#179: Universal Christ

Any insights from the new weekly Silent Hour and book discussion of Richard Rohr’s Universal Christ?

Indeed! In fact, outside of Eucharist, speaking for myself, I can’t remember a more personally transformative program we have held for the adults of our parish since my tenure began in 2014. The silence has been SUCH a grace and the book discussion downright riveting! Below is an excerpt from Rohr’s book that we discussed at length this past Tuesday. If you find it as consoling as we did, consider yourself very welcome and invited to join in! We will have read up to chapter 9 come Tuesday, Oct. 29. I suspect that we will continue into November. Silent hour begins in the Disciples room at 11AM (arrive any time you like) and the book discussion starts at Noon.

From Rohr’s Universal Christ, emphasis his:
If any thought feels too harsh, shaming of diminishing of yourself or others, it is not likely the voice of God. That is simply your voice. Why do humans so often presume the exact opposite –that shaming voices are always from God, and grace voices are always the imagination? That is a self-defeating path. Yet, as a confessor and a spiritual director, I can confirm that that broken logic is the general norm. If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God…
One recent holy man who came to visit me put it this way, “We must listen to what supports us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging us. We must listen to what is alive in us.” I personally was so trained not to trust those voices that I think I often did not hear the voice of God speaking to me, or what Ab Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.” Yes, a narcissistic person can and will misuse such advice, but a genuine God lover will flourish inside such a dialogue. That is the risk that God takes-and we must take-for the sake of a fruitful love relationship with God. It takes so much courage and humility to trust the voice of God within. Mary fully personifies such trust in her momentous and free “Let It Be” to the Archangel Gabriel (Luke 1:38) and she was an uneducated teenage Jewish girl.

Most Christians have been taught to hate or confess our sin before we’ve even recognized its true shape. But if you nurture hatred toward yourself, it won’t be long before it shows itself as hatred towards others. This is garden-variety Christianity, I am afraid, but it comes at a huge cost to history. Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society. In fact, “fast-food religion” and the so called prosperity gospel are some of the very best ways to actually avoid God – while talking about religion almost nonstop. We must learn how to recognize the positive flow and to distinguish it from the negative resistance within ourselves…If a voice comes from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the “Accuser,” which is the literal meaning of the biblical word “Satan.” Shaming, accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks. It is how we talk. God is supremely nonviolent, and I have learned that from the saints and mystics that I have read and met and heard about. That many holy people cannot be wrong.