My uncle keeps asking me to listen to the Catholic priest Richard Rohr. I don’t know much about Rohr, except he’s an intellectual, in the tradition of thinkers like Thomas Merton or Eckhart Tolle.
(I’ve been blessed that in my family and my extended family we’ve always been surrounded by books and quality thinkers, and encouraged to read the original source texts of religions and philosophers and be curious, and talk openly about them. I say this because it’s normal to me. But I’ve heard some people’s religious upbringing and it was awful. So if you’ve run into that, this might not land.)
At any rate, I did listen to the YouTube clip below, and I set aside one of Rohr’s books to read later. One quote from the YouTube clip stood out, even though I didn’t understand it at first. I’ve been working through it, and now I think I get it. Rohr says:
“Nothing dies, everything is transformed…but we pulled Jesus out of the Trinity and tried to understand Him as a standalone figure…it was meant to be a universal cosmic statement of how reality works….Jesus is meant to be the universal archetype, the cosmic stand in, of everything”
Here’s what I think that means, even though I admit I don’t fully understand it. Christians believe that God loves humanity. This is not necessarily what other cultures believe. Some cultures believe life is suffering, some believe the purpose of life is to gain glory, others believe that we are all one.
Christians justify their belief that God loves us by saying that God became a regular human, and felt pain. According to that belief, this is love, because it shows that God gets involved in human affairs. And of course, they believe that God was killed for humans who didn’t deserve it, and that this is love.
If I understand Rohr correctly, he’s saying that Jesus is therefore the symbol of love. I think he’s saying don’t get too fixated on understanding Jesus because that’s missing the point. The point is what that story tells us about the belief that God loves us.
And then this, which jumped out at me, because it drives the reason home:
“When all of history isn’t hopeful, when society isn’t hopeful..it’s really hard to heal as individuals…Christianity was meant to be a cosmic hope for history”
The writer Grant Morrison (a chaos magician, of all things) first introduced me to this idea – that symbols of hope move us forward. Morrison takes it a step further, arguing that this makes the writer’s task sacred. To write hopeful things is to write a hopeful future. And if I understand Rohr correctly, Christianity is hope, because it means we’re loved, and being loved means there’s always hope that we’ll figure this out.
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