This past week's theme was, "This Is My Body." He was exploring the traditional Christian concept of "incarnation" in what for many would be a highly provocative way. That's one of the things I absolutely love about his writing. It puts me in mind of phrase I learned during my chaplaincy training (about which I wrote back in May), "Tell me about this God you don't believe in. I probably don't believe in that God either." Rohr seems to me to be saying, "Tell me about this teaching you don't believe. I probably don't understand it that way."
What is the meaning of the word, "Christ." It's often been said, "'Christ' isn't Jesus' last name." It's often understood as signifying Jesus' God-hood. Yet what if you don't believe in those teaching? What if you believe that Jesus was a man, a human person, who was not God but had, instead,
"[an] identification with God so complete, [a] relationship so intimate, that they seemed to be one and the same. Jesus saw the world with God's eyes; he loved the world with God's heart; and his acts were ultimately the acts of God. Those who looked at Jesus saw God's face, and they met God directly through him." [That's from my first book, Teacher, Guide, Companion: Rediscovering Jesus in a Secular World, p. 38.]What does this do to the concept of "the risen Christ"? There is a spiritual way of understanding it that does not require the overthrow of the human experience of life and death. John Dominic Crosson notes that the word "resurrection" is different from the word "restitution," and that one need not believe in the later to believe in the former.
In the meditation "The Universe is the Body of God," he quotes the theologian Sallie McFague:
"The resurrected Christ is the cosmic Christ, the Christ freed from the body of Jesus of Nazareth, to be present in and to all bodies."That certainly changes things!
So often we get stuck with a particular understanding of a word, rather than experiencing a reality. So often we refuse to see anything in a particular teaching because of the way we were taught to think of it. Yet at least equally as often, to quote Inigo Montoya, "I do not think that word means what you think it means." And if you take that new meaning with you back into the rest of the text and the teachings, whole new meanings open up.
Christianity is by no means the only way we humans have tried to make sense of that space between being born and having to die. Yet for those who have left behind that Christian tradition in which they were raised, or who have never even explored it because of what they've heard it's about, I offer an encouragement to look again, and to look anew. You might be surprised by what you find.
This is one of the ways a spiritual director/companion can help you with your journey. They provide a space in which to dance with questions of meaning.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
