“It is much easier to belong to a group than to belong to God. To belong to a group one usually has to be convinced the group is ‘right’; to belong to God, one always knows one is as wrong as everybody else.”
– Fr. Richard Rohr, Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections
Here is another quote from Rohr that is every bit as timely as when it appeared in his Daily Meditations back in 2013:
In recent years and elections one would have thought that homosexuality and abortion were the new litmus tests of authentic Christianity. Where did this come from? They never were the criteria of proper membership for the first 2000 years, but reflect very recent culture wars instead. And largely from people who think of themselves as “traditionalists”! (The fundamentals were already resolved in the early Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed. Note that none of the core beliefs are about morality at all. The Creeds are more mystical, cosmological, and about aligning our lives inside of a huge sacred story.)
When you lose the great mystical level of religion, you always become moralistic about this or that as a cheap substitute. It gives you a false sense of being on higher spiritual ground than others.
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