"God Is Hated Here"

“Less than a block from where I used to live in downtown Albuquerque there is a sidewalk where the homeless often sit against the wall to catch the winter sun. Once I saw a fresh graffiti chalked clearly on the pavement. It touched me so profoundly that I immediately went home and wrote it in my journal. It said, “I watch how foolishly man guards his nothing — thereby keeping us out. Truly, God is hated here.”

I can only imagine what kind of life experience enabled this person to write in such a cutting but truthful way. I understood anew why Jesus seemed to think that the expelled ones had a head start in understanding his message. Usually they have been expelled from what was unreal anyway — the imperial systems of culture, which demand “in” people and “out” people, victors and victims. In God’s reign “everything belongs,” even the broken and poor parts.

Until we have admitted this in our own soul, we will usually perpetuate expelling systems in the outer world of politics and class. Dualistic thinking begins in the soul and moves to the mind and eventually moves to the streets. True prayer, however, nips the lie in the bud. It is usually experienced as tears, surrender, or forgiveness. Perhaps I can presume that this homeless person is not formally educated in theology or psychotherapy; yet through the path of suffering, and maybe prayer, this person is in touch with both essence and edges — and knows who God is.

This is why St. Bonaventure and others said that a poor uneducated person might well know and love God more than a great theologian or ecclesiastic. You do not resolve the God question in your head — or even in the perfection of moral response. It is resolved in you, when you agree to bear the mystery of God: God’s suffering for the world and God’s ecstasy in the world. Agreeing to this task is much harder, I’m afraid, than just trying to be “good.”...

It is fair to say that the traps of mind and ideology are as toxic and as blinding as the so-called “hot sins” of drunkards and prostitutes, though they are harder to recognize. Most of us have to be taught how to see; true seeing is the heart of spirituality today….

The street person feels cold and rejected and has to go to a deeper place for warmth and truth. The hero pushes against his own self-interested ambition and eventually discovers that it does not matter very much anyway. The alcoholic woman recognizes how she has hurt her family and breaks through to a Compassion that is much bigger than she is. In each case, the edges that we call reality have suffered, informed, and partially self-destructed. Then they often show themselves to be unnecessary or even part of the problem. Only then do we recognize and let go of the boundaries and edges surrounding our soul.

No wonder that the saints and mystics so often use those unpopular words of “surrender” and “suffering.” As Jesus says, “Unless the grain of wheat dies, it remains just a grain of wheat” (John 12:24). We do not find our own center; it finds us. Our own mind will not be able to figure it out. We collapse back into the Truth only when we are naked and free — which is probably not very often. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking. In other words, our journeys around and through our realities, or “circumferences,” lead us to the core reality, where we meet both our truest self and our truest God. We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity.

In Jesus, God tells us that God is not different from humanity. Thus Jesus’ most common and almost exclusive self-name is “The Human One,” or “Son of Humanity.” He uses the term seventy-nine times in the four Gospels. Jesus’ reality, his cross, is to say a free “yes” to what his humanity finally asks of him. It seems that we Christians have been worshiping Jesus’ journey instead of doing his journey. The first feels very religious; the second just feels human, and not glorious at all. We tend not to see the transformative pattern of death and rebirth, and how God is our transformer, until after the fact. In other words, we are slow learners, and that is why most spiritual teachers are found in the second half of their lives.

For example, Julian of Norwich, the holy English anchoress (1342–1416), had an amazing ability to move beyond either-or thinking. She could live with paradox, unanswered questions, immense inner conflicts, and theological contradictions — and still trust and be at peace. One wonders if this was the fruit of her womanhood, her nonacademic status, her at least twenty years of solitude in the anchorhold, or just the fruit of one night’s “showing,” as she called it. Certainly she represented the best of what we mean by “contemplative seeing.” As she put it, “First there is the fall, and then there is the recovery from the fall. But both are the mercy of God.”

Maybe you can’t believe that until the second half of life. How did we ever lose that kind of wisdom? Especially when it is almost everybody’s experience? Only the spacious, contemplative mind can see so broadly and trust so deeply. The small calculating mind wants either/or, win or lose, good or bad. Yet we all know that the deacon sings of felix culpa on Holy Saturday night. We were saved, the liturgy says, by a “happy mistake.” Jesus reminded Julian that his crucifixion was the worst thing that happened in human history and God made the best out of it to take away all of our excuses. As they were for Jesus, “our wounds become honors.” The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God not by doing it right but by doing it wrong!

On a very practical level, the problem is that contemporary Westerners have a very fragile sense of their identity, much less an identity that can rest in union and relationship with God. Objectively, of course, we are already in union with God, but it is very hard for people to believe and experience this when they have no strong sense of identity, no boundaries, and no authentic religious experience. People who have no experienced core are trying to create identities and let go of boundaries. For them, it might be helpful to explain that prayer in the early stages is quite simply a profound experience of that core: of who we are, as Paul says, “hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3).”

~ Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer