Christ-Soaked World

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit caac.org. Welcome to season one of another name for everything. Casual conversations with Richard Roar exploring the core themes of his new book, The Universal Christ. This podcast was recorded in a tiny hermitage on the grounds of the Center for Action and Contemplation, a nonprofit founded by Richard Roar, located in Elbacriqui, New Mexico. Because of that, you may hear neighborhood sounds, such as sirens, dogs, and the occasional llama orgle. We're your hosts. I'm Paul Swanson. And Brie Stoner. We're staff members of the Center for Action and Contemplation and students of this contemplative path. Trying our best to live the wisdom of this tradition amid stipers, disruptions, and the shifting state of our world. This is the first of 12 weekly episodes. Today, we'll be discussing the first chapter titled, "Christ is Not Jesus Last Name." As we talk about the themes of the Universal Christ, how do you explain the Christ to a child? Well, let me start with this. And you know this as parents. The wonderful thing is that they don't have trouble believing what you say to them, which is why you're taking such risks if you don't give good stuff. But you know, just like they believe animals can talk and animals can be their friends, they understand relationship, friendship, through the way you've mediated friendship to them as mother or father. So you know, certainly the most simple language of love, caring for you, protecting you, always everywhere all the time. They don't have trouble believing that kind of language. To us, it all almost sounds sentimental and like a sell job. I don't think it's heard by a small child as a sell job, but a wonderful unfolding presence that they can rely upon. So any language that communicates presence, availability, caring, protection, because as you know, children do have their little fears at night and so forth. You wonder where that early fear comes from, but to be assured that there's someone protecting them. And they're not alone and there's someone they can call upon. Yeah, I mean, they're not ready for my dang sophisticated theology of distinction between Jesus and Christ. They don't need it yet. They don't need it. I think now we need it, but children don't. It's all presence, presence. However, you can communicate presence and caring presence. The trouble is a lot of us. I'm not trying to be negative, but a lot of us were raised with threatening presence. Who's watching you and sees everything you do and knows every thought you have and always said in a terribly threatening way. That was not at all a good communication of the Christ presence. In fact, it was the Antichrist. It was the opposite of the experience. You mentioned relationships as being part of how we build that sense of presence with children. I wonder what relationships in your life have been part of the significant expansion into a more cosmic Christ. I think for myself, many of the greatest recognitions haven't been theoretical. They've been trying to create relationships. I wonder if you could share any of the relationships that come to mind for you that helped you experience the universal Christ. Yes. I think it was precisely after I had, maybe by the intention of others, stretched myself into otherness. What came to mind this morning was, remember when I was living in Dayton as a a theologian, one of my ministries was to go to an inner-city hospital. They did an interview with my approach and they said, "You're one man, welcome wagon." You're overdoing it. Cool. I was trying so hard to console and meet all these people, but it was genuinely Christ-soaked experience because it was my first move, really, outside of the world that I had been living in, of Catholics who were mostly white, who were mostly middle-class. I remember that passing over that edge, how do I relate to a poor black man? Then the recognition that not only could I do it, but it was wonderful. That was my early Christ experience. I think the Christ will always be experienced when you cross the line into otherness. If you try to pull it all into sameness, you stay with people just like me. I don't think you experienced the Christ. You might have some cozy Jesus experiences that you call Jesus' experiences, but they're not even worthy of Jesus because you're largely loving yourself. Thinking you've expanded the circle of encounter. There has to be an expanded circle. Or it isn't Christ for you. You used a phrase just a moment ago, that is one of my favorite of yours, which is Christ's soaked world. What does that phrase mean to you? What can we learn from that imagery? What I believe, and I believe the scriptures say, but we just weren't told to look for it, is that reality was christened. If I can use that word, I know we've given from the very beginning, from the moment of its inception. Now it's interesting that we use the metaphor of anointed, pouring oil over something to reveal its sacredness, starting with the stone of Jacob. Beth L, this is the house of God. This is the gate of heaven. So we see this mounting recognition in the Bible of presence of presence. So I'm so glad that phrase struck you that reality is already soaked with the presence. And we sought a metaphor like anointing to remind us of what was already there, to say, this is sacred. The oil doesn't make it sacred. The anointing of something makes you hopefully, that worked a lot of the time for many people, and makes him aware, this person, this rock is sacred. So we anoint not just people, but at least in the Catholic Church, we anoint the walls of churches, we anoint holy stones to say, this is presence. That's good stuff. And of course, that's the meaning of the word Christ. Christ is simply the Greek word for messiah, Messiah, the anointed one. And the trouble is that we limited that anointing to the unique body of Jesus, and then didn't convince many people that was true. Because once you go on the limiting course, it's only here, it's not there. Then you create argumentative Christianity, deciding what is anointed and what is not. So when I say Christ soaked world, I'm talking a creation spirituality, that, well, Ephesians 1, 3, no, yes, Ephesians 1, 3. So one of my favorite verses, you were chosen in Christ from the beginning. Further on, before the world began, you were chosen. So maybe speaking of human election at that point, in Romans 8, he sees it in terms of nature too. All natures is longing to reveal the sons and daughters of God, that even the natural world, as my father Francis says, is brothers on Sister Moon. It's all in the family of Christ's soakness. We just weren't trained to see it that way, very unfortunately. And now we thought we could. torture animals, pollute the earth, kill people who were not Christ soaked, because we thought it was up to us to decide. She's got the anointing and he doesn't. You cannot leave that choice to the human being. That choice comes from the divine anointing. And I don't think we were able to see that. That we would always choose to find people like us, groups like us, countries like ours to be anointed. And if you don't mind me being a bit Catholic, you know what I'm going to say, but another thing that became usually argumentative was the presence in bread and wine. It's just the same mystery and saying it's true at the elemental level. Elements contain the presence. Now we made it too much, well the priest is the magician who makes the presence happen. We brought it right back to ourselves, you know, not the honoring presence in the elemental world of food in this case. That's good stuff. It really is. If we'd only understood you, Christ, as the the taking of the notion of presence, not just to people, but to things. And then Augustine's notion of keep feeding people this thing supposedly until they know that they are what they eat and they are the body of Christ too. The whole thing is the body of Christ. But that's a mystical knowing and you'll never be able to prove that nor do you need to because the journey toward that seeing is the journey toward enlightenment. And it is a journey. You don't get it all in one minute. You get it by many moments of reverence, of respect, of as roomy would say kneeling and kissing the ground. Many moments like Jacob of pouring the oil on the rock and saying, this is the gate of heaven. This is it. You know, by normal Jewish theology that would be paganism. It sounds like a Hindu temple. That's right. Pouring oil on a rock and saying, this is the gate of heaven. That's I take that as the first concrete image of what became the Christ mystery. Well, we're still uncomfortable with this material. Yes. Our own materiality and everything else. Yeah. And that was made so much worse by that seeming incompatibility between Christianity and science. And that kind of the way that that upheld that discomfort with materiality and made it easier to build theories of escaping out of this world. So that makes me think about, it makes me think about our origin story. And what was it you were saying to me Paul? We were talking about origin story and you said something about comic book heroes. Yeah. I'm not a huge comic book person at all. But I find the origin stories of these kind of superheroes as a matter of narrative to be the most fascinating, the most interesting. And there seems to be like a elemental primacy in those stories that are far more interesting than say stories that come later about, you know, what is Thor up to in movie eight. Yeah. So it's like that the importance of our origin story and how that then impacts how we view the world. And specifically for myself and for many of us growing up being handed this creation story in which it all kind of boils down to a hungry woman with unfortunate timing, you know, there has to be, there has to be something more for us beyond that story that we can, that can allow us to have a greater view. And I noticed you do that in your book. You talk a lot about the importance of creation and in the beginning to name this Christ in the beginning. And I wondered if you could talk to us about what is the relationship between the origin story and Christ. Wow, that's a book right there. How you begin sets the trajectory. And you know, I just sat at this weekend to a conference that I say if there's any chapter or book of the Bible that's inspired, it's going to be the first chapter of Genesis. And yet I would like to point out, isn't it interesting even in the first and second chapter of Genesis, there's two maybe three versions of the origin story, which are all lumped together, which was supposed to set us up like the four gospels did. You know, there's not one official one. I don't know how people had four gospels said there's only one true interpretation. Well, there's four interpretations of the same healing story in almost every healing story in the New Testament and the same in Genesis that we have two probably three, some say four, eventually in the book of Genesis, four different accounts. So already we're we're given inspiration, but a hint that there's not only one way to see it, this should have kept us from this horrible notion of supposedly biblical inerrancy, but as you well know, that was bad enough, but then we didn't really begin with our origin story, original blessing, it was good, it was good, it was good, it was good, it was very good, Genesis one, but for a very perverse reason, it seems to me, we decided to begin with Genesis three, the problem, the sin, eating that dang apple. Bad timing. I think the human mind likes to wrap itself around a problem and then think of itself as the problem solver. See, my denomination has solved the problem by pouring water at the right time with the right words and baptizing. Think of all the fights we've had over baptism. Yeah. Yeah. Who pours a whim to the poor? What do they say? Child, they're an adult. A child or adult? And did they really have faith or did they not have faith? It all became problem-solving Christianity, whereas the problem really, and I'm not exaggerating, was solved in the first chapter. There is no problem. It is good, it is good, it is good, it is good, it is good, it is very good. Well, no, it's really bad. We just prefer to start with a negative. Now we know with brain studies that that is true of the human brain, that it wraps around negativity, fear and problems. It doesn't know how to rest in contentment. That's why we treat our teach various processes of meditation to learn how to rest in thisness, in nowness, in enoughness. Because you have to retrain the mind, at least at this point in history, but it must have often been that way, because much of history repeated this problem of loving problems. So, with our love of problems, did we just collapse Jesus into Christ and then leave that there as opposed to seeing Christ as something, it is good, it is good, it is good from the beginning. How does that change, how does that change it for us? How does Christ change our perspective on the origin story? Well, you said it very well. In fact, I might quote you on that. We collapse Jesus into Christ. And here's the problem with that. Now, here I am, but it leaves 13.7 billion years, empty of presence, empty of God. Are you just, are you really telling me, and am I supposed to believe that God only started talking 2,000 years ago? Or even, four to, at most, 5,000 years ago, which is drip in time, with the beginning of the writing of the Bible. God was not talking before we wrote the Bible, and that's why the early Franciscans believed that creation was the first Bible. Nature was the first Bible, which is stated as, you know, in Romans 1, 20, everything we need to know about God is in the world as it is created. Marvelous line. But yeah, we just, we pretty much had Jesus without Christ. And that's why I think this is such an important notion. Because then this Jesus became something that we could capture and encapsulate in our moment of time, in our Spanish culture, American culture, Lutheran culture, whatever it might be. It was all too tiny. The Christ keeps Jesus from being tiny, are malleable, are usable, because it's too big for the human mind to contain it, or control it. That's so helpful. It is helpful, if I can, I can preach it to myself. I just say, why didn't I say this with that clarity 40 years ago? But we're ready for it now, even though I'm sure the book is going to get a lot of pushback. But I thought that from the naked now book. And it's the only book that I haven't got a single negative letter on. So I'm ready to be surprised that people are ready for a bigger frame, a bigger frame, a non-dual frame that we're not lessening Jesus, we're not replacing Jesus with Christ, but we're saying the two notions, the two realities balance and inform one another and fulfill one another, really, both of them. God should just change his everything. It really does. That's why the initial title as I gave was another name for everything. Yeah. And that's Christ. And I do emphasize thing. It's not a name for every concept. Concepts are not infreshment. The word became flesh. So Christ is precisely thinness, reification, physicality, materiality in rudimentary forms like rock, and all the way from there. All the way up to our messy humanity. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, following that thread, I'm curious with the way that science and religion have been separate into two camps. It's ridiculous. And in a way, it seems like part of what you're offering in this book is how the universal Christ can heal that divide. Can you speak more to that? I'd love to. Do you see how because we didn't understand embodiment in carnation, which is our only real unique message in Christianity, we splints again with our dualistic mind from those who analyze the physical world. They were beneath us. They were called scientists. They only knew about physicality. We know about spirituality. What we fail to recognize is that the spirit was hiding itself, revealing itself, knowing itself in and through physical reality. If we would not have made that split, we would have been much less eager to diminish or dismiss the scientific mind. They were knowing what could be seen with the eye. We were knowing we hope, although not very well, it seems. The meaning, the full meaning of what we're seeing with the physical eye. But those are not in intention. Well, maybe they're intention, but they're not in competition with one another. Once we know the physical world is revealing the spiritual world, then my gosh, engineers, mechanics and scientists are our friends. We were talking a moment before about that marvelous Ken Burns show on PBS last night about the Mayo Clinic and how in Rochester, Minnesota. And how much it was formed by the faith of these Franciscan nuns. I was so proud of them. They kept saying it all the way through the whole show. These nuns were Franciscans and who saw no problem with working together with doctors who were secular. It was a wonderful message. The doctors were secular. The nuns are spiritual, but they loved and trusted one another and produced by most accounts the greatest hospital on the earth. Because neither of them asked the other to compromise. The nuns respected the physical medical training of the doctors. And for some wonderful reason, Dr. Mayo and his two sons respected and needed the love and the devotion of the nuns who at that point were all the nurses. All the nurses were nuns. So they brought a different kind of devotion. None of them were doing it for salaries. None were doing it. So they could help the poor from the beginning. And we didn't have the thing today where only the rich get health care. Yeah. Anyway, off the point. Quite the embodiment of the spiritual and the science. And I'm really moved by that phrase you just used to say that we don't need to compromise one for the other. And I think that's really a huge problem that so many of us have with the frameworks and the religious paradigms that we've been handed is that we were given them and asked to compromise our intellectual integrity or our love of this world or our love of creation. And so I find that to be really helpful to think that there could be a Christianity in which I don't have to compromise my love of science or this world in any way. My love of my brain. Jesus does say to love God with your old mind. The mind is not diminished. And here's the irony of the whole thing. We became so threatened by rationalism after the Enlightenment are the scientific method. And then in the strangest and most silly kind of way, we took on our own form of rationalism to compete with this mind that we hated. And we lost what I would call the contemplative mind. Our unique access point. I mean, biblical fundamentalists. I know this sounds like a contradiction. They're actually rationalists. And what I mean by that, they create a little frame inside of which there's a certain kind of logic. Oh, it makes, oh yeah, I lived it. It made perfect sense when I was in it. As long as you stay in that frame and don't talk to anybody outside of it, you're actually insisting on reason, not faith, while calling it faith. That's the trap that fundamentalist religion is in. It actually has huge control needs. And reason has huge control needs. Faith doesn't. And that's what gives it free access, open access. It isn't preoccupied with controlling the data that's coming in. So it allows you to be much more patient and kind, frankly, it should. But that's not the religion we have today. Most people do not associate, forgive me, Christians with being patient and kind. They don't. Right. Which shows where our own kind of very degraded rationalism. Yeah. Or even, or even being comfortable being human. Yeah. We spend so much time avoiding our messiness and our faults and our failures and our. Skiesing them. Yeah. Yeah. Which maybe to the first question is part of why I'm having so much difficulty in my thirties is that I'm coming about full circle into a full acceptance of my humanity, maybe even for the first time. And it's very different. And you'll never stop. Right. I still feel I'm doing that at 75. Yeah. Accepting my humanity, seeing my humanity, and daring to believe that it could be beloved of God. It never stops. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's good to know that the road ahead is more of the same in a way. Like in constant practice. I don't think it changes. Just you get more practiced at trusting it, allowing it, and not needing it to be perfect or right. Even by your own criteria. Yeah. Perfect and right. But that just springs to mind the frameworks of my own Christian upbringing of thinking that how I identify as a Christian was knowing who's in and who's out. Of course. And then in this journey of more inclusivity, it's been a wonderful unfolding. And I think, you know, you've been drawing that roadmap for a lot of folks. And I'm curious, Richard, how did you go from into a more inclusive framework where you could dare to say things like God loves things by becoming them? I quote that three times in the book, don't I? Or I say that. I don't know if I read it somewhere else. I don't think I did. If I did forgive me. But I was so proud of myself. I came up with that verse. God loves things by becoming them. That's a good one. Well, it is a good one wherever it came from. Because I think it's also a bit truth. You know, well, it's mirrored already in the Trinity. God loves the Father just to use Trinitarian classic language. God loves the Son by being one with the Son. So you've got the Father. The Son loves the Spirit by being one with the Spirit, but giving the Spirit. So it's becoming and giving, becoming and giving, having over and receiving endlessly. So I think it was reflection on the doctrine of the Trinity. Then, moving out from that, reflection on the belief in incarnation, that he loved humanity by becoming humanity. But then, pretty much, we stopped the cycle there. And we all worshiped, we Christians, the body of Jesus. And we're real happy that Jesus came there. Our God came there into that body. But we're not ready to expand it. And for me, that's the whole point. You've heard me talk a lot about moving from the personal to the universal and the concrete to the universal. The first 2,000 years of Christianity, we largely were in awe of the concrete. And I'm going to try to say that in a positive way. I don't think there was any ill will or it took all of the effort we could to kneel and kiss the ground before the presence in this one little baby in Bethlehem. But we did the same thing with the Catholics, with the Eucharist. Took all of the faith we could to dare to believe that the divine presence was in a piece of bread. So we worshiped the bread. And even in our own canon law, we said, "Sacharanta, Pro-Popolis, the sacraments of the sake of the people, they're not an end in themselves. They're the sake of the transformation of people. But often they just became the exercises of priests. So we would be in awe of this magical, priestly class who could bring the divine presence to us. And that's what's falling apart now. Thank God. This idolatry of the medium, instead of the accessing of the message. And you Protestants did it with the Bible. We Catholics did it with the church and the priesthood. But it's the same idolatry. It's the same loving the medium instead of the message. And what you've been talking about, previous to this, about how some of the same things you wrestled with in your 30s, you continue to wrestle with now. Who do you struggle to include now as you've grown at this inclusive framework? Is there anything come to mind? Well, yeah, I am. I'm sure if I be totally honest, it's people who are like me at my worst, righteous people, judgmental people, overly zealous people, all of which I am. And when I see it in other people, I have a very hard time accepting it. A fairer say a call, Christian, a righteous Christian. And then I transfer that to the political sphere. When a whole group of politicians on our present American political scene can never admit they're wrong, can never even laugh. There's some of them I swear, I'm waiting for them once to crack a smile. They can't. And when you're hiding behind loads of illusion, you don't have time to smile. No, no, no. So I see through that because I'm so damn serious. But then I have a hard time loving it and forgiving it and other people. You know, little people, humble people, sincere people like you, no trouble. That takes no effort whatsoever. But give someone who's rigid and righteous. I just need divine grace to know how to see Christ in them. They're a huge blockage. You know, I can almost get to the point where I can fully embrace an incarnational world view like you're talking about. And I'm so moved by your humility and naming that what bothers you about other people or what really what triggers you, you say is something that you see in yourself. It's my worst self. Yeah. And so for me, you know, you say this beautiful phrase that a Christian is one who can recognize Christ and everyone and everything. And I can almost do that except when it comes to that humiliating mirror toward myself of my own shit and shortcomings. And, you know, so what helps you embrace your own incarnation, I guess. I wonder if it's not a necessary tension to be the pushback against any glib thought that you are enlightened, converted, saved, loving. I just use, I get to see every day how I'm not loving. I had massed this morning at the parish church down in the corner, all dressed up at seven o'clock and there were several people at a hard time loving for very judgmental reasons on my side. These people who were the most pious and cyst on falling to their knees at communion time. And they're the least involved in the church. They do no service. But when they're there attending a service, they're the most pious of all. I just, I could not love them. And I asked, okay, Lord, let me let positive energy flow toward that person. But I think you have to have those kinds of resistance to make that choice to plug into the bigger source. I Richard do not have the grace to love this lady on her humble knees in front of me, leaving on the tongue and clearly dramatizing to the whole church that I am very authentic. So I judge in my mind she's inauthentic. I hate that hardness of heart in me even if it's only momentary. I think that has to happen. I don't know any other way. So keep relying upon mercy, choosing grace, surrendering to love unless you see it's in capacity in yourself. It's non-presence in yourself. So that's what you've heard me say years ago. Sin is part of the deal. Yeah. If we think we're ever going to get rid of it. Yeah. We've got to not do it to learn what it means to do it right, to have it be done to you in a better way. That really helps me. Richard think about one way that I can embrace the universal Christ beyond just a concept, but in my own life as embracing my shortcomings, my failures, my, you know, moments of I can't do it as an opportunity to rest in something bigger. That's really helpful for me. Thank you. That makes me happy. Thank you. I'm going to continue to work on my plan for perfection. So Richard, we wanted to close that conversation by asking you the question, where have you seen or experienced Christ this week? This week? Yeah. Now, you know, I have to go back maybe because it's just a few hours ago to that same mass this morning. Other people in the church, I was able to deeply respect and love. The flow was natural, was immediate, was drawn out of me by their sheer goodness. So I think that's often the way we're drawn into the Christmassy, where it's pulled out of us by the beauty, the goodness, or the truth of another situation or another person. But how is it a Christ experience if this makes sense? When I surrendered to it, allowed the flow to happen, I experienced a leap of joy, whereas when I resisted it and the lady who had fallen to her knees and received communion on her tongue, I didn't experience a leap of joy. Now, let me explain. I think when you see Christ, when you're in the flow, you experience what Paul calls "ingulations," the fruits of the Spirit, the second fruit of the Spirit, he lets his joy. I just got to be selfish and honest about it. When I allow the flow to happen and can see Christ, as I get in some of the people in churches morning, there I felt joy. When I stopped that flow and judged this woman who might be suffering a great deal, who knows? And her fault for her knees might be entirely authentic. But I had no joy, just had a hard heart for her. It's like a hard, cold heart. So I experienced Christ already this morning when I let the flow happen unresistant. And I'll resume. my own judgments, my own analysis, my own positioning up and down, right and wrong. Once I get into that positioning, I'll always find a way to dismiss people who are somehow by my criteria, inferior, inadequate. So you see, I'm just as bad as the supposed Pharisees that I hate so much, but I see that Phariseism in me. When I see Christ in people and do not try to position them up or down, I experience joy. So if joy is the fruit of the Spirit, then I get to trust that is the true seeing. You follow that's the true seeing because there was no joy when my heart was hardened. However momentary it was, there are actually several people who were driving me crazy. Two of them are sitting across right now. For example, these two questioners who will not shut up. Let me get out of my day. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. The beautiful music you're listening to is provided by Bird Talker. Another name for everything with Richard Roar is produced by the Center for Action and Contemplation thanks to the generosity of our donors. If you're enjoying this podcast, consider rating it or sharing it with a friend to help create a bigger and more inclusive community. To learn more about Father Richard and to receive his free daily meditations in your electronic mailbox, visit cac.org. If you want to hear more about these ideas, it's parvin online community. Consider participating in the live webcast of our spring conference, March 28th through the 31st. For details and to register, visit cac.org/events. From the high desert of New Mexico, we wish you peace and every good. Do you feel called to walk a more contemplative path? The Center for Action and Contemplation is an educational nonprofit supporting the journey of inner transformation. Our programs and resources will help grow your consciousness, deepen your prayer practice, and strengthen your compassionate engagement with the world. Learn more about our resources such as publications, podcasts, email series and events at www.cac.org. [MUSIC]