The Gospel Cannot Happen In Your Head Alone

This came from Richard Rohr, The Good News According to Luke: Spiritual Reflections, p. 138. I love how Rohr emphasizes Jesus’s teaching about giving and receiving love. This is such a key piece of what it means to encounter God. If we lose this, we lose everything.

The Gospel cannot happen in your head alone.

The gospel is about relationship. Unless there is someplace on this earth where it’s happening between you and another person, I don’t believe you have any criterion to judge whether it’s happening at all. Unless you’re in right relationship with at least one other person on this earth, unless there is some place you can give and receive love, I don’t think you have any reason to think you are giving or receiving divine love either.

Is there at least one place in your life where you are giving and receiving love? If it happens in one place, it can happen everywhere. If you are truly capable of loving one person, you’re capable of loving more than one, and eventually even your enemy, and finally all. Love is one piece. Thus, we rightly speak of being “in love” and Paul speaks of being “in Christ.” Love is all or nothing. You either express love or you don’t. The Scholastic philosopher, Josef Pieper, said it very well, “the proper habitat for truth is human relationship.” How we relate to anyone is how we relate to everything else, too.