Friday, November 8, 2024
On The Cosmic We podcast, Richard Rohr explores on how opening ourselves to the flow of God’s unconditional love allows us to pass it on:
We’ve failed to communicate the unique nature of divine love. Divine love is infinite, but the notion of infinity cannot be conceived by the human mind. We can’t help but turn back to adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, one of my favorite Catholic mystics, shares, “There is a science about which [God] knows nothing—addition!” [1] What she was trying to say was that once we dive into infinity, which is God, any notion of adding, subtracting, meriting, losing, being worthy, is all a waste of time. God’s love is infinite, a concept the human mind cannot form. The divine notion of perfection isn’t the exclusion of imperfection, but the inclusion of imperfection. That’s divine love.
Human love thinks we have to exclude imperfection to love a person. But I’m old enough to know there’s no perfect people around. They don’t exist. We’ve all learned to keep hidden our little secret or shadow self. But divine love includes imperfection, which is what makes it divine love. Without the grace of God, we cannot do that. We pay attention to the imperfection: “I saw him do that. I heard her say that.” Then we have identified our reason not to love and we can feel superior and even “damn” the other person. That’s what I mean when I say Jesus became a scapegoat because he knew that the human pattern of scapegoating always makes someone else the problem instead of ourselves. Christianity is not about changing other people—it isn’t! It’s nice if people do change, but that’s God’s work. It’s about changing ourselves, and that never stops. I’m 80 years old and I’m still trying to change myself.
In one of his letters, Paul says, “The yes is always found in Christ,” the yes to reality (see 2 Corinthians 1:20). We are living in love if we can maintain a daily yes. That doesn’t mean we don’t recognize injustice and stand against it, but we don’t let our hearts become hardened and our minds become rigid in its judgments. Love is always a yes. Even though we might see little or big problems, we don’t let it stop the yes. I find in my old age that I’ve eventually had to forgive everything. Everything! Myself, my parents, the Catholic Church, the United States of America.
Once we stop expecting, needing, or demanding that something or someone be perfect, we’re much happier. We’re doing ourselves and the world a favor. It’s not easy to do apart from the life and grace of God flowing through us. That’s why, for me, the notion of God as Trinity, the flow of relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is so important. Without that daily flow, we get trapped in the negatives. We all do. We all will, unless we tap into the love of God flowing through us.
______________________________________________________________
Five For Friday John Chaffee
1.
“Where your fear is, there your task is.“
– Carl Jung, Swiss Psychologist
As an Enneagram 5, I am a head-oriented person in my decision-making. That means I am prone to overthinking issues ad nauseum. Unfortunately, along with that type comes the propensity to allow fear to dictate my actions more than inform. Fear is a state of being that all of us can fall back into, but coupled with a scarcity mindset, I confess that fear often gets the better of me.
So, this insight from Jung is helpful. It reminds me that my fears are my to-do list. They are the unique work that I alone have to do in the world. We all love stories, shows, and movies of people confronting their fears, yet we shrink from confronting our fears for ourselves. Indeed, this is an evolutionary advantage, as it helps us avoid facing our fears because they might kill us.
But that does not mean that our fears now will kill us, even if we believe they might.
2.
“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. Everything else is commentary.“
– Hillel the Elder, Rabbi from 10 BCE
Hillel and Shammai were famous rabbis in their day, often falling on opposite sides of debates. As I understand it, they were masters of Halakah and Haggadah, straightforward, legal, and playful bantering.
Here, Hillel essentially tells the Golden Rule. It is fascinating how it then says every other line of interpretation adds to what is already said in the Golden Rule. Somewhat playfully, he affirms the Torah while holding most of it “as commentary.”
3.
“The name of God is the name of the chance for something absolutely new, for a new birth, for the expectation, the hope, the hope against hope (Rom. 4:18) in a transforming future.“
– Jack Caputo, American Theologian and Philosopher
What I appreciate about Jack Caputo is that he tuned me in on what we mean when we say “God.” Many people’s model for God is a parent-like figure, some cosmic ghost, or a phantom aggregate of our hopes and dreams. I don’t want to get into the weeds about that right now, though. Jack is saying here that latent within the word “God” is also the theme of “possibility.”
In the beginning of the Bible, there is a New Creation. Toward the end of the Bible, there is also a New Creation.
Spirit is not interested in the same old but in New Creation.
Even right now, when I feel I am cornered with several serious questions, it feels like my back is against the wall… I need to remember to have faith in “Possibility.”
4.
“There can be no Christian speech about God which does not represent the interest of the victims in our society.“
– James Cone, American Theologian
How often do we forget that the Greek word Σοτερ (Soter) does not only mean “Savior” but also “Liberator.”
Any definition of Christian spirituality that does not emphasize liberation is not worth its salt. How different would our world look if we preached, “Jesus, the Liberator of the World”?
5.
“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow.“
– Vincent van Gogh, Dutch Painter
Break out. Defy the norms. Rise above them. Improve them where they need improvement. Do not settle your personhood for the sake of fitting in.
This past week, a mentor told me something that has stuck with me. He said (paraphrased), “Wow. So you are like the son of a system, and you rose up within it, learned to play by its rules, and even worked toward a role serving and protecting that system… Until you couldn’t anymore. And from there, you have been charting your own path beyond that system but with the tools that the system gave you. That is inspiring.”
It is true. I worked in the church world, went to three schools for it, got three degrees in the field (I majored in Biblical Studies, got a Master of Divinity, and a Master of Theology), and tried to be ordained in two different denominations. However, I didn’t check all the right boxes and pushed back in places when I “shouldn’t have.” I never wanted to fall into unhealthy dynamics. I refused to enter the role of a pastor in a way that I felt was unsustainable or inauthentic to my own understanding of the faith. For years, I felt as though I was expected to be a pastor in a way that was more telling people what to do and what they needed to know rather than allowing them each to have their own path and offer up wisdom from the Christian tradition as it felt appropriate.
For these reasons, I have enjoyed being a spiritual director for the past season or two. It allows me to do faith-shepherding in a way that feels far more organic, less structured, and more wild. It feels much closer to my understanding of a particular itinerant rabbi who wandered around telling parables and being a healing presence wherever he found himself.
My path is unorthodox/unconventional, but it feels right according to my own temperament and wiring.
