Episode 35 - The Cosmic Christ with Richard Rohr

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hey everybody michael gunger here we are really honored to have richard rohr on the program today we were recently on tour going through albuquerque new mexico and had the chance to sit down with him a quick word about the production though normally we try to get good sound quality for all of you but being on tour we didn't have a lot of the gear with us so this is just us sitting in richard's office with a field recorder speaking with him so sorry that the audio quality is not up to our normal standards but you know what it's richard rohr i think you're gonna love it yeah so we're sitting here in albuquerque new mexico with richard rohr who i know many of you that listen to this show are a fan of as we are and they have this lovely campus here in the barrio in the barrio of new mexico albuquerque yeah and uh we just wanted to sit down and gather a little bit of wisdom from you if we can we're called the liturgists and uh one of our big things is we tend to have a lot of people that feel spiritually kind of frustrated or homeless yes but people are still interested in spirituality or or whatever so we te we talk art science and faith kind of find ways of how they understand it for you that's wonderful um and we just wanted to chat with you a little bit so wherever you were thinking yeah we were thinking some of the things there's a lot of places where the things we talk about you talk about a lot better yeah we often speak of the essential nature of mysticism in christian faith and practice for us that was a reaction to a journey through doubt in my case atheism that embrace of mystery finding a god and an experience can help to find a grounding that maybe a list of rational propositions don't do as well for sure and i'd love to hear when you talk about mystic what you're thinking about and what you mean okay let's start there all right for me and i try to make it as simple as possible uh i simply mean experiential knowledge of god as opposed to seminary textbook even biblical knowledge of god which is still for most people one or two steps removed from experience and both of the are you from an evangelical background or what would you be originally i was a southern baptist both catholic tradition and protestant evangelical we all had our own biases against experience right we catholics especially after the reformation became very defensive because you know we lost half the church to you terrible heretics we circled the wagons and actually without knowing it we got in bed with western enlightenment and so the christianity i was raised in was very rational intelligent systematic appeal to intellectuals the typical catholic that you would probably have known on a street corner parish in almost any city was filled with icons and devotions and statues which looked very pagan to you but that's all they had the amazing thing is and this would fit in with your concern for art very often art opens you up to mystical experience more than words do yeah and so the catholics had an advantage without realizing it and produced a lot more still inviting people to the mystical level starting with luther and of course i totally understand luther saw what we catholics had done with the word mysticism we made a lot of cheap sentimentality and pseudomysticism into mystical language supposedly well he just the pendulum always swings as you know he swung it to the other side and he basically said i don't believe in mysticism we don't want lutheranism to be mystical he didn't know what he was saying because he was throwing out the higher levels without meaning to right you know the the early protestant reformation which was coterminous with the invention of the printing press thank god but it it moved the whole christian message in the west not in the eastern church to a highly heady left brain level and therefore we set up for western atheism we set people up for western agnosticism it's uniquely a phenomenon of western christianity this virulent atheism anywhere this angry atheism you know so we gotta and i say that to christian groups we gotta take responsible by the pitiful way we presented the gospel you know so um did i answer your question what was your first oh you just said mister what do you mean experiential yeah experiential and if you say it that way then you avoid all this sense of that it's higher level in fact it is but but once you say a higher level you appeal to the ego and you appeal to all the wrong instincts and people so i don't want to say higher level but it does call forth in a person and you use the right word an immense respect for mystery and once you respect mystery you open very quickly to paradox to what i call non-dual thinking you probably know which is almost the best descriptor possible for mystical knowledge mystical knowledge is always non-dual you understand it it doesn't get into this argumentative either or republican democrat gay straight kind of language that we've got almost the only language left in america or the west because we in the christian church in my opinion didn't do our job for 500 years we haven't been doing our job how do you see the catholic church embracing mysticism versus more than modern enlightenment because interestingly i actually tried to become catholic i have hardly tried for a little while well for a minute i was wholehearted i got discouraged quickly i went to i went to assisi did you i did and i did a retreat a week a week of silence there meditation where did you live um it was a place it's called the simple peace they had like a retreat center oh okay just for a weekend and going into the tomb of francis and the whole town just felt and i guess it was because i'm meditating most of the day that i'm coming into this i just and it's it reeks of spirituality and many wise people have told me that who aren't even christian yeah yeah so after that i was like i think i want to be catholic jim wallace told me the same thing i took him there when we were young men you know jim wallace of saint john as well he said god this town could make a catholic out of me just i said don't do it well then i visited i visited a priest in denver where he lived and it's sort of a cure that dogmas you're the doctrines of the catholic church you will have to say i believe i described all these things i was like i don't know i can't say i believe all of every anything really so i kind of lost uh lost some heart but i'm curious about where you see it currently i'm sure there's a lot of diversity within the church where do you see it going where is it at no i mean well you you that's your finger right on it you know most think because you picture us pope cardinal archbishops bishops deacons love it priests ah it looks like the ultimate linear system here's the paradox that when you have that strong a superstructure you actually can hold together much more diversity it's it's no one would suspect this then the typical protestant denomination can hold together because you've got to hold it together by a scripture quote we held it together with ceremony and rolls and statues and that holds together much more it's it's a much bigger tent ironically so you put your finger on him catholicism is from far right to far left you know and we'd all call ourselves catholic which is as you know the meaning universe right the barrier it is what we're supposed to be but i've often said roman catholic is an oxymoron and we've been more roman catholic than we've been catholic and here's where the protestant reformation was so needed and so important to to point out the idolatry of rome now we're saying this as you know in a strange time because now we have a pope that we could you know wait all of history for he's the best thing that's ever happened to him so right now we're all in favor of the papacy you know it's like a benevolent monarchy is still the best form of government as plato said i mean this guy is just moving through changes that would take 100 years of congressional votes or discussions or he just moves it through it's wonderful if only he could last five more years please god let him live so in answer to your question catholic this is a cliche but it it it's the best and it's the worst because it can hold together the big tradition and if you have the desire which you originally elicited or showed you can find it much easier inside of catholicism than you can in the typical protestant denomination that's just true that's not meant to be anti-protestant it's just you came along too late in history and you know if you just start with john calvin yeah it's just i'm not a fan yeah it's just it's just way too late and way too narrow and way too moralistic i mean both luther and calvin hat were not mystics and i was told that by the lutherans in germany i was even the catholic speaker at a conference one of the last trips i took before i turned 70. and it was on was luther a mystic and all these lutheran theologians there i was the catholic who was i don't know what i was supposed to be the devil's advocate but i didn't have to say it they said no he wasn't but of course why he lost it was our over doing the thing so poorly and then condemning him and painting him into a corner and he did by the end of his life become a very angry man and you can't be a mystic if you're angry you just can't yeah you lose it you lose the non-dual mind that's a that's a particular topic of passion for me that's neurologically true so brain scientists uh wholeheartedly agree that you cannot be angry and a mystic at the same time they are opposing parts of the body do they say that directly well that's good to hear yeah you know in my class in january here with living school i had a wonderful therapist from chicago who who is also a neuroscientist just to affirm what you said you'll love this i've been using it everywhere he said we can now prove fearful negative hateful thoughts are like velcro the neurons just grab around them and and solidify and myelinate and here it gets better than that i think better positive grateful loving thoughts are like teflon they use that they just slide off unless you savor them consciously this is contemplation is so it's a whole new argument for it unless you savor them consciously for at least 15 seconds positive grateful i mean you've all seen seen things that are just oh that's beautiful and you walk right by it you're going to say you've got to sit there and savor it and taste it and consciously we would say give god thanks for it or something and only then does it imprint and he had the neuroscience for this yeah so just what you're saying so that that's actually the core of what i wanted to talk to you about oh okay because you know we have all these listeners some are current catholics some are former catholic current prose protestant evangelical post-evangelical this big tent what they all have in common is they're at some degree frustrated or disenfranchised but have a longing they're not done yes and and what they have trouble with is finding a way to that experiential knowledge so we've just thrown a little tidbit on the program for paying attention of taking 15 seconds to focus on gratitude when you encounter beauty but what are some other things that as you teach people about action and contemplation that you teach them to practice in order to foster that that gratitude you know much of early stage contemplation it doesn't sound prayerful or pious at all it's largely recognizing the depth of your addiction to negative thinking to compulsive thinking to repetitive thinking you have to be humiliated by that first of all and that's most of the first year of contemplation that every time you try to sit in silence you see what comes up first and what comes up first is the crap it's just all of that velcro stuff that wants to grab on to you and you're so used to grabbing on to it that you let it happen again so first it's recognition secondly it's humiliating recognition that i've been here 15 minutes and all i've thought about is myself or what whatever it might be that's such an imploded world how could that mind ever be capable of god you understand that's what you have to first realize and then you beg for grace for the open field for freedom you know i tell people so many of even your generation who will say i don't need to be saved from anything why are you telling me i need a savior i i give i said you just try to release yourself from one negative thought that you're attracted to and you'll see you need a savior you can't do it by yourself by just willpower it's the old don't think of an elephant thing or when i was a little catholic boy you don't think of naked ladies you don't know well they just set us up to be obsessed with naked ladies not realizing that so it doesn't sound very inspiring does it in the first stage now the scripture i use is mark 1 13-15 where mark says the spirit drove him into the wilderness so first of all you almost have to be driven there by circumstances now it is the spirit driving you but you don't know it and where the spirit drives you is into the wilderness the chaos the the confusion the narcissism of your own inner world you and then it says if you remember and there he met the wild beasts anthropologists say there there were no wild beasts in israel at jesus time he's clearly talking metaphorically you know there's no lions and tigers who would have caught you in palestine at that time and then the next wonderful line and then angels ministered to him it's just these three verses spirit drove him into the wilderness there he met the wild beasts and angels ministered to him if you can endure the attack of the wild beasts and not give up by all the negativity crap past wounds uh all that we all carry from usually from our earliest years and it's all in the unconscious so all you're doing in early contemplation which is why thomas keating calls it the the divine therapy you're taking the lid off of the unconscious you really are and once it comes up what first comes up is not wonderful it's confusing it's angry he wants to blame somebody wants to that's why our politics i mean look don't you just want to cry at these debates don't you just want to cry it's this is what our country has produced but terrifying it's terrifying but it's predictable when religion has been doing its job for 500 years of transforming consciousness we have people who are educated but not transformed the ego is still totally in charge and that's true of both sides really you know you know maybe some certainly much less than others but first you recognize it then you recognize you need you need help to get rid of it you know that wonderful line in romans 8. we do not know how to pray so the spirit is sent to us in our weakness so it's like the first step of the 12-step stuff you know first you got to experience your i don't know how to get rid of this this is the way i've been thinking for 30 years now i use the proverb the dog returns to its vomit it's not a very pretty proverb but every person i've taught contemplative prayer they have to suffer that much of the first years just that we are all addicted to our way of thinking and our way of thinking has very predictable patterns now i know i probably shouldn't say this on a christian podcast but you're ready for this okay all right okay christians will not call this a christian podcast the reason so many people were attracted to eastern religions and buddhism in particular the last 30 years really is because buddhism made a science out of what i just talked about you understand they they because they didn't eliminate experience the way we did we just said believe you don't need experience right we never learned how to refine experience to critique experience you've heard us catholics talk a lot about spiritual directors it's one of the other gifts of catholicism you know the jesuits really refined it one of the reasons if you were in my school i could encourage you to have experience and give you tools to trust your experience is because we have the tools to critique experience now the buddhists have always had that you understand whereas we just tell well believe john 3 17. and so and he believes john 3 17 with his angry dualistic alabama mind not to pick on alabama but you understand what i'm saying it's just it's it's useless you can quote john 3 17 all you want and there is not a psyche or a soul or a space ready to receive the brilliance of what that is really trying to communicate or any other bible [Music] verse it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed 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liturgists join over one million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-dot-com slash liturgists so this is kind of an absurd question to ask for sure it isn't go ahead what is god oh god that isn't himself i gave you permission and you got me anyway well let's go back to what exodus says is the only name by which i shall be known you know after he says i am who am to moses there we have the key for not idolizing any name for not thinking any name will ever be adequate have you read my book the naked now that second chapter on the yahweh prayer that it really couldn't be spoken it could only be breathed and this is immense immense breakthrough if we would known from the beginning that the god who was revealing himself starting in the jewish exodus experience is unknowable through conceptual thinking as john of the cross then we'll say 15 centuries or no longer than that 2 000 years later god cannot be known god can only be loved and that loving then becomes its own kind of knowing that's brilliant epistemology that's exactly what the buddhists are saying but john of the cross is one of the few in western christianity and he's not until the 16th century shortly after the reformation it's precisely when we're losing the contemplative mind almost completely by the fights of the reformation that teresa of avila and john of the cross emerge in of all places you know super catholic spain the counter reformation almost i i see it now five centuries later as a warning you know you catholics you better not lose what your gift should be to the lord the contemplative knowledge my opinion historically is that each time we divide it starting with the big division well no the first one is when we aligned with constantine divided the church into ordinary street corner catholicism christianity and the whole group that went off to egypt and syria and palestine and cappadocia that's the first great division that's no small thing because basically the contemplative mind was preserved there and in ireland because they weren't part of the empire the mainline roman catholic became frankly fast food religion fast food religion that's why we needed the reformation then the second great break comes in 1054 when the patriarch of constantinople and the bishop of rome mutually excommunicate one another isn't that nice talk about dualistic thinking you know but after that we in the western church which largely formed me we nodded to the eastern fathers and the desert fathers and mothers but we didn't seriously study them we studied the western fathers of the church do you understand people like augustine and so forth so when protestantism comes along you're at best reacting to one half of the half and this is what your generation you're the first generation that's recognizing that you know with some humility and gratitude it's not no you don't you're not angry at anybody except you wish you would have gotten this sooner but that's the whole protestantism is finding itself in today not that we aren't in a hole too but your whole is especially deep because most protestants never had the contemplative teaching never yes john wesley was approaching it or any methodist that you know okay and then you understand yeah the heart strangely warmed you know you have the roots of the rediscovery in methodism uh and even his word methods it's like our word practices you've got to find practice but he was so far removed from he didn't have the foundational contemplative teaching anymore that he would have only found the eastern fathers and the desert fathers you know about how you quiet the mind how you let go i mean you go back to some of the desert fathers if vagra is ponticus and well origen isn't a desert father but their teaching sounds buddhist it sounds buddhist and now when we say it people think you're a buddhist no i'm a christian in touch with the whole tradition not just a piece of it yeah that's kind of how i found modern well christian competent practice uh i i attend the methodist church and i've been studying meditation strictly from a buddhist and a secular mindfulness aspect then i started to explore centering prayer a little bit and my pastor actually introduced me to your work because there is this like methodism sort of of all the protestant churches i think it might be the most warm or desiring of the catholic tradition and presence it's the least angry it is we always feel that when we're around methodist it doesn't create angry christians like many of the other denominations do you know yeah wow well how would you get to the baptist then i started there oh my parents were baptist my god and i grew up in the baptist church and that was like a like a like a really good baptist until i wasn't yeah remember you've heard me say pray it's best to start conservative it's best to start very grounded in something you believe passionately yes and i did it's much easier than the the post-denominational kids who are growing up with an open field to which they get passionate about nothing in particular you understand then to narrow down the field and to fall in love with jesus like a good baptist does they almost don't know how to do that because their critical mind keeps well well you know all those provisos and so forth yeah that's where i'm i'm the strangest combination of very traditional and conservative and and probably terribly out there the reason i'm terribly out there is because i'm traditional and conservative and i mean that in all seriousness i could prove that you know that is precisely knowing the whole tradition knowing the jewish scriptures knowing the desert period the early church that allows me to talk the way i talk interesting yeah and people would think it's just the opposite you know and you know what set us back is this whole period of deconstruction from mainline protestants like shelby spong who became their only so our bolt man i don't know what names you'd be familiar with i'm who became so negative against the tradition but while trying to reform it they really were i half agreed with them spong was actually my uh stepping stone back to any sort of like actual practice he would have appealed to your rational obviously intelligent minds yeah and i can i can agree with most of what spong says except my desire is to be a reconstructionist not a deconstructionist do you understand where you just keep saying oh the doctrine of the virgin birth you don't need to believe that you don't need to believe this that doesn't help anybody it really doesn't you know rather what wonderful symbol is being communicated in a belief in the virgin birth do you understand and you get there now you've got experiential christianity do you understand it opens you up to experience but just dismissing things appeals to the rebellious arrogant mind that says oh i'm not a superstitious whatever anymore but we're getting there we're getting there now your generation especially it's mostly young men like you seem to be getting this today it's you know one of my publishers told me that my single biggest demographic was young evangelical males reading my books blew my mind because there's some convergence has happened with those of you who were raised traditional but you weren't raised traditionally i was oh you were charismatic oh good they're the ones who have their feet on the ground the most without knowing it they've got their feet on the ground with lousy theology but their early charismatic experience or jesus experience keeps you i know there's something real here you understand i know this isn't all just words i know that there's something enlightening here so that that is very in line with my experience you know let's go back to something you just said you know to say you don't have to believe in a virgin birth or no whatever so what kind of where i've been i had an experience with god and it was distinctly jesus flavored if that makes any sense that's about all you could have and uh but it didn't bring me to any intellectual knowledge of any theology and what i found in time was that i sort of voluntarily surrendered to an idea of a resurrection without like taking it as a factual thing i just voluntarily surrendered it to it and it seemed to somehow keep open this conduit between me and god but there's still more you know i don't know where i think about a virgin birth or or ideas like that i don't necessarily examine them forensically i sort of try to contemplate them symbolically yeah good good but i often try to tell people in our audience i'm not telling you have to believe anything i'm telling you if you're interested you can be open to these experiences and see where they take you and in that journey something that was really powerful for me i struggled a lot with the idea of an incarnation and a trinity they just seemed like weird absurd concepts to me those are two biggies but go ahead but then i heard you talk about the cosmic christ in the context of the trinity and it was a little hallelujah moment would you just talk a little about the cosmic christ in the context of trinity for our listeners i i got to have my book on the trinity finished by this tuesday so i'm filled with trinity these days uh oh god where do i start see here's what we did we pulled jesus out of the trinity and created a whole religion the which was jesus-ism and i love jesus in fact if you've heard my stuff i'll give more importance to jesus historically than the evangelicals ever do you know because he's cosmic he's not just a historical person you know which we find from colossians and ephesians and prologue to john's gospel that was more the foundational christology of the franciscan tradition because of francis's love of nature and animals and brother son sister moon we immediately gravitated toward this cosmic notion of christ inhabiting the universe that creation was already redemption that christmas was already easter is the way we put it you know and uh so franciscans we were the big popularizers of christmas you know before that the first 1200 years easter was rightly the big feast unless you really get the full meaning of incarnation that jesus is the personal incarnation i believe i still believe that i really do it explains so much but he emerged in a moment of time when human consciousness was ready for interface but what we've had since the big bang is the manifestation of god in creation and of course i always have to use romans 1 20. everything you need to know is contained in the world as it is you know romans 1 20. the first bible for the franciscan tradition was nature was creation and now we're the first generation that could give an approximation of number to that somewhere between 13.8 and 14.6 billion years ago we would say the incarnation began it was god began to manifest what's going on inside of god and it really fits the first word is let there be light now we know the one stable element is the speed of light and there is light in every single inch of the universe even in what appears to be darkness so we know that there was a huge release approximately four million photons per square meter oh you even see i'm saying this to a man who understands see usually people think i'm making that up and give us the word for that the cosmic microwave background radiation isn't that great but this christ existed as colossians ephesians the pro and five other places say very clearly the christ existed since the beginning of time we don't know how to picture that but they did all right so but what we did is we tried to make you now you've got the perfect mind for this we try to make people fall in love with jesus without falling in love with christ they knew nothing about christ so their jesus was just way too small you know way too tiny i mean if tomorrow just to make it very practical and you've figured this out already when we discover life on another planet the whole christian religion is going to go through a major shock because its premise has been undercut you know that we needed salvation from sin because of adam on this planet it's all based on that premise all you really need jesus for is the blood sacrifices the last few days of his life you know the first 30 years of his life can largely be ignored jesus taught us how to live not how to go to heaven and we took it all and moved it into this how to go to heaven later so for me i don't know how many years i have left but i want to finish this trinity book next week if possible but then the next one is i've got to help people distinguish between jesus and christ you know they overlap but they're not the same and when you say as i hope you do i do i believe in jesus christ you're making two different faith affirmations that you were never told about and so the reason we have the problems with racism and pollution of the earth and homophobia and sexism is because that none of them met the christ do you understand jesus becomes a competing religious figure with muhammad and moses or wherever else you the christ there's no one to compete with you understand it's all embracing it's nature itself it's something that was available to the stone age people you know i mean could god have really created stone age families and said well you're just throw away i'm waiting for america to come and to discover that discover the gospel it's so narcissistic when you think of it the way we've interpreted jesus pulled him into a tribal god to support our country club religion you know it was largely tribal so first we got to expand the field by making our basic definition of god trinity all right see once you pull jesus out of the trinity here's what happens we made him into a monarch sitting on a throne look at the art all of europe you know he's he's god the father again because we don't trust god the father we don't even like god the father because he demands blood of his son he can't love us naturally he has to get a blood sacrifice before he can love us there was an inherent mistrust i'm going to go so far as to say dislike of god incipient in western christianity especially once you got into this substitutionary atonement thing so once you allow jesus to be the one who comes forth from the father bringing that infinite love and saying i have come to take you back with me now john 14 means a whole new thing you know it repositions it doesn't throw away i still would call jesus the savior because he brings the whole message home to to our believe ability and see ability and touch ability as first john says but we've got to reposition salvation in creation itself in the very beginning god planted grace inside of whatever he created to evolve us to where we're evolving now but that's a very different frame you know in my a preface to this book on the trinity i don't know if you're familiar of oh you are i'm sure thomas coons the structure of scientific revolutions where he really introduced the word paradigm shift to to the modern mind i think maybe he created it i don't know but he says basically when you have a major paradigm shift which trinity was supposed to be and god was a circle more than a pyramid right but you and i grew up with pyramid theology it was all top down from god the father you know demanding blood of his son it's just so horrible when you think of it once you move away from the circle that we're invited into the divine flow of the trinity which i mean the eastern fathers were obsessed with that that was the meaning of salvation then you don't overplay the jesus card and you need all this blood sacrifice and blood atonement and so forth it just got way pulled out of context i'm not not throwing it all out i think you you're prepared to know it's just you know text outside of context ends up being the wrong text because you know you don't know how to read it anymore and that's what happened to our uh so first we got to get trinity then trinity we've got to define incarnation coming forth from the trinity as nature itself secondly the personal which is jesus right back to jesus now jesus is the alpha and the omega of history just as the book of revelation says in terms of a personal blueprint every time you read logos in john's gospel just put the word blueprint all right he's the blueprint of what he's going to do everywhere else he's going to put the divine and the human together in you and in all this world you know jesus is the living icon of it saying follow me trust this what i put together which is why the early icons always he's holding the two fingers i'm both i'm human and divine and i'm holding them together in this one body now we can understand salvation first of all as a corporate concept as a social historical concept which it clearly was in the hebrew scriptures you know god is always making covenants with israel with the people with history he uses individuals like noah and abraham but through them it's made with the people wow but what we have now especially from the last 500 years is this terribly individual personal professional watered down how can you go to heaven how can you go to heaven it's it's well disguised narcissism it's well disguised selfishness which i think we're bearing the fruits of you know what's happening in this election right now is revealing the moral bankruptcy of so much of american christianity that people who call themselves christians can think some of these candidates are even in the field of christianity and can be excited about it i will forever mistrust your interpretation of christianity if you could think and you know the people i'm talking about are even close to anything but i think it's going to have that effect it might be one of the good that you are bankrupt in terms of your ability to talk about jesus ever again because you ca you can't see hate you can't see racism you can't see arrogance you can't see pride you can't see deceit list all seven capital sins greed and gluttony too they're all there for the whole world to see and they're cheering for it up and down christians it just breaks your heart it just breaks but it's not their fault their jesus they were given was way too small when he's small what happens is he gets captured by culture you know the italians make him into an italian the swiss make him into a swiss we made him into an american businessman which is why we can elect american businessman president and think he's christian don't get me on my political battle but it's just it's hard not to be right now it's that's a pretty good job so sad but we've tried to be pretty apolitical in the history of our program becoming less than this election has been very difficult how can you not because it's so antithetical to what i consider and i'm very generous about orthodoxy very very generous uh but to associate some of these movements with the name of christ to me is is perverse absurd yeah but if we don't discover the cosmic christ i think christianity is is destined to become a small tribal religion of prejudicial people which are largely there now you know not people with thomas mertens and mother teresa's and taylor de chardins and people who are larger than life we were supposed to create people like that right big people right uh and then we still do you know but look at like someone even a big person like nelson mandela who i think did have some identification with methodism but to do his big thing he largely had to pull back from organized christianity it was just it was too small a field for a heart and mind as big as as he was in a lot of the church a cynicism about folks my age especially folks younger than me but i am actually um very encouraged by people from a largely we would say secular background or secular frame of mind find themselves responding to some invitation towards this movement towards reconciliation it actually makes me very hopeful look good and you know in my core i am too yeah that's a gift of the gospel and the indwelling spirit that i i have to fight cynicism every day but i think in my deepest soul the battle has already been won you understand but i still have to work with it because i see the stupidity of america and of the churches it's just why would i waste my time you know it's not even worth wasting your time i hope that doesn't sound too judgmental but because this is the world we have to love and i hope i can yes um some practical steps for people how to move towards a larger view how to move into contemplation i know you have a school here but for people that can't drop out of their lives and go to a school how do you start and then we're and i'm also curious of where you're at today with your practice and how does it evolve over the years or how has it evolved for you wow um and how does that still inform your experience of god it shows such maturity that you keep pulling me back to that do you got to realize how different that is from your forefathers all i wanted to fight about or talk about was atonement theory you know we don't buy atomic theory it's all just up in the clouds theory yeah but both of you pulling me back to practice tells me you're sincere and and already along the path or you wouldn't even ask that question the future of christianity is going to depend on two things the readers of a reformed christian the rediscovery of trinity as the nature of god that god is a communion not a man on a throne all right uh god in the beginning was the relationship is the way i say it in my new book the second is the rediscovery of practice as long as we stayed in belief systems we remain argumentative for 500 years just arguing arguing arguing and getting us nowhere except be creating very argumentative people who arguing is a way of life for them you know so for you to ask practice now let me give you some of that have you read the naked now book yeah you've read that one okay there's some of it's in there yeah there's another one that i did with the dalai lama a few years ago in louisville silent compassion and i'm trying to bring the christian tradition to to the buddhist tradition and then the other one that most links contemplation with action is called dancing standing still dancing standing still those are both fairly small books you could read them in one good and then we'll have links to those on the website at theliturgist.com for everyone oh okay in the one i'm writing on trinity in fact just yesterday i i offered five practices at the end see once you go toward what you're asking for there's no authority to fight which has made us so anti-authoritarian it's just anti-authority uh you you just say do the practice and then they and they come back and they want to fight i said have you done it yet well no i don't believe in it well then you can't agree with it or disagree they do you know they always want to dismiss it before they release themselves to it you know and even the old catholic rosary you've seen pious little catholic that was a practice you know it's a good practice it actually is as genius to it you know now even most catholics don't know how to let it lead them forward because there's no good teachers but anything repetitive anything a chant a mantra well you know it from your science it stops the racing of the left brain you know it stops your obsessive patterns of thinking i describe it in brain terms because you have a human brain that's wrapped around a monkey brain that's wrapped around a reptilian brain and the the repetitive motion and the repetitive chanting gives the monkey something to do to leave you alone yes that's a good way to say it we're not making fun of your brain no we like your brain what about your current practice how is that shaped okay well it certainly you know i was lucky that i was i joined the franciscans when i was 19. now that's the way we did it before vatican ii when catholics always use this term vatican ii that was the great reform in the 1960s where the catholic church one of the enigmas of history reformed itself when it was doing very well our numbers were all-time high and wonderful pope john the 23rd said let's let some air into this dusty old church and uh but before that we were basically uh a tribal religion a ghetto religion it was very happy but very naive that blew us open to the modern world the documents of vatican ii so you didn't ask for all that but i was i was raised in the old church so you know in the old novitiate when i was a novice in 1961 we had to come into the chapel in the morning in the dark in silence and kneel for 20 minutes you know and pray you know now they were already teaching us some of what i now recognize was contemplation you know that gave me a wonderful start in terms of even at the age of 19 to learn what to do a little bit just a little bit with my mind in those long boring periods of silence you know then i have to say you know i was ordained a priest in 1970 and really got caught up in ministry in the community i started back in cincinnati and there was so much exciting happening and it all began by a charismatic phenomenon on the night of november 8th 1971 i was preaching all these boys and they began singing in tongues right on my feet you know so i can't deny experience because i saw these boys lifted up moved from there to their right in front of me and that's never happened to me since the very first retreat i gave november 6th 7th 8th 1971. it's never been repeated but i call and you'll understand that were you in the assembly of god even or no similar similar see what what charismatic experience is is many mysticism what it lacks is good theology it doesn't know where to lead you after the pentecost experience but i know and i suspect you know there is such a thing as the baptism in the spirit there really is all it's saying is there is such a thing as experiential knowledge of god with just what we're saying here but by the same token this community got so big so quickly i was the big daddy of all these 19 year old kids now i'm 29 they're 19. we sang i mean these are prayer meetings of 1500 people you know and the singing and tongues phenomenon kept me grounded in mystery and in the search for god but there was so much happening i can't say i develop my contemplative teaching for those first 15 years i was just pulled into the world of of ministry you know with young people in particular who want to talk to me all hours of the night and it was just i was surviving in many ways even though it was great fun i saw a lot of healing and a lot of again the movement of divine energy but then it was really only when i started going on on the road my early cassettes started getting me invited to work in third world poor countries peru and philippines and so forth then i saw and that's why i came here and founded this place that so many people who i agreed with their progressive reading of the gospel their vatican ii liberal catholicism their social justice concern especially but again and again i saw them as angry people not contemplative people not happy people just right people but now we were right on the left instead of right on the right you understand and that's what made me move here 30 years ago and found this place i said we got to address this head-on how do we teach the contemplative mind so i took a contemplative year in 1985 to discern whether i should leave cincinnati or actually went down to thomas merton's place and gave a retreat to the monks that year in kentucky and just i did uh they gave me the hermitage for 40 days after easter and i lived there 40 days alone and without any doubt that became the solidifying my job the rest of my life is to teach the contemplative mind that's the only that's the change that changes everything you understand everything else doesn't change everything it just it's just a new idea or a liberal social justice concern all of which i'm for but contemplation is changing the seer instead of just telling them what to see and by and large what our our christian sermons have done is tell people what to see and not how to see and that's been my concern here will be 30 years this summer that i've been here and we ourself then went through many stages frankly of some staff who got it and some staff who just got a paycheck here to be perfectly honest every organization goes through that people who really get it and are passionate about it and people who are just along for the ride you know and so we went in and out of that over 30 years i've said sequentially over these 30 years this place would have been a native american spirituality center an eco-spirituality center a gay rights center a feminist center and a new which one didn't i mention but depending upon the passion of the recent executive director you know now now we're really lucky do you know michael our present director no he he set this up so he knew of you i guess and asked me to take it but this young man and he is young uh just early 30s he really gets even though he's a seven on the anagram do you know the underground there hyper enthusiasm enthusiasm five and nine so that's why you're both good listeners but sevens are you know what they are yes here michael is a seven but he's got such a brilliant mind and such personal integrity that he and i it makes me think i'm ready to go because he's putting together the real pieces with integrity of what i'm trying to say he listens and listens to what i'm saying what i'm really saying better than i know what i'm really saying you understand so i consider him a great gift uh and the two you met with or are two other wonderful staff my practice now just to jump into the present i live in a little hermitage around the corner uh so i get to have plenty of hours just with my garden and my dog and uh i wake up make myself a cup of coffee light a candle on the hearth there and i spend usually the first 45 minutes uh and not always in a perfect sit sometimes if i don't feel any inspiration i'll i'll pick up a spiritual book and to try to get myself stirred a little bit you know sometimes i'll journal and write what's coming up and sometimes i'll just sit and you know look at the candle that's the most common thing i think then i come over here in that room where you just were and at 8 30 the staff meets there in that circle and we have a sit together and uh not all the staff is required to come to it a lot of to be honest we have 20 some people on staff i think some don't care in the least about contemplation you know they're just holding a job they're holding it down don't repeat that well it's going to be just just i'm not putting 100 000 people see we haven't distinguished in career and vocation you know in all of our people and all we have is a sense of career and occupation what pays the bills you two clearly have more than that which means you're you're understanding our life is vocation right and i always say what you do even if when you aren't getting paid for it that's what you're passionate about you know that's your vocation and if you need to be paid for every little thing you do you haven't moved from occupation to to vocation but fortunately an awful lot of people coming through this place have i think discovered their vocation what they would do even if it wasn't paying the bills yeah how long do you guys sit together well this is 20 minutes and then i read the gospel of the day you know we have a lectionary methodist church does too and then you probably didn't notice it but there's a whole pile of prayer petitions people are always sending us then we read those we pass them around the circle everybody reads one to just keep the suffering of the world in mind and then we start our work day and then there's neighbors and people who join us too then the rest of the day i come here early in the morning i do a little bit of my writing here but mostly back in my little house and what i try to do there is preserve some great big chunks of non-stimulation and what i mean by they don't turn on music i don't turn on the tv now i do at other times i don't want to make myself heroic all right i've been watching these dang debates i don't know why it just makes me mad every time i watch them but uh was it carl bart who said you should have the bible in one hand in the newspaper in the other i do believe you just i don't have anything to preach about it's current unless i know what's happening in the world so i don't want to be and that was the franciscan way you'll read about that in the book see the form of monasticism up to francis was monasticism monks we weren't monks i'm a friar i'm not a monk i don't know if you know that all right now the friars had a different approach our approach was to stay right in the city with the people with the active life and still be a contemplative that was much harder but that became the franciscan way to remain involved with the world and still find your identity and your ground and your foundation which of course is what you have to do are you a married man too i am yes both and you have children too two beautiful girls two little girls and you have two little girls oh no kidding both of you two little girls how neat yeah so um i guess that's my practice yeah now for years when i was on the road flying all around the world i always almost always took lent in a hermitage that's why i wrote half of my books interesting you know whatever the inspiration was would come upon me when when you have 40 days completely alone yeah it's just wonderful wonderful the things that happen now that i don't travel so much and i do live in my little hermitage of my own i don't do that anymore maybe i should but i i don't feel the need for it i feel like now i can keep my ground yeah and don't lose it that's the way i did as much when i was a young man you know i'm not saying i'm there i'm just saying it's easier it's easier yeah yeah so your book on the trinity mm-hmm do you know when it comes out yeah it's supposed to come out early november it's going to be called the divine dance okay the divine dance the trinity and the transformation of the self that's the subtitle i'm so excited about i just i do feel i could die after this one's written not that it's that wonderful but but it's what i needed to say right before i died and and i know i'm drawing it from the tradition these aren't just richard's ideas they're very traditional ideas about the trinity but you know carl rauner the german jesuit he made the statement in the early 60s he said we could drop the doctrine of the trinity tomorrow which every christian degree is the absolute centerpiece and it wouldn't change 98 of christian practice doctrine or belief how and he said how could something be so central and be so roundly ignored as anything significant at all that just tells you right there have we been on a track that's sort of a strange track we're living in a time where now because of the internet and globalization we can study the eastern fathers if you want to you can study the desert father fives would like to do things like that they do they eat it up so you know we used to be able to remain blissfully ignorant because we do we didn't read lutheran theologians we didn't read and a lot of them have some good stuff to say so we can't stay in our little cubicles anymore so it's just it's the second axial age i really believe that if you're familiar with that carl jasper's language where there's a huge convergence and if you stay outside the convergence it's by your own choice but the the knowledge the wisdom the perennial tradition is now available to everybody and uh if you're ignorant now you're culpably ignorant it seems to me now a lot of people don't have the freedom i have i don't have children i don't have a wife so but that makes it all the more incumbent upon me to use my time for the the good of others i think that's the only justification for celibacy that okay you have a certain amount of leisure time free time quiet time that a father doesn't have okay thank you so much you're welcome you're wonderful thank you for everything that you do and your whole life's work it means so much i could talk to people like you all day [Music] you