I grew through early adulthood under the mantle of a number of different Protestant denominations. It occurred to me along the way that those labels were completely unnecessary. That was my first break out of our famed boxes into which we try to stuff God, as He looks on with probable amusement, the rolling of His eyes, or worse, fury.
We try to limit the God of the Universe with "mine-is-better-than-yours" denominations, traditions, translations, all of which create a heaven and hell that operates out of what Rohr calls our amnesia, rather than our union with the Living God. We have forgotten the place from which we originated--our souls began in this very union; life on earth is growing up with authentic freedom to choose whether or not to return to that union.
I began to wrestle with this dilemma: if God is greater than all of His enemies--our sin, a bereft culture, and Satan and his legions--how come He [God] doesn't end up with all of His precious creations somewhere in an eternal timeline? Because I took God out of that box in my mind, I was prepared for Rohr's exceeding eloquence:
It is religion's job to teach us and guide us on this discovery of our True Self, but it usually makes the mistake of turning this into a worthiness contest of some sort...[when in fact, the facets of religion] are just tugboats to get you away from the shore and out into the right sea; they are the oars to get you working and engaged with the Mystery.Now hold onto your seat. If you are still firmly entrenched in the first half of life, which is a wonderful and necessary place to move through, what follows will not make sense and may even sound treacherous. But this blog series is in its second half of Rohr's book, so onward we must go, again in his words:
If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God! God excludes no one from union, but must allow us to exclude ourselves in order for us to maintain our freedom.
Our word for that exclusion is hell, and it must be maintained as a logical possibility. There must be the logical possibility of excluding oneself from union and to choose separation or superiority over community and love. No one is in hell unless that individual himself or herself chooses a final aloneness and separation.
Life is all about practicing for heaven. We practice by choosing union freely--ahead of time--and now. Heaven is the state of union both here and later. As now, so it will be then. No one is in heaven unless he or she wants to be, and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union...if you go to heaven alone, wrapped in your private worthiness, it is by definition not heaven. The more you exclude, the more hellish and lonely your existence always is.And finally, in case your first-half-of-life-head has not already exploded:
The ego clearly prefers an economy of merit, where we can divide the world into winners and losers, to any economy of grace, where merit or worthiness loses all meaning. In the first case, a few of us good guys attain glory. In the second case, all the glory is to God.What a troubling thought that religion--our churches--might be oars carrying us to a place where we get the glory instead of God, where our superiority and Right exclude the Truth that God is poised to include all on His terms and His timeline.
We are imposing a geography of heaven and hell, along with our timeline, on the fluid destination pattern that belongs only to God.
How staggering to view Him with so large an embrace. Are we to wrestle with the largeness of this view?
Yes. In fact, I would say,
Don't leave home without it.
