Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I got the chance to spend a few hours with Richard Rohr, along with the other members of the Associated Ministerial Order. We traveled to Albuquerque to the Center for Action and Contemplation to sit in conversation with one of the great teachers of our time on the subject of Christian prayer and the spiritual life. Here are a few thoughts and quotes from the first day:<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery time you choose to love, you forego a little bit of your own truth for the sake of relationship.\u201d What he was talking about here is the idea that the object of life is not perfect theology, but right relationship. We want so badly to be right, to be justified, to be pure, and perfect, but that\u2019s just not possible. We have to let go of the reigns a little bit, and let go of our need to be right if we want to love another person. What God is after, in the end, is that we should relate to everything in love.<\/p>\n
Rohr talked about the necessity of trusting your own experience. In the Western Church we\u2019ve been formed in such a way that we believe we cannot trust our own personal experience of God. We need a quote from an expert to validate our own experience, or we cannot trust it. Spiritual formation is, at least in part, about learning to trust our own experience. Rohr says we must always remember that God\u2019s first revelation is creation (the cosmos, for us the earth). God is revealing God\u2019s self in creation and we are part of that. There is an inner witness (soul), that has the capacity to relate to God. This is one of the teachings of the Franciscans \u2013 grace is inherent to all creation. It\u2019s not a magic elixir, it\u2019s woven into the universe.<\/p>\n
This means that every single moment is a treasure, and the particular<\/em> is of utmost importance. John Duns Scotus is a famous Franciscan who has influenced Rohr a great deal. Scotus talked of the importance of thisness<\/em>. God hasn\u2019t created in the abstract, but in the particular. God did not create \u201ctrees.\u201d God created \u201cthis tree, and this one, and this one\u2026\u201d Same goes for humans. The treasure is the uniqueness of all of creation, and the fact that God has created and willed the life of all of it and God infuses it all with Grace. \u201cYou can know a lot about love. But until you meet a man, meet a wife, you will never know love\u2026 God only created this. That you exists means God is choosing your being in this moment.\u201d I think that\u2019s a pretty stunning reality that could change our lives if we lived into it. God is choosing my being in this moment, because of his love and goodness. Life is a gift not just as we are born. Life is a conscious gift all the way along. If we can learn to experience the presence of God\u2019s grace and love in the \u201cthisness\u201d of everything, that practice would radically transform the way we relate to God, ourselves, others, and the created world.<\/p>\n Talking about the evangelical distortion of the Trinity, Rohr said that evangelicals have basically pulled Jesus out of the Trinity \u2013 out of the essential relationship with the Father and the Spirit. His critique (one which I think has some merit), is that we have trouble understanding the eternal nature of Christ. That Christ was in God before the incarnation. Then we distorted Jesus\u2019s teaching from \u201cfollow me,\u201d to \u201cworship me,\u201d and lost the mystery of of Christ\u2019s union with God.<\/p>\n Rohr also critiqued the in\/out exclusionary nature of Protestant Christianity. He said that this actually set the groundwork for agnosticism and atheism as they were reacting against the exclusion. He reminds us that Jesus did not make the exclusionary move except with religious insiders who were themselves being exclusive. That\u2019s the one thing Jesus could never accept: exclusive people bent on keeping others out of the kingdom.<\/p>\n \u201cThe cross is revelation. Jesus was not \u201cplan b\u201d after creation went off the rails. The cross is a vision of \u201chow much God flows toward you, loves you, lives in you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere is only one heresy: Gnosticism. It comes up every century under a different name\u2026 Gnosticism is always trying to find salvation in some kind of theory, some kind of knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLeave me with a person for twenty minutes and I can tell if they\u2019re saved or not. It\u2019s obvious who\u2019s in heaven and who\u2019s in hell\u2026 people in heaven \u2013 life flows out of them, quite simply. They\u2019re not always putting up boundaries and putting up barriers. You can tell if one\u2019s in hell, it\u2019s no surprise\u2026 they sure look like they are in hell\u2026 no joy\u2026 waiting to be grumpy, waiting to take offense, waiting to feel they haven\u2019t gotten what they deserve.\u201d<\/p>\n More later.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tuesday and Wednesday of this week I got the chance to spend a few hours with Richard Rohr, along with the other members of the Associated Ministerial Order. We traveled to Albuquerque to the Center for Action and Contemplation to sit in conversation with one of the great teachers of our time on the subject […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[790,13],"class_list":["post-2372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-amo","tag-richard-rohr"],"yoast_head":"\n