Here Fr. Richard helps us to see and hear Jesus of Nazareth in what he taught, what he did and who he is—the loving, liberating and life giving expression and presence of God. In so doing he is helping Christianity to reclaim its soul anew.” As happens with each of Rohr’s books, there’s a lot of fruit and many seeds. Consider, for example, the many possible applications in the spiritual practices of creativity, imagination, and attention, including in the visual and performing arts, based on this:

Rohr gave this presence a name. For him, the Cosmic Christ is the spirit that is embedded in—and makes up—everything in the universe, and Jesus is the embodied version of that spirit that we can fall in love with and relate to. (Their simultaneous distinctness and oneness can be difficult for an outsider to grasp; Rohr describes “The Universal Christ” as a sequel to “ The Divine Dance,” his book about the mysteries of the Trinity.) He uses many of the same verses as the early Franciscans to support his claims. “Christ’s much larger, universe-spanning role was described quite clearly in—and always in the first chapters of—John’s Gospel, Colossians, Ephesians, Hebrews, and 1 John, and shortly thereafter in the writings of the early Eastern fathers,” he writes. He believes that, after the schism between the Eastern and Western Churches, in 1054 A.D., the Eastern Church held onto a more expansive vision of Christ, but the Western Church increasingly focussed on Jesus the man. “We gradually limited the Divine Presence to the single body of Jesus, when perhaps it is as ubiquitous as light itself—and uncircumscribable by human boundaries.” The notion of Jesus as a god-king—wearing a golden crown and seated on a throne—was pushed by political rulers, who used it to justify their own power, but it limited our understanding of divinity. “It was like trying to see the universe with a too-small telescope,” Rohr writes. See Sarah A. Schnitker, Jay Medenwaldt, and Lizzy Davis, “Can We Do Better Than the Enneagram?” Christianity Today, December 21, 2020, https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/january-february/enneagram-personality-psychology-research-based.html. The Cosmic Christ or the Universal Christ is a false concept of Christ being mystically in all things. It is supposedly based on Colossians 1:15–17, which states, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by Him and for Him. He is before all things, and Him all things hold together.” John 1:1–3 is also referenced in relation to this concept: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.” The New Testament starts from a wholly different premise, namely that “Jesus is Christ,” and that “in him all the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form” (Col. 2:9). First John 4:1–3 says those who deny that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” are manifesting “the spirit of the antichrist.” In The Universal Christ, Rohr says the statement “the Word became flesh” (John. 1:14) is not “referring to a single human body” (5). But if the eternal Son didn’t become incarnate in “a single human body,” then how did the miracle of the incarnation happen at all? The Universal Christ aligns with what Scripture calls “the spirit of the antichrist.” Reality of EvilY]ou and I can reopen that ancient door of faith with a key, and that key is the proper understanding of a word that many of us use often, but often too glibly. That word is Christ. Creation: God—from the Big Bang onward—was already “incarnate” in all things: “This self-disclosure of whomever you call God into physical creation was the ‘first incarnation’ (the general term for any enfleshment of spirit), long before the personal, second incarnation that Christians believe happened with Jesus” (12). Rohr writes that “God loves all things by becoming them” (16, 20). The perennial tradition "trains you to connect the dots and see what themes keep recurring" in Scripture, he said.

Mitch Pacwa, a Catholic priest, critiqued and rejected the enneagram in his book, Catholics and the New Age (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant, 1992). See also Mitchell Pacwa, “Tell Me Who I Am, O Enneagram,” Christian Research Journal, Fall 1991, https://www.equip.org/article/tell-me-who-i-am-o-enneagram/. See also Don Veinot, Joy Veinot, and Marcia Montenegro, Richard Rohr and the Enneagram Secret (Wonder Lake, IL: MCOI Publishing, LLC, 2020). The Universal Christ permeates all creation including us. We are all the image and likeness of God. ( Thursday)

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Rohr sees the Christ everywhere, and not just in people. He reminds us that the first incarnation of God is in Creation itself, and he tells us that "God loves things by becoming them." Just for that sentence, and there are so many more, I cannot put this book down.

We can rightly assume that Jesus is very much involved in the sustaining and redemption of all of creation. Colossians 1:20 states that Christ will “reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” And Romans 8:22 says that “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” Thus, we can agree that Christ is the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of the entire cosmos. Christ is deeply concerned with the entire creation. Richard Rohr wants a new reformation of the Christian faith, and in that, he’s in league with others. But in another sense, he’s been in a class by himself for at least a decade. He is Western Christianity’s most identified contemplative, the one we think of when we consider that word, that way of approaching life. This is no accident. When Rohr stopped traveling many years ago, he founded “The Living School” in New Mexico, and those who want to learn to become contemplatives (not just Christians) come to him. He appeals to his own progressive Catholics, but also strongly to those, often Millennial and younger, ex-Evangelicals and mainline Protestants who seek to infuse their theological understanding with ancient root spirituality. He stops near a narrow aqueduct that runs between the CAC properties to explain a bit of the history and function of these "acequias." Rohr has been writing about “non-dual” thinking, as well as “Oneing” and other similar terms, for several books now, and this broad sweep approach to understanding faith can be freeing. The Universal Christ takes similar adventurous turns at big ideas in “Another Name for Every Thing” (Part 1), and “The Great Comma” (Part 2).Resurrection: “the general principle of all reality,” and “resurrection [is] another word for change” (170–1). On Easter Sunday “one circumscribed body of Jesus morphed into ubiquitous Light” (176). He adds: “If a video camera had been placed in front of the tomb of Jesus, it wouldn’t have filmed a lone man emerging from a grave . . . [but] something like beams of light extending in all directions” (177). Yet Rohr cheekily affirms that “I am quite conservative and orthodox by most standards on this important issue [of Jesus’s resurrection]” (172). More conservative Christians tend to orient their theology around Jesus—his death and resurrection, which made salvation possible for those who believe. Rohr thinks that this focus is misplaced. The universe has existed for thirteen billion years; it couldn’t be, he argues, that God’s loving, salvific relationship with creation began only two thousand years ago, when the historical baby Jesus was placed in the musty hay of a manger, and that it only became widely knowable to humanity around six hundred years ago, when the printing press was invented and Bibles began being mass-produced. Instead, in his most recent book, “ The Universal Christ,” which came out last year, Rohr argues that the spirit of Christ is not the same as the person of Jesus. Christ—essentially, God’s love for the world—has existed since the beginning of time, suffuses everything in creation, and has been present in all cultures and civilizations. Jesus is an incarnation of that spirit, and following him is our “best shortcut” to accessing it. But this spirit can also be found through the practices of other religions, like Buddhist meditation, or through communing with nature. Rohr has arrived at this conclusion through what he sees as an orthodox Franciscan reading of scripture. “This is not heresy, universalism, or a cheap version of Unitarianism,” he writes. “This is the Cosmic Christ, who always was, who became incarnate in time, and who is still being revealed.” The problem with Rohr isn’t just that he has adopted certain theologically debatable positions. It’s that the indispensable, all-transforming, holy mystery of the gospel—the Word become flesh (John 1:14)—is not even there. In its place is emptiness. If Jesus’s human body vanished, as Rohr tells us, and its diffusive beams scattered everywhere, then there is nothing left to worship except the universe itself. Or perhaps the conclusion is that one worships one’s own Christ-nature? It’s hard to see how worshiping the universe or worshiping oneself is any different from worshiping nothing, in a shadowy sort of pious nihilism. Putting these together, it is quite difficult to see any of this having any real connection with anything that could be described as orthodox Christian belief as historically expressed. Rohr repeatedly claims that his vision is radical, startling, surprising and new, and that readers m Rohr’s attempts to downplay Jesus and extol a false version of “the Christ” notwithstanding, the Incarnation was a one-of-a-kind and once-for-all event.