Sunday
The Christ whom Paul met was not identical to the historical Jesus; it was the risen Christ, the Christ who remains with us now as the Universal Christ.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Paul creates the mystical foundations for Christianity. It’s a mystery of participation in Christ. It’s not something that we achieve by performance. It’s something that we’re already participating in, and often we just don’t know it.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
We have nothing to protect after transformation, and that’s the great freedom and the great happiness we see in converted people like Paul.
—Richard Rohr
Wednesday
Paul knows the mysterious truth, which only direct experience can bring home to us, that somehow even in this determined world “all things work together for good to them that love God.”
—Evelyn Underhill
Thursday
Paul recognizes that the greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order. There seems to be a shadow side to almost everything. Only the unitive or nondual mind can accept this and not panic; in fact, it will grow because of it and even grow beyond it.
—Richard Rohr
Friday
Paul asserts that God doesn’t play favorites. All human beings are on the same level, whatever their religious background. We’re all united in our need of grace.
—Brian McLaren
Week Thirty-Three Practice
Putting on the Mind of Christ
Father Richard describes contemplation as a practice of putting on “the mind of Christ”:
In contemplative practice, we refuse to identify with any one side, while still maintaining our intelligence. We hold the creative tension of every seeming conflict and go beyond words to pure, open-ended experience, which has the potential to unify many seeming contradictions. We cannot know God the way we know anything else; we only know God subject to subject, by a process of mirroring. In Paul’s words, this is the “mind of Christ” (see 1 Corinthians 2:16). It really is a different way of knowing, and we can recognize it by its gratuity, its open-endedness, its compassion, and by witnessing the way it is so creative and energizing in those who allow it.
Truly great thinkers and cultural creatives take for granted that they have access to a different and larger mind. They recognize that a Divine Flow is already happening and that everyone can plug into it. In all cases, it is a participative kind of knowing, a being known through and not an autonomous knowing. The most common and traditional word for this change of consciousness was historically “prayer,” but we trivialized that precious word by making it functional, transactional, and supposedly about problem-solving. The only problem that prayer solves is us!
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (CAC Publishing, 2017), 38–39.
Image credit and inspiration: mohammad hassan taheri, untitled (detail), 2023, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The fluid, impermanent sand slipped through Paul’s once-certain grasp, as his Divine encounter cracked open his clenched knowing and invited him to see from a transformed perspective.
