Love [people] even in [their] sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Father Richard honors that we must be very clear about right and wrong, naming when injustice takes place, while maintaining our commitment to grace and love:
The full and final biblical message is restorative justice, but most of history has only been able to understand retributive justice. I know you’re probably thinking of many passages in the Old Testament that sure sound like serious retribution. And I can’t deny there are numerous black and white, vengeful scriptures, which is precisely why we must recognize that all scriptures are not equally inspired or from the same level of consciousness. Literal interpretation of Scripture is the Achilles’ heel of fundamentalist Christians.
We have to begin with dualistic thinking, just as we must first develop a healthy ego and frame before we can move beyond it. Jesus often made strong binary statements, for example, “You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24); “The Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats” (Matthew 25:32–33). We must first be capable of some basic distinctions between good and evil before we can hold paradox. Without basic honesty and clarity, nondual thinking becomes very naive. We must first succeed at good dualistic thinking before we also discover its final inadequacy in terms of wisdom and compassion. Not surprisingly, Jesus exemplifies and teaches both dualistic clarity and then non-dual wisdom and compassion: “My Father’s sun shines on both the good and the bad; his rain falls on both the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:45).
The ego prefers a dualistic worldview where bad people are eternally punished, and good people (like ourselves) are totally rewarded. But the soul does not need to see others punished to be happy! Why would anyone like the notion of somebody being tortured for all eternity? What kind of psyche or soul can condemn others to hellfire? Certainly not Divine Love. [1]
Could God’s love really be that great and universal? Could it be anything less? Love is the lesson, and God’s love is so great that God will finally teach it to all of us. Who would be able to resist it once they see it? We’ll finally surrender, and God—Love—will finally win. God never loses. That is what it means to be God. That will be God’s “justice,” which will swallow up our lesser versions of retributive justice. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, CONSPIRE 2016: Everything Belongs, session 3 (CAC: 2016), MP4 download. Unavailable. See also “Universal Love” Daily Meditation, December 8, 2016.
[2] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (Crossroad Publishing, 2003), 133.
Image Credit: Jordan Heath, untitled (detail), 2018, photo, New Zealand, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. At the meeting of river and lake, we see the great watershed of God’s mercy— justice rolling wide and without vengeance, drawing us into a love larger than our own grievances and inviting us toward the common good.
Story from Our Community:
When I was a little girl, God was a hard taskmaster. Whenever my mother (who suffered from schizophrenia) saw me doing something she disapproved of, she would shake her finger at me and say, “Stop that right now or you’re going to go to hell.” This terrified me, but I was blessed with precious nuns and parish priests that were kind and supportive. In the 1950s and 60s, these good people showed me a loving, merciful, caring God. I encountered Father Richard and the CAC in the 1990s, and they continued to feed my soul. I am in my 80s now and I experience God holding me close and guiding me each day.
—Mary W.
