrection"

Friday, November 23, 2018

Richard Rohr's Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation for Week Forty-seven in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Friday, 23 November 2018 "Death and Resurrection"

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Richard Rohr's Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation for Week Forty-seven in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Friday, 23 November 2018 "Death and Resurrection"

"Life-Death-Life"

Friday, November 23, 2018

The whole process of living, dying, and then living again starts with YHWH “breathing into clay,” which becomes “a living being” called Adam (“of the earth”; see Genesis 2:7). Breath and what appears to be mere dirt become human (the word “human” comes from the Latin humus). Matter and spirit are bound together; divine and mortal interpenetrate and manifest one another. The Formless One forever takes on form as “Adam and Eve” (and in Jesus “the new Adam”), and then takes us back to the Formless One, once again, as each form painfully surrenders the small self that it has been for a while. Jesus says, “I am returning to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be” (John 14:3). Resurrection is simply incarnation taken to its logical conclusion: what starts in God ends in God—who is eternal.
Buddhists are looking at the same Mystery from a different angle when they say, “Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form,” and then all forms eventually return to formlessness (spirit or “emptiness”) once again. Christians call it incarnation > death > resurrection > ascension. This is about all of us, including all of creation—not just Jesus—coming forth as individuals and then going back to God, into the Ground of All Being. That cyclical wholeness should make us unafraid of death and thus able to fully appreciate life.
The Risen Christ represents the final and full state of every True Self: God-in-you who is able to see and honor God-everywhere-beyond-you too! In other words, Christ is more than anything else a “holon”—a scientific term for something that is simultaneously a whole by itself and yet a part of a larger whole, too. Jesus is telling us that we are all holons! We all participate in the one single life of God.
“To God, all people are in fact alive,” as Jesus put it (Luke 20:38). We are just in different stages of that aliveness—one of which we experience as dying.
Gateway to Presence: If you want to go deeper with today’s meditation, take note of what word or phrase stands out to you. Come back to that word or phrase throughout the day, being present to its impact and invitation.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-Bass: 2013), 81-84.
Image credit: Autumn Leaves (detail), Koan, 2018.
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News from the CAC
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"Image and Likeness"
2018 Daily Meditations Theme
God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26)
Richard Rohr explores places in which God’s presence has often been ignored or assumed absent. God’s “image” is our inherent identity in and union with God, an eternal essence that cannot be destroyed. “Likeness” is our personal embodiment of that inner divine image that we have the freedom to develop—or not—throughout our lives. Though we differ in likeness, the imago Dei persists and shines through all created things.
Over the course of this year’s Daily Meditations, discover opportunities to incarnate love in your unique context by unveiling the Image and Likeness of God in all that you see and do.
Each week builds on previous topics, but you can join at any time! Click the video to learn more about the theme and to find meditations you may have missed.

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Inspiration for this week's banner image: As I’ve come to understand that life “composts” and “seeds” us as autumn does the earth, I’ve seen how possibility gets planted in us even in the hardest of times. —Parker Palmer