Pentecost
Father Richard encourages us to read the Scriptures by following the model of Jesus and in the company of the Holy Spirit, whose presence the church celebrates today.
Jesus knows how to connect the dots and find out where the sacred text is truly heading, beyond the lower-level consciousness of a particular moment, individual, or circumstance. He knows there’s a bigger arc to the story—one that reveals God as compassionate and inclusive. Jesus doesn’t quote lines that are punitive, imperialistic (“My country is the best!”), wrathful, or exclusionary. He doesn’t mention the twenty-eight “thou shall nots” listed in Leviticus 18 and 20 but chooses to echo the one positive command of Leviticus 19:18: “You must love your neighbor as yourself.” The longest single passage he quotes (in Luke 4:18–19) is from Isaiah 61:1–2. Jesus closes with the words “proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord,” deliberately omitting the next line—“and the day of vengeance of our God”—because he didn’t come to announce vengeance.
This is what the Spirit teaches any faithful person to do—read Scripture (and the very experiences of life) with a gaze of love. Contemplative practice helps us develop a third eye that reads between the lines and finds the thread always moving toward inclusivity, mercy, and justice. [1]
The biblical revelation is about awakening. It’s about realization, not performance principles. We cannot get there, we can only be there, but that foundational Being-in-God, for some reason, is too hard to believe, and too good to be true. Only the humble can receive it, because it affirms more about God than it does about us. To achieve that realization, I invite us to read the Old Testament and the New Testament as one complete book: an anthology of inspired stories, with a beginning, middle, and end. Read it as one Spirit-led text.
Read it as inspiration, by which I primarily mean that God is slowly evolving the reader’s consciousness, so that it can receive an ever-clearer understanding of itself as the beloved of God. Biblical texts, when read with “poverty of spirit” (Matthew 5:3), explain both ourselves and history to us. When read with a sense of entitlement, as if we are owed something, they unfortunately lead us to an imagined ability to explain God to others.
God does not change in the text, but we do. The written words are inspired precisely insofar as they inspire and change us! Here, I’m using the literal meaning of the word inspire—to “breathe into us” a larger life. If the written words don’t accomplish that, then they’re not at all “inspired”—at least for us.
I’ve met too many people who believe in all kinds of inspired texts but are lifeless—without the breath of life that was blown into the nostrils of Adam (Genesis 2:7). “They approach me, but only in words” (Isaiah 29:13), with what both Isaiah and Jesus called “lip service” (Isaiah 29:13; Matthew 15:8). [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Hierarchy of Truths: Jesus’ Use of Scripture (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2014).
[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, rev. ed. (Franciscan Media, 2022), 28, 29.
Image credit and inspiration: Annie Spratt, untitled (detail), 2018, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Through the stillness of our witnessing, word and image become thresholds—stirring the unseen and inviting Spirit to speak through the quiet bloom of our attention.
Story from Our Community:
I’d like to share my own daily practice, which blends silence and an ongoing conversation with God. I start each day with 20 minutes of quiet time (not easy for me), then lectio divina, and CAC’s Daily Meditations. During the day, I converse with God, inviting presence or simply asking for guidance—or frankly just complaining. My interaction with the Divine is human, needy, affectionate, surrendering, questioning, and, I hope, open. As my head hits the pillow at night, I remember to thank God for all of it.
—Connie V.
