Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.
This is the last of a five-session series featuring Richard Rohr as he presents an Alternative Orthodoxy. The process questions below are from a small group resource entitled Embracing an Alternative Orthodoxy.*
As you’ve seen and heard, Richard Rohr names things as he sees them! In one moment he uncovers religious dysfunction and holds it up to the light; in the next he presents a vision of relationship with God that is transformative and inspiring. Given the breadth of the territory, it’s inevitable that Richard touches themes in your own journey of religious and spiritual growth.
From the 10 statements below, choose one or two that connect with your own story in some way. Share, either with one or two other people or with the members of your small group, how these statements in some way speak to your own experience or the experience of people close to you:
1. People who are initially attracted to religion are people who like social order. They think that God came to earth to be a policeman. This attention to social order in religion has a place in the first half of life when the ego needs to be contained in boundaries. If you stay in this first half of life religion, you stay at the moralistic level.
2. Scripture, Jesus, the mystics and saints recognized that the goal of religion is not a perfect moral stance, but union with God.
3. Union with God is achieved by doing things wrong rather than by doing things right. Perfection is not the goal.
4. Moralism is less concerned with love and more concerned with creating an ego identity that can hold the moral high ground. Too often the heads of religion are involved in finding sinners and in managing sin.
5. We see Jesus exposing ugly morality throughout the gospels. It’s always the same story: the one who is always wrong is, in Jesus’ eyes, revealed as right.
6. What undoes moralism is a moment of unitive consciousness, a moment of grace, a moment of unearned love, a moment of forgiveness, a moment of unmerited consolation. That’s the only thing that breaks down the quid pro quo world of morality.
7. God has come to save us all by grace. The mystics have no trouble surrendering to that. For Bonaventure, God is a fountain full of outflowing love, only flowing in one direction, always and forever. There is no wrath in God; there is no anger in God. There is only outpouring love.
8. You will obsess about moralism if you don’t get to the mystical level. You become more anal-retentive the older you get when you haven’t experienced God. It’s not joyful; it’s not a wedding banquet; it’s not happiness. You get more desperate, more impatient, and you want more laws to obey.
9. When you get moralistic, it’s not long before you get violent. When you are sure you are on higher moral ground than other people, it’s very quick that you have a right to torture them, exclude them, punish them, kill them and, as Jesus says in John’s Gospel, when you do it you will think you are doing a holy duty for God.
10. The mind that emerges from mystical experience, from second-half-of-life maturity is the contemplative mind. You don’t calculate life; you contemplate life. If you want to grease the wheels to second half-of-life consciousness—to the mystical level—the best way is to contemplate.
THE WEAKER I GET, THE STRONGER I BECOME!
Richard spoke enthusiastically about Paul in Session 3 and returns again with glowing affirmation of Paul’s understanding of the mystery of the cross. Here are some key lines to remind you of what Richard said about Paul:
· If you take the whole corpus of Paul, it’s 90% mystical.
· Paul reveals that all these constructs to create order in the world are doomed to failure.
· Paul’s key for creating order in the universe is by introducing disorder at its center. That’s what he means by the mystery of the cross.
· Your only ordered world is your ability to deal with disorder and failure.
· Paul introduced a new order that is recognizing, honoring and using disorder for good purpose.
Below are three passages from three of Paul’s letters. Read each of these aloud and discuss:
Where in his writing do you see Paul giving expression to the interplay between moralism and mysticism that Richard is uncovering in this session? Feel free to go to other passages from his letters that come to mind.
Paul may not have anticipated that his letters would be read not only by the folks in Corinth, Rome and Galatia, but also by us. What would you say to Paul in response to the passion and vulnerability of his writing?
Galatians 2:19-21 (The Message)
What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn’t work. So I quit being a “law man” so that I could be God’s man. Christ’s life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not “mine,” but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.
Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God’s grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.
Romans 7:4-6 (NRSV)
In the same way, my friends, you have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead in order that we may bear fruit for God. While we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we are slaves not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.
2 Corinthians 12:7-10 (The Message)
Because of the extravagance of those revelations, and so I wouldn’t get a big head, I was given the gift of a handicap to keep me in constant touch with my limitations. Satan’s angel did his best to get me down; what he in fact did was push me to my knees. No danger then of walking around high and mighty! At first I didn’t think of it as a gift, and begged God to remove it. Three times I did that, and then he told me, “My grace is enough; it’s all you need. My strength comes into its own in your weakness.”
Once I heard that, I was glad to let it happen. I quit focusing on the handicap and began appreciating the gift. It was a case of Christ’s strength moving in on my weakness. Now I take limitations in stride, and with good cheer, these limitations that cut me down to size—abuse, accidents, opposition, bad breaks. I just let Christ take over! And so the weaker I get, the stronger I become.
GROWING MYSTICS
Doug opens up an exploration of how churches can both be a barrier to the experience of God as well as a community to open up that experience when he asks:
Essentially, you’re saying that the destiny of every Christian is to be a mystic. That seems so implausible that we put it off to the next life! I say to folks (half joking) that I set out to be a mystic and then got ordained. The sheer busyness of the job rendered it nearly impossible. I can see individuals and small groups coming together to enter into that kind of unitive consciousness and I can see that having an effect in action, but how in the world do you make it a bigger phenomenon?
Richard responds:
When I say mystical, I mean experiential. It is possible if we get out of the realm of law and doctrine. Most people have God experiences but there’s no one to tell them, “You just had it!” We’ve made it a churchy thing as we ministers well know: you’ve had it when you’ve been around candlesticks and vestments. This is why we get back to this need for spiritual direction—wise people who can say, “That moment of communion you had with your little baby while you were breast feeding today—that’s it! That moment of enjoying that wildflower and feeling that jerk of joy in your heart—that’s it!” We need to un-churchify the gospel. It’s just too darn churchified! People are having religious experiences and don’t know it.
In the conversation that follows Richard’s reflection, the members of the group open up various aspects of this matter of church as a block to mystical experience or church as a guide in that process. Allow their conversation to be a source of reflection for yours:
Raymond asks:
Can church be a place where people are helped to identify the presence of God in their everyday lives, a place where people can talk together about how their everyday lives are an experience of God?
What would it take for church to be more like that? What success have you had in creating
that kind of opportunity?
Suzanne asserts that people can have experiences of God in any moment quite apart from the presence of a priest, rabbi or preacher. The other members of the group support that, and Richard speaks about “the training into subtle consciousness” that is required as individuals move to this deepening practice of Presence. The group recognize the power of community in this process, and Richard underscores the need for communal support of the individual:
If there isn’t community holding you accountable to what you say you’ve experienced, helping you unpack your experience, it doesn’t go anywhere. I could be heard to be encouraging individualism, but I’m not. That doesn’t go anywhere. We’re social beings. Unless I let your holiness rub off on me, I won’t experience my own. As Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am.” We have a total promise of presence, just as strong as in the bread and the wine.
Talk together about the power of community (whatever size) to be a place for holding you accountable in the growth of your mystical consciousness, as well as a setting in which you become ever clearer about the daily presence of God in your life.
NO MORE COUNTING
Richard offers this final reflection at the end of the five sessions:
Here in this second half of life—
the mystical, the contemplative, the adult Christian—
you stop counting and let God stop counting.
The counting game is over.
The ego counts; the soul experiences.
It lets it be and learns from it, but it doesn’t weigh and measure.
Here in this American culture of entitlement—
people counting what they deserve
and think they have a right to—
entitlement creates unlikable people.
We worry about our children growing up
in an entirely entitled society.
But then there’s the world of grace—
the world of the gospel,
the world of mercy.
It’s all gratitude and confidence, the confidence
given by God’s gratuitous choice and love
to use you as an instrument,
to dwell in you.
Validated at the deepest inner level:
no need to be rich,
no need to be famous,
no need to be good-looking,
no need to think that I’m better than you.
The need itself is taken away.
If you can just notice in your own mind and emotions
whenever you’re counting
or thinking God is counting,
that’s not where you want to be.
It’s a waste of time.
It’s finally self-defeating.
Organized religion creates membership requirements,
and then you’re right back into counting.
The gospel
is a great leveling
of the playing field.
All of us equally carry that divine image.
All you can do is give thanks, because it’s totally undeserved.
It has nothing to do with you: gift, gift, gift, gift, gift.
The grace of God freeing us
from the burden of counting.
What insights and practices will you take away from this series that will help you give up counting?
How will you support yourself in being in the culture of entitlement without being of that culture?
BE THOU MY VISION
Be thou my vision, O joy of my heart;
naught be all else to me save that thou art,
thou my best thought, by day or by night,
waking or sleeping thy presence my light.
Be thou my wisdom, my calm in all strife;
I ever with thee, and thou in my life;
thou loving parent, thy child may I be,
thou in me dwelling and I one with thee.
Riches I heed not, nor vain empty praise,
thou mine inheritance, now and always;
thou and thou only, the first in my heart,
great God of heaven, my treasure thou art.
Great God of heaven, after victory won,
may I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my vision, O ruler of all.
Irish ca. 8th century; translated by Mary Elizabeth Byrne, 1905;version by Eleanor H. Hull, 1912.
* Adapted from Embracing an Alternative Orthodoxy: A 5-Session Study by Richard Rohr with Tim Scorer, Morehouse Education Resources, 2014)