Love Is Love

“It is amazing how religion has turned this biblical idea of faith around to mean its exact opposite: into a tradition of certain knowing, presumed predictability and complete assurance about whom God likes and whom God does not like. I guess we think we have God in our pocket. We know what God is going to say next, because we think our particular denomination has it all figured out. In this schema, God is no longer free and must follow our rules and our decisions. If God is not free, we are in trouble, because every time God forgives or shows mercy, God is breaking God’s own rules and showing terrible inconsistency!

The amazing thing about the Hebrews is that they did not repress their reality. They refused to let themselves be consoled by superstitious myths. In a certain way, Israel did not distance itself from its own contradictions or the contradictions of life, from the horrors and abysses of human history—which finally became “the cross” in Jesus. But these hard realities had already been presented in the stories of Job, their own experience of exodus and exile, and their constant invasion or occupation by foreign powers. They often must have felt like saying to God what Teresa of Avila is supposed to have said: “If this is the way you treat your friends, I would hate to see your enemies…

The New Age temptation, and the sophisticated liberal temptation, is to live only in the realm of my private experience. That’s far too small. Basically, to just keep telling your story becomes boring and narcissistic after a while. The question always, for everyone, is “How does this fit into a larger context?” “What do I do with my experience for the sake of others and for the sake of the future?”

More conservative, traditional people tend to get lost in group loyalty, group identity. “My country right or wrong” or “My religion without any inner experience of the same” would be examples of this level of thought. Everything can become bowing before the leader or identity of the group. Many conservative Catholics are unable to admit the absurd things that past popes have said and done. Many conservative Americans are incapable of criticizing their own political party, the military or the president of the United States. I think people at either of these extremes become ideologues, which means that one replaces real experience with predetermined conclusions. They have their answers before listening to and learning from the information. Both need a larger dome of meaning to save them from themselves.

The third dome of meaning that encloses and regulates the two smaller ones is called “The Story.” By this, I mean the patterns that are always true. I hesitate to tell this to “true believers,” but this is much larger and more shared than any one religion or denomination… For example, forgiveness always heals; it does not matter whether you are Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Jewish. Forgiveness is one of the patterns that is always true, it is part of The Story. There is no specifically Catholic way to feed the hungry or to steward the earth. Love is love…”

~ Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality