All Religions Converge One Point

The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr.  Convergent.  260 pp.  $27.00 *****

For my devotional reading these days, I’ve been reading both The Universal Christ and Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.  Rohr’s book seemed largely theoretical (though he mentions various practices) and Shunryu Suzuki’s perfectly practical: almost every section is about sitting.  Somehow or other I finished both books on the same evening, and came across two concluding passages, both outside the primary text.

Rohr was speaking in an appendix—which I suggest you read before beginning the book—about four different world views (the first three are the material, the spiritual and the priestly).  “In contrast to these three is the incarnational worldview, in which matter and Spirit are understood never to have been separated.  Matter and spirit reveal and manifest each other.  This view relies more on awakening than joining, more on seeing than obeying, more on growth in consciousness and love than on clergy, experts, morality, scripture, or rituals.  The code word I am using is this entire book for this worldview is simply ‘Christ.’”

But he cautions us later, “Even the incarnational worldview can be understood in glib and naïve ways, and thus also be ‘wrong.’ . . . “When one too quickly and smartly says, ‘All things are sacred’ or ‘God is everywhere,’ that doesn’t mean one has really longed and made space for this awareness, nor really integrated such an amazing realization.”

Then I turned to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and read in the epilogue.  “We Buddhists do not have any idea of material only, or mind only, or the products of our mind, or mind as an attribute of being.  What we are always talking about is that mind and body, mind and material are always one. . . . Enlightenment experience is to figure out, to understand, to realize this mind which is always with us and which we cannot see.”

The words of my title come from a video of Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn which I watched some years ago.  I’m also reminded of Francesca Fremantle writing an article about Tantra and referring to William Blake as the English Tantric, because of two lines in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:  “Everything that lives is holy,” and “Energy is eternal delight.”  She felt those two statements expressed the essence of Tantra, though the British poet who wrote them had never heard of it.

But the subject at hand is The Universal Christ, a book which expresses a Christianity that is in no way exclusive or (pardon the expression) parochial.  Richard Rohr’s sees his vision as a fact of the universe.  He proclaims a God who didn’t create the world in seven days, but who, in the big bang (or however this all came to be) became the world, manifested as the world.  He was, and is, incarnate in everything.  Incarnation wasn’t an event that took place at a moment in history, as most Christians believe.  It is a fact that permeates all of history, not just human history (which is not even the blink of an eye on one tiny planet), but the history of the universe.  Jesus perfectly understood this fact, and stands as a human exemplar of it, but he wasn’t the only one.  You too are an incarnation of God.  But don’t get a swelled head: so is the cockroach walking across your floor and the rock outside in the yard.  So is the computer you’re reading this on.  So is everything.

There are various Bible passages that argue Rohr’s point, but the most eloquent and beautiful is the first eighteen verses of the Gospel of John (a book which my brother refers to as “one religious genius writing about another religious genius”).

Jesus was a human being, someone who lived in time, but Christ is the universal principle which he realized (or as Rohr says in the title of his first chapter, “Christ is not Jesus’s last name).  That universal principle existed long before he came along, and continued long after his brief human life.  It does not depend on someone believing it.  It has nothing to do with belief.

What all this reminds me of is the Soto Zen practice as taught by Eihei Dogen, in which we’re taught that everything is alive, everything is sacred, everything has Buddha Nature, “each of you but also the altar, and the floor we’re walking on,” as our teachers have told us.

It is one of those religious truths that I always had a vague hunch about, but never heard someone spell out so eloquently.  Rohr takes us through an entire Christian journey, with chapters like, “Accepting That You Are Fully Accepted,” “Original Goodness,” “Love Is the Meaning,” “The Feminine Incarnation.”  I didn’t swallow the whole thing hook line and sinker, but much of it seemed right on to me, and to express a religious vision that I completely agree with.

Rohr is a popularizer, not the most elegant writer on the face of the earth, but he is always clear.  He says he wrote the book in a solitary creative burst of thirty some days.[1]  People speak of it as the culmination of all his work, which has been considerable, with many books through the years.  He was recently profiled in the New Yorker, and runs an organization called the Center for Action and Contemplation, which sends out free daily meditations.

Traditional conservative Catholics hate this book, of course.  You can read their fulminations on Amazon.  They would like truth and salvation to be exclusively theirs.

That’s not the case.

[1] I think he said 39, but I haven’t been able to find the passage.