Father Richard Rohr insists that grace is the essence of who God is.
The goodness of God fills all the gaps of the universe, without discrimination or preference. God is the gratuity of absolutely everything. The space in between everything is not space at all but Spirit. God is the “goodness glue” that holds the dark and light of things together, the free energy that carries all death across the great divide and transmutes it into life. When we say that Christ “paid the debt once and for all,” it simply means that God’s job is to make up for all the deficiencies in the universe. What else would God do?
Grace is not something God gives; grace is who God is. Grace is God’s official job description. Grace is what God does to keep alive—forever—all things that God has created in love. If we are to believe the primary witnesses—the prophets, the mystics, the saints, the transformed people—an unexplainable goodness is at work in the universe. (Some of us call this phenomenon God, but that word isn’t necessary. In fact, sometimes it gets in the way of the experience, because too many have named God something other than Grace).
There’s no way that the Scriptures, rightly understood, present God as an eternal torturer. Yet many Christians seem to believe this, and many are held back from trusting God’s goodness because of this “angry parent in the sky” that we have created. The determined direction of the Scriptures, fully revealed in Jesus, is that God’s justice is not achieved by punishment, but by the divine initiative we call grace, which enables us to bring about internal rightness, harmony, balance, and realignment with what is.
The concept of grace is first called mercy, or hesed in Hebrew: the ever-faithful, covenant-bound, infinite and eternal love of God. All God’s power for renewal and resurrection proceeds from this source, never from punishment. Jesus punishes nobody! I would go so far as to call grace the primary revelation of the entire Bible. If we miss this message, all the rest is distorted and even destructive. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough.
The only prerequisite for receiving the next grace is having received the previous one. As the mystics have often said, God “hides.” Every moment is not obvious as God, as grace; it looks quite simply like another ordinary moment. But our willingness to recognize it as gratuitous—as a free gift, as self-revelatory, as a possibility—allows it to be that way. God’s hiding ceases. God and grace become apparent as a gift in each moment. And those who learn how to receive gifts keep receiving further gifts. “From God’s fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” as John 1:16 puts it.
The “Threat” of Unconditional Love
In The Tears of Things, Father Richard presents the journey of the prophets as one that ends in trusting God’s unconditional love and grace. He uses the prophet Jeremiah as an example:
The first covenant between YHWH and Israel appeared to be bilateral: “If you obey my voice and hold fast to my covenant, you of all the nations shall be my very own” (Exodus 19:5). But the covenant that emerged in Jeremiah’s time was unilateral from YHWH’s side: “Deep within them I will plant my law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people” (Jeremiah 31:33). This dramatic change replaces the earlier order by surpassing it, not destroying it. God forgives undeservedly, even after direct disobedience! This is a love that waits and hopes and desires, working toward surrender and trust. It gifts us a new covenant that we can actually fulfill, just not perfectly or by ourselves. Only God can fill in all the gaps. Henceforth, there is no such thing as deserving or earning anything. All is grace.
Jeremiah 31 is frankly a total changing of the guard—and what is guarded is only the human capacity for intimate reciprocal love! As many scholars have agreed, the notion of a God-initiated, unilaterally fulfilled divine relationship is the highest peak of any spirituality, especially since most of us fear, deep down, that we’re unworthy of it.
It is deeply unfortunate that our interpretation of the old covenant is so enmeshed in our dualistic logic of tit for tat that most Christians remain untouched by Jeremiah’s proclamation of a spiritual revolution. We remain content with retribution and vengeance passing for justice. We would rather stand outside of love than receive a love of which we believe we are not worthy—or have not earned or cannot figure out. We think the old covenant at least tells us where we stand, even if it is outside of paradise. We seem to find certitude more comforting than we do trust or love. Infinite love is literally too much for most of us to comprehend. We think we know how to love—alone. But how do we know and love together with a “divine another” living within us? The answer is by participation rather than performance—riding the divine coattails, as it were.
In his aloneness and anguish, Jeremiah saw what a majority still cannot see twenty-five hundred years later. Our refusal to allow ourselves to be loved undeservedly and unconditionally will probably forever be the anguish of every prophet and the burden of every mystic or saint. Jeremiah’s scroll of writings was cut into pieces and burned by King Jehoiakim (Jeremiah 36). This is how threatening any new covenant of grace, or any new anything, is to a world already set in full and determined motion.
Watching Movies as Spiritual Practice
Updated repost after Oscar season
| MARK LONGHURSTMAR 9 |
One of my favorite T-shirts is from my local community movie theater. It has a picture of a nun in a habit standing behind a director’s camera and a caption above that reads, “Movies are my religion.” I’m on the second version of the same shirt, since I wore the first one out until it frayed. As a longtime Christian and former pastor, I readily affirm that “movies are my religion,” since I experience God every time I slouch slightly into a cinema chair and receive the good news—or terrible or complicated news—of that particular movie of the week. Movies are sacred. We can find God at the movies—just as we stumble upon God in life itself—if we allow ourselves to participate in a larger story. The marvelous combination of film reel, acting craft, musical score, screenwriter dialogue, and story arc, matched with a community theater (best-case scenario), can draw us out of ourselves to experience empathy, awe, grief, and enjoyment. Movies mirror life to us so that we can see life anew.
It’s a spiritual practice for me and I try to go as often as I can. I’m fortunate enough to have the exquisite curation of my local art-house cinema to guide me to films that matter, both then and now, but I also love a trip to the multiplex with its luxury seats, surround sound, and large screen. I’ll watch anything, and this year I did, from the powerful Saoirse Ronan recovery movie “The Outrun,” to director Andrea Arnold’s latest “Bird,” to the awards favorites “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” “A Complete Unknown,” and more. I even watched “The Substance” through gaps between hands covering eyes.
Two weeks ago, I saw Nickel Boys, a poetic, experimental exploration of two boys’ friendship amid a Florida private school’s hidden horror of racism, murder, and abuse. Based on the exquisitely-told story by Colson Whitehead, I experienced this film as a contemplative meditation on suffering, memory, and beauty. It’s absolutely heartbreaking and utterly beautiful. The filmmaking is done in first person, so the viewer sees through the character’s eyes and does not immediately know what the protagonist looks like. I found it destabilizing at first, causing me to wonder what was happening, and then mesmerizing as I settled into the pain and longing of characters Elwood and Turner’s experience. Other than “Dune Part Two,” “Nickel Boys” was my favorite film of the year. (“Anora” is right up there, too. I may have been the only one in the theater laughing out loud at the slapstick comedy turn the movie takes. Sean Baker is a genius!)
Like any longstanding religion, going to the movies has its rituals. If you’re like me, the popcorn and soda fill in for Eucharistic bread and wine, or trail mix and kombucha. If I arrive early, there’s sometimes a prayerful hush during the pre-movie anticipation. Ads for the local dentist or bank might roll while I read over the printout of coming attractions. The lights darken as if calling us to worship, trailers prepare us for the main event, and we plunge into the experience for which we’re all there.
Watching movies is a contemplative practice for me because of how they change me. Movies have always stretched my imagination and consciousness and helped me grow. Watching The Normal Heart rivetted me as I learned about the AIDS crisis that took place when I was in elementary school; Almost Famous electrified me with the energy and confusion of rock and roll; Malcolm X provided a perspective of Black Power that I had never yet heard; The Bourne Identity catapulted me into the desperate thrill of finding out who you are (amid fights and car chases); I’m pretty sure the first Top Gun contained the first sex scene I saw (my friend’s parent told us to cover our eyes, but of course we didn’t); Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master depicted the dynamics of cultic charisma and abuse; and on and on.
I also rest when I watch movies. Some call it escapism, but it’s more than that for me. The video loop of my constant thoughts pauses, and I feel my whole body relax. I’m thinking but not thinking for once, almost as if meditating. I’m experiencing how the characters’ words and decisions, enhanced by the pulsing or peaceful soundtrack, impact me.
I’m convinced, too, that movies can create empathy—for those ready to watch them with an open heart. They invite us to witness a story different from ours, like Daniel Craig’s drunk, debauched, and deeply unhappy William in “Queer.” Craig’s vulnerable and powerhouse performance chronicles the insatiable hedonistic desires of a bohemian literary type, wandering from bar to bar in Mexico City, and eventually into the Ecuadorian rainforest searching for ayahuasca. Craig’s character’s gargantuan sadness provides an invitation for empathy. The hope is that such exposure to stories creates greater inclusion and compassion in our lives. I let go of the ultimacy of my own story, I witness another, and I am more human as a result.
The religion of film can often bridge the gaps between us.
Failing to read the creation chapters in Genesis as temple narratives means that we will probably interpret them with another, less accurate, lens. For example, I thought of Eden as a divine zoo when I was young. It’s where God set up a comfortable habitat to watch his naked human creatures frolic without a care in the world. Like most modern Americans, my understanding of paradise was defined by leisure. In this way, the Garden of Eden seemed more like a hippie commune to me than anything resembling a temple. Viewing Eden as an all-inclusive resort or a human zoo presents God as a puppet master and reduces humanity’s purpose to just divine amusement. 