Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.
TOUCHING THE COSMIC CHRIST
You’ve heard Richard Rohr talk about his understanding of the Cosmic Christ, a key element of alternative orthodoxy that is an aspect of the legacy of the early Franciscans.
It may be a challenge for you to really grasp all that is intended by the term Cosmic Christ, but the presence of your group and its process can support you in coming to terms with this theological perspective. Discuss the four questions below as you work together to understand this concept. For each question, there are key words related to an aspect of this theology:
· Key Words: the big bang—the first incarnation—the birth of the Christ mystery—the interplanetary Divine.
o What are the implications of saying that the birth of Christ occurred at the moment of the creation of the material universe?
· Key Words: a second incarnation—2000 years ago—an exemplar—for Christians—the mystery of God
o What does it mean to use the two words Jesus and Christ together, not as two names for Jesus but as an expression of a mystical reality?
· Key Words: Eucharist—elemental incarnation in a material universe—“Oh my God, I am the body of Christ!”
o How might you now experience the Eucharist differently as you consider these insights about the Cosmic Christ?
· Key Words: Nothing is secular—grace indwelling—mountains as cathedrals—Divine image
o In unitive consciousness, how you love anything is how you love everything. How might your life be transformed if you embraced the Franciscan vision found in Richard’s teaching in this session?
PAUL GETS IT!
Richard Rohr encourages us to see the gift that Paul is to us as we struggle to grasp this vision of the Cosmic Christ. Read the following indented text then consider the questions that follow:
The personal incarnation happened 2000 years ago, we believe as Christians, which is Jesus. They became so infatuated with this person of Jesus that very quickly they seemed to call him the Christ, although there’s no evidence that he ever called himself that. The scriptural evidence is that it was Paul who got it. Paul gets it because Paul knew Jesus Christ the way we do. He never knew Jesus in the flesh. He hardly ever quotes him and yet he talks with such authority, such certitude. He met the Christ mystery and until you know that, you do not understand the mystic Paul. He is in love with this Christ mystery, which is the same Jesus Christ that you and I meet.
So when we introduce people to Jesus without the rest of the incarnation—the Christ—we end up with a moralistic religion. Moralism takes over whenever you don’t have mysticism. You will become more moralistic the less it touches upon unitive consciousness. The Christ is something you know mystically. When I say mystically, I mean experientially. Whatever happened to Paul on the Damascus Road, he knew experientially some universal meaning to this Jesus figure—and he universalized from that. His most common single phrase in his authentic letters is in Christo—in Christ. That’s his code word for this understanding.
We are living inside this incarnation. We are the Christ too! He’s not denying Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the holon, the exemplar of the whole, the stand-in for everybody. We can’t fall in love with concepts, energies, ideas and forces. You’re not going to give your life for a force. As 1 John says, we need someone we can see, and touch, and look into his or her eyes, and relate to. Persons love persons. That pulls our soul out of itself.
1. When have you “experienced” the Christ mystery in the way that Paul seems to have done?
2. Paul and Richard would have us see that we are living inside an incarnation—in Christ—but we don’t fall in love with a concept. What do you fall in love with in such a way that your soul is enlivened?
OUR GOD MAY BE TOO SMALL
If we follow Franciscan orthodoxy, which teaches that Christ is incarnated in all creation right from the big bang, then sooner or later we have to deal with the matter of other civilizations, cultures, traditions, revelations and religions in a way that honors the Christ mystery that is incarnate in the immense diversity of creation. Read Richard’s reflections on this matter and then consider the questions that follow:
Jesus is the personal personification of the eternal Christ mystery, but the Christ mystery was already available to the Stone Age people, to the Persians, to the Mayans, to the so-called barbarians and pagans. These were not “throw away people!” That’s what you came down to if you were Roman Catholic: God was waiting for the Pope to appear and everything else was throwaway. Imagine that! You’d have to say that this is a petty God, a small God.
If we don’t balance out Jesus with Christ, our very theology is going to become a very limited worldview. It ends up being in competition with other world religions instead of a vision that is so big, so cosmic that it includes everything and everybody.
When you return to a Trinitarian notion of God, it opens up interfaith dialogue, because you admit God is formless. You admit God is energy and spirit, which is the Holy Spirit. Suddenly we have all kinds of levels for dialogue. What happened when we pulled Jesus out of the Christ mystery and out of the Trinity? We overplayed the Jesus card apart from who Jesus really is. That made us unable to talk to Hindus and Buddhists, to respect the Jewish roots of this very Jesus.
Jesus then becomes in competition with Muhammad or Buddha. It becomes a personality issue: “Do you like Jesus. Well, if you don’t like Jesus, well then God doesn’t like you!” Come on! The question is, “Do you like the Christ Mystery?” I can see your answer to that in the way you walk down the street and the way you respect the person at the checkout counter. There are some Hindus that like the Christ mystery much better than a lot of Roman Catholics, Evangelicals, Lutherans and Episcopalians. I’m happy to be Christian, but that doesn’t put me in competition or a race with the other world religions to prove that I’m better.
We’re not trying to be rebels anymore; we’re not trying to be reactionary or heretics. We’re just trying to be honest about our experience. And that ability we now have to be honest about our experience is making us ready for an adult Christianity, for an adult notion of what’s really happening, without throwing out Jesus. You’ll go back and fall in love with Jesus more than ever before, but now you’ll recognize that this Jesus is not just the Savior of my soul, but he’s the naming of the very direction of history—the Alpha and Omega—this perfected humanity that he reveals in one moment of time and where we are all being seduced toward.
1. In a creation of such awesome diversity, where the Christ mystery is available to all, what is it that gives you your Christian identity? What do you claim as a follower of Jesus Christ?
2. Richard has a way of provoking more good questions even while answering the earlier ones. What questions would you like to ask him as part of deepening into a more adult Christianity?
3. What would you like to talk about with people from other faith traditions now that we can acknowledge that they have something to say?
A LOT TO WRAP OUR HEADS AROUND!
For many who are listening to Richard, what he is proposing is nothing less than a shift in worldview at the deepest level. He helps us to appreciate the challenging journey of transformation by reminding us several times of the levels of consciousness that Ken Wilber has articulated: archaic—magical—mythical— rational—pluralistic—mystical (non-dual).
Jennifer gives voice to the kind of challenge involved in this intentional movement toward non-dual living:
It’s hard for me to wrap my head around it. It goes back to Richard’s definition of faith: the dichotomy of not knowing and knowing. A lot of it’s my upbringing in the scientific method and the emphasis on proof. I think that’s why the historical Jesus is so attractive at the rational level because there are things you can know and things you can understand. Yet, at the same time we don’t call ourselves Jesus-ians! We call ourselves Christ-ians. So we really need to understand what it is to be Christian and to understand Christ and God in all creation from the beginning. It didn’t just begin with “I”— incarnated here on earth. It’s a lot to wrap your head around!
Richard acknowledges Jennifer’s observation and hints at what the process of transformation might look like:
Your mind, your prayers, your songs, your reading of the scripture will almost have to readjust for two years; but then you’ll see it everywhere. Once you see it, you’ll know this isn’t my idea. It’s there, but no one told me to pay attention to it.
1. Where do you find yourself in this process of growing consciousness? In what ways does Jennifer give voice to your thoughts and feelings?
2. Richard is hinting at a classic process of spiritual practice and discernment: “putting on a new mind” as Paul would say. What are your practices for opening yourself to a new way of seeing that would transform your life completely?
MOVING LIBERALS ALONG
Doug makes an observation that holds a mirror up to liberals, the very people who are likely to be using this study:
There’s a liberal temptation to focus so much on the historic Jesus until we can say X, Y and Z about the historic Jesus. When you get the cosmic aspect it blows open both the conservative and liberal paradigm.
Richard responds:
It critiques the liberal just as much as the conservative, because neither of us understands the Christ very well. Ken Wilber has pointed out in describing the level of consciousness that the downside of the pluralistic level—where most liberals are—is that they are so in love with pluralism that they hate any notion of hierarchy. When you go to the mystical level (the Cosmic Christ level), then you really appreciate hierarchy. Then you have a new criterion for critiquing the liberal just as much as the conservative. Liberals tend to be trapped because they are just smart enough to dismiss everyone below as superstitious and ridiculous and everyone above them as falsely religious in their mystical silliness. They stay there, many of them, the rest of their lives and can be just as dogmatic, authoritarian and dualistic while thinking they are not. You can really appreciate what Wilber calls hierarchy. Yes, there are things that are still needy of analysis and critique—not dismissal—and that includes the liberal mind, the pluralistic mind, which thinks that the goal of history is pluralism. The goal of history is union with God which honors pluralism but doesn’t get trapped there as an end in itself.
1. Where do you find yourself in this analysis?
2. How might churches with a liberal bias encourage their members to experience the goal of history as union with God?
BENEDICTION
Christ whose glory fills the skies,
Christ the true, the only light,
sun of righteousness arise,
triumph o’er the shades of night.
Dayspring from on high, be near;
daystar, in my heart appear.
Dark and cheerless is the morn
unaccompanied by thee;
Joyless is the day’s return,
till thy mercy’s beams I see,
till they inward light impart,
glad my eyes and warm my heart.
Visit then this soul of mine,
pierce the gloom of sin and grief;
fill me, radiancy divine,
scatter all my unbelief;
more and more thyself display,
shining to the perfect day.
- Charles Wesley
* Adapted from Embracing an Alternative Orthodoxy: A 5-Session Study by Richard Rohr with Tim Scorer, Morehouse Education Resources, 2014)