I enjoyed Richard Rohr’s Everything Belongs and his Conclusion chapter. He put a few bullet points together to summarize the main points. I’m putting them down, here, so I can keep them handy. Read further if you are interested:
– 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 (what rational and control-needy people usually demand), nor is it incoherent chaos (what cynics, agnostics, and unaware people expect), but instead human life has a cruciform pattern. It is a “coincidence of opposites,” 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 their 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. 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 death journey 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.”
– Do 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 new creation” ourselves (Gal. 6:15).
– 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 as much 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 for its reconciliation with 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 useable one for God.
– These few are enough to keep the world from its path towards greed, violence, and self-destruction. God is calling everyone and everything Home. 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 (Phil 3:10). 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 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 the mystery of the suffering and joy of God who do not formally belong to any church. 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).
– 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 Name for God,” there will be no more surprises for our mind and no more victims for history.
– The contemplative mind is the only mind big enough to see this, and the only seeing that is surrendered enough to trust it. The calculative mind will merely continue to create dualisms, win/lose scenarios, imperial ego, and necessary victims. It cannot get out of its own illogical loop. Einstein put it 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 in what we call “the cross.”
Joe Skillen 