An Angel Came to Earth with a Torch and a Pail

A few last cleome

His hand shook as he told the very short story of the angel who came to earth with a torch and pail.

I wasn’t going to tell you this, he said, smiling, but I’ve decided to.

This is what Richard Rohr said:

God sent an angel to walk the earth. In one hand, the angel held a pail of water. In the other, he held a torch. Full of curiosity and wonder, the people asked – what are you doing? And why?

I’ve come to put out the fires of hell, said the angel.

And to burn down the mansions of heaven.

Only then can we understand God.

***

A system of reward and punishment – of winning and losing – is utterly inadequate to understand what’s going on with God, Rohr said. The God of the universe – our God – wants everyone to win. (Love your neighbor. Love your enemy.)

My own life is mercy upon mercy, grace upon grace, he said. Remember the story of the fig tree in Luke, he reminded us. God is always giving us a little more time to get it a little more right.

The next day, back on stage in his red wheelchair, he remembered something that happened on the last day of class in 1969. His favorite professor left the room with the same stack of books he’d brought in and taken out with him each day, never having opened or referred to them. The professor backed out the door of the classroom, saying to his students – “Just remember, Plato had more influence on Christianity than Jesus did.”

There was a stunned silence in the classroom. Rohr remembers it a lifetime later.

All these years later, he’s come to the same conclusion. Platonic dualism ruined everything, he says. Not just Christianity – Western “everything”.

It’s a dualist mindset, in which spirit and matter are opposites.

Plato taught us to love one (spirit) and hate the other (matter).

In the end, we worshiped one (spirit) and were seduced by the other (matter/materialism).

A better version of Christianity sees that matter and spirit can only be considered together, as one. Rohr calls this “incarnational thinking.”

Saucer magnolia

***

From his short work, Just This:

Undergoing God

Your life is not about you; you are about Life. You are an instance of a universal, and even eternal, pattern. The One Life that many of us call “God” is living itself in you, and through you, and as you!

This realization is an earthquake in the brain, a hurricane in the heart, a Copernican revolution in the mind, and a monumental shift in consciousness, yet most of us do not seem interested in it. It is too big to imagine and can only be revealed slowly: You have never been separate from God except in your mind.

You gradually recognize that the myriad forms of life in the universe are completely diverse and utterly one at the same time – just like the Trinity…

We are all “undergoing God,” whose supreme job is the “oneing” of all reality. Oneing is a lovely word I borrow from Lady Julian of Norwich’s Middle English to describe the process of overcoming dualisms and divisions artificially created by the ego and the mind.

This should be an enormous weight off your back. All you can really do is agree to joyously participate! Life in the Spirit will feel like being caught much more than being taught about any particular doctrine.

Henceforth, your very motivation and momentum for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is simply immense gratitude – for already being there!

***

Joe Pye weed

From Mary Oliver

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The very last of the agastache (hyssop)