Father Richard affirms God’s desire for us to know and welcome all of ourselves and others:
God is clearly more comfortable with diversity than we are, and God’s final goal and objective are much simpler. God and the entire cosmos are about two things: differentiation (people and things becoming themselves) and communion (living in supportive coexistence). Physicists and biologists seem to know this better than theologians and clergy.
Religious people who use the scriptures to condemn or exclude others seem to have different goals and objectives from those of God or Jesus. Their arguments generally have to do with very secular concerns: power and control, fear of the other and the unknown, and idealization of a family unit that Jesus himself neither lived nor idealized. Check the Gospels if you don’t believe me.
Institutional religion tends to think of people as very simple; therefore, the law must be very complex to protect them in every situation. Jesus does the opposite: He treats people as very complex—different in religion, lifestyle, virtue, temperament, and success—and keeps the law very simple in order to bring them to God:
A legal expert put him to the test: “Teacher, which commandment in the Law is the greatest?” He replied to him, “‘You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.’ This is the first and foremost, and the second is like it: ‘You are to love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hangs everything in the Law and in the Prophets” (Matthew 22:35–40).
Jesus takes the risk of allowing people the freedom to be themselves and to love God according to the shape of their own heart, soul, body, and mind! Religion developed for the sake of social control, but Jesus doesn’t give us much grist for the social control mill. Jesus is asking a different set of questions, ones that take away our private agendas and remind us of the ways we have not yet begun to love. For Jesus, it is all about union—union with God, others, and what is, however it presents itself. We cannot let labels trip us up. We all belong, but how cleverly our moral pretenses prevent us from struggling with what is right in front of us! How ingeniously our ego protects itself from compassion and understanding. [1]
Author Jen Austin considers how God invites us to move beyond neat categories:
It is part of the human tendency to put everything into a neat little category…. However, categories also allow us to include and exclude people based on characteristics that are unfamiliar to us or that we don’t understand. Black or white, gay or straight, we spend a lot of time and waste a lot of energy creating and adhering to labels in our culture, quite often at the expense of basic human dignity and common sense…. God is bigger than all our little boxes. God’s love transcends the lines we draw on earth. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Where the Gospel Leads Us,” in Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions of Conscience for the Churches, ed. Walter Wink (Fortress Press, 1999), 86, 87, 88.
[2] Jen Austin, Coming Out Christian: Finding Wholeness in Faith and Sexuality (Sources of Hope Publications, 2006), 223.
Image credit and inspiration: Beth Macdonald, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. An estuary reveals a world that is more than just land or water, but something beyond them both.
Story from Our Community:
At some point in the forty years I practiced law, I came to realize that the certainty my hyper-conservative religious upbringing had taught me was inadequate. Law school and my litigation practice reinforced the dualistic thinking with which I had grown comfortable. Applying binary logic to assess or judge the infinite variables of human experience is illogical. When I was able to open my mind to the spectrum of gray between the black and white alternatives, the invitation into God’s mystery became ever more appealing. I thank God that the many shades of gray give perspective to the reality I experience.
—Larry B.
