Healing and Transformation

Below is the final chapter of Richard Rohr's Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer. Over the last couple of months, I have learned so many life lessons from this wonderful little book, and I am very thankful for Richard's powerful and fresh conclusion that puts words to many of the frustrations and joys inside of my soul.

A Contemplative Seeing of The Doctrine of the Cross  

· God is to be found in all things, even and most especially in the painful, tragic and sinful things, exactly where we do not want to look for God. The crucifixion of the God-Man is at the same moment the worst thing in human history and the best thing in human history.

· Human existence is neither perfectly consistent (as rational and control-needy people usually demand it be), nor is it incoherent chaos (what cynics, agnostics, and unaware people expect it to be); instead, human life has cruciform pattern. It is a “coincidence of opposites” (St. Bonaventure), a collision of cross-purposes; we are all filled with contradictions needing to be reconciled.

· The price that we pay for holding together these opposites is always some form of crucifixion. Jesus himself was crucified between a good thief and a bad thief, hanging between heaven and earth, holding on to both his humanity and his divinity, a male body with a feminine soul, expelled as the problem by both religion and state. Yet he rejected none of these, but “reconciled all things in himself” (Eph. 2:10).

· Christians call this pattern ‘the paschal mystery’: true life comes only through journeys of death and rebirth wherein we learn who God is for us. Letting go is the nature of all true spirituality and transformation, summed up in the mythic phrase “Christ is dying, Christ is risen. Christ will ever come again.”

· We should not be surprised or scandalized by the sinful and the tragic. Do what you can to be peace and to do justice, but never expect or demand perfection on this earth. It usually leads to a false moral outrage, a negative identity, intolerance, paranoia, and self-serving crusades against “the contaminating element,” instead of “becoming a new creation” ourselves (Gal. 6:15).

· We must resist all utopian ideologies and heroic idealisms that are not tempered by patience and taught by all that is broken, flawed, sinful and poor. Jesus is an utter realist and does not exclude the problem from the solution. Work for win/win situations. Mistrust all win/lose dichotomies.

· The following of Jesus is not a “salvation scheme” or a means of creating social order (Which appears to be what most folks want religion for), as much as it is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world. Jesus did not come to create a spiritual elite or an exclusionary system for people who “like” religion, but he invited people to “follow” him in bearing the mystery of human death and resurrection (an almost nonreligious task, but one that can be done only “through, with and in” God).

· Those who agree to carry and love what God loves, which is both the good and the bad of human history, and to pay the price of its reconciliation within themselves – these are the followers of Jesus – the leaven, the salt, the remnant, the mustard seed that God can use to transform the world. The cross is the dramatic image of what it takes to be such a usable one for God.

· These few are enough to keep the world from its path toward greed, violence, and self-destruction. God is calling everyone and everything to Himself. God just needs some instruments and images who are willing to be “conformed unto the pattern of his death” and transformed into the power of his resurrection. They are not “saved” as much as chosen, used, purified, and beloved by God – just like Jesus, who did it first and invited us to “the great parade.”

· Institutional religion is a humanly necessary but also immature manifestation of this “hidden mystery” by which God is saving the world. History seems to make both the necessity and the immaturity of religion glaringly apparent, which upsets both progressives and conservatives. Institutional religion is never an end in itself, but merely a wondrous and “uncertain trumpet” of the message.

· By God’s choice and grace, many seem to be living this mystery of the suffering and joy of God who do not formally belong to any church (Gandhi, Simone Weil, Etty Hillesum, and Nelson Mandela are just a few examples.) And many who have been formally baptized have never chosen to “drink from the cup that I must drink or be baptized with the baptism that I must be baptized with” (Mark 10:38). They have the right to words but not the transformative experience.

· The doctrine, folly and image of the cross is the great clarifier and truth-speaker for all of human history. We can rightly speak of being “saved” by it. Jesus Crucified and resurrected is the whole pattern revealed, named, effected and promised for our own lives. If we can say yes to this vulnerable face of God, there will be no more surprises for our mind and no more victims of history. I personally do not believe that Jesus came to found a separate religion as much as he came to present a universal message of vulnerability and foundational unity that is necessary for all religions, the human soul, and history itself to survive. Thus Christians can rightly call him “the Savior of the World” (John 4:42), but no longer in the competitive and imperialistic way that they are usually presented him. By very definition, vulnerability and unity do not compete or dominate. In fact, they make both competition and domination impossible. The cosmic Christ is no threat to anything but separateness, illusion, domination, and any imperial ego. In that sense, Jesus, the Christ, is the ultimate threat, but first of all to Christians themselves. Only then will they have any universal and salvific message for the rest of the earth.

· The contemplative mind is the only mind big enough to see this, and the only kind of seeing that is surrendered enough to trust it. The calculative mind will merely continue to create dualism, win/lose scenarios, imperial egos and necessary victims. It cannot get out of its own illogical loop. Einstein put in this way: “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it.”

· God has given us a new consciousness in what we call “prayer” and an utterly unexpected, maybe even unwanted, explanation or reality in what we call “the cross.”