The Christian Meaning Of Enlightenment (Richard Rohr)

[Reefs]

[Reefs]

True Self vs. false self....

[zendancer]

Those are excellent videos, and I plan to suggest to my Christian friends who're interested in ND to watch them.

[Reefs]

Mar 27, 2024 12:24:12 GMT -5 zendancer said:

Those are excellent videos, and I plan to suggest to my Christian friends who're interested in ND to watch them.

Yes, most excellent!

Here's a short one you can share with your friends, transcript below.

Where do Christianity and Non-duality meet?

- Father Richard Rohr

RR: As Christians, what we believe is that Jesus is the image of full humanity and full divinity put together. Which, logically, is an impossibility—you're either one or the other. So we have non-duality at the core, at the center of the whole mystery.

And then he says himself “I and the Father are one”. So we have the human Jesus totally identifying with the divine God, we have Jesus being a material and yet clearly a highly spiritually evolved person. So you would have thought that Christianity would have been masterful at understanding non-duality, because our basic doctrines can’t be understood without it.

And yet, what happened, of course, it got filtered through Greek thinking. And I’m not saying Greek thinking isn’t wonderful, it is. But it tends, for the sake of clarity, to be rather dualistic, it differentiates, it clarifies. And so that filter, originally through the Greek mind and then overtaken largely by the West, not entirely but largely, [so] we just didn't develop the non-dual understanding. And we didn't teach it to people.

So they had a doctrine that Jesus is fully human and fully divine, but they didn’t have the mind to really know how to understand that. So you can see why we emphasize belief. We believe it, [but] not really experience it. They didn’t know how to experience it, for the most part, except at the mystical level. And, of course, we've always had the Christian mystics who got it.

But we never used the word non-dual. We needed the East to give us the word, and once you have the word, then the clarification follows afterwards, it seems to me.

[laughter]

Mar 27, 2024 12:24:12 GMT -5 zendancer said:

Those are excellent videos, and I plan to suggest to my Christian friends who're interested in ND to watch them.

We watched the second, shorter one last night. Yes, wow. Clearly insightful, and entirely delightful. And on holy week. Thank you, Reefs!

[laughter]

Mar 27, 2024 21:06:49 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Mar 27, 2024 12:24:12 GMT -5 zendancer said:

Those are excellent videos, and I plan to suggest to my Christian friends who're interested in ND to watch them.

Yes, most excellent!

Here's a short one you can share with your friends, transcript below.

Where do Christianity and Non-duality meet?

- Father Richard Rohr

RR: As Christians, what we believe is that Jesus is the image of full humanity and full divinity put together. Which, logically, is an impossibility—you're either one or the other. So we have non-duality at the core, at the center of the whole mystery.

And then he says himself “I and the Father are one”. So we have the human Jesus totally identifying with the divine God, we have Jesus being a material and yet clearly a highly spiritually evolved person. So you would have thought that Christianity would have been masterful at understanding non-duality, because our basic doctrines can’t be understood without it.

And yet, what happened, of course, it got filtered through Greek thinking. And I’m not saying Greek thinking isn’t wonderful, it is. But it tends, for the sake of clarity, to be rather dualistic, it differentiates, it clarifies. And so that filter, originally through the Greek mind and then overtaken largely by the West, not entirely but largely, [so] we just didn't develop the non-dual understanding. And we didn't teach it to people.

So they had a doctrine that Jesus is fully human and fully divine, but they didn’t have the mind to really know how to understand that. So you can see why we emphasize belief. We believe it, [but] not really experience it. They didn’t know how to experience it, for the most part, except at the mystical level. And, of course, we've always had the Christian mystics who got it.

But we never used the word non-dual. We needed the East to give us the word, and once you have the word, then the clarification follows afterwards, it seems to me.

"Christ" == "not-two" .. hence "Christ, Jesus", or "Jesus, the Christ". It's hidden in plain sight, in the Eucharist, Communion. Communion is a rejoining.

There's quite a bit more that I could write about to expand and expound on his idea about dualistic thinking and the origins of Cathlocism as a religion, and for that you have to account for Roman culture and history. This implicates the many valid critiques of the institution of Catholicism. Some subjective and judgemental. Others, simply objective. Any priest worth his salt will be the first to note that the Church is the work of men, and it's my understanding that even the clergy, who act in personum Christi, go to confession and admit they are sinners.

[Reefs]

Mar 28, 2024 5:47:54 GMT -5 laughter said:

Mar 27, 2024 21:06:49 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Yes, most excellent!

Here's a short one you can share with your friends, transcript below.

"Christ" == "not-two" .. hence "Christ, Jesus", or "Jesus, the Christ". It's hidden in plain sight, in the Eucharist, Communion. Communion is a rejoining.

There's quite a bit more that I could write about to expand and expound on his idea about dualistic thinking and the origins of Cathlocism as a religion, and for that you have to account for Roman culture and history. This implicates the many valid critiques of the institution of Catholicism. Some subjective and judgemental. Others, simply objective. Any priest worth his salt will be the first to note that the Church is the work of men, and it's my understanding that even the clergy, who act in personum Christi, go to confession and admit they are sinners.

He goes into the historical and human aspects in the first video. I'll see if I can find a transcript.

[Reefs]

transcript:

batgap.com/richard-rohr-transcript/

[Reefs]

Mar 28, 2024 5:41:11 GMT -5 laughter said:

Mar 27, 2024 12:24:12 GMT -5 zendancer said:

Those are excellent videos, and I plan to suggest to my Christian friends who're interested in ND to watch them.

We watched the second, shorter one last night. Yes, wow. Clearly insightful, and entirely delightful. And on holy week. Thank you, Reefs!

I thought you might like it. Here's an Easter sermon from a few years ago...



transcript:

Resurrection: Not a One-Time Miracle


RR: Good morning. […] Pray that I can help open this wonderful scripture [John 20:19-31] for you. It's one of those scriptures that speaks for itself, stands on its own, because it's so filled with magnificent metaphor and image. And yet, it needs to be endlessly unpackaged, because it is so rich. So let me try.

[We] begin with very last verse, it says: “These thoughts have been recorded to help you believe that Jesus is the Christ.” Let's start with that. […] Most of us conflated, the two words, Jesus and Christ, most of us frankly were trained to think that Christ was Jesus’ last name. This particular passage, as many of the sermons in Acts, say it much better. Jesus revealed the Christ. Jesus became the Christ. Jesus proclaimed the Christ.

So let's get that straight to begin with, in John's Gospel, which is mostly talking about the Christ, we're talking about a different archetype, image, teacher than Jesus; even though they become the same. And these this early preaching is coming to that recognition, the Christ… and this is clear so you don't think I'm preaching something untrue, this is clear in the prologue to John's Gospel, the hymn at the beginning of Colossians, the hymn at the beginning of Ephesians, the first paragraph of Hebrews, the first paragraph of 1st John—I have to cover all my bases, so you don't think I'm making something up. They all say, with absolute clarity, the Christ existed from all eternity. Jesus only existed in time, 2,000 years ago.

Now, we who came along 2,000 years later, we just lumped the two together—Jesus Christ. Actually, it's one of the major Achilles heels in Christian theology, because to put it most concisely, most of us were taught, or invited, to fall in love with Jesus but we weren't taught or invited to fall in love with the Christ.

The Christ is a cosmic concept. And let me put it straightforwardly, the Christ is the Christian code word for Reality, for Everything. Jesus becomes the Christ, and in that includes in his journey, that he walks for us and with us and in us, the classic archetypal human journey: from conception, hidden conception in Bethlehem, to an ordinary life of thirty years, like most of our lives are, where you hardly hear about him, to trial, betrayal, death and resurrection.

But this is a statement, now listen closely, this is not just a one-time anomaly, and we Christians get all happy on Easter “Yay! God the Father raised up Jesus!” No, it's a statement about how Reality works, all the time everywhere. And we're living in a most wonderful time, where physics and astrophysics especially, is proving this for us. Quite simply put: nothing dies. Everything is transformed. And the final chapter of history is resurrection.

This was always understood by the great Christian mystics, who were much more Trinitarian than most of us are. But we pulled Jesus out of the Trinity, tried to understand him as a standalone figure, whittled Jesus down, and unfortunately that's why— to be perfectly blunt—we still have Christians who can be racists. We still have Christians who don't love the big mystery. They don't love the big truth. They don't love what Jesus calls The Reign of God. We made Christianity into a tribal religion, when it was meant to be a universal cosmic statement about how reality works.

Jesus, to use maybe later language, is the archetype, the corporate personality, the stand-in for Everything. Suddenly the Christian message has huge relevance for the life, but even more relevance for history.

The other great flaw it seems to me that we've fallen into is to pull the gospel into an individual theory of how you can go to heaven or hell… What a sad story! And then most people go to hell by our own rules, it seems. And you listen, you know, ever since the late great planet Earth and all this malarkey about Armageddon and Apocalypse now… The final end of history was not resurrection, quite the contrary! It was all sliding down to a tragic tumultuous and punitive ending.
You see, when all of history isn't hopeful, when society isn't hopeful—and any of your therapists know this—it's very hard to heal individuals. It's very hard to make you hopeful when the whole thing is going to hell in a hand basket. Christianity was meant to be a cosmic message of hope for history.

Now, let's go back to the gospel text, and we're going to see what this final chapter of history looks like, what kind of God we really have. And of course, if we're created in the image of God, how we image God is rather important. If he's punitive, we can be punitive. If he's violent, we can be violent. But what we're going to have here appearing behind locked doors, where they are hiding for fear of the Jews… Here we have an image of all of history hiding, almost always out of fear, look at our contemporary politics in this country, most of it fear-based, because that's what appeals to the ego at the lowest level of motivation.

In the evening of the first day of the week, the beginnings of a new creation, the first day of the week, the doors were locked. They were hiding for fear of the temple authorities. And Jesus came and stood among them and he said Shalom. The great Sabbath, the great peace of the Sabbath, and then he showed them the price of this transformative journey, he showed them the wounds in his hands and in his side.

So we have Jesus… let me just give two succinct words how God, how Jesus is being presented to us. He is coming in the midst of history as the forgiving victim. Let me repeat it: the forgiving victim. Without it, we all play games of victimhood for our own aggrandizement, and there will be no new history, there will be no new day. And you see this in our world right now, people simply accumulating past grievances to give themselves moral high-ground, and the right to be violent, because you did this to us…

And here Jesus, who is betrayed by his own inner circle, abandoned by most of them except the three women at the foot of the cross and John… (I said to the last group, if I had reappeared, I would have said “You idiots! How can you be so obtuse!”) And all he says is Shalom. Doesn't even mention it. Doesn't even bring it up. This is a new day, this is a new history. Which, unfortunately, has not been the majority of Christian history either. And not only does this new presence, this new availability of God, crossing through locked doors even, but he breathes on them… now any of you who are students of scripture know what this is connoting. Where did this last happen? Right at the beginning of the Bible, in the second chapter of Genesis, where Yahweh takes the mud of the earth and he breathes into it.

So we clearly have a connotation of the new Adam. If Adam was the archetype of the first human being, as Paul says in several places, Christ is the corporate personality for the second transformed human being. And here we have a marvelous, symbolic, metaphorical statement of what transformation looks like. Because breath and spirit, Holy Spirit, and forgiveness are all equivalent. They're all the same thing. God is as available as the breath right in front of your mouth. God is always recreating humanity by this infusion of spirit, this infusion of love into the cold heart of Adam.

And then to take it even further and we call this the Principle of Incarnation, he knows that we're going to do exactly what we did, largely spiritualize this whole message. And he has to bring it down to earth. He has to bring it to embodiment. He has to bring it to physicality, has to bring it to this world and the suffering that most of us go through in this world. And Thomas doesn't want to believe in a wounded God. He doesn't want to believe in a God who participates and is in solidarity with human suffering. He says, you can't know what I'm talking about Thomas, until you put your fingers inside my wounds. You've got to feel what it feels like for the poor for the rejected for the abandoned, now you can believe. This is incarnational Christianity. This is not some bypassing of the human journey, but we have Jesus returning to some form of physicality, not fleeing into the heavens, but re-entering this world in a new way. And brothers and sisters, that's exactly the Jesus you have access to today, in fact, this moment. It's the same Christ. It's the same presence. It's the same forgiving victim. It's the same Shalom. And it's the breath you're taking in right now.

[laughter]

Mar 31, 2024 11:39:53 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Mar 28, 2024 5:41:11 GMT -5 laughter said:

We watched the second, shorter one last night. Yes, wow. Clearly insightful, and entirely delightful. And on holy week. Thank you, Reefs!

I thought you might like it. Here's an Easter sermon from a few years ago...

A great example of the value that can be offered by a learned sage who has devoted his life to the truth. Only seekers need burn the books. Paraphrasing Father Joe from memory: "the resurrection happens in the moment, every moment". Thank you (profusely), kind sir. and Happy Easter!

[Reefs]

Mar 31, 2024 15:04:38 GMT -5 laughter said:

Mar 31, 2024 11:39:53 GMT -5 Reefs said:

I thought you might like it. Here's an Easter sermon from a few years ago...

A great example of the value that can be offered by a learned sage who has devoted his life to the truth. Only seekers need burn the books. Paraphrasing Father Joe from memory: "the resurrection happens in the moment, every moment". Thank you (profusely), kind sir. and Happy Easter!

It's like these people give you some kind of decoder ring, and suddenly when you go back to the scriptures, it all makes sense and is also so obvious. Amazing. RR got a book on the story of Job btw, Job and the Mystery of Suffering. I've been browsing a bit thru the book, because I think it's very much related to the 'ND and suffering' topic. I found this formula in the book:

Holiness = reunited to the whole = goodness = what is.

[Reefs]

I think it's worth posting the transcript of the first video. When RR talks about religion, it actually reminds me of Abe, they have a similar, no-nonsense and yet fun, perspective.

Since that talk is a bit long, I'll be breaking it up into several parts and also add time stamps.

Richard Rohr - The Christian Meaning Of Enlightenment (part 1)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=evGOSDyfH7s

(00:15)

[Christianity] has defined enlightenment in such a very, very individualistic, tiny way that really offered little gift to the world. I don't know all the historical reasons for that, my guess—and that's all I can say—is that both in Eastern orthodoxy and in Roman Catholicism we align ourselves with Empire. And once you align the message of a spiritual teacher with imperial thinking, there's a whole bunch of questions you can't ask anymore, and you can only see what you're told to look for. And if you weren't told to look for it, you can't see it.

(01:02)

(I don't know if you've attended any of Brian McLaren's workshops, and maybe some of you have also seen this video where he tells one side of the room to observe how many times the people dressed in black throw the ball to the people dressed in white. And he says: “This side of the room, you count how many times the people dressed in white throw it”… So you're just intent on winning, because, you know, I want to get the right number. And after we've all counted and seen the… maybe it's a two minute video… he asks, and it's amazing how many people still get the number wrong. But then he says: “How many of you noted that during this passing of the ball, back and forth, a gorilla walked across the scene?”… And honestly, in a group much bigger than this, he did it in one of our conferences in Albuquerque, it wasn't more than two percent of the people who noted a gorilla. He shows it again, and it's quite obvious… “How did I not see…?” Because we were focusing on one thing, we really did not see, our eyes did not see something else.)

(02:25)

Well, I think once the gospel of Jesus got aligned with the Roman Empire in the West, with Byzantium in the East, there were a whole bunch of gorillas we just didn't see. It was all individual soul salvation. And that's the word, pretty much, that came to substitute for Jesus, if you want to carry through the metaphor of enlightenment, it's rather clear, especially in John's Gospel. But we didn't ask about enlightenment, even for the individual, much less for the corporate. What we settled for, or what I call belief systems and belonging systems… When you want to unite people, which is what Empire wants, you want everybody to be conformed into one worldview, you really are threatened by any notion of inner freedom, or inner awareness, or consciousness. You would rather, to be perfectly honest, have people unconscious. And so you settle for belonging systems.

(03:45)

And we look at most of the wars of Europe and Christian nations, and they've all been between groups that both consider themselves Christian. But you can see that the Christianity was identified, if at all, with their nationhood, with their rights as a people, or their image as a people; continuing into the first World War and in some ways even the second, that the group you belong to, the group you fought for was your identity, that was your personhood. And even the church, the churches, were largely content with this. We were more Italian, or German, or French, or Spanish than we were catholic, even though the word catholic means universal. We clearly never got it, it was much more our identification with the group.

(04:50)

Let's go back to Jesus. He still is the founder of the firm of Western Christianity, you know, even though you wouldn't think it. And I have to say this, not in any sense an anti-Protestant statement, but in most ways Protestantism did not reform Catholicism in these regards. It was asking the same narrow questions, and tied into the same European imperial worldview, in most cases.

(05:20)

Jesus, to use the metaphor of light, calls himself in John's Gospel “My word is the true light that enlightens all peoples”, in John 8, “I am the light of the world, anyone who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have light too”… And what he says of himself, this is not usually pointed out to Christians, it seems to me, he in John 8 does say “I am the light of the world”… but in Matthew 5 he says “YOU are the light of the world”… I don't know why we teachers never pointed that out?

(05:55)

We exalt Jesus. But always feel to exalt Jesus we’ve got to negate humanity, which is what religion does. Religion is always looking for one Absolute, one highly exalted Absolute, because that tends to hold the group together. But we don't want to say what Jesus said in [Matthew 5:14], “YOU are the light of the world too”… I've never heard a preacher in all my years in the church connect those two phrases, and show that they, in some ways, contradict one another, or not contradict, actually complement.

(06:35)

In Matthew 6, here's where he's really moving in the direction that we would now call either shadow work or capacity to have a different set of eyes… now, enlightenment is something I participate in. Let me try Matthew 6:22, “The lamp of the body is the eye, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be filled with light. But if your eye is diseased, your whole body, in fact, will be filled with darkness. In fact, if your inner lamp is in fact darkness, what darkness there will be.” So, I mean, this could be straight a Buddhist teaching: how you see is what you see. And it's all about cleaning the lens. And if you don't clean the lens…

(07:30)

I see this in teaching contemplation, most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are. And we just have not given Western civilization this kind of wisdom. We just haven't. You could remain terribly narcissistic, greedy, vain, egocentric, but just believe the doctrines of the church… and this was all the way to the top, you know, you didn't demand transformation. So when you emphasize belief systems and belonging…

(08:10)

Belief systems, by the way, ask almost nothing of you, right? It's really no skin off your back to say “I believe Jesus is the Son of God”, you know. “I believe”—if you're evangelical—“the Bible is the inerrant Word of God”, or—if you're Catholic—“I believe that Mary was always a virgin”… Great! You know… so what?! So what?! We really created fast food religion. And you felt you were some high-minded, transformed person, because you believe doctrines. And again, Protestantism did not reform Catholicism, it just changed the belief systems and the emphasis: we're going to emphasize this instead of that, belonging systems. So what loses out when you emphasize belief systems and belonging systems is transformational systems—is this really changing perception?

[zendancer]

I've enjoyed watching several of his videos, and IMO he's one of the best explainers of a ND Christian perspective. However, yesterday someone mentioned something from one of his videos that surprised me. In one of his YouTube videos Rohr apparently said something like, "I try to stay in presence, but I'm not always able to do so." I've been searching for that quote, but so far have been unable to find his actual words about this. If he actually said something like that, then he hasn't yet penetrated the illusion of the SVP. In every other way he seems extremely clear, but it's impossible to fall out of presence or cease being THIS and any sage worth his/her salt would know this. All apparent efforting is seen to be an illusion after one discovers the truth of one's being. This reported statement doesn't detract from his primary message, but it indicates that one further realization might result in what Zen people call "discovering the last word of Zen."

Out of curiosity does anyone here know which video contains his words regarding this issue?

[Reefs]

Richard Rohr - The Christian Meaning Of Enlightenment (part 2)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=evGOSDyfH7s

(09:20)

I have to say, one of the wonderful things the Franciscans gave me, we had to study four years of philosophy before they put the scriptures in our hand. And I think that is what kept a lot of us from going fundamentalist. And we always feel sorry for the denominations where you give young preachers “the Word of God!”, you know, you inflate the young ego with “I have the ultimate power!” But he doesn't know how to think yet. And I'm not trying to make this overly rational, because we know that's been much of the problem too, but the very first course I took in 1962 had four years of philosophy, was a course, some of you probably took it too, a terribly ugly word, it's called “epistemology”… And epistemology is: How do you know what you think you know?

(10:20)

The East emphasized epistemology: How do you know what you know? What is consciousness? How do you become aware?.. [and] went through all the different theories of knowledge and so forth, but in fact, in the real common order of Western Christianity, it was a small percentage that studied epistemology. Mostly you just dove into metaphysics, in other words, not “How do you know what you know?” but “What is the Truth?” And this running to people, usually young people, when they began their studies, into this lust for certitude, this lust for metaphysical explanation without much observation. Observation was not encouraged. It was giving people answers before they even largely asked the question.

(11:15)

We American Catholics grew up on a terrible little book called “The Baltimore Catechism”, I'm sure some of you had it forced on you too. And we now find out, you know, this was written by some Monsignor from New Jersey—nothing against Monsignors from New Jersey—but he had no major degree in theology. A catechism a whole is a whole system of question and answer, question and answer. I love to point out, I still have my dog-eared copy that I often refer to.

(11:45)

If you go back to your Baltimore Catechism, question 16 is this “Where is God?”… and in fact I'm going to find out who the true Catholics are in this room, I'm going to ask the question (we had to memorize it, you know, it was all memorized) and you all know the answer: Where is God? [audience: in Heaven] No, God is everywhere! You're not good Catholics. The answer is: God is everywhere. Really, that’s pretty good! The Monsignor from New Jersey was not all bad, but in fact, he lost it right after question 16.

(12:25)

The other 326 questions and answers in the Baltimore Catechism really go out of the way to say “Well, we didn't really mean that. God really isn't everywhere. God is only in the Roman Catholic Church. All the rest are heretics. And he is really only in the bread, in the tabernacle, which is locked up in the church. And only if the priest was in good standing when you celebrated mass…” So you see, what you end up with, God is hardly anywhere! And we priests control it. We got the key to the tabernacle…

(13:15)

And these were all well-intentioned, sincere, good people, many of them had a better heart than I do. But were just given very, very limited worldviews. And this is the temptation of all religion, that we decide where the sacred is and where the sacred is not. That's what it comes down to. And once you're in control of that, you're in control. I mean, this has been priesthood in every civilization since the beginning of time, deciding what is sacred and what is not sacred, by purity codes and “can't touch this, can't eat that”… it's all divvying up the world. Well, I'm afraid we did the same with our whole understanding, or our lack of understanding, of enlightenment.

(14:05)

So to get back to the theme: What happened was that the word salvation, which is used a lot in the New Testament, sort of started substituting for enlightenment. And the worst piece of that is that it was all pushed off into the next world. At that point you have no transformational religion anymore. It's all—I'm going to use a cynical phrase, but you'll understand—it's all fire insurance! And religion is paying your fire insurance dues, or whatever they might be… And I do know, some of the metaphors in the New Testament lend themselves to this.

(15:00)

But if God really is an eternal torturer—I want you to feel that!—eternal torturer, to anybody who doesn't like Him or Her, why would you create mystics? I mean, let me put it this way: if on your first date your girlfriend said “If you don't date me again, I will burn you for all eternity!”… Would any of you go on a second date with this… ? No, you gotta know, that's what we're dealing with! I'm making it facetious… but it isn't facetious. I'm a priest 42 years and I've done enough spiritual direction and confession to realize, my god, their real, active image of the Divine is not allurement or safety or intimacy or enticement, its threat. This won't work, this will not work! […]

(16:15)

And I’m not saying that no one got it, because I've traveled enough now to enough countries, cultures, religions… inside of every monastery, diocese, school, parish, church there's always a few enlightened people, there always are. Against all the odds! There's a few people who just flow with love, in every religion, in every group. And you say, “What did they do right? How did they get it, with all the horrible theology that we gave people?”…

(16:50)

But back to the notion of salvation. You see, once you have an imperial religion, which is what happened after 313, and Constantine and his friends made us into the established religion of the Empire; you have to have, as I said, conformity, agreement. You want to have one God figure that holds the nation together. We’ve seen that in all of history, it works very effectively. But most especially we Christians had to prove and demand that you believe that Jesus is God. Because he became the effective God figure. It was not really Trinitarian mystical theology anymore… You look in the front of most of European cathedrals, Jesus sitting on a throne like a judge. It's not the meek, humble Jesus that we know anymore. He's operating as a judge and a king, who holds together Western civilization.

[Reefs]

Apr 5, 2024 6:41:50 GMT -5 zendancer said:

I've enjoyed watching several of his videos, and IMO he's one of the best explainers of a ND Christian perspective. However, yesterday someone mentioned something from one of his videos that surprised me. In one of his YouTube videos Rohr apparently said something like, "I try to stay in presence, but I'm not always able to do so." I've been searching for that quote, but so far have been unable to find his actual words about this. If he actually said something like that, then he hasn't yet penetrated the illusion of the SVP. In every other way he seems extremely clear, but it's impossible to fall out of presence or cease being THIS and any sage worth his/her salt would know this. All apparent efforting is seen to be an illusion after one discovers the truth of one's being. This reported statement doesn't detract from his primary message, but it indicates that one further realization might result in what Zen people call "discovering the last word of Zen."

Out of curiosity does anyone here know which video contains his words regarding this issue?

Based on what I have listened and read, he's no Meister Eckhart or Ramana. But he's definitely pointing into the right direction, and given the extremely limited vocabulary that he's allowed to use, he's doing an extraordinary job, IMO.

Here's a short recording about being present in the NOW, transcript below.

Richard Rohr - To Be Awake Is to Be Now—Here

The Lord be with you. A reading from the holy gospel, as written to us by Mark [Mark 13:33-37]:
Jesus said to his disciples: “Be watchful! Be alert! You do not know when the time will come. It is like a man traveling abroad. He leaves home and places his servants in charge, each with his own work, and orders the gatekeeper to be on the watch. Watch, therefore; you do not know when the lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning. May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to all: ‘Watch!’” This is good news from the Lord.

I'm afraid that we probably hear this gospel as if it's a threat, like the coming of the Lord is going to get us, or trap us. In fact, the point is exactly the opposite. When is the moment when the Lord comes? In fact, what the text is saying is, every moment, all the time, in the evening, at midnight, at cockcrow in the morning. The presence, brothers and sisters, of God is infinite, everywhere, always and forever. You cannot not be in the presence of God. There's no other place to be. The only change is always on your side. God is present but we're not present to the presence. And you could say that all spiritual teaching, and this is not oversimplified, is simply teaching you how to be present to the moment, at midnight, in the morning at cockcrow or in the evening.

When you're present you, will experience the presence. But here's the problem: we're almost always somewhere else, living in the past or worrying about the future. The mind can only do two things, it can reprocess the past over and over and over and over again, this makes you an obsessive compulsive person, which most people are right, really, they just keep thinking the same thoughts over and over again; or you worry about the future, over and over and over again. If you watch your mind it doesn't think many original thoughts, you just keep thinking the same problematic way that your mind loves to create. If we don't find a way out of this, you can go to all the church services you want and you're not going to be present to the presence. You're not going to experience the Eternal Advent, the Eternal Coming of God.

I had a wonderful week, as I hope you did, for Thanksgiving I was invited by the monks at Snowmass Colorado, to spend the holiday with them. You might not know of this community, it's a Cistercian or Trappist monastery, right in the middle of Colorado. I drove up in a big snowstorm on Tuesday, but fortunately got there. And they put me up in one of their little beautiful hermitages that looks down over the mountain valley and the monastery, during the time I was there. And of course in a Hermitage there's no television, there's no iPad, there's no iPhone, there's no computer, there's no radio, there's just you and the trees. And I took Venus, my dog, along, she was chasing rabbits. But there was nothing but the natural. It was so easy there to be present to the presence, to watch the snow fall and to give God glory for it. Everything became an occasion for joy, for satisfaction.

Brothers and sisters, I don't think we know what a unnatural world we live in. No one has ever had the obstacles that we have. We carry our obstacles in our pockets now, our iPhones and iPads and any excuse to be somewhere else than right here, Right here is never enough, right here right now can never make us happy, we've got to fill it with useless conversation… And let's be honest, most of our conversation is about nothing, nothing that matters, nothing that lasts, nothing that is real…it's over and over and over and pretty soon we've frittered away 20 years of our life, the only life that you have. Brothers and sisters, you have to find a way to experience your experiences, or otherwise you're just on cruise control, and you go through your whole life and you don't know what's happening, that the Divine energy of God is flowing through each one of you. And it has nothing to do with you being perfect, because you're not and you never will be, and for a wonderful reason. That's what God loves, the imperfection and the ordinariness of the human life, that's you and that's me.

Advent is not these four weeks before Christmas, although it is. Advent is always. The coming will happen whenever you are here. Did you ever notice that the words “now”, “here” if you put them together and it spells “nowhere”… and when you're now here it always feels like nowhere, feels like nothing, and we're rushing to the next moment as if it's going to be better, and it isn't! Because if you don't taste this moment, you won't taste next moment either, or next or next year or next month. Brothers and sisters, God invites you to live fully the only life that you'll ever have. And the way you live it is not by living in the past or in the future, but living right now.