“Faith is the comfort of not needing to know” ( Richard Rohr)

Somewhat unsteadily, using a cane for support, Richard Rohr walked across the stage at the University of Notre Dame, settled into the armchair across from the interviewer. He gazed into the darkness where the packed auditorium of listeners awaited his words in silence. It was Rohr’s first public talk since Covid created a cocoon around our lives.

(Note; The talk referred to here ,“Christianity and the Re-emergence of the Non-dual Mind” is available for viewing on YOUTUBE)

Gentle, smiling, often self-deprecating, this elderly, grandfather-like figure cut to the heart of our 21^st century reality. Holding it in the light of the Gospel, particularly the Beatitudes, Rohr showed us that in our eagerness for clarity, our fear of uncertainty, we’re caught in dualities.

“If you don’t understand non-dual thinking, everything slips into liberal of conservative”. Instead of clinging to our own way of thinking as the only right way, Rohr advises “let the whole horizon of reality all come towards you.”

We still haven’t grasped the message of Jesus, haven’t accepted that wisdom lies in that hazy place where we are at peace with not knowing, “Faith is the comfort of not needing to know.” The mystics of the early centuries of Christianity accepted, embraced this unknowing in contemplative presence.

Rohr’s own presence, that smile, that shake of the head at absurdity, was puzzled, a little sad….

He drew a paper from his pocket, unfolded it, began to read a poem to us, translated from Symeon, a tenth century theologian.

We awaken in Christ’s body

As Christ awakens our bodies,

and my poor hand is Christ, He enters

my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully

my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him

(for God is indivisibly

whole, seamless in His Godhead).

I move my foot, and at once

He appears like a flash of lightning.

Do my words seem blasphemous?–Then

open your heart to Him

and let your heart receive the one

who is opening to you so deeply.

For if we genuinely love Him,

we wake up inside Christ’s body

where all our body, all over

every most hidden part of it,

is realized in joy as Him,

and He makes, utterly, real,

and everything that is hurt, everything

that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,

maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in Him transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely,

and radiant in His light

we awaken as the Beloved

in every last part of our body.

(I found the full poem in The Enlightened Heart, an anthology of poetry edited by Stephen Mitchell, Harper Perennial, 1993)

As the interview was drawing to a close, Rohr was asked, “How would you want to be remembered?”

“I’m about life.” Rohr replied. “It’s not about me. God allowed me to do everything wrong so God could do everything right…through me…in spite of me….it’s all mercy, within mercy, within mercy.”

What words would Rohr send in a text message to the world? “In the end it will be good.”

Painting of Julian of Norwich by Jane Joyner

I write this on the Feast Day of Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century mystic who lived through three outbreaks of Black Plague, which reduced the population of England by one-half, the violence of the Peasant’s Revolt and the Western Schism which brought chaos to all of Christendom. Yet her writings are a distant echo of Rohr’s words about mercy, about all being well in the end. In her book, Revelations of Divine Love, Julian records her conversations with the risen Jesus which took place in a night of visions following her near-death experience at the age of thirty.

Acknowledging to Julian that, indeed, sin is everywhere, Christ assures her that “All shall be well, and all will be well, and you shall see for yourself that all manner of thing shall be well.” In the two decades of reflection that followed these visions, Julian came to trust that the meaning of this message was that everyone would be saved.

Julian too was texting to the world: “In the end it will be good.”

Today, on Julian’s Feast Day in the Anglican Calendar, I wondered what Julian herself would most want us to remember from her many teachings. Asking for her guidance, I combed through her Revelations of Divine Love seeking passages that seem most important to our lives, to our calling in these times when hope seems out of reach…

(All of the selections are from the Long Text of Julian’s Revelations in Showings, Colledge & Walsh translation, Paulist Press, New York, Toronto, 1978.)

The first passage is stunning in its intimacy and tenderness:

I saw that (Jesus) is to us everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us. And so in this sight I saw that he is everything which is good, as I understand. (Fifth Chapter)

The second continues the theme of intimate nearness, inviting us to respond in like manner:

For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the trunk, so are we, soul and body, clad and enclosed in the goodness of God. Yes, and more closely, for all these vanish and waste away; the goodness of God is always complete, and closer to us beyond any comparison. (Sixth Chapter)

And the third choice: He did not say: “You will not be troubled, you will not be belaboured, you will not be disquieted”; but he said: “You will not be overcome.” God wants us to pay attention to these words, and always to be strong in faithful trust, in well-being and in woe, for he loves us and delights in us, and so he wishes us to love him and delight in him, and trust greatly in him, and all will be well. (Sixty-Eighth Chapter)

(Reflections on Julian of Norwich to be continued…..)