Throughout his ministry, Father Richard Rohr has recognized the power of Twelve-Step programs to bring about spiritual transformation. The steps parallel the counterintuitive wisdom of Jesus:
What the ego hates more than anything else is to change—even when the present situation is not working or is horrible. Instead, we do more and more of what does not work, as many others have rightly said about addicts. The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As the English poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973) put it: “We would rather be ruined than changed, / We would rather die in our dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die.” [1]
Addicts—which I’m convinced are all of us, in one way or another—have an intense resistance to change. We like predictability and control. That’s one of the reasons addicts find it easier to have a relationship with a process or a substance rather than with people. Unlike objects, people are unpredictable. Having a drink, making a purchase, or turning to our devices can change our superficial mood very quickly. Even though the mood shift doesn’t last, it makes us feel like we are in control for a while. We don’t have to change our thinking or way of relating to people. We don’t have to sit with our boredom, discomfort, or anger, which short-circuits our ability to grow up and to move beyond whatever is in our way.
In the process of healing and gaining sobriety, salvation becomes not just something we believe, but something we begin to experience through the process of transformation through grace. Both Jesus and Paul were change agents. They were hated by their own groups precisely because they were constantly talking about change. The first thing Jesus said when he started preaching was, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). The word usually translated as “repent” is the Greek word metanoia, which is surely best translated as “turn around your mind” or “change your thinking.” Most of us won’t move toward any new way of thinking or actual change until we’re forced to do so, which usually means some form of suffering or disturbance that upsets our habitual path.
Until we bottom out and come to the limits of our own fuel supply, there is no reason for us to switch to a higher octane of fuel. Why would we want to change? We will not learn to actively draw upon a Larger Source until our usual resources are depleted and revealed as wanting. In fact, we will not even know there is a Larger Source until our own source and resources fail us. Until and unless there is a person, situation, event, idea, conflict, or relationship that we cannot “manage,” we will never find the True Manager.
[1] W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, ed. Alan Jacobs (Princeton University Press: 2011), 105.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, How Do We Breathe Under Water?: The Gospel and 12-Step Spirituality (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2005), CD, DVD, MP3; and
Image Credit:Rose B. Simpson, The Secret of Flight (detail), 2015, sculpture.
We featured the artist of these sculptures, Rose B. Simpson, at our recent CONSPIRE conference—so many of us were impacted by her creations that we decided to share her work with our Daily Meditations community for the month of November.
Image Inspiration:I’m this post-colonial, bi-cultural being in the world who has experienced. . . the gift of perspective in context in this foundation but also this deep asking of why. Why do we do the things we do? Why do we live the way we do? Why have the things happened to us that have happened and why do we continue to abuse each other and also our environment and ourselves? —Rose B. Simpson, CONSPIRE Interview, 2021
Learn more about the Daily Meditations Editorial Team.
Prayer For Our Community
Loving God, you fill all things with a fullness and hope that we can never comprehend. Thank you for leading us into a time where more of reality is being unveiled for us all to see. We pray that you will take away our natural temptation for cynicism, denial, fear and despair. Help us have the courage to awaken to greater truth, greater humility, and greater care for one another. May we place our hope in what matters and what lasts, trusting in your eternal presence and love. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our suffering world. Please add your own intentions . . . Knowing, good God, you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God. Amen. Listen to Father Richard pray this prayer aloud.
Story From Our Community
When my first marriage ended, I immersed grief in alcohol, drugs, women, and denial. Through an overdose, I met Jesus, “my savior.” I discovered my grief was not about the relationship ending, but thinking my desire to serve God was gone. Who would want me? The answer—God! Through this realization, I am able to serve God and my sisters and brothers as an addiction and mental health counselor. —Gary C. Share your own story with us.JOIN NOW
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News from the CAC
Explore the Contemplative Dimensions of Healing Trauma with James Finley
In this free audio series, Healing Trauma, clinical psychologist and CAC teacher James Finley guides listeners into contemplative healing as a response to suffering. James outlines seven steps that intentionally invite spirituality onto the journey of healing trauma.
Now Streaming: Love. Period Season 2
How do we live justly? Discover ways to choose fairness and equality every day (hint: it starts with loving yourself!) with Jacqui Lewis of NYC’s Middle Church. Season Two of our podcast Love. Period follows her new book “Fierce Love”—revealing a bold path for a better life and a more just world.
Explore Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations archive at cac.org.
Christian contemplation and also Buddhist reflection share a typical goal. Both seek to de-center the thinking mind to allow a deeper experience of reality, love, as well as empathy to arise:
Words Buddha suggests “I am awake.” Jesus informed us in a variety of areas to stay awake and mindful (Matthew 24:42; Mark 13:33– 37; Luke 21:36). However, awareness is not something that simply implies considering points carefully or being actually mindful. The Buddhists mention objectless awareness, where we are not conscious of anything in particular. It is a breathtaking, responsive recognition whereby we absorb all that the circumstance, the moment, the event uses, without removing anything. That really does not come naturally to us. We have to work at it! All types of meditation, as well as contemplation, are instructing us in some way to separate our assuming mind. Some have even called it the “ape mind,” because it keeps leaping from monitoring to observation, believed after idea, sensation after sensation, the majority of which indicate very little. We have actually lived with it for numerous years that we take the monkey mind as normative.
What the wonderful traditions, such as Buddhism, instruct us is that the ape mind truly is instead worthless when we get to things like the fact, love, freedom, infinity, infinity, and God. The ape mind can’t access such points and has no capability to take them in at any deepness. What we need to do is find out various minds, which we Christians call contemplation. Reflection is not churchy, pious, or peaceful. It has little to do with having a withdrawn individuality. It actually is a different mind– it’s not thinking, which is what we suggest by calling it objectless understanding. We do not focus on any particular things of consciousness.
Paradoxically, the path to get to objectless recognition is, to begin with simply one point, one object. We could also call it practicing awareness. Below is an invitation: I motivate you to take some time today to concentrate on one single item. Focus on it not so much with your mind, yet with your detects. See it wherefore it is– its texture, its form, its giftedness, its gratuity, its shade, its representation of light, its isness. Concentrate on this item up until your mind or vanity stops combating the minute and also quits claiming something to this impact: “This is ridiculous. This is silly. This doesn’t indicate anything. This doesn’t make a little bit of difference.”
If we can absolutely enjoy this, whatever this is, it ends up being the portal to everything. Exactly how we like one point is ultimately just how we love every little thing. We need to locate our capability to see, to enjoy, to accept, to forgive, and to delight in something. If we can not indulge in one reptile or one fallen leave, we are not going to delight in God. How we see is how we see. Just how we do anything is just how we do every little thing.
All forms of meditation and contemplation are teaching us some methods to compartmentalize our thinking mind. Some have even called it the “monkey mind,” because it keeps jumping from monitoring to monitoring, assumed after thought, feeling after sensation, many of which suggest very little. What the fantastic traditions, such as Buddhism, instruct us is that the monkey mind actually is rather useless when we get to things like reality, love, flexibility, infinity, endless time, and God. What we have to do is learn various minds, which we Christians call reflection. It really is a various mind– it’s not believing, which is what we suggest by calling it objectless awareness.
Author Heath Bradley wrote in the Preface to this 2012 book, Flames of Love, “this book is the fruit of wrestling with the spirit of the risen Jesus and refusing to let go until I received a blessing…. It has come in the form of a distinctively Christian vision of universal salvation that still has an integral and biblically-faithful role for the reality of hell… discovering the Bible-honoring, Christ-centered, and God-fearing vision of universal salvation that has been present in the church from the beginning has brought me a great deal of joyful confidence, even though not absolute certainty… the way of thinking about the end of all things that I will struggle to articulate in this book strikes me as the most coherent and compelling way of making sense of how God’s story of redemption through Christ will turn out.” (Pg. ix-x)
In chapter 1, he explains, “In this book, we are concerned with understanding and evaluating a specific Christian vision of God and God’s relationship to humanity known as Christian universalism…. [which is] the belief that ultimately every person will be saved through Christ. This vision of salvation stands in sharp contrast… to the dominant Christian vision of hell … that all people who are not Christians will spend eternity in conscious torment.” (Pg. 2)
He suggests, “Calvinists hold that God can accomplish whatever God wants to accomplish, it’s just that in their view God doesn’t really want to save all people. Arminians hold that God wants to save all people, but unfortunately, God cannot make free human beings choose salvation. Christian universalism simply affirms with Calvinists that God can do whatever God desires to do, and with the Arminians that God desires to save all people. Put those premises together, and you get the conclusion that God will save all people.” (Pg. 15)
He acknowledges, “many [atheists] reject traditional theism out of deep moral convictions; convictions that say that a God who tortures people forever for sin that they couldn’t help avoiding in the first place is not worth worshiping. I think they are on to something, and they are right to challenge a religious response that appeals to divine mystery to justify actions that we would immediately and unequivocally label as evil if attributed to human beings.” (Pg. 21) Later, he adds, “One of the main reasons I am motivated to argue against the everlasting damnation of all non-Christians is that I believe this doctrine… actually keeps many people from fully loving God with all they are, because deep down, to them God is a monster they are scared of, not a Father they adore.” (Pg. 129)
He observes, “while many Christians have this moral intuition that a God of love must care about justice and making things right, they wrongly assume that everlasting hell is the only way that God can bring about this justice… we are not forced to choose between believing in either a god who punishes the wicked forever on the one hand, or in a God who is morally indifferent and nonresponsive to the evil and injustice in life on the other… Indeed, most Christian universalists hold to a very robust and strong vision of divine judgment. Judgment need not be everlasting conscious torment in order for it to be very serious.” (Pg. 31-32)
He points out, “Jesus taught us to think of God primarily on the model of a loving parent. On one occasion he said, ‘Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead of a fish?…’ Jesus is encouraging his followers to compare the character of God with the character of human parents, who… would not do anything to actively harm their children… Francis Chan and Preston Sprinkle … write [in Erasing Hell: What God Said About Eternity, and the Things We’ve Made Up ], ‘… We don’t have the license to define love according to our standards and sensibilities.’ Actually, if we do take Jesus seriously, we do have the license from him to think about God according to our own standards…if we throw away human standards of goodness when thinking about God, then the claim that God is better, greater, and higher than our goodness is rendered meaningless.” (Pg. 41-42)
He asserts, “if these passages [1 Cor 15:22, Rom 5:18, Phil 2:9-11] are easily dismissed in the discussion as not really affirming universal salvation, then what WOULD it take for you to be open to the idea that a biblical author taught universal salvation? If Jesus wanted to reveal to us that God relates to all people with unlimited compassion and unbreakable love, how could he say it any more clearly than to say that God ‘is kind to the wicked and the ungrateful’ [Lk 6:35]?… A thoughtful reader… could easily argue that the apparent universalist texts are just as ‘clear’ as the apparent everlasting hell texts. There is no compelling reason why the everlasting hell texts should simply be assumed to be the clear texts that set the interpretive parameters for the supposedly ‘obscure’ universalist texts.” (Pg. 57-58)
He argues about Hebrews 9:27, “Universalists agree that humans die once and face judgment. There’s no debate there. The important question, though, is just what does the judgment consist of, and could God’s judgment actually make it possible for a person to repent and turn to Christ?… Paul can logically (and theologically) affirm both a response of faith AND an affirmation of universal salvation IF one doesn’t rule out from the start the possibility of salvation opportunities in the age to come.” (Pg. 59) Later, he adds, “There are also no explicit scriptural declarations that a person’s fate is definitively sealed at death… Supporters of the possibility of postmortem conversion will certainly agree … that all people face divine judgment when they die, but they will also affirm that God’s judgment is designed to elicit repentance and foster reconciliation.” (Pg. 123)
After quoting Revelation 21:23-25, he comments, “Throughout the book of Revelation the ‘kings of the earth’ are presented as the ultimate bad guys… their names are not found in the Book of Life, and so they are among those who are thrown into the lake of fire. Yet here we see them making their way into the heavenly city that has gates that are never closed… It is hard to imagine that they would be open so that the inhabitants of the city could leave, so they must be open so that those in the lake of fire can make their way in. Since John is clear that nothing can enter the heavenly city without being cleansed of sin, this could reasonably lead one to conclude that the lake of fire ultimately has a corrective and purifying function.” (Pg. 75-76)
He asks, “if God’s love is relentless, unstoppable, unchanging, unconditional, and never-ending, then why will physical death change all of this?… I can see no reason why a God of steadfast love will stop trying to reach out to a person after their physical death. Many early Christians couldn’t either. For the first four hundred years of the Christian church, many Christians believed that there would be postmortem opportunities for salvation.” (Pg. 84-85)
He notes, “The belief in an age of accountability is ultimately grounded, not primarily in specific scriptural declarations, but in more general scriptural affirmations about the character of God and in our deep moral sense of what is right and wrong. In that sense, it is a doctrine with a similar status as the belief in the possibility of postmortem salvation… While there are no texts that can be used to directly support an age of accountability as most contemporary Christians conceive it, there are several texts that can be marshaled in support of postmortem conversion. Christians who easily and quickly dismiss the possibility of postmortem conversion because of a lack of clear and direct scriptural support, and at the same time hold to a belief in an age of accountability, are … demanding a level of scriptural support for one doctrine that they are not for another.” (Pg. 86-87) He adds that Number 14:28-31 “clearly considers the ‘little ones’ to be anyone under twenty years old, not just infants and children.” (Pg. 88)
He suggests, “Many people argue that since Revelation speaks of the lake of fire burning forever, that it is clear that not all will enter through the open gates… One can just as easily argue the reverse position, namely, that since Revelation asserts that all things will be restored to God, the passages asserting that the lake of fire lasts forever cannot be taken literally. While I would not go so far as to say that Revelation unequivocally and unambiguously affirms universal salvation, it undeniably at least holds up as a possibility… to turn to God after death.” (Pg. 90)
He states, “I think that [1 Peter 3:18-20] teaches the descent of Christ into hell for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel to set people free. That Peter… uses the term ‘gospel,’ and … ‘proclamation,’ a word that is used throughout the New Testament to describe preaching the gospel for the purpose of conversion, all fit together nicely with the interpretation I am proposing. The only detail that seems to throw off this way … is the reference to the generation of Noah… [But] The generation of Noah came to be regarded as the most-wicked generation ever with no chance of finding redemption… In naming this generation in particular, Peter seems to be affirming that there is absolutely no group of people outside the scope of God’s will to save. If there is hope for them, there is hope for anybody!” (Pg. 91-92)
He says God has the power… to change the human will to see the ugliness and destructiveness of sin and to turn away from it and embrace the grace that is freely given by God. take the apostle Paul, for example. On the road to Damascus, as he is on his way to persecute Christians… Paul wasn’t seeking to choose Christ. He had chosen to reject Christ and to try to stamp out those who had accepted Christ as the Messiah.” (Pg. 98)
He contends, “one cannot consistently and coherently let the distinctively Christian claim that God is love be their guide, while at the same time affirming that all paths [to God] are equal… What I want to point out is that one can hold on to the affirmation that Jesus Christ is the exclusive means of salvation, without concluding that salvation is exclusively limited to those who profess Christ in this lifetime… the saving work of Christ is not limited to people who in this life knowingly and intentionally put their trust in Christ… Christ can reach through to people in this life without them necessarily knowing about him…” (Pg. 110, 114, 117)
He asserts, “When exclusivists claim that … God owes us nothing in the first place, they are making an unwarranted logical leap… to infer from this that God then has the right to create billions of people who will experience everlasting torment because they have not heard the gospel message and accepted it in this lifetime is another. To say that God owes us nothing is not the same as saying that God has the right to do anything.” (Pg. 115)
He points out, “While belief in an everlasting hell maybe what has motivated many evangelists and missionaries, I would argue that it is precisely this belief that has largely contributed to a transactional, decision-oriented focus towards evangelism that has made accepting the gospel the minimal entrance requirement for heaven. In contrast, Jesus said evangelism is to be about making disciples by teaching people how to live…” (Pg. 139)
He also argues, “Punishing someone for eternity does nothing to really make things right. Let’s return to the case of Hitler. How can everlasting punitive suffering really make up for the horrendous evil he perpetuated into so many lives?… To think that ‘getting even’ is what heals life’s deepest wounds is a myth… Hitler, for example, maybe given a role to play in the restoration of his victims. We can imagine God enabling his victims to offer him forgiveness, and in turn, God enabling Hitler to feel and see the horror of his wrongs, and then, with God’s help, to repent and do all he can to make reconciliation and restoration possible. This strikes me as a much more biblically shaped and Christ-centered view … than simply consigning Hitler to never-ending punishments where he never realizes and fully agrees with God’s condemnation of his sin.” (Pg. 158-159)
This is a marvelous, surprisingly “philosophical,” and creative explanation and defense of Christian Universalism; it will be a “must-reading” for anyone seriously studying the doctrines of Hell, Conditional Immortality, and Universalism.
The truly wonderful info is that God is not a remote God, a God to be feared, to remain free from, or a retaliatory God. The God that is moved by our pains as well as additionally participates in the quantity of the human fight … God is a thoughtful God. This recommends, to begin with, that God is a God that has in fact picked to be God-with-us … As promptly as we call God “God-with-us,” we enter into a new collaboration of love with him. By calling God Emmanuel, we determine God’s devotion to remaining in harmony with us, to share our satisfaction as well as additionally pains, to safeguard as well as additionally protect us, as well as additionally to sustain each of life with us. The God-with-us is a close God, a God whom we call our shelter, our citadel, our expertise, in addition to additionally, much more extensively, our assistant, our guard, our love. We will definitely never ever before really identify God as a thoughtful God if we do not comprehend with our heart as well as likewise mind that” words wound up being flesh as well as likewise lived among us” (John 1:14).
“But there are not a few who would be indignant at having their belief in God questioned, who yet seem greatly to fear imagining Him better than He is.” -George MacDonald
“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” -1 John 4:18
“To say that God’s goodness may be different in kind from man’s goodness, what is it but saying, with a slight change of phraseology, that God may possibly not be good?”
-John Stuart Mill
“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.” -1 John 4:16B
“It is not the way of the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction in punishment for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned, aware how they would turn out when He created them- and whom nonetheless He created.
-St. Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetical Homilies
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