Communion of Sinners

"Spirituality tends to be more about unlearning than learning. And when the slag and dross are removed, that which evokes reverence is right there waiting! Many religious people seem to think that God, for some utterly unexplainable reason, loves the human past (usually their own group's recent past) instead of the present or the future of this creation. As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name.” We can do much better than substituting mere traditionalism for actual God experience.

Our identification of God with the past has done the present and future no favor. Old mistakes are still mistakes, and we do not need to keep repeating them. For much of the world, this preoccupation with the past comes across as a divine approval of everybody else's death (non-Christians, heretics, Native peoples, “sinners,”women, the poor, slaves, and on and on), and never our own.

Many people have lost all interest in our grand spiritual talk and our Scriptures because they too often have been used by people who are themselves still small (who are stuck in their False Self). It does not help to deny that we are stuck, and yet it does not help to stand arrogantly above it all either—as if we do not all share in the one great human crucifixion of reality, the one “world sorrow”(Weltschmerz, the Germans call it).

We Christians affirm the communion of saints in the Nicene Creed, but I think there should be an equal belief in the “communion of sinners.”We are all fully a part of both groups. My hope is that this book will above all else clarify for you, and especially confirm in your own experience, a few things that are true for people of any religion or no religion at all. I will use God language, because it is still the language of 95 percent of the world and 99 percent of history, but I think you will agree that what I say about grace, death, and resurrection is true for everybody and does not need specifically religious language at all." -- Richard Rohr