The One You Feed - Father Richard Rohr on The Universal Christ

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

Father Richard Rohr is a globally recognized ecumenical teacher bearing witness to the universal awakening within Christian mysticism and the Perennial Tradition. He’s a Franciscan priest in the New Mexico Provence and the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque. In this episode, Eric and Father Richard discuss his most recent book, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe.Need help with completing your goals in 2019? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Father Richard Rohr and I Discuss…His book, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and BelieveWhat the word “Christ” means for himHow God loves things by becoming them, by uniting with themThat a mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone elseThe notion of God IN all things vs God IS all thingsHow Christ is a stand-in for everythingFocusing on the death of Christ and missing the life of ChristWhen God hides his faceThe difference between spiritual darkness and depressionA loss of the feeling of faith in God isn’t the same thing as a loss of faith in GodHow distraction doesn’t make you happyGod uses 3 things to draw us out of ourselves: goodness, truth and beautyLife doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderfulHow God uses evil for your transformationThat Jesus punishes nobodyWhen you return in kind – like Michael and the dragon – you become the dragonThe 2 virtues you need to move forward on the spiritual path: humility and honestyFather Richard Rohr Links:Center for Action and ContemplationTwitterFacebookWestin – their reason for being is to help you travel well – eat well, move well and sleep well. Welcome to wellness. Explore at Westin.comPhlur makes stunning, non-toxic perfumes, listing every ingredient and why it’s there. Visit www.phlur.com/wolf and use promo code WOLF to get 20% off first custom sampler setDoorDash – Don’t worry about dinner, let dinner come to you with DoorDash. Get $5 off your first order of $15 or more when you download the DoorDash app and enter promo code WOLFIf you liked this episode with Father Richard Rohr, you might also enjoy listening to these earlier interviews:Richard Rohr – Part 1 (2017)Richard Rohr – Part 2 (2017)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today's episode is brought to you by our newest Patreon members, Mick, Patricia, Christine, and Connor, and the rest of our members who support the show. If you'd like to become a member of our Patreon community and enjoy the many benefits of the membership, go to oneufeed.net slash join. Thanks. There has to be emptiness. Our fullness isn't very exciting. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.

This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Richard Brewer, a globally recognized ecumenical teacher bearing witness to the universal awakening within Christian mysticism and the perennial tradition. He's a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico province and a founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation. His new book is The Universal Christ, How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, hope for, and believe. Hi, Father Richard. Welcome to the show. We are excited to have you on again, and we are very

happy to be here another time at your Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque. It is lovely out here, and we had a lovely service that you did this morning that was really nice. Good. Good to have you. Yes. So we are going to be talking about your book, The Universal Christ, how a forgotten reality can change everything we see, hope for, and believe. But before we do that, we are going to start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love.

And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather, and he says, Well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, The one you feed. So I'd like to start by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. It really is a magnificently simple parable.

And, you know, you might say, oh yeah, of course. But I don't think most of our people in Western society have been trained to see it that way. In other words, they thought they could

entertain negativity, resentment, even toward themselves. And they wouldn't have a cost to pay for it. We didn't really emphasize the interior life. For all that Christianity, at least, thinks that it did, it really didn't. And people, as long as they didn't act out externally, thought they could walk around with that bad wolf, so-called. Resentments, angers, fears, judgments. And we see it now in our politics, in our church, our whole country,

how the bad wolf, if you want to call him that, our whole country, the bad wolf, if you want to call him that, his voice, her voice, whoever it is, is being easily heard, too easily heard, which means we're feeding him well. Yeah, it does seem to be the case in a lot of situations. So let's move into the new book. And you use the word the universal Christ. And usually when we hear Christ, we think Jesus Christ. You're talking about something different.

So tell me, what is Christ, that word for you? What does it imply? What does it imply? What does it mean? Well, first of all, let me say, so people don't think I'm taking them down a dead end, this is entirely orthodox, traditional, and scriptural, but it was just never emphasized. What happened, in effect, was Christ became Jesus' last name, as it were. Whereas if you read the New Testament, particularly the first chapters of Colossians, Ephesians, John's Gospel, first letter of John, first letter of Hebrews, they all say very clearly that Christ existed from all eternity.

Now we all know Jesus was born 2,000 years ago, but for convenience sake, it just was not worth making that distinction. I'm trying to understand why that was so true, and I can't help but think it has something to do, I'm going to say it just to make the point, with things like the Hubble telescope. Discovering in our lifetime the extent of the universe, that it's still expanding, and expanding at a faster pace, we're recognizing at a gut level, we have to have a God as big as all of this. And this God can't be limited to planet Earth.

And Jesus can't be limited to a sin that was committed by Adam and Eve between the Tigris and Euphrates River. In other words, very limited in a certain space-time continuum. And so thus far the book has received way more response, positive response that I'm getting, I'm sure there's negative out there, than I ever expected. And I think it's because the mind and the accompanying heart is ready for it. You know, there's not, I'm not getting the hate letters I got on some of my past books.

It's almost a relief, I think, to some people. Yeah. And so what you're talking about with Christ is this idea that an incarnational worldview, which is basically you say, but God loves things by becoming them. God loves things by uniting with them. And so really what you're talking about is seeing Christ in everything. What you're talking about is seeing Christ in everything. Yeah.

You know, again, that seems when you first hear it, oh, that's oversimplified. Because we haven't emphasized it or taught it even is why we have the social problems we have today and why Europe, at least in my opinion, which was once the totally Christian continent, isn't just post-Christian. In many ways, it's anti-Christian. The big wars came from the Christian continent. In other words, we left Christians the freedom to decide where the sacred was and where the sacred wasn't. And we've done it non-stop, beginning with anti-Semitism, already incipient in even the New Testament. Then we have heretics being worthy of being burned at the stake.

We have women always remaining inferior. Every century has its chosen person or persons where it doesn't have to see the sacred, which I'm calling the Christ. Once you leave that free to the individual ego to decide we now know after 2 000 years the results are tragic really tragic and then the earth itself or the animals you know nothing was except my group, my Christian group, those who said it just like me, and everybody else was worthy of disdain. Well, how can Jesus possibly be the Savior of the world

or the Lord of the universe? As John's gospel begins to think of him, if he's always just protecting a little tribe. We largely have, and I got to name it as such, tribal Christianity today. You know, Jesus was used as a way to hold my group together, not as a way to proclaim the divine presence in all things. Now, you know, just to add on, the most conservative little document that we Catholics grew up with in this country was called the Baltimore Catechism. And question 16 of the Baltimore Catechism, we had to memorize question and answer.

Sister would ask, where is God? And we'd all say, God is everywhere. This is so basic, we forget how basic it is. Right. And then much of the rest of the catechism pretended God, well, was not really everywhere. Really only in the Catholic Church, in our case. But then I found out,

after I started moving around the world, every other group did the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. You say that for you, a mature Christian sees christ in everything and everyone else and then you go also say that this incarnational view this seeing christ in everything is the key to mental and spiritual health as well as to basic contentment and happiness. No, because if the whole thing is beloved, if the whole thing is good, as Genesis 1 says,

five times in a row, it was good, it was good, it was good, it was good, it was good. It was very good. And it's really pernicious that with that as the starting of the narrative, we chose to start with the problem, Genesis 3. Why? Well, I think men in particular, if you'll allow me to say so, tend to be problem solvers. If you create a problem, I'm here to solve it to believe that there was no problem to begin with that it's all good it's all the child of God it's all beloved now let me throw in quickly because I know what some of our listeners are thinking. Well, he sounds like a pantheist to me. No, my opinion is not pantheism.

Pantheism means God equals all things. God and all things are the same. There's no distinction between creator and creature. The authentic belief of Orthodox Christianity, although most of us were never taught this word, is panentheism, to use the Greek word. God in all things. God revealed through all things. The divine DNA is inserted inside of all of reality.

And let me just add to that, how could it not be? If there's one creator who created all things, how could the divine imprint not be in a tree and a dog and the sky and the entire universe? Well, that really is a basis for mental health. You live in a world that is good and let's say it that isn't the perception of most people today they seem to feel that evil is even winning and i can see there are good evidence for that. But when we don't contrary that with the gospel,

people are left with a double whammy, it seems to me. Their intuitive observation of how much is going wrong. And then, well, even the Christian church says it's all going to hell in a handbag. All the recent, and it is recent, you know, teaching on Armageddon, Apocalypse Now, the rapture, left behind. The first church would not, the early church, let's take the, well, really the first thousand years, wouldn't have known what you were talking about.

This is a very recent version of the gospel that ends with a whimper and not a bang. And yet many Christians take that as our narrative. We're in trouble when that happens. Because a little kid growing up looking for a vision, a positive vision of meaning, direction, hope, purpose, won't find it there. If you only read one chapter in the book, just read the one on resurrection, because that is the Christian statement about the final end of history. Summarized in the body of Jesus, capitulated in the body of Jesus, but Jesus is a stand-in for everything. Jesus Christ is a stand-in for everything.

But again, most of us weren't taught to see it that way. Right, I think for most versions of Christianity, what's important about Jesus is that he died for our sins, his death. But you say that focusing solely on that, we miss his whole life. It's true. It sounds too oversimplified, but it's true. We really didn't need his life, his Sermon on the Mount, his humility, his tenderness, his compassion. His humility, his tenderness, his compassion.

All we needed, if you'll allow me to say it, was some warm blood at the end of his life inside a whole frame of retributive justice, which isn't the only definition of justice. But I must say, in history, it's been the most common one. Tit for tat, quid pro quo this much sin this much atonement or this much retribution so we settled for what I call a transactional understanding of Jesus where I believe the full meaning of Jesus and by the way this book will not Jesus and by the way this book will not lessen your love or appreciation for Jesus I would hope at least quite the contrary he gives us a transformational understanding of history

and his own transformation is the pattern of ours that's what I'm trying to say through the whole book I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really?

That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So I want to change gears a little bit and talk about something that you wrote in the book. And you were sort of talking about when God sort of pulls back or hides his face, right? Hides his face. But you said, I must be honest with you here about my own life. For the last 10 years, I have had little spiritual feeling, either consolation nor desolation. Talk to me about that experience and how you frame it within your faith.

And I'd also be interested in how you framed what I think might have been depressive episodes within your faith. Because you talk about Mother Teresa had these periods of darkness that people said was depression, and you're saying that's not really what it was. No, it isn't. So tell me more about all that. It's very funny you bring that up, because today's been one of those days. very funny you bring that up because today's been one of those days from the moment I woke up this morning my feeling tone was flat line just ok I guess I love God I want to love God I guess I love life I want to love life unless you have days like this, which among the Catholic mystics was called darkness,

or it would be comparable to the Buddhist notion of emptiness. Only when you come to that flatline day do you go deeper and draw upon deeper resources. I'd be willing to bet I'm going to have almost the opposite in the next few days because today I'm drawing upon no, I hope it doesn't come through my talk, but no positive, it doesn't mean negative

because I'm having no positive feelings. It's what I call flatline. Just, okay, it is what it is i believe but i don't feel so as the so many of the mystics put it the feeling has to be taken away so you choose so you decide to love i'm sure if you're married you have to do that a hundred times in your lifetime with your partner. Maybe a year. Yeah. You don't every day feel it.

You have to decide for it, choose it, rely upon past moments of intimacy or communion. And that allows you to go. I don't think there's any way to go deeper, except the dance of emptiness and fullness. If every day that you love Jesus was just a gush of emotion, and I've had many of those wonderful days in my life, you know, there's too much payoff for the ego. You don't really love Jesus. You love the feelings Jesus gives you after a while. So that's what the saints meant by God withdrawing his face.

There has to be emptiness. Our fullness isn't very exciting, to put it that way. We don't have much understanding of that. No offense, I'm not sure what religious tradition you come from, but the Protestant tradition had almost no teaching on darkness. Almost none. They had sin. When I talk about darkness, I'm not talking about sin.

Yeah. darkness, I'm not talking about sin. Yeah. And without that, without any good teaching on spiritual darkness, you don't grow very deep because you think you've lost faith when in fact you're being taught faith. You're being taught love and you're being taught hope. The three biggies. Yeah, that makes me think of a couple things. One of the lines that I may have used on this show more than any other is this idea that sometimes you can't think your way into right action, you have to act your way into right thinking. It's one of our principles. Yeah, and so that's kind of what you're talking about. It really is. Very good. But help me understand, how do you delineate, or is it not important to

delineate this darkness, this spiritual darkness, from what we would call depression? It's a very worthy question. I've alluded to it in several of my books. I think it comes down to a kind of underlying positivity that you can still do what you have to do, treat people with love and respect, willingly put one foot in front of the other. It's just what's withdrawn is the enjoyment, the feeling of joy isn't there. It's constantly choice, choice, choice. Whereas true depression, I'm told at least that you don't have those qualities

that you really find it hard to love hard to hope you know you're being held like this morning I would have to say I've prayed more I was in the car a couple times had to run home for something. And in most of my movements,

there's been a constant prayer. God, you've got to help me. I don't know why I'm doing today. Now, I don't know if I'd offer those prayers if I was feeling it. Do you understand? So it isn't a loss of faith in God. It's a loss of feeling faith in God. Yeah, anhedonia, right, which is the word that people will use for lack of enjoyment and things you normally get a lot of enjoyment. And this question is real near

and dear to me because i have dealt with depression most of my adult life and i've had a little bit of a flare-up recently but one of the things that i'm always sort of trying to process through for myself is is this depression is this what you're referring to as sort of a spiritual darkness? Is this just my temperament to a certain degree? Yeah. Right? Like a melancholy sort of... Sure. And so, just I'm always interested, and when I read that in your book,

I thought, I really want to bring this up with him. And you're making some very good distinctions. Because that has to be usually, at least, partially true. That some personalities are more inclined to a soberness. Let's just call it that, yeah. In me, I've always been rather serious uh so maybe i'm inclined to it more yeah but uh i always felt a basic underlying happiness but but i'm not a giddy or joke telling person i wish i were i love our director and some of the staff here because they are,

and they balance me out. I need people like that around me. Thanks for being so vulnerable because you're speaking for one-third the human race, at least. And probably two-thirds of our listeners. So one of the other things that you talk about is that the experience of God, and we referenced it a little bit, seeing Christ in everything. You say that anything that draws you out of yourself

in a positive way for all practical purposes is operating as God for you at that moment. God experience always expands your seeing and never constricts it. You know what to read. That's a jam-packed line. And every word is important. That, see, the boundaried self, the protected ego, or if you just want to call it the ego, the protected ego, or if you just want to call it the ego, doesn't know how to let the divine flow of grace,

the Trinitarian love that moves the whole universe, is the sap of the universe. It doesn't know how to let that flow. It dams it up inside of you. And there have to be, and God gives them constantly once you learn how to see. Since I've been talking to you, I'm looking out the window and noticing that the cherries are already coming out. They're real tiny, but on our little cherry tree out here. I don't know if you can see it. And that already made me happy. No, it takes so little to make you happy. made me happy. No. It takes so little to make you happy. And whatever is facilitating that flow,

you know, stopping the damned up, you can almost understand damn either way, is operating as Christ. And that's not being cutesy. If you don't find that, you really do stay inside of yourself. I think in so many movies and literature, the image of the Christian is often an anal retentive person who can't laugh now that isn't always true by any means but i think we've projected that storyline that we aren't people who are inside the flow of love and life and joy but we're we're primarily keeping the what we call the subject-object split. I'm over here as a subject. That cherry tree is an object for my objectification. It's not something I can momentarily merge with and love and appreciate and overcome the split,

so I'm knowing it subject to subject, delight to delight, like knows like. Once you can allow yourself to know things in that way, you're never far from contentment. I'm not even going to call it always, you know, a leap of joy, but something even better, a deep satisfaction that life is okay. Why is God allowing those cherries to emerge again? With no help from us, we just let it grow every year. It's so wonderful. But unless you see it at that level, you don't draw life.

It doesn't draw life out of you. Let me put it that way. Right. Yeah, you have a beautiful couple lines. You say, God seems to have chosen to manifest the invisible in what we call the visible. That's right. So that all things visible are the revelation of, and I love this phrase, God's endlessly diffusive spiritual energy.

Once a person recognizes that, it is hard to ever be lonely in this world again. See, if the whole universe is subject to subject, and let me describe what I mean by that. I'm not just talking to it, but I'm giving it voice and letting it be a thou, as Martin Buber would put it. I'm sure you're familiar with his I-thou relationship. But I let it, as it were, talk back to me and tell me about life, tell me about life. Tell me about God, a lovely blooming tree. You're connected in such a way that you can never be lonely again.

There's activity. There's agency. There's mutuality. There's giving and receiving. That's the only way a hermit can live alone for 40 days. Whenever you see the reemergence of hermits, and we can go through at least Catholic history and see the periods where they just multiply, you've always got a rebirth of the contemplative mind

where there's deep contentment inside of what's right in front of you a tree an animal everything gives you satisfaction and everything gives you connection when you live in a separate universe where that's just a tree, that's just a dog for my consumption or for my profit, when you're constantly cutting the link, of course you're going to be lonely. Really, it's that simple. Of course you're going to be lonely. And I think this is why we have so much sexual abuse.

I mean, sex, false sex in particular, is just looking for connection because I don't have it. Someone who's universally connected does not need to use or objectify other people, much less hurt them in any way. So it's all one. So, you know, it's strange that we call the act of intercourse making love. I don't know statistically how often it is making love or how often it's making lust. And making lust leaves you disconnected, if you understand. You're still over here and she or he is over there. It doesn't satisfy the soul at all. But when you discover the other as a fellow thou,

Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, he said there's either the I-thou relationship or everything descends into the I-it. It's utilitarian, it's mercantile, but it's not meaningful. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really? No, really. Yeah, really. No, really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really? No, really. And you can find it on the iHeartRadio

app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I was on a retreat recently with a spiritual teacher and he said something that really struck me and it goes back to kind of what we were talking about, about acting your way into right thinking. He said, you know, you're going to have these spiritual experiences and that experience is going to go. But the important thing is to devote yourself to what little bit of it remains. I would agree with him. Yeah.

So it's this, okay, that experience is gone, but there's an underlying truth there that I saw, that you see, that people see. And how do you devote yourself to that? Devote. That's a beautiful choice of words. And again, why you can't get tied to the feeling yes the feeling goes and it does in all of us just like the honeymoon does but there was something true there in the honeymoon experience which is simply an experience of radical unity. Yeah. And that's what we were created for. That's what we live for.

But then when we can't experience them naturally, easily, we try to manufacture them by what I'm going to call high-intensity events. Rock concerts. I'm not saying rock concerts are wrong but don't spend too much time there or what you do is you up your your ante of expectation i need loud loud noise i need lights to an unbelievable level and now i'll be excited i mean you can't help but when you watch tv what are they going to do next to engage my imagination how much light do we need on uh what's the show idol american idol you know i mean it is fascinating yeah it is in many ways beautiful but it's what the early

desert fathers would have called you know the lust of the eyes and they're not talking about naked women they're talking about too much visual excitement which makes you think i need that to be happy no you really don't need that to be happy. No, you really don't need that to be happy. You need that to be diverted or distracted. Because after American Idol, I'm just picking on them. It's a wonderful show, I'm sure. But you really won't be any happier. You really won't.

Distraction does not make you happy happy it has to touch the depths now some of the beautiful stories of people who rose from nothing to becoming a great singer maybe that can touch the soul yeah but lights and loud noise of themselves will always fail to do it. Or firework shows, you know? Yeah, which scare dogs. I know. My dogs never liked Fourth of July. So, yeah, I think that's a really interesting point.

And you talked about this idea of anything that draws us out of ourselves, right? And you used that God uses three things in particular, goodness, truth, and beauty. And it's interesting to me because when I watch TV, there are certain shows, and what I've realized is that I cry very easily. Oh, good. And what I realized is what usually gets me

is scenes of deep goodness. Right? There's a kindness between two people. Rituitous kindness. Yeah, it just brings it out. And the same spiritual teacher I was talking about in his book recently said, you know, not tears of joy,

not tears of sadness, tears of depth. And that really hit me because I've never been able to put words on what it is. What it is. Wow, I totally agree with that. I always wish I could cry more easily. The moments that it does happen most easily for me, and I don't know why I've talked about this to therapists,

is moments of reunion. Someone who hasn't seen their mother for 20 years or anything oh i just sobbed like a baby i was never abandoned or you know i uh the usual psychological explanations don't make sense to me but to see two people who've never known one another just clutch at one another and weep, I weep too. Yeah, it's beautiful. It is. That's wonderful. Do you relate to that too? Yeah. People parting is another. Yeah, and parting. We were just talking about the book Death of an Archbishop by Willa Cather, which takes place out here. One of the beautiful parts of that book is Father Latour, I think you would say, and Father Valiant, and the love between those two, and how Father Latour would just, how much he missed his friend

when he went out to do the mission work. It's just a beautiful part of that book. It would kind of get me, because you could feel him. His friend would leave, and there was this part of him that went with him. Wow. That says you are capable of the same thing. I have to say, of course, it's been 25 years since I read Death Comes for the Archbishop. I remember it being a beautiful book about New Mexico, but I didn't remember that friendship. You must be there inside. That's great.

Yeah, it's a beautiful book. So you mentioned the cherry trees outside the window a minute ago. But in your book, you also mention this glorious tree over here to our right. You say it's a massive 150-year-old Rio Grande cottonwood tree. And you say it spreads its gnarled limbs over the lawn, which is true. The twists and turns in it are, are, are stunning. And you say, basically, in a lot of ways, it looks like an imperfect tree. And you go on to say divine perfection is precisely the ability to include what seems like imperfection. And you've got a sign in your office that says,

Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful. You can come back and read it. It's still there. The sign, I mean, and the tree is still there. And the tree is gloriously still there, yeah. Everybody wants to paint it or take a picture of it. They tell me, an arborist told me that he thinks it had a mutation, which made it take these circuitous, unnatural bends in the even large trunk branches. In the rediscovery of the gospel, we discovered nothing else but that,

else but that. That evil is not something you can ever totally eliminate, exclude, dismiss, discard. You have to forgive it. Forgiveness is different. It's still there. I call it the inclusion of the negative. That's at the heart of the gospel, but I think the Western dualistic mind was just not capable of seeing that. You know, I was teaching my last time last summer in Germany, and you're probably familiar with the classic iconography of Saint Michael. He's on a horse. George is more on a horse. Michael's more just standing there heroically, and he's stabbing a dragon or standing on the dragon. That's pretty much where we've been up to now,

really assuming that the dragon can be killed. Right. See, that's a lie. That's not true. God uses evil for your transformation. We now have words for it. We call it integration, reconciliation. Well, while I was there, they took me to several different churches and art museums

where they had pictures that only apparently were common for a certain period in the middle ages of saint martha now i don't this is not biblical i don't know where it comes from but saint martha is never pictured uh stabbing or spearing the dragon, she's always feeding it. Here we go to the wolf again. Or petting it. And it's always a side picture. And my friend, who's fascinated by these same things, he took me to church after church.

In Nuremberg we were at that time, but then we went on to Munich. There it is again. Martha is always off to the side and isn't it interesting there's the masculine approach to killing evil and there's the feminine approach and Martha tames the dragon yeah now we'd call that restorative justice it isn't it doesn't punish it transforms yeah yeah and you know parents are already doing that with their little children if you really want to help your children grow up you don't just punish them you teach them right okay now why isn't that a good thing to do why would it be good to now apologize to your little sister for what you just did or it's it's we've already learned this at the human level where did we learn that? From the way God operates. Jesus punishes nobody. Check it out. He calls people to responsibility.

But the real punishing notion of Christ came after he was gone. And we largely projected it onto him, in my opinion. I love that story about saint martha and feeding the dragon you know another thing that you know these things i say over and over one of the big ones is this idea that suffering equals pain times resistance you know the resistance to this and i was in a in a workshop i was doing recently i was talking about about the story of Milarepa, a Buddhist, I don't know what you would call him. I'll just call him a sage. Where, you know, he has a story where there's all these demons in his cave.

And he's chasing them around, trying to get rid of them. Then he's trying to teach them the Dharma. He's doing everything he could do. And he finally says, fine, demons stay. And most of them disappear. No kidding. And then there's one big demon remaining, just the big gnarly demon. And he finally just puts his head in its mouth.

Wow. So it's speaking to this same idea of St. Martha and the dragon. It sure is. Thank you. I've never heard that before. Yeah. Yeah. You see, see well you know this it's non-violence training 101 when you return in kind once michael starts stabbing the dragon

he's become a dragon he's not saint michael anymore but it's the dualistic mind of earlier history just couldn't read things that way. Yeah. It's not their fault. It was all power and force, not love, that changed things. Yeah. You have a beautiful quote that ties a few of the things we just talked about, seeing things from a Buddhist perspective. You say, after all, there's not a native Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, or Christian way of loving.

There's not a Methodist, Lutheran, or Orthodox way of running a soup kitchen. There's not a gay or straight way of being faithful, nor a black or Caucasian way of hoping. We all know positive flow when we see it, and we all know resistance and coldness when we feel it. All the rest are mere labels. Thank you. It's a beautiful passage. Did you read that? Someone did recently, but it must be striking people.

Yeah, that's hard to deny. it has nothing to do with me being Catholic or someone else being another denomination that's just undeniable truth if you can be honest and you know I've said others have said many times the only the only two virtues you really need are humility and honesty to move forward on the spiritual life. If you lack humility to admit that, you know, if the Buddha said it and it's true, it's true. Thomas Aquinas told us, who's of course considered the great Catholic intellectual, the first question should not be who said it. The first question should be, is it true?

And if it's true, it's always from the Holy Spirit. I love that. Always from the Holy Spirit. So it doesn't matter if Confucius said it or Muhammad said it. Why can't we see that? Well, it's revealed. It reveals, it seems to me, how tribal we are. We only believe truth from our tribe.

Yeah. All else is suspect. Well, you end up with very small truth. You do. And it's so interesting to me how, you know, we can talk about how Christians do that, but I know some pretty strong non-Christians, to put it politely, and it's the same way. If it speaks of a church or a God or anything, it's just, it's nonsense, right?

Which is just is, it's just as bad as the, the opposite of that, which is, you know, if it's not said in the right way in my particular orthodoxy, it's not, I mean,

it's, but I agree with you. And that's why I loved going back to what we talked about, that you said anything that draws you out of yourself in a positive way. And I think it's so easy to feel. And people often say to me, how do you know if you're feeding the bad wolf? And I say, well, usually if you're quiet, you know.

If you're quiet. If you're quiet, you can feel it. It's a different energy. It's a constriction. It's a tightness. It's a contraction. I keep referencing this same spiritual constriction it's a tightness it's a it's a contraction i keep referencing this same spiritual teacher adi shanti is who it is who was also on oprah and been on our show several times um one thing he said that really hit me he's talking about this

the ego structure and he said all ego is it is, is just a constriction. And that's why I love that line of yours. And whether it's exactly true or not, but it speaks to the same thing that you're saying. If it's this outflowing, a bigger, wider perspective, that's the spiritual impulse working through you. And this constriction, thisness we feel it I know it isn't a word and it's somewhat crude but I called it outflowing or in sucking and after a while you can tell when you're in sucking yes you're just pulling back hardening your edges it has the taste of fear to it it

it's a coldness to it yeah you've got to learn to recognize that in your own body yeah but because we didn't pay much attention to the body we let it go unnoticed, literally unnoticed. Yeah, yeah. Wow. I want to read another line of yours. You say, I have never been separate from God, nor can I be except in my mind. It's your mind. It's a thought that you're separate from God that creates the separateness.

It isn't objectively so. That's the other major piece of restoring the gospel. Thinking that we earn divine union by moral behavior. You don't earn divine union. You're created out of infinite union with God from all eternity. God chose you in Christ from all eternity. Read Ephesians 1. I think it says it three times. So you can't call this heresy or unscriptural. But the Western civilizations really idealized the mind.

And so it had no critique, granted it. All we did was fight within the arena of the mind or of different philosophies and so forth. But the only people who moved beyond the mind's dominance were people we would call mystics, contemplatives. They didn't throw out the mind, but they gave it its due, but it didn't control the whole show. Because we let it control the whole show,

I think, therefore I am. There it is. That's western philosophy in one sentence. Our thinking defines us. Gee because that it took on the mind took on if you'll allow me an almost demonic character that demanded total allegiance and it what it did was convict us of our unworthiness of our shame uh you know the word of of Yahweh to Adam and Eve after they leave the garden who told you you were naked as if to say I didn't but once you leave the garden of union reality will tell you you're naked you know you're not smart enough you're not good looking enough you're not your body isn't perfect enough you're not moral enough became the equation if you were raised religious which didn't really mean that we loved

god it just meant a search for some kind of moral perfection and the irony was that ledger of perfection or morality was different from culture to culture right And that was the benefit of 45 years traveling around the world to see, well, this isn't considered sin here, or no one's shamed by it over here. It's not God's will. More often than not, it was our will to create taboos and things. Let's take the classic one for Catholics. I know you probably have different ones.

Was eating meat on Friday. You know, my parents' and grandparents' generations, that was a mortal sin. It isn't even in the realm of evil. And when you trivialize evil by calling eating meat on Friday a mortal sin, you know what happens? You miss the real evils that are all around you. As I said before, where did the First and Second World Wars come from?

Christian Europe. Where we wasted time not eating meat on Friday. I mean, it's a fine symbol, but it isn't evil. And we got away with world wars. We got away with Nazism. You just want to cry. God must be so patient. God must be so humble to let us go down all these dead ends

and keep drawing us back. Because as you know from the book, I am absolutely convinced God is saving history and judging history, not individuals. We're all caught up in the divine sweep. That seems like a new notion. Notice how he will condemn cities. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Bethsaida, Capernaum, Chorazin.

Where will you go? Up to heaven? No, down to hell. He damns the whole cultural milieu. Do you understand? What we now call social sin. And most of us have no education in that. So I'm writing just a small follow-up to this book on the Christ, because I only alluded to it and didn't develop it. I believe salvation is a social, corporate, historical notion,

but I believe sin is too. We are sinful. I'm too fragile to bear the burden of sin, so I basically deny it. But once you know, I'm carrying yours and you're carrying mine, you go back and read Romans, and I'd be willing to bet you'd see, my gosh, this is what Paul is saying. We all have sinned. We're all dying together on the vine. And we bear one another's goodness and we bear one another's shame.

That, I'm convinced, is the gospel. It calls us much more to solidarity than private perfection. See, private perfection just is very well disguised egotism, very well disguised narcissism. It doesn't make you a loving person, as if I could be loving apart from loving you, or perfect apart from honoring your gifts.

So for me, that's going to be the discovery of the next thousand years, if we last, is the discovery of the social nature of the gospel, which is there for everybody to see, but you have to be told it. You have to be told it. Well, that is a beautiful place to see, but you have to be told it. Yep. You have to be told it. Well, that is a beautiful place to wrap up. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post-show conversation about the voice of God internal, Joan of Arc, lots of fun things. Listeners, you can get access to this post-show conversation and all the others, as well as a teaching song

and a poem mini-episode each week at oneufeed.net support. Thank you so much, Father Richard. You're welcome. You're worth it. Such a pleasure. Thank you. Such a pleasure. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to ReallyKoreally.com

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