AARP Falling Upward by Richard Rohr

Author:Richard Rohr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-02-02T05:00:00+00:00

All Creation “Groans” (Romans 8:22)

Creation itself, the natural world, already “believes” the Gospel, and lives the pattern of death and resurrection, even if unknowingly. The natural world “believes” in necessary suffering as the very cycle of life: just observe the daily dying of the sun so all things on this planet can live, the total change of the seasons, the plants and trees along with it, the violent world of animal predators and prey. My own sweet black Lab, Venus, today killed a little groundhog, and brought it to me expecting approval. How could she think this was wonderful when I thought it was terrible? She dropped it with disappointment when she saw my eyes. Only the human species absents itself from the agreed-on pattern and the general dance of life and death. What Venus had done would be disastrous only if I want to be perfectly rational and “progressive.”

Necessary suffering goes on every day, seemingly without question. As I write this in the deserts of Arizona, I just read that only one saguaro cactus seed out of a quarter of a million seeds ever makes it even to early maturity, and even fewer after that. Most of nature seems to totally accept major loss, gross inefficiency, mass extinctions, and short life spans as the price of life at all. Feeling that sadness, and even its full absurdity, ironically pulls us into the general dance, the unified field, an ironic and deep gratitude for what is given—with no necessity and so gratuitously. All beauty is gratuitous. So whom can we blame when it seems to be taken away? Grace seems to be at the foundation of everything.

This creative tension between wonderful and terrible is named so well by Gerard Manley Hopkins, as only poets can. Even the long title of his poem reveals his acceptance of the ever-changing flow of Heraclites and also his trust in the final outcome: “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.”

Flesh fade, and mortal trash

fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.1

The resolution of earthly embodiment and divinization is what I call incarnational mysticism. As has been said many times, there are finally only two subjects in all of literature and poetry: love and death. Only that which is limited and even dies grows in value and appreciation; it is the spiritual version of supply and demand. If we lived forever, they say, we would never take life seriously or learn to love what is. I think that is probably true. Being held long and hard inside limits and tension, incarnate moments—crucibles for sure—allows us to search for and often find “the reconciling third” or the unified field beneath it all. “The most personal becomes the most universal,” Chardin loved to say.

Reality, creation, nature itself, what I call the “the First Body of Christ,” has no choice in the matter of necessary suffering.

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