RICHARD ROHR -

oh i know me too well that was unduly kind i hope i can halfway live up to it well i'm very excited to share with you this this is the first time i'm presenting this material i just finished my book on the trinity two weeks ago and uh the publishers told me i may not give copies of it out yet i don't think it's you know that big a deal but he thinks it is and uh but i am gonna uh do something that i don't like to do very much which i'm gonna largely read you the preface because it sums up all the themes that it takes 200 pages then to unpackage but let me before i read the preface let me say this uh i really do believe without exaggerating that the next century either christianity rediscovers the god that it claims it believed in and it wanted to believe in it but consciousness just wasn't ready for it but i i think without the rediscovery of the trinity there is no reform of christianity from the bottom up because the whole thing of incarnation salvation the meaning of creation just all gets distorted and so uh you know here let me give this as an opening line in the beginning was the relationship it all starts with a cosmic relationship now i want you to to compare that to the idea that the mind naturally gravitated for toward in most of history which was a pyramidal view of reality which made god a monarch sitting at the top of a pyramid and i can probably say unless you are a mystic and i'm sure a lot of you are but uh that's probably the image of god you're stuck with and you can't get very far with that because basically it idealizes power when in fact the image of trinity is god as ultimate vulnerability the exact opposite of so every notion of god that you you probably grew up with doesn't work anymore but i'll tell you what does work with new excited efficacy is the understanding of jesus as the image of this kind of vulnerable god it's it's it rearranges everything it's the change that almost organically lets everything else fall into place and along with that of course our understanding of god is requiring violence for the redemption of the world therefore legitimating unnecessarily violent act which we call the crucifixion that doesn't fit anymore but i don't have to dismantle any of those things i hope and pray that i can say this with some degree of clarity it just happens it's just oh my god and you'll feel it rearrange let me point out to begin with also that the the genesis passage of the creation which you've all read or heard read more than once uh it uses very intriguingly the plural it says let us create in our image go back check out your bible all right it says let us create in our image now before i even go any further if any of you i know you young ones are into googling uh just i want you to google a picture of the atom and i can tell you what it will be you've seen it a thousand times it's three particles cycling around one another as the basic building block of the entire creation that we're a part of them in god indeed god has created this world in god's own image but it's not an image of an old white man with a white beard sitting on a throne throwing down thunderbolts okay we're largely stuck and this is going to be shocking to some of you with a rather pagan notion of god the uh not that there's anything wrong with pagans but you know it's no accident that the latin word deus is does that sound like zeus well of course because that's what it came from the greek notion of the the god throwing thunderbolts down those of you with the spanish background dios it's the same thing huh we never really reformed our notion of god we fit the gospel message as unfittable as it is inside of what was easy for the monarchical mind to understand it fit into our physics it felt fit into our politics it fit a fit into our understanding of how reality works and it was all top down carl ronner the great german jesuit who is such a expert at our second vatican council in the early 60s he said shortly before that that we could drop the doctrine of the blessed trinity tomorrow and 98 of christian practice would remain untouched and unchanged that tells you right there how little effect it's had none of you if you're orthodox christians of any denomination would think of denying the doctrine of the trinity but it has almost no pastoral practical political effect on the way we've shaped history but i think thanks to science thanks to the expanding universe that we now know is the truth and we're the first generation that ever knew that suddenly we have the mind to understand it it's like niels bohr said the world is not only stranger than we think but stranger then we can think and i'm going to say the same of course about the doctrine of the trinity god is not only stranger than we think but stranger than we can think now with that let me read in great part my preface i'm sure i'll go off on tangents but let me try it i'm going to begin i got to show my orthodoxy right at the beginning or all the evangelicals would just close me down catholics don't read the bible that much i'm sorry to say it's really to our shame to our shame yeah but i give three quotes from john's gospel those who were here this morning heard me talk about the cosmic christ first one john 3 17. that one you're probably familiar with god did not send his son into the world to condemn it but so that through him the world might be saved that's what some like you know bonaventure have called the alpha or the book of revelation the alpha point of history then in john 5 17 he says my father goes on working and so do i my father goes on working and so do i then john 14 the holy spirit will teach you everything and remind you of everything now i think we have to be honest in a bit that the father and the holy spirit have in great part and this will make more sense i hope by the end of this hour uh having great part been the lost people we overplayed the jesus card we pulled jesus out of the blessed trinity and in fact the whole notion of cosmic salvation didn't make any sense anymore as i said this morning it all became a notion of individual private salvation god was not saving history god was not saving the cosmos this was all not moving towards some omega point which tayard prefers that word but both the alpha and the omega are already in the book of revelation at the very end of the bible and so we're prepared the little hints are there but in great part we simply weren't ready to un-package it so before you try to figure out why i'm beginning with these three separate citations about a very active and involved god let me try to explain and all i can ever do is try in his book i bet you scientific minds have read this book it's a classic thomas kuhn's book the structure of scientific revolutions he popularized and really brought into common parlance the phrase paradigm shift most of us use it with some you know frequency he made clear that even in the scientific field and in the ordinary human mind a paradigm shift is tantamount to what religion called major conversion and it is equally rare he said this is a scientist it's equally rare in both science and religion ken wilbur says that on a good day on a good day a healthy person is at most willing to call into question 5 of how they already think that's on a good day most days the ego is so entrenched all that gets in is what you already think that's why without contemplation people just don't really grow because they're so addicted to their way of thinking that's the universal addiction your way of thinking is what you're addicted to and i am too and without a practice of contemplation i would wouldn't know have known how to loosen my grip on my way of thinking any genuine transformation of world view thomas kuhn said ask such a major switch from the track we are familiar with that often those who hold the old paradigm must actually die that's how resistant we are to change the ego hates change more than anything else those addicted to the old paradigm must actually die before a new worldview can gain traction and wide acceptance even more shocking is his conclusion some say paradigm paradigm i don't know that it matters that a paradigm shift has little to do with logic it has little to do with evidence or everything but much more to do with cataclysmic insight and breakthrough it's what we mean by conversion where the old game falls apart the way you've explained the world in terms of the capitalistic worldview is which is how we've read the gospel just ceases to make sense once you've experienced radical grace you basically stop counting you stop counting counting doesn't mean anything once you've ex you swim in the waterfall of abundance or under the waterfall that's major conversion and i do think a lot of our christian people not this is not said offensively have never experienced radical conversion they're still trying to pull the gospel inside of their capitalistic worldview and it becomes a reward punishment system good guys win nice girls go to heaven bad girls go to hell and for some reason that makes sense to people they like it even though no one would call that good news not amazing hardly anybody wins meister eckhart if you're talking about a non-dual mystic i mean uh he he called this phenomenon boiling boiling when the peridot boils over and doesn't work anymore so at the risk of sounding like i am making a serious overstatement i think the common christian image of god despite jesus i guess i already said this is still largely pagan but history has so long operated with a static and imperial image of god as a supreme monarch how many of you don't say the man upstairs i mean which just shows why we're still we haven't experienced any radical conversion who is mostly living in splendid isolation from what he created and it is the he by the way almost always and he's largely seen as a critical spectator be honest a critical spectator from afar that we desperately need a paradigm shift in our christian consciousness to begin to relate to god as what we have always called trinity but barely understood now let's also admit those you good evangelicals who do read the bible you have probably noticed the word trinity is not in the whole bible it's not a biblical word it took us three centuries of reflecting upon the language of jesus who talked like a wild mystic non-dually and he talked about himself as god or the son of god but then spoke to god as if god was over there and that one he called father he actually used a little child's term abba a very dear term so he clearly trusted and loved this god that he addressed as himself and yet other than himself and then frequently especially in john's gospel but in the synoptic gospels too he speaks of this spirit that is also the same as the father the same as himself and yet different any of you with a philosophical background would would recognize this as the what they call the first philosophical problem the first philosophical problem is the problem of the one and the many how can there be unity in all of creation and yet so much diversity look at all these thousand different faces in this one room how can we be one and yet be so different well that philosophical problem was resolved at the very beginning or should have been resolved this slowly dawning christian revelation was supposed to have radically changed our image of god but for the most part it didn't nobody's fault i just think consciousness wasn't ready for it the old wiring was just too much in place it has taken us 2 000 years to try to make the shift but now history mental health and i hope i'll have time to talk about that so many negative and angry christians do we need much proof of that today i mean i think we mass produce negative angry people because their image of god is is punitive they don't really love god they're afraid of god they're not caught up in a cosmic sweep of of grace and freedom instead of trinity being an abstruse conundrum i remember the irish nuns who taught me sister ephron in the third grade brought in the little shamrock and held it up god bless her and she says you know this is what god is like we said yes sister and she said don't think about it of course she was right and she was because it lit it is unthinkable it's unthinkable now remember mystery is not something you can't understand get rid of that mystery is something that's endlessly understandable another layer another layer another layer another layer another layer that's where the whole journey with god is where it's always new levels of intimacy new levels of safety new levels of freedom so uh it took him three centuries now i'm gonna run away from my preface i mentioned this morning that they took words from greek theater you artistic types will just love this you know that they took two words from the world of greek theater the cappadocian fathers that was eastern turkey and the language of the educated was greek in the fourth century these three fathers of the church the two gregories and basil formulated finally what they thought was the nature of god revealed in the bible and they called it trinity and now we take it as our common conversation but they said this isn't me making this up check it out go to your theology books if you want to the word they chose from greek theater was perichoresis if that sounds like choreography it's no surprise means to dance around can you believe it that's the best word they could come up with for the nature of god god is a circle dance all right so that's going to be the title of my book the divine dance but this is nothing but trendy california thinking this is this is third century cappadocia eastern turkey fathers of the church then they took another word and we could talk about this half an hour but i won't take half an hour the word you and i use to describe an individual human being in the english language is person you're a person i'm a person right do you know what that word originally meant right persona in greek was the stage mask that the actors used before they had microphones like i'm enjoying right now and they operated as megaphones para sonare in greek and in latin means to sound through pere sonare to sound through so this is so exciting i it makes because it shows how the meaning of a word can turn exactly around they used the word to say that the father was the father but in fact he was a sounding through of jesus or the christ and the holy spirit the holy spirit was the holy spirit but in fact his identity was totally given and totally surrendered total self-emptying and total infilling constantly eternally which means god is infinite love that's all god can do the flow is only and forever in one direction so any language of god being pissed off i know we all grew up with that it was usually uh called wrath in the have you ever listened to evangelical songs that you love that word wrath you know jesus came to defend us from the wrath of god oh god how do you undo that and especially if you had a wrathful father to begin with you know you're just so ready to believe the wrath of god i did a hermitage in arizona i used to always do lent alone and this was about 2003 i think it was and i had kept a journal during the first 35 days or so and uh the last days i was just going to re-read the journal from beginning to end and see how god was teaching me during these days of solitude and silence and i went up to the center house which was some dis distance from the hermitage and they're on a coffee table with setting katherine la cugna's classic book god for us she was a teacher at notre dame this was her last great work before she died way too young and i just knew i wasn't supposed to reread my journal but i was supposed to read this book it was a heavy tome if you don't have a background in theology i wouldn't recommend you'll probably bore you to death but i had enough background that i could stay with it and even be intrigued by it and i i just realized by as as i got almost halfway through the book she is describing in this history of the doctrine of the trinity the kind of god i've been living with for the last 35 days where it was an experiential knowledge of flow and freedom and grace and indwelling and i was caught up in the flow it wasn't god wasn't out there anymore god was in here and i was a part of the divine flow and she gets to the end of this huge tone and in the last three pages she says if this is any truth what the entire christian tradition has said about the nature of god then any notion of wrath in god any notion of god being pissed off uh is theologically absurd and unthinkable and impossible the water wheel as bonaventure called it only flows in one direction each person sounding through pouring out himself a hundred percent to the other and she receiving a hundred percent and what she has received she outpours do you understand it's only a mystery of infinite outpouring do you see how this changes your very definition of god right from a monarch to a vulnerable presence and then what the early mystic said is the whole meaning of creation the whole meaning of salvation is the one who was to become visible which we call the son or jesus the christ who is to become incarnate and enter into creation as one of us his whole job and john's gospel says this in a dozen ways was to come and take us back with him so we were as shocking as this sounds creation is the fourth person of the blessed trinity take an end to this eternal flow those of you familiar with what is my favorite piece of religious art andre rublef's trinity you've seen the three people sitting around the the round table i'm sure it's available at any good christian bookstore or art store what i bet you never noticed and we're going to put this out along with the book is on the front of that icon i'm sorry i don't have a copy here tonight if i should have thought of that beforehand there's a little seemingly hole or something on the front of the table and recent studies uh chipped off what had happened there and they said this is glue well now we're almost certain that the three people are sitting around the table and what was on the front of the table was you got it a mirror so the observer this totally breaks all the rules of iconography there's no example of ever gluing a mirror on the front of an icon but so the observer looking at this mystery of three living and outpouring love and infinite love one toward another we who allow ourselves to be seduced into that mystery become the fourth person sitting at the table is that good or not and that rearranges your entire notion of the meaning of incarnation the meaning of salvation i have come to take you with me back into the bosom of the father so uh i think trinity is is the only way we're going to get out of this foundational problem that we're experiencing in western christianity instead of god being an eternal threatener which let's be honest that's what most of us were raised with the eternal threatener making a list checking it twice going to find out who's naughty or nice it's largely a glorified santa claus it has nothing to do with trinity whatsoever whatsoever if there's someone watching and making a list who of you feels safe in this universe no it's an unsafe universe when the one who started the whole ball rolling is out after us making a list checking it twice we in fact have god as the ultimate participant in everything in everything no exceptions both the good and the painful and that's the image of the crucified who came to reveal god's solidarity with human pain which is what paul calls the folly of the cross so let me try to describe i'm back to the preface now the two world views in stark contrast instead of an omnipotent monarch let's try what god is trinity demonstrates as the actual and wondrous shape of the divine reality which then replicates itself in us let us create in our image and in all the array of creation genesis 2 1. and now we know the whole biological and physical universe is all a matter of what we now call ecology what the mystic simply called flow that there was one flow if any of you have ever been to the iona or the celtic art of ireland and scotland it's sort of shocking if you grew up roman catholic and we used to the bloody body of jesus hanging there on the cross but those old celts who weren't a part of the roman empire are not so controlled by the establishment all of their pictures and go see them for yourself they're all over ireland and scotland are simply curly cues that have no beginning and no end where did they get that where did they get the courage to say that and and mixed in with the curlicues and the and the spirals are invariably animals trying to reveal that the whole of creation is a part of this mystery of transformation not just human beings which is what we whittled it down to and whittled it into and after a while it wasn't very exciting because once we startled started the whittling process i mean you know there wasn't room for hardly anybody except people just like us and every denomination did the same dang thing over and over and over again huh god likes us but not you folks over there how could this religion ever hope to be or how could jesus ever hope to be the savior of the world when we can't even build bridges you know i i did what i did here this morning at trinity wall street last december and some right-wing catholics were out there filming me you know and they sent it to all the bishops or some of the bishops look at richard up there on the altar with episcopalians you know so i said to the bishop i said you know if jesus could eat with prostitutes and drunkards and taxpayers the least i could do is stretch myself to eat with episcopalians you know i mean i got to make it silly to see how how tiny this table has become there's nothing cosmic about it jesus is not the alpha in the omega of history we made him the head of a small tribal religion this was no message about the nature of reality as i talked about this morning huh that the christ is the stand-in for everything he's he's he's the the cosmic moment that pulls creation together and reveals the eternal pattern so instead of watching life happen from afar and judging it how about god being inherent in life itself what else could it be how about god being the life force of everything what else could it be what else could god be once you say it it's just so obvious instead of being an object like any other object now you know all the mystics said this you cannot know god as an object as soon as you try to make an object out of god john of the cross says god is unknowable god refuses to be known and can only be loved now we use that term today a lot for good reason the objectification of people the objectification of women and women's bodies so we're aware that this is what boover would call the i it relationship when you objectify another person as if they're merely an object for your consumption what we have and i'm going to coin this word if i can with the book what we have is complete subjectification just the opposite of objectification the three grant the i thou relationship one to another grant dignity grant freedom grant unconditional love grant themselves they subjectify in the good sense each and every one of them and it's a mystery that never stops as they each defer in perfect and total love this is of course mirrored in the human family and really every act of love so how about god being the life energy between each and every object i'm a dog lover as i bet a lot of you are you know my little dog venus she's 13 and a half now a black lab she's turning pretty white but she can hold my gaze much longer than i can hold hers she just looks at me with complete adoration and she just keep looking as long as i look just like a mother at the breast looking at her baby huh when the oxytocin is released when i see the the nuzzling of horses when i see all mammalian mothers the the extent they will go to to protect their children and to love their children that's the life force of the universe that's the love that connects the sun and the moon and the stars as dante would put it that's god now don't please don't think this is heretical it's what every mystic ever said and we're perfectly prepared now just to state my orthodox credentials to to understand the mystics of all religions and all denominations because what we have in the admittedly limited metaphors of father son and holy spirit i admit they're just metaphors we can find other words that break open the heart space much better for maybe some of you but what we have in what the one we call father you don't have to use that term if it bothers you find a better one that open the only thing is it's got to open your heart don't just get angry about using the word father you find a better one that opens your heart and then you've been drawn into the mystery but we have in the term father what we would call the trans-personal nature of the divine when you speak of god as consciousness you speak of god as the air as everything as as that which fills all things as love itself that's a transpersonal notion when you speak of god as personal which is probably how most of us in this room enter the arena that's the second person jesus and that is where most of us need the gaze of love from one human being to believe it so that is when john's gospel says i am the way i am the gate right on that's for nine out of ten people that's the truth i think and that's something buddhism doesn't enjoy to the degree we enjoy it the personal loving dear humble face of jesus but we also have the impersonal and that we call the holy spirit so look at all the metaphors for holy spirit descending dove blowing wind flowing living water uh flames from heaven tongues of fire in every case it's an impersonal metaphor or image that leads us into the world of of physical things and that they're all connected that they're all emblazoned the whole world is the burning bush now it's all flowing with the one same universal life so now what i just told you if you're on a prayer journey and i hope you all are all the available metaphors for god even as you're walking home tonight and you look at your beautiful california flowers every one of them the trans-personal the personal and the impersonal can all now open your heart and you can talk to sufi mystics jewish mystics buddhist mystics although they wouldn't usually use that term uh and they'll know what you're talking about now we've got a universal language so the very doctrine that we thought unitarians especially thought would would separate us from the other world religions actually becomes the doorway into intense dialogue with all the religions of the world it was us overplaying the jesus card pulling jesus out of the trinity stuffing him up on a throne and making him into the new god the father uh that's what destroyed the paradigm that's what made it impossible to see god as the divine flow as love itself which john's letters clearly say and so love consciousness or if you were here for the gospel reading this morning forgiveness or compassion they're all the same thing they're all the same thing and jesus identifies it with his breath he breathes on them beginning the flow that begun with the creation of adam and says you know uh receive the forgiveness of god receive the the re-creation of the world with the divine breath so this allows god to be with us in all of life i i don't know how you can keep from being a mystic once you understand the trinitarian flow instead of god standing on the sidelines always critiquing always critiquing which things belong and which things don't who's in and who's out and didn't we waste most of our early training deciding who was in the church and who wasn't and what the membership requirements were it was all about requirements the very thing that paul said would get us nowhere this allows god to be always involved instead of what i would call the in and out god that leaves most of humanity orphaned as john's gospel says john 14 18 i will not leave you orphaned but i i think the vast majority of christians still and i've been a priest 46 years now i think i've learned earned the right to say this for the vast majority of catholics i mainly pick on catholics because that's my group all right but uh god is still out there out there and they got to placate him and please him and kiss up to him because he hasn't kissed up to me you understand it's not a flow in which i have been drawn into and by the way that word catholic you know that emerged in the second century already it was the name the early christians took to themselves that didn't come from on high that came from the bottom up we are the catholic people and you've all been told what the world word means universal but what did we do we made it into roman catholic i hope do you hear the contradiction in terms there all right and forgive me i have to say the same about anglo catholic right contradiction in terms all right if you're too anglo you're not catholic right and if you're too roman you're not catholic and what we're ready for is the catholic church the church that really has a universal cosmic message frankly and i won't have time to get into the uh atonement theory tonight unless you force me but uh you know if we discover which is more than likely you know we're only one galaxy in 600 billion galaxies or something when we discover life on another planet tomorrow our whole story of salvation is going to fall apart because it all depends upon adam sinning on this earth and jesus coming to this earth but if the christ from all eternity is the real image of the invisible god and creation itself is the christ and the christ is coterminous with creation as the prologue to john's gospel says as colossians says as ephesians says we've now got a cosmic religion a religion that doesn't need to limit itself to planet earth and maybe we are the only planet i don't know if i don't know i'm not smart if this is the only place that god has created life on so theologically this of course repositions grace as inherent to creation planted inside we call it growth we call it life now we call it evolution if we had understood god as trinity christians should have been in the front line of believing in evolution it's obvious it's obvious it's written everywhere huh that god has planted this tendency toward multiplication diversity growth nothing dies as i said this morning resurrection is not just an anomalous thing that happens in the body of jesus it's the nature of the universe you know and what you called it liquid and and solid and gas yeah yeah same thing it just keeps changing forms in the catholic uh funeral mass we proclaim it we say life is not ended it merely changes huh life is not ended it merely changes but we didn't see the christ as the stand-in for reality as the namesake for everybody that included all of us we always saw his divinity and humanity as something that was unique to him no he came to take us with him and to say follow me what i have done you also must do whereas paul puts it so beautifully he's the pledge the guarantee the promise he's the head of the great parade the great procession the oldest of many brothers and sisters the early fathers of the church were very invested in an understanding of salvation that they called i bet you've never heard this word most of you adoptionism it wasn't this justification by faith thing that frankly luther way overstated in my humble opinion and for 500 years we've been deciding who's justified and who isn't the early church didn't use that word they used we are all adopted we are taken into the flow into the table yes we admit that jesus is the eldest of many brothers and sisters as it were they're all metaphors but you are the adopted sons and daughters of god bearing the same human divine identity as he did but we're just the ones who have a harder time believing it we just can't trust it that we could be sons of god that we could be daughters of the lord so uh along with adoption theology was inheritance theology you'll see that word a lot in paul 2. galatians 4 ephesians 1 romans 8. he loves to use the word that you're going to get the same inheritance that jesus got but we made him an exclusive savior i hope you're not getting tired i know this heavy stuff he's an inclusive savior what was true of him is true of everybody you see we did history no favor we gave history no hope when we made him an exclusive savior instead of recognizing what he was true of him was true of all of us and he came to take us with him so this god is the one that we have named trinity the flow that flows through everything without exception since the moment of the big bang then you may no longer divide the world into the sacred and the secular it's one world it's all sacred it's all holy and you're a part of it you don't have to gain your divine identity you don't have to earn it you've got it the water poured over your head didn't make you into a christian i know we talked that way and i baptized many people i know that's the language but all you're doing is awakening washing away the illusion that you're not a son of god that you're not a daughter of the lord it's not making it happen it's awakening what has already happened and what has always been true so now i'll get poetic and i will draw it together with this every vital impulse every force toward the future every creative momentum every loving surge every dash toward beauty every running toward truth every ecstasy before simple goodness every leap of elon vetol as the french call it every bit of ambition for humanity in the earth every research scholar who cares about the future every human being who cares about holiness and wholeness is the eternally flowing life of the trinitarian god the bigger problem is not the problem of evil it's the problem of good how are there so many good beautiful people on this earth who don't give up who keep caring who keep trying many of you are right in this room that's the unstoppable life of god whether we know it or not it's happening in you now what a christian is supposed to be is someone who knows it that's all the others have it too they all have it even those hindus have it darn it and those pagans in africa they have it darn it no it's not just we have it it's universally true since the very beginning you are the people who have awakened to it at least we were supposed to be this trinitarian god is not an invitation that you can agree with or disagree with it's a description of what is already happening in god and in everything created in god's image and likeness this trinitarian god allows you impels you to easily live with god everywhere all the time in a budding plant in the smile of a gardener in a teenage boy's excitement over his new girlfriend in the tireless determination of a research scientist in the mechanic taking pride in his hidden work under the hood in the downward flow of every mountain stream and even in the suffering and death of those very things because death is a part of this life now that's the rub that's what it took jesus to come visibly into the world to reveal that death is a part of life the buddhists call it the principle of impermanence everything everything everything this beautiful church will not last forever right i will not last forever you will not your marriage will not your children will not america will not sorry the republican party will not i'm not going to comment richard zip but shut up how could it be anything else and such a big definition of life that it even includes death it even includes the opposite that's infinite life when you can include death so that none of your labors will be wasted as first corinthians 15 says in the chirp of every bird excited about a new morning in the hard beauty of every sandstone cliff which we have so many of in new mexico and the clerk's gratuitous smile at the department store she didn't have to smile at you why did she she can't get anything from you especially huh in the deep satisfaction of every job well done in the passion of wild sex in the passivity of the hospital bed the world life death the present and the future all belong to you and you belong to christ and christ belongs to god first corinthians 3 22 23 it is one trinitarian flow since the beginning of creation unless god seers can begin to make this paradigm shift there's no way that god is going to be able to save the world no way no way it's all about counting and measuring and weighing who's in and who's out courtroom scenes and penal systems and substitutionary atonement theories do not inspire or change the world it is not about being ostensibly religious we've tried this for centuries but it is about being quietly joy-filled and cooperative romans 8 28 quietly trusting the flow you're in it right now you can enjoy it right now you don't have to get there you can't get there because you're already there you can only be there you can't get there can you feel the difference you can't get there you can only be there that's contemplation yes god is saving the world god goes on working just as we do even though we mostly fail to notice fail to enjoy fail to pass on and fail to live our one and only life our one time to be consciously a part of the flow we become then like the small god we have worshiped and thus spectators at our own funeral so i end with two more scripture quotes how about this you can check them out if you think i'm making these up colossians 3 11 there is only christ he is everything and he is in everything colossians 3 11 go home read it all right i didn't make that up right there's only christ or is augustine put it three centuries later in the end there will only be christ loving himself in the end there will only all of this one ecological mystery of life and death will finally say yes to what it has been a part of and then when he is fully revealed this is colossians 3 4 when he is fully revealed and he is your life you too will be revealed in all your glory with him thank you thank you [Applause] i didn't know so let's stand and stretch for a moment and while we stretch let me invite the rector of all saints church ed bacon to come up to the stage oh it's it's so exciting to get so excited you don't have a picture in the sacristy or anything thank you very much please have a seat i want to uh say two or three things uh and then we'll open for questions uh first i want to add to john depp house's welcome my welcome on behalf of all the people at allstate's church we're really thrilled you're here it is absolutely fantastic that so many people are in this room and we'll get to that point because i want to ask richard about that in just a second but first we want to give you an opportunity to put into sacramental form your joy and gratitude for being here tonight so we're going to pass the baskets they're called joy baskets you'll note that we did not charge uh any registration of or participation for this event um but you all can go ahead and start passing well no don't start yet and we know that all of us are so grateful for what richard does and we are grateful that the people of all saints church have wanted to attract richard being here but also all of the work that's coming out of the center for contemplation and action we'll talk about that in just a second um but we simply wanted to give you an opportunity to give so please do so we're going to pass the baskets and while they're coming around we also want to say that if you would like to be a part of what we call an experiment in christianity at all saints church the movement of all saints we try to be much more movement than institution here we would love for you to pledge um we have pledge cards and the pew racks in front of you they are blue at the top and if any of you would like to you don't have to be a member in the institutional conventional way we've got pledging members who live in all sorts of places all over the world and we'd love to have that and also i'm going to say just a word in just a minute about my retirement we have established an a bacon ed bacon transformational speakers fund so that we can continue to attract richard here eliadelio other people who are staying on the transformational edge of giving us a new narrative which is actually an ancient narrative of healthy religion and healthy christianity so jim ledoux is around and he would be glad to please stand jim he's our director of giving and he would be glad to talk with you about the transformational speakers fund so now enough of that richard i want to spend a minute in gratitude with you so um and all of you will please forgive me if i get emotional but this is my last opportunity and that i'm retiring on may 1. my last opportunity to thank richard in this space although he and i are tethered forever and i'm going to be in albuquerque and he's going to be wherever i am and we're going to continue our relationship and i'm going to continue to learn from him but during the peace this morning at the 9 o'clock service two people came up to me and just spontaneously said i want to thank you for introducing richard rohr into my life richard rohr has changed my life one was a man one was a woman and um [Music] richard you have allowed us to be the only church with a license to show the conspire tapes we have shown them very very faithfully and people have come and learned people have gone really really deep with you and you have brought so much oxygen into our religious and spiritual life and i simply wanted on behalf of this institution the people gathered here this faith community and myself to thank you very much [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you thank you you're very kind very kind so having said that and having experienced that and also having experienced two full houses at the nine and eleven o'clock liturgies this morning and and i apologize to everybody we had to turn away uh because of the fire uh hazard of people coming in and wanting to be with richard in the forum and this place filling up like this tonight i would like this is not unusual for you but i would like for you to reflect on what's going on there's something there there is something big and deep at stake in really busy people coming here tonight and coming here this morning and wanting to soak up the stuff and and and we're not into egocentrism here i mean we really are not building you up you are a dog a doggone delivery system for something that is life-giving so i know it's not you i know you're pointing beyond yourself but could you just kind of talk a little bit about what's going on in our hearts it still astounds me too uh we're certainly experiencing a different a completely qualitatively different kind of reformation where we recognize so many if not all of the fights we've gotten involved in for 500 years have been historical accidents and we all were victims of these historical accidents instead of the essential this is the essential no church ever divided over this well maybe the unitarians did rejected the trinity but they didn't need to reject it because we didn't believe in it either really so it's a positive reformation but look how you know gandhi and martin luther king couldn't emerge till the 20th century i know you're familiar with spiral dynamics i just think consciousness or carl jasper's called it the second axial age there's a lot of evidence we're in the second axial age where where thought is coming together in a non-reactionary non-angry non-violent way and if you look at almost every church reformation it was angry and the crowds like yourselves that come we're not angry they're just excited about i want to live this full life i and i don't need to reject the previous christian group and so if anything i've said tonight created in you a spirit of rebellion or anger then i failed that that's not going to get us anywhere that's not the franciscan way of reform and uh trinity does that just as good as anything i know because you get out of the world of counting and you move inside the infinite flow where all measuring and weighing [Music] is sort of useless of of who's right and who's wrong because our best doctrinal formulations are still children playing in a sandbox do you understand it's they're still just words just words and so i think trinitarian theology in particular invites you into an experience into an inner life into a prayer life that is beyond words and so you let words fall into their place i think one of the great gifts of california if i can say this here is is the high amount of artists and musicians that you've created are you bring forth in this part of the world and it's been my experience that very often artistic creative types understand flow better than we theological types do many you know they they wouldn't put it in theological language but they know when they're in the flow and and i know that too when it's just coming and i don't know where it's coming from you know but but i know and thank you for saying it that i'm not the source of this you all have the capacity to know that that you're being used and that's when trinity becomes real for you when you know you're being used you're being guided you have not been left orphaned the only people who believe in angels are the only people who experience angels are those who believe in angels the only people who experience the flow of god are those who trust that it could be true and there's a lot of people almost here's the irony almost by the failure and i don't mean this in a negative way the failure of organized religion to transform the world at even a superficial level if this election isn't proven it what is it going to take to reveal the bankruptcy of american christianity huh that it it's just a veneer it's just varnish on top of an entire culture built on fear and war and power and money you know and and once you see that you you can't worship at that altar anymore because you know it's not in the flow in fact it's resisting the flow not that it can't be used for the flow i'm not saying there's anything inherently evil everything can be used but when you make an idol out of everything that's when you don't use it for the flow when you worship at the altar of whatever that is so helpful because i think you're talking about transformation oh yeah uh personal transformation but communal cultural cultural yes yeah all of that so that opens my i mean that speaks to my heart space right there and you talked about the difference between transformational and transactional theology yeah and you mentioned just those words have a different energy it's amazing how those two words have helped a lot of people to recognize that most of us were raised with a transactional description of the world jesus had to go through a transaction with his father to save us if you were raised catholic like i was let's be honest our understanding of baptism confirmation first communion was all transactional just a check on your resume there was no necessary change of consciousness it was not for me now it was transformational for five percent i think that's safe to say we still all of our churches produce saints and mystics and profits but our failure rate was pretty high you know and as i said the high amount of racist people materialistic people militaristic people who still go to church on sunday blows your mind has all of this preaching achieved so little result in terms of really pulling you out of the idolatrous system and for the most part and we can prove this statistically not only are we pretty much like everybody else but often even worse because we think we have god in our side so we can be racist for jesus you know we could be materialistic for the gospel or whatever it might our militaristic for the protection of the christian world so that's what's this this tremendous humiliation i think has forced a transformational understanding of christianity upon us so my last beat and then we're going to open up the mics and as i understand you're going to go over and sign books so um [Music] i'm struck by so many times when i'm reading you and some of your co-conspirators that transformation and healing are mentioned together oh very good and and it and at our place here we experience that so many of us come and weep so much during church because at the same time i think there's this movement toward transformation there's this deep thing about wholeness and healing going on can you speak to a little bit well you know the way i've often said it is you read the four gospels jesus does two things teach and heal teach and heal teach and heal teach and heal and the healing is very often illustrating the teaching that he just did and when i was growing up healing wasn't even in our catholic vocabulary we took the sacrament of the anointing of the sick and you catholics know what we called it extreme unction all right the final lube job before you before to talk about transactional that's just true i don't mean to be cruel but it's just there was no healing for life in this world read most of western literature when the priest enters the room it's the end of the line all right this is not someone announcing good news for healing for this world it wasn't about this world it was all an evacuation plan to get us into the next world yeah and this just won't work anymore especially as we see us on the verge of global disaster with what we're doing to the planet but we didn't have to care about this planet because this was something to get away from huh when the whole creation story says and it was good five times in a row it was good it was good it was good it was good it was very good and then we began with this doctrine of original sin which is another word not in the bible begin with the problem instead of beginning with what matthew fox so brilliantly called original blessing so we're getting there though we really are and this doesn't mean that people who went ahead of you weren't beloved of god salvation isn't a question of if it's a question of when all right when are you going to get it and you're just the lucky people who can now get up much earlier you got it and i think the a large percentage of people really didn't enjoy life very much because they weren't supposed to enjoy it we were supposed to suffer it and endure it and make the rest of us suffer very often because of it because we didn't understand emotional healing relational healing cultural healing when when i worked with the healing ministry in the 1970s with francis mcnutt who wrote that first book called healing you know i went on the road with him several times and he said richard i'm getting all these hate letters from these pious catholics who say what are you doing writing a book about healing and he showed me one we catholics don't heal that's something protestants do in a tent that's something protestants do in a tent huh but they were speaking truth healing was not a part of the catholic vocabulary that i grew up with because transformation you made the connection was not a part religion wasn't about transformation now it was evacuation for later that religion has no power to save the world or the individual soul because as i said at mass this morning if the gospel doesn't give hope to history it's very hard to give hope to individuals and that's what we're dealing with remember when i said i hope i get to talk about mental health i think every one of us in this room knows that mental emotional health is getting scary in this country the amount of schizophrenic unhealthy people who you don't know what they're talking about when you live an entire culture that's unhealthy you produce a high amount of unhealthy people right and the gospel was meant to to give the whole society a vision of we're going somewhere hope that's what we celebrated easter that the final chapter of history is resurrection not armageddon and apocalypse now got it but i bet a lot of you grew up grew up much more influenced by the late great planet earth how many millions did that sell what a theological disaster the exact opposite of that this is heading towards some place good the omega point of history which is the christ beckoning us all into his eternal self once you can live inside of that cosmic hope it's much easier i know this personally it is much easier to pray over people and heal them but when you try to heal and pray over isolated people inside of a whole thing that's going to hell in a hand basket [Music] it's almost it's you're wasting your time and i say this after 45 years of giving retreats and people leave the retreat all fired up and they go back home to the world as it really is which is pretty you know sad and and pretty negative and pretty hopeless when you live inside of hopelessness you create mentally ill people i'm just going to say it that way who don't want to live in this world so they find a way out of it they find a way not to survive in this universe because it's not going anywhere anyway we had something so much better to offer the world and i've got to believe we still will i gotta believe that all right i'm gonna share you with other people john's gonna have a little a little bit of time for some q a and if you'd like to come towards the mics uh with a question or comment i'll remind you we do have book sales in the room uh the building next door regis house the guild room so if you want to make your way over there afterwards you can buy books and richard will be signing some and a reminder that while we do love every sermon that gets preached in this church we simply would not have time for all the stories and wisdom that you may have to share tonight from the mic so just a reminder to keep questions and comments brief so that we can get to as many as possible in this short period of time so start with mike number one you when you study church history you know it's pretty crazy and and the the the metaphor used in genesis about the tree of knowledge of good and evil can you contrast the tree of knowledge with the tree of life sure i think that's what you're talking about i start my book the naked now with that quote is the front is piece did it ever strike you as supremely strange that the tree we're not supposed to eat of and if we do we will most surely die is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you may eat of all of the other trees in the garden which is god allowing a lot of freedom and a lot of risk taking a lot of sin if we can even put god uses sin in our favor so that's not surprising once you understand the gospel but i think it was a warning at the very beginning of the bible against this idolatrous assurance that i know you know the arrogance of the certitude that i know who's gone to heaven i know who's gone to hell i know who's right i know god doesn't love gay people all this knowledge where'd you get this knowledge from you know it this arrogance of spiritual knowledge that makes people judgmental makes them rude makes them cruel makes them stingy of heart very stingy of heart we were warned against that at the beginning of the bible now the tree of life which was presented as the positive tree is for me thank you for bringing it up the first image of the flow and it returns in the very last chapters of the book of revelation whereas you know the tree of life is now in the middle of the garden and the rivers are flowing out from the tree of life but all in between the whole rest of the bible is just war and adultery and stupid kings and and yet and god just keeps working with all of it working with all of it which shows god's love of the secular world that's the genius of the hebrew scriptures that they incorporated all these things that's why we catholics didn't read the bible it just wasn't very spiritual you know and we like to read pious lives of saints and things like that and i understand that but when we recognize that that this very involvement of god with secular history was god's involvement with the tree of life which includes death true divine life always includes death sorry for such a long answer i'll try to be shorter um i don't know who calls you a heretic but you make heresy sexy i've never been told that before like heroes and sex take that home to the friars um what uh i want i just it's not really a question as a prompt to talk about the whole substitutionary thing no and really like oh god because you know it's it's uh this is so cosmic and so i can relate but like this bloody thing easter that we go through it's difficult for me to swallow so yeah so i won't i won't be able to say that much but it is in my book things hidden in chapter eight and nine where i developed the great debate between the franciscans and dominicans in the 13th century the dominicans defended what became the mainline position at that point we were like the supreme court there was a majority position in a minority but we franciscans were usually the minority position and unfortunately we lost that debate when protestantism came along it thought it was reforming catholicism and on many levels it certainly did but most of our mainline theological positions they accepted and unfortunately this is the case they got more invested in the substitutionary atonement theory than even we did because we always had the minority position or we called the franciscan position and here it is in two sentences right jesus did not come to change the mind of god about humanity got it didn't need changing god loved god's creation from the moment he created it she created it jesus came to change the mind of humanity about god that's it in two sentences now it's much more sophisticated and much more subtle than that but uh because all of the metaphors there in the new testament you're going to go back to your bible and say richard's wrong because all those jewish temple metaphors of sacrifice propitiation atonement ransom those metaphors are used there's no doubt about it those made sense to people raised in temple sacrifice do you understand but that's why hebrews said it's over this whole game of sacrifice there's no sacrifice that's needed jesus is the end of sacrificial religion that's the meaning of the that the game is over you don't need to earn god's love i'm revealing the infinite character of god's love by my nailed open hands so the graphic still worked you understand you don't have to have my sophisticated theology i think a humble indian in peru as i saw once looking at the crucifix with tears in their eyes they got it god is for me and the transformation happened in many sincere people who gazed upon the one that we had pierced but just don't make it a transaction on jesus part that the father required because i'll tell you well i didn't get into that that's why the father was pretty much neglected because we all if we'd be honest had a huge bias against the father if his love is that conditional if he demands blood before he can love his own creation then this isn't a very loving god that is the fly in the christian ointment that has kept centuries of christians from becoming loving mystics and free lovers of god and creation because underneath it all was this massive hidden and denied not just mistrust of god but actually fear of god it doesn't work just doesn't work it's got to go uh and it's falling apart now okay i'll shut up over here this morning you spoke of the cosmic christ as reality or something like that would you please say more about that because cosmic christ has always struck me as very triumphant christian imperialism and that's clearly not how you're using no no not at all no remember when i said that this notion of christ is not in competition with anything because it includes everything right that's why i say the christ symbol is not now limited to the jewish jesus which did i i will be very orthodox i still believe jesus is the image of the invisible god i still believe in the divinity of christ if you stay with me you'll find out i'm quite conservative right and ironically it's that conservative holding on to the essentials the essentials which allows me to blow the whole thing wide open if you keep it there so the cosmic christ is as soon as matter and spirit became one now we are the first generation that has a word for that we now call it the big bang we even give a date to it 14.6 billion some say 13.8 that god decided it seems and here time falls apart i don't know if time even means anything but god decided to show himself herself itself to manifest the innards of god and that's creation so the early franciscans insisted that the first bible was creation and now that is in romans 1 20. if you want to check it out right that is in the bible the everything you need to know is in the created universe and they said that if we if we didn't respect the first bible created world if we didn't learn how to contemplatively honor animals and plants and waters and skies and this magnificence that's around us every day we would murder and mangle the second book the second book is that maybe a little over 2000 years old but the first bible is 14 billion years old that's the cosmic christ so jesus is the personification this is christian belief if you're not christian you don't have to believe it it coheres though it holds a lot together jesus is the personification in a moment of time when we were ready for an eye vow relationship i think when consciousness had evolved enough that we could fall in love with something somebody he became the human eyes and face of this infinite eternal christ which is creation so the cosmic christ is saying as colossians and ephesians say the christ existed from all eternity jesus was created in a moment of time christ is creation part of what you're saying yes not part yeah that's it and that's a lot if if any of you think i'm i'm making less of jesus you're not hearing me if you think i'm taking away your jesus this makes jesus far more central the alpha and the omega you know of history that's saying here's where it came from divine love and here is where we return to divine love as taylard says the christ stands at the end of history seducing it forward into love good stuff back here thank you can you expand on the holy spirit as distinct from jesus christ and god within the trinity yes i'll try that's what it takes 200 pages in the book to try to unravel but let me just say a few little good things i hope all right remember i said the holy spirit the the metaphors used are always dynamic metaphors moving metaphors flow metaphors the holy spirit is like the glue the goodness glue i call it in my book immortal diamond that connects everything that keeps everything connected really the state of sin and it is a state more than an action is when you disconnect we know this from mass murderers they're always disconnected people you know and we were told i bet you were told like me that our job was to be correct no your job is to be connected that's all just stay connected stay if in the beginning was the relationship you will know god as long as you stay in relationship with the flower in front of you with the blue sky above you with your wife with your children don't disconnect when you disconnect you're in the state of sin and at that point you will end up doing a lot of stupid things when you do actions that we would call sinful let's just be very traditional right i would be willing to bet if i could be your spiritual director or your confessor at that moment when you did something really stupid you were unconscious you were when you're conscious you'll always love you'll always love when you're unconscious you will do cruel things rude things deceitful things lustful things you're always unconscious so ah i hope this helps you understand that the spirit and i said it real quickly the spirit and consciousness for me are the same thing and love you you can use those three words interchangeably interchangeably and i can prove that with orthodox theology all right they're the same thing so jesus is the physical manifestation you always have to deal with physicality when the word became flesh so that's why in the end there will only be christ loving himself when the whole physical universe recognizes itself in one another when all of you so that's why in the christian world we rightly say we are the body of christ yeah that's correct and then as you so beautifully did this morning i was able to celebrate with two of your eucharist augustine says this so well we feed you the body of christ so this mystery of incarnation doesn't just move to the personal level it moves to the elemental level symbolized in bread and wine that even the elemental universe is the body of christ oh my god i know you're going to call me a pantheist no that's christianity it's christianity that's incarnational religion which is rightly called pan-enthism god in all things not god is all things so make that distinction that'll please your pastors all right i'm not teaching pantheism but i am saying what the gospel clearly proclaims that god is in all things so christ is always the mystery of physicality enfleshment embodiment materiality the spirit is the goodness glue that keeps everything connected the father is the transpersonal source out of which all this love flows and returns so that's the best i can do for now okay that was great thank you you're welcome should we go for another hour i think we have time for one more one more i'm sorry i'm talking to you um i've spent my adult life working with teenagers and they get all this they get it they want to love each other do volunteer work they love the earth what they can't understand is how christianity projects us to be so not that and they're so disillusioned toward the traditional church i was wondering how your message is being received among young people a huge number of which have been so disenfranchised from traditional church yeah it's very true though you wonder what is happening again i think it's an evolution of consciousness that our younger people simply don't buy our prejudices that my generation just absorbed because the church was so subservient to american culture and we were first of all americans and then we had a little veneer of catholicism or christianity on top of that it's almost a grace that by rejecting christianity many of them not all of them are discovering the real deal you understand because they don't have to beat their way out of the paper bag the way my generation had to do you know of saying this doesn't make any sense so we see a lovely lack of prejudicial behavior in a lot of our young people one of my publishers said to me a few years ago and it totally surprised me they said do you know your single biggest demographic this was from falling upward and immortal diamond ah they said it's young evangelical men i said it's not catholics they said no catholics don't read you very much but young evangelical men who were raised on the bible and recognized it didn't open their heart space you understand it it didn't free them to love the blacks or the gays or the the non-americans or it just made them into republicans or something you understand it didn't it didn't necessarily help them to to embrace the republican and the democrat and the independent and everybody else that that they saw that naturally for some reason well thank you and i hope anything i've said tonight is heresy you'll forget it as you walk out the door okay [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey fellow ragamuffins thanks for watching the video please hit like or subscribe to join the tribe if you'd like access to some of our premium content you can visit ragamuffintv.com and leave a comment below to get to know some of the community members see you next time

Channel: Richard Rohr University

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Keywords: Richard Rohr, Richard Rohr Videos, Richard Rohr 2021, Richard Rohr Universal Christ, Richard Rohr Ennegram, Richard Rohr Falling Upward, Richard Rohr breathing Underwater, Richard Rohr Heresy, Richard Rohr heretic, Richard Rohr CAC, Richard Rohr Rare Videos, Richard Rohr St. Francis, Richard Rohr Universalism, Richard Rohr Atonement Theory, Richard Rohr Hell, Richard Rohr Jesus, Richard Rohr Catholic Priest, Richard Rohr Franciscanism

Id: DnlMDz91K9I

Length: 90min 59sec (5459 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 04 2021