Richard Rohr The Universal Christ

‘Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside’ wrote GK Chesterton, big picture Christian of the last century. Where are the big picture Christians of today with the ear not just of the church but the world? Franciscan monk Richard Rohr is one of them though on the fringe on account of his occasional sparring with church authority. Like Merton he writes with a depth that appeals beyond religion blessing unhappy relativists and materialists as well as over cerebral believers. ‘The Universal Christ’ is his magnum opus and it thrills with the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ.

Rohr builds like Teilhard de Chardin from the first chapters of John, Ephesians, Colossians and Hebrews which point to the cosmic pre-existent Christ, to how the incarnation is anticipated at creation and how love holds everything together. ‘Christ is both the Divine Radiance at the Beginning Big Bang and the Divine Allure drawing us into a positive future. We are thus bookended in a Personal Love - coming from Love, and moving toward an ever more inclusive Love. This is the Christ Omega! (Rev. 1:6)’. The big picture for Rohr is everything and everything is Christ.

‘Without a universal story line that offers grace and caring for all of creation, Jesus is kept small, and seemingly inept. God’s care must be toward all creatures, or God ends up not being very caring at all, making things like water, trees, animals, and history itself accidental… What if we recovered this sense of God’s inherent grace as the primary generator of all life?... The evolutionists rightly want to say the universe is unfolding, while believers can rightly insist on the personal meaning of that unfolding… God has worked anonymously since the very beginning—it has always been an inside and secret sort of job. The Spirit seems to work best underground. When aboveground, humans start fighting about it.’

Such a paragraph gives inspirational taster of Fr Rohr’s new book even if betrays his his unsettling prophetic gift. It’s as if a modern day Thomas Merton spelled out his later universalism knocking religious heads together, an image he goes Rohr actually goes beyond at one point. He speaks of Christians needing to take their heads off, let alone their glasses, and put them back on with new thinking! Such thinking owes much to Teilhard de Chardin in its appreciation of evolution as an unfolding that is both material and spiritual.

As spiritual guide over his 75 years Richard Rohr is practised at pointing people forward from thought and prayer into action. He writes ‘Jesus was clearly more concerned with what Buddhists call ‘right action’ (‘orthopraxy’ in Christianity’) than with right saying, or even right thinking’. His book is timely in its Franciscan call to action over the spoiling of creation and, here respectful of church authority, builds from Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment. A piece of art Rohr applauds is a statue of St Francis gazing down in awe at dirt on the ground. The Holy Spirit doesn’t only come from above but reaches up from the earth. 

‘I doubt if you can see the image of God (Imago Dei) in your fellow humans if you cannot first see it in rudimentary form in stones, in plants and flowers, in strange little animals, in bread and wine, and most especially cannot honour this objective divine image in yourself. It is a full-body tune-up, this spiritual journey. It really ends up being all or nothing, here and then everywhere’. When people get that ‘tune-up’, capacity to contemplate the world with love, whether they are believers or not Rohr would see them as in Christ, ‘for them, as Thomas Merton says, ‘the gate of heaven is everywhere’ because of their freedom to respect what is right in front of them - all the time.’

People are often more correct in what they affirm than what they deny. Richard Rohr has a lot that’s sound to affirm, most of all the universal love of God, even if he skirmishes with Evangelicalism and traditional Catholicism. I found ‘The Universal Christ’ a book I could commend to a thoughtful seeker friend on the grounds it both comforted and discomforted me. In provoking such dialogue within Christians it will serve important conversations with people outside church walls but like us, to return to Chesterton, inside the cosmos.

Richard Rohr The Universal Christ
How a forgotten reality can change everything we see, hope for and believe
SPCK 2019 Kindle Edition £5.03 ASIN B07NPGJ2NB 274pp

Canon John Twisleton 16 October 2019