Episode 95 - Richard Rohr and The Universal Christ (Part 1)

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[Music] hey everybody Michael Ganga here science Mike and this is a special episode we we don't go on location for many episodes there are a few people in the world like Richard Rohr that were like alright we'll get on a plane fine almost everyone more like when are you going to be in Los Angeles but we had a chance for all four of us to fly to Albuquerque New Mexico wait at the old restaurant of the Year nominee PF Changs it was really good it is one of the best PF Changs I've ever had when I saw it that it was nominated for Restaurant of the Year si come on Albuquerque I love you you got a you got to do better for yourself but anyway all four of us went to the CAC and got to sit down for a couple hours with this amazing legendary man Richard Rohr why is it do you think that our audience resonate so much with Richard Rohr Mike I mean it's like he's obviously a favorite any time we put something on with him people like yes what is it I think so many of our listeners they're either not sure where they are with Christianity or they're so frustrated with that tradition that they're kind of done with it but for so many of us that I would guess the vast majority of this audience invested years or decades of early life in that tradition and no matter how you feel about it today you've been shaped and molded by Christianity and at least for me sometimes it feels like like tossing it all out is as a haste I mean I spent so much time in the church and so I think Richard Rohr represents such a uniquely hopeful figure for people who listen to our show I mean he's a he's a Catholic friar a month basically in in the Catholic Church who's you know positions on things like LGBTQ equality are far out of step with our audience and yet Richards heart is so open manners so gentle and his theology so reassuring I think he almost uniquely offers hope that there's something redeeming about the Christian tradition to people who listen to the liturgist podcast well I hope you all enjoy this third appearance of Richard Rohr on the liturgist podcast such a pleasure to have him back we've broken it into two episodes because it's a bit long and thought you could do in a couple sittings if you'd like welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody father Christianity is a faith that is often defined by division the church is splintered into an ever-increasing number of denominations and sects all of whom plays distinct claims on the nature and reality of Jesus Christ one thing that struck me immediately about the universal Christ was the way that it bulldozed the divisions between Orthodox and Catholic Catholic and Protestant pre enlightenment and postmodern male and female and even spoke into faith divisions across ethnic racial and cultural boundaries such a radical notion of inclusivity is wildly subversive what led you speak of a universal Christ as a Franciscan boy you began to answer by the final line it was my Franciscan professors in the late 60s who clarified for me how our own theological school was different than mainline Catholicism that our Christology was based on Colossians Ephesians the prologue to John's gospel and you wonder how did we get to that well it was really Francis was not a theologian he was an intuitive genius he just did it did the truth much more orthopraxy than orthodoxy then what we needed was to give theological heft to that because he looked like sort of a romantic brother Sun sister moon sister water brother air everything was granted subjectivity you know but it still was sort of romantic and sweet and you know an academic wouldn't take it seriously so in the first century when we were huge in numbers they fled to the great universities of Europe Paris Oxford Cologne Bologna and we're anxious to create a philosophical theological foundation to what Frances only intuited so you've heard me use this name Duns Scotus who I had to study for four years most people have never heard of him but he was our main teacher because he did that let me just give you one example the 13th century with the rise of scholastic philosophy which is very heady very rational but also very clarifying if you could take the time to understand it Thomas Aquinas the big spokesman for that said everything is analogous in being to God by you know it by analogy you know I wish we could at least get people that far you know I'd really be grateful but songs Coda's took a huge leap forward he said no no there is no analogy of being between creation and God there's a university that's a big word University in Latin word made one voice he said you may speak with one voice of the being of God angels humans animals plants and the earth itself so that became the the concept of the great chain of being you see what you've given is ontological foundation for what I call holiness once you grant that that the whole thing is grounded in creation from the beginning there's no waiting 13.7 billion years for God to start revealing godself God was revealing the God's self from the first moment of creation so Duns Scotus and the other name I quote several times st. Bonaventure those were our two great intellectuals in the first century and you read Bonaventure he's got as many books as Thomas Aquinas you're struck by is there's no notion of Hellfire threat punishment it's just optimism and hope so forgive the long answer but being educated in that tradition specifically done SCOTUS and Bonaventure gave our Christology a completely different foundation and our I can almost remember the moment when my systematics professor quoted Colossians 1 you know all things are recapitulated in Christ and he took that verb recapitulated and translated it he says if you understand this you understand Franciscan Christology but again we were always a subtext we were never condemned as heretics the church in the 13th century was frankly more broad-minded that it is later when we all got defensive we got especially defensive after the Reformation and circled our wagons around a very narrow form of our orthodoxy we had at once that it was hard to hold on to because the you've heard me talk probably too much about how the ego needs an enemy it needs a foil it needs to be against something to find its own boundaries now if you haven't found your boundaries in the very nature of being you will do that you understand if you you don't understand the university of all being you will define yourself by differentiation oh I don't know how else you can do it I think this is one reason why we all hold onto our belief system it does give a coherence and a radical unity to creation that it overcomes what we call the first philosophical problem which is called the one and the many I say every philosopher in one way or another was trying to resolve how can there be unity when what we look at with our eyes is obviously diversity and most people get lost in the diversity in fact almost everybody except mystics and poets some musicians I didn't mean some as a criticism one of my favorite lines in the book was it felt kind of like a throwaway and just like a real quick thing you in someone there and wait what is when you talk about the universal Christ and all these big ideas there's a lot of people that think that that's outside of the big tradition of Christianity yes and of course through the book and you have sources show that this has been here and when you say this line that maybe this was the big tradition well or what the big tradition has been trying to do with perhaps without even knowing it I wanted to hear you speak a little more into that it reminded me of sort of what when you look at creation as a whole when you look at a tree doing what it does flowering its branches it doesn't necessarily know what it's doing it doesn't like think of what it's doing but it has this whole genius within it that's kind of unfolding it's very it's very late yeah so I wonder if you mean by the soul of things really yeah I just love to hear you speak to it do you see Christianity as a whole of being led by something outside of the individuals within it how was it good way to say it of course that's perhaps the heart of our leap of faith this trust that there is an other nests that is gracious and that is involved what we have is at least in a lot of Catholicism I don't know about the other groups but it's it's not bad will but it's practical atheism no they believe in all kind of belief systems of redemption salvation but there's no sense of a gracious presence really being involved in your life and a day to day level so so you don't have to steer the ship alone now I know that's been sung about and talked about in many pious ways but God understands whatever limited way our vocabulary works that God is doing it in me with me as me your life is so much happier well you don't think you have to steer the ship are you have to get it right by yourself as if you could can you feel the five hundred pounds get off your back now I know an unbeliever will call that the opium of the people but when I see the mental health and even joy of people who live that way really that's my answer you know and when it produces so many healthy happy people by the end of their life when they know it's not all about me I'm about it whatever it is now what we're saying in this book is the it's the big phenomenon that we're trying to connect with our word for that and it's not the only word but it's a good word is Christ that Christ is the naming of the collective the collective goodness that is willing to carry and include badness and that's Jesus so the Christ is the life principle that is the beginning Genesis one it was good it was good it was good it was good it was good five times then it was very good the sixth time on the seventh day Sabbath today it says it was holy this is a very coherent creation story but for some dang reason we preferred to start with Genesis 3 it's almost ill-will why did we do that well the only way I can resolve it I'm sure it's not adequate explanation but as I look at my brother's fellow males I think man jump on something when there's a problem to solve and since males were most of the teachers and most of the preachers for the first 2,000 years we like a problem to solve and we like saying we've got the answer in fact we've got the only answer home that's just my theory of why we stupidly decided to begin with Genesis 3 instead of Genesis 1 so that beginning with Genesis 1 is what I would call creation spirituality our original blessing original goodness instead of what we Roman Catholics coined as original sin let me stop with this when you start with a problem you normally continue with the problem and end with bigger problems I never said it that way before I'm glad you liked it you can't start with a problem and that was done SCOTUS this big assumption with the atonement that Jesus cannot just be remedy for sin because that puts us in charge of history you understand were the agency and God and Jesus is simply the reactor he said no Christ is the Alpha and the Omega God begins with a cosmic vision not dependent upon a story of someone eating an apple between the Tigris and Euphrates River around 4000 years ago doesn't work you just it puts us in a tribal understand now I love the Genesis creation story it's inspired on so many levels but not on a literal level even though the hints are there even in the literal reading of the text I hope that's helpful Richard you've written so many books over the source of your life to many who really they say Rudy's thank you you've got a lot to say I've noticed them in the lead up over the last several years you always seem to be referencing this concept of the universal Christ the cosmic yeah I'm not really saying I gotta make this clear before I die yeah and so here it is you did it you wrote this book what was this writing process like for you um how did this book come to be how did it flow in and through you was a sobering was a joyful was a tedious as most writing often is what was this process like for you that's interesting you to ask because it certainly took me longer to write than any of my books almost two years and part of that was the wonderful editors I was working with became so invested in the message that they kept sending galleys back to me and said Richard make this clearer make that paragraph follow from that paragraph you need an example to hold people's attention so I think there were eight iterations that's far longer than any book I ever wrote so I have to admit by the seventh and eighth I was sick of it I said do I have to read this book one more time oh but yeah so it was tedious you used a good word and yet now after saying that that's the bad news yeah I'm gonna say the good news when I sat down in Lent of 2017 almost exactly two years ago March in fact to begin to write this I would have to say that 7/8 of what became this book just flow it out of me with but it's because I've thought about it all so the original thing here it is I know I was so contented with myself and all and then the labor began of but you got to make that clear that chapter should be ahead of that chapter and they were always right I wonder if everybody doesn't really need an editor there's just thing you're here editors can see that the writer can't see that's certainly true in my case I think many of my earlier books would be much more long-standing if I had had an editor like this it was several people actually one of the things that I noticed in reading this book is that well it's called the universal Christ that seems to be just as much about being human hmm and and I'm wondering a little bit if you or I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that about how understanding the universal Christ allows us to be more fully human well here's where we come to the balancing act and for me as a Christian the necessary balancing act between Jesus and Christ I don't know that the Christ mystery per se in itself teaches us how to be human but the Jesus ark does it grounds the whole thing it am arises the whole thing I don't know if that's even a word but I love it it personalizes the whole thing it humanizes the whole thing keeps our gospel from being airy-fairy ideology and conceptualizations flying around the universe that allow metaphysical types which is a very small percentage of humanity you've probably all taken the myers-briggs the vast majority of human beings are sense8 hands-on they don't actually need all these conceptualizations they just need what's right in front of them to work or make sense or be true or be wonderful or be wrong but they they begin with the concrete so as I try to say in the book I think Jesus grounds the concrete and the Christ grounds the universal when you have both of them and healthy tandem and relationship I think you've got the potential for a very healthy holistic religion but up to now we haven't had much of the universal it's all been ethnic nationalistic sexist homophobic always tribal the tribal level and not that Jesus teaches that he certainly doesn't but if you're in some manipulation and use history is proven we use Jesus that way without any doubt we used him for tribal purposes to hold together the kingdom of France to hold together the Empire of England you know it became the ritual symbol system that everybody bowed before and saluted but a sense of a universal presence that was equally present in the people of India as the people of Britain I don't think they got that nor did we of course with the black people or the native people so the Christ is the necessary corrective I hope I'm right in saying necessary to the Jesus mystery the Jesus mystery is a necessary grounding to the Christ mystery mm-hmm so I'm hearing you say that that part of our if I could use the word Redemption would be in us recognizing that everything is all connected and has always been connected and and that we're just kind of catching up to that maybe culturally is the church I think that one of the points of pain for so many people in the journey of being human is the story that their bodies are bad yes yes and so more specifically when I when I read the work that you've just written and the text or that particular phrase that you so often God loves things by becoming them I wonder what that does for us borrows favorite phrase you've got to change the name of the book the name of the book has to be God loves things by becoming them you'll pray harridan is music soon [Music] you [Music] [Music] so my idea is how does this this truth God loves things by becoming them and the coming together of these things that we we have thought as a church have been different for so long how does that actually help us heal our experience of our physicality a relationship to our embodiments it's a supreme irony that we are the religion that believes God took on flesh and yet have yet to create a positive theology of sexuality Earthcare emotions it became our shadow instead of our gift waaaaaah and I think all the sexual addiction of everything today it soon is revealing we didn't give the world a positive hopeful meaningful theology of the body and so now it's just overreacted into sexual abuse harassment addiction I mean aren't you getting tired of watching the news is there anything else except who has been sexually attacked now but in a certain way it's predictable if you don't make the body good the body becomes an instrument of manipulation of power of repression and then it itself rebelled against that repression and I see that so much in my own Catholic Church where so many of us who were celibate and understood that in a repressive way instead of an expressive way we didn't really check into the erotic meaning of life and erotic isn't the same as genital and that's an important distinction to make I hope I'm an erotic person I hope even I'm a sexual person but don't equate sexual with genital can you although almost everybody does almost everybody does but the ability to take delight in someone else's face or to use me to touch somebody that's erotic good or rather sensual yeah essentially it's saying you're good and I'm good and you don't need to fear me and I'm not gonna abuse you by that touch Wow but that's such an enlightened level of embodiment and we're just not there yet we really aren't it's one of my favorite places to hang out and looking at what happens in our bodies and how that relates to our spirituality so I'm sure we're so disconnected to it it's really sad and so what you're disconnected from becomes shadowy and that's what controls you yeah shadowy meaning that which I'm afraid to deal with express own and so it remains literally in the shadows of the self and comes out in indirect ways I almost no I'm not saying certainly not that God caused our horrible pedophilia scandal but it does reveal this issue how people who thought they could deny their embodiment and be holier than thou because so many of them were these highly ritualistic legalistic Catholic priests and bishops you know that it found a way out and which was very sick sad sad I grew up in a faithful and Orthodox Catholic family and I loved it ever since I was small it captivated my imagination and my sensibilities and everything I did was about being the best Catholic I could be but when I got a little older things started to fit differently my faith became uncomfortable and I saw people splitting off into different territories different binaries different politics and it made me really uncomfortable and made me afraid I couldn't be Catholic anymore but the thing I had loved so much just wouldn't fit but when I heard you on the liturgist podcast for the first time Father Lord I rediscovered the love that I had had as a child and actually rediscovered it as a child in a way your theology on the Trinity specifically the divine dance freed me to enjoy relationships again in a way that I hadn't been able to it freed me to seek unity and to seek peace in a world that was becoming increasingly divided I found wholeness in a faith that I have always loved and want to continue to love maybe not in the same way that I did but definitely in a healthier in my whole way thank you so much father or for freeing me to stay Catholic and to connect with God [Music] I'd love to explore the ways that you talk about God you know God loves things by becoming them and in many ways you'll talk about God is the ultimate all the ultimate itself yes but then sometimes you say things like what you just said of God didn't cause this thing or in one part you you mentioned how Jesus is God not Mary I'm interested in that when you move to those places of saying God is not some things it seems like there are lines that you draw well be seen as dualistic when the whole thrust of the book is non-dualistic so what's the difference between the universal Christ in your mind and a more pantheistic or hmm that's what I was gonna say yeah let's start by defining pantheism hmm pantheism pan means all theism refers to God means God and creation are equivalent you can use them with one voice here I just said I believe that what I think is good Orthodox Christian teaching is that you must always maintain a distinction between the Creator and the creatures now here's where we're finding a middle position saying I'm not saying all things our God but I'm saying God is in all things and all things are in God now you know the Greek word pan and theism God in all things so I think that's important I don't want to have to live up to being God that's held by the collective I know I did not in my present form exist from all eternity I know I'm not morally perfect I know I'm not all-powerful so it punches you with the first dramatic good news but then pulls back and says but you're only a part and not the whole so I would define the Christ as the inclusive notion of God and you and I as the included but to be the included is not the same as being the include er so I am maybe I'm just trying too hard to be Orthodox it's me makes perfect that makes perfect sense that I know I'm not the include ER now I learn a little bit of that from God and learn how to broaden my in capacity to include because God is the great include er you know my first well-known book was one called everything belongs love that book well many people started with that in fact I told the staff just this week that's what they should write on my tombstone really cuz that's my only message if it how could it not belong if it's here yeah yeah or if you don't want to call God the great include ur called God the great allow ur which is very different than the Almighty God language omnipotent God language that all of us grew up with because that that creates atheism you you play the almighty omnipotent card too much then they'll just see a thousand places where it ain't true yeah if God is Almighty why didn't he do something about slavery yeah why didn't he she do something about you know the Holocaust you know like when I was making the point Mary is not God I'm trying to keep her in her true place if you continue I think in that same page it says she's a god she's us she's the included one but the feminine symbol for at least those of us from the Orthodox and Catholic tradition she's the symbol of the eternal yes that God needs from all humanity now animals and trees we call this instinct or intuition I guess or genetics they have the s planted in them naturally you and I have the yes planted in us voluntarily yeah because you can't have love without freedom you can love does not exist except in the realm of freedom so preserving that freedom which God has given us to name the animals to to sin we're up to Genesis three now was God's great risk the great risk God took so that he could be loved she could be loved freely in return not out of fear not out of guilt not out of shamed and once you go down that road you realize how many centuries we waste it on fear-based religion because if you threaten people into God if you threaten people into belief the final product is not love let me just leave it at that it doesn't produce loving people I've been a priest 49 years this year I just fear that we created a set of filters in all of our denominations none of us are free from this so it must be the nature of the ego we've created a filter that in fact let in fear-based people they were the ones attracted to the message when I see the lack of civil rights the lack of kindness love caring in and lack of service the vast amount of Christians in my observation I hope I'm wrong but they appear to be attenders at services not lovers of the world instead that doesn't even need much proof it's overwhelmingly true that we defined ourselves by attending and intellectually believing but not by loving because again you start with a problem you end with a problem are an even greater problem when you start by appealing to fear and threat are using threats I don't think you could gather the great lovers and I say that having that so many activists here in our own school or going on our 32nd year of the center and we founded it to help people who were working for social change do it better do it from a place of love a place of freedom a place of grace but it also made me aware of how most the students who came had not been trained in that and that's why they left Christianity again and again and again it was not a school of love it was a school of Conformity which my own seminary was you were rewarded and promoted to the next grade if you had shown you knew how to conform this was especially strong in Catholicism I think but I found it takes different forms in every every religion so you end up with an unloving wholes love does not dominate the field it's obedience loyalty saluting whatever needs to be saluted but not building homes for the poor let's just make it very practical [Music] I have a follow-up question to his question on pantheism your response on panentheism oh yeah I didn't complete that please go ahead really I lose my train of thought no it was good uh so in in the universal Christ one of the things that struck me most about the book was your assertion that comes up many times around the whole thing being sacred oh yes and we grow up with so many dichotomies around secular and sacred yeah you know supernatural and natural and and I found that wildly provocative of you to basically yeah to to break those barriers and also then to assert that the whole thing is a miracle I mean I I mean we're seeing a large move in the church around well someone calls the supernatural culture and I know you have a lot of experience or have had waves of renewal or charismatic understanding and your history is how do you reconcile your Catholicism your charismatic leanings in terms of you know the activity of the Holy Spirit and potentially even the idea of gifts of the Holy Spirit while also understanding this universal concept that everything belongs and there is no divide between natural and supernatural there's no let me start with the answer in one sentence but then try to fill in the gaps there is no distinction between natural and supernatural except in the mind no but that's a distinction because how you operate in the mind is how you're gonna operate so yeah so once the mind accepts that now if you need some scripture remember the wonderful story in Acts where God says to Peter how dare you call anything unclean that is clean where and and they it took that for Peter to move out of his tribal Judaism to a Catholic you know the way I'm using the word universal notion that was beyond tribalism was Karl Rahner there one of the my five greatest teachers he was a German Jesuit in fact the first frontispiece quote is from him but his whole teaching was on the supernatural existential and I mean he goes a great intellectual length in essence you might be able to say well that's a secular thing and this is a sacred thing again you're doing it in your mind but on the level of existence encounter with reality there is no place where God is absent there's no place that may be called profane just as Peter is told in acts to the Apostles so the supernatural existential in the case of existence practical life everything is holy if your mind allows it to be you know what reveals that as a given is this whole notion of forgiveness you know which might be God's great work to forgive reality for being imperfect and you've probably heard me say in years past every time God forgives God is saying I would rather have a relationship than be right I know you broke the law that's not the point anymore I want to maintain really God has the authority apparently the ability the inclusivity to do that so I always say divine perfection is precisely the ability to include imperfection and that's God's prerogative but what we have usually operated out of as a human notion of perfection which is almost always the exclusion of seeming imperfection and what we see after 2,000 years is we cannot any longer grant that right to human beings Wow to decide you know what's sacred and what's profane because we pollute it again and again and again I think the gospel takes away from us the right to say that sacred and that's profane and so I'm calling that I don't know if I use the word in the book ontological basis for holiness ontology is the science of being so once we find holiness planted in everything from the moment of its creation from the beginning then there's no picking and choosing anymore do you understand it's not up to you to decide that why people have the image and black people don't where'd that come from it came from the ego that came from the power needs of a group and it's been so constant and continues now that I have no reason to believe it's going to change unless we declare the ontological basis in reality itself Universal ubiquitous the gift is given we are those paul was searching for words like you are sealed in the Holy Spirit there you can tell he understands this at least at an intuitive level but later Christianity particularly in the West did not understand that it limited it to human beings and as history when long to less and less human beings so it hardly ended up being good news for all the people as the Angels announced already at Bethlehem this incarnation is good news for all the people we just couldn't comprehend that level of inclusivity you know you've heard me teach from Ken Wilber his phrase that many of us use of transcend and include we've turned it around and the students are finding so much more help in it we now speak of it as the principle of include and transcend we put the word include first and that has garnered universal response from all of our students my god that's the better way to say it I never thought I could improve ken wilber but your variability to include is the transcending it to a higher level of consciousness whereas you you leave it up to the ego transcend and once I get higher I can include that's gonna have some dangerous results but include and transcendence that I could say that on this podcast cuz that's new I wasn't saying that for the last ten years [Music] this has been part one of a two-part episode with Richard Rohr called the universal Christ please continue to the next file in your podcast feed to hear part 2 this episode was produced by victory Palmisano project management was provided by Corey Pig editing and sound design by Greg Moore Dean music was provided by Michael hunger and tyler chester management was by brent cradle and your for host this week have been hillier McBride Michael Hunger William Matthews and me science Mike thanks for listening and we'll see you in just a moment for part 2