Father Richard Rohr reflects on our universal participation in life and the connectedness to which Christ invites us:
We all need to feel and know, at the cellular level, that we are not the first ones who have suffered, nor will we be the last. Instead, we are in one universal parade—God’s “triumphal procession,” as Paul calls it, using the metaphor of a Roman triumph after a great victory (2 Corinthians 2:14). In this parade, he says, we are all partners with both the living and the dead, walking alongside countless ancestors and descendants who were wounded and longed for healing. This idea, “the communion of saints,” became the last phrase added to the Apostles’ Creed centuries later, almost as if it took us a while to recognize its importance. Someday, maybe we will have the courage to add “the communion of sinners,” too. The body of Christ is one great and shared sadness and one continuous joy, and we are saved just by remaining connected to it.
Since the Enlightenment, however, we have been trained to believe that we each can “do it my way,” like Frank Sinatra’s song, instead of participating in everybody else’s great parade. As I often say, if we do not mythologize our pain, all we can do is pathologize it. We Westerners have lost the ability to frame the significance of our own little lives. I suspect that those who grew up with the richness of the myths and sacred stories of Ulysses and Athena or the Corn Mothers or Kali may have found meaning and consolation for their pain more readily than many of us do today. They knew they weren’t alone on the journey, while we no longer believe or live as if we are an inherent part of a much bigger story. We believe ourselves separate from the cosmic dance that created Greek comedy and tragedy and led the Pueblo peoples of the Southwest to dance and carve kachinas as a way of marking human events or emotions. Helping people see that they are cooperating members of a performance that is already showing—and will keep showing—is surely why so many of the religions of Indigenous people were, at their heart, ancestor worship.
We are invited to realize I am not the first nor the last to feel this suffering. I can now choose to be a weak but willing member of the whole communion of saints! Surely such solidarity is our salvation, rather than private purity or personal wholeness. Paul called it living “en Cristo,” a phrase that he used multiple times to name the shape and coherence of our collective participation.
Maybe hope needs to be cosmic hope to be hope at all. Maybe pain needs to be borne together, and for all time; it is very hard to bear alone, or in the moment. We fight it as unfair and undeserved when we could instead carry it as an act of human and loving solidarity.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage (Convergent, 2025), 101–102, 104.
Image Credit: Ravi Sharma, untitled (detail), 2021, photo, India, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. There is a wisdom that knows humanity as one continuous breath—the veil between worlds thin and alive—where the memory of our ancestors moves through our very cells.
Story from Our Community:
This weekend my family, which is spread out all over the country, surprised me by coming together to celebrate my 70th birthday. The love that I have poured out over the years was reflected back to me in their words and presence. God’s love—given and received—received and given back again. A Divine exchange, an experience of the abundant generosity of love that literally took my breath away. God’s love and grace flowing through and surrounding us all. How blessed I am!
—Mary Sue B.
