Picture yourself before the crucified Jesus; recognize that he became what you fear: nakedness, exposure, vulnerability, and failure. He became sin to free you from sin (see 2 Corinthians 5:21). He became what we do to one another in order to free us from the lie of punishing and scapegoating each other. He became the crucified so we would stop crucifying. He refused to transmit his pain onto others. 

Richard invites us to receive these words as Jesus’ invitation to us from the cross: 

My beloved, I am your self. I am your beauty. I am your goodness, which you are destroying. I am what you do to what you should love. I am what you are afraid of: your deepest and best and most naked self—your soul. Your sin largely consists in what you do to harm goodness—your own and others’. You are afraid of the good; you are afraid of me. You kill what you should love; you hate what could transform you. I am Jesus crucified. I am yourself, and I am all of humanity. 

We then respond to Jesus, hanging on the cross at the center of human history, turning history around. Richard prays: 

Jesus, Crucified, you are my life and you are also my death. You are my beauty, you are my possibility, and you are my full self. You are everything I want, and you are everything I am afraid of. You are everything I desire, and you are everything I deny. You are my outrageously ignored and neglected soul. 

Jesus, your love is what I most fear. I can’t let anybody love me for nothing. Intimacy with you or anyone terrifies me. 

I am beginning to see that I, in my own body, am an image of what is happening everywhere, and I want it to stop today. I want to stop the violence toward myself, toward the world, toward you. I don’t need to ever again create any victim, even in my mind. 

You alone, Jesus, refused to be crucifier, even at the cost of being crucified. You never asked for sympathy. You never played the victim or asked for vengeance. You breathed forgiveness. 

We humans mistrust, murder, attack. Now I see that it is not you that humanity hates. We hate ourselves, but we mistakenly kill you. I must stop crucifying your blessed flesh on this earth and in my brothers and sisters. 

Now I see that you live in me and I live in you. You are inviting me out of this endless cycle of illusion and violence. You are Jesus crucified. You are saving me. In your perfect love, you have chosen to enter into union with me, and I am slowly learning to trust that this could be true. 

Richard Rohr sits in front of an impressive tree with his dog. The tree to his right is an old-growth forest tree that has shed its bark. It has been dying for some time. To the right is another old-growth forest tree long since dead, slowly disintegrating into the soil. The translucent background is an old-growth forest fallen tree, decaying, plant life growing on top. All the old growth forest trees are from Hartwick State Park in Grayling, Michigan. The insightful words on contemplation are Richard Rohr’s, sent to me by Gail. I am not sure where she attained them.

I was counseling a young married man recently, and he was very discouraged with himself. No matter what, he could not stop being irritated at others, biting off people’s heads, resenting every little thing. He said in desperation and anguish, “How can I change this? I don’t know how to be different!”He sounded like Paul: “What a wretched man I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”(Romans 7:24). Then I asked him if he was that way with his two little children, and without any hesitation he said, “No, not at all, hardly ever.”

You see the point, I am sure. The only way to be delivered from our “body of death”is a love that is greater, a deeper connection that absorbs all the negativity and irritation with life and with ourselves.  Richard Rohr ‘Breathing Under Water’

Scattered thoughts written by Richard Rohr in ‘Breathing Under Water’

People’s willingness to find God in their own struggle with life—and let it change them—is their deepest and truest obedience to God’s eternal will….“God comes to us disguised as our life!”

……

The Jewish name for the Holy One, literally unspeakable, is “Yahweh,” which we now believe was an imitation of the sound of breathing in and breathing out.

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

…..

You see the point, I am sure. The only way to be delivered from our “body of death” is a love that is greater, a deeper connection that absorbs all the negativity and irritation with life and with ourselves. Until we have found our own ground and connection to the Whole, we are all unsettled and grouchy.

…..

Do you know why most of us are called to marriage, and even “saved” by marriage and children, even marriages that do not last forever? Marriage and parenting is made to order to steal you from your selfishness. It first of all reveals your selfishness to you…and then if you stay in there, and fall into a love that is greater, it is usually much easier from there. Not without work, however, because the ego and the shadow do not “go gentle into that good night,” as Dylan Thomas would say.

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

God does not directly destroy evil, the way our heroic and dualistic minds would like to imagine. God is much wiser, wastes nothing, and includes everything. The God of the Bible is best known for transmuting and transforming our very evils into our own more perfect good. God uses our sins in our own favor! God brings us—through failure—from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience. How could that not be good news for just about everybody?. –‘Breathing Under Water’ Richard Rohr

And to be fully honest, I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others. As Simeon told Mary, “A sword will pierce your heart, so that the secret thoughts of many will be laid bare” (Luke 2:35). –‘Breathing Under Water‘  Richard Rohr