it’s why you, whoever you are, can experience God’s unadulterated care for you
in your garden or kitchen, your husband or wife, an ordinary beetle, a fish in
the darkest sea that no human eye will ever observe, and even in those who do
not like you, and those who are not like you.
This is the illuminating light that enlightens all things, making it possible for
us to see things in their fullness. When Christ calls himself the “Light of the
World” (John 8:12), he is not telling us to look just at him, but to look out at life
with his all-merciful eyes. We see him so we can see like him, and with the
same infinite compassion.
When your isolated “I” turns into a connected “we,” you have moved from
Jesus to Christ. We no longer have to carry the burden of being a perfect “I”
because we are saved “in Christ,” and as Christ. Or, as we say too quickly but
correctly at the end of our official prayers: “Through Christ, Our Lord, Amen.”
*1 See the extensive research on this term in Walter Wink’s The Human Being: Jesus and the
Enigma of the Son of Man (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002).
*2 Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi 45.
*3 Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond, xxi–xxii, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2013), and the
“mosaic” of metaphors in Appendix B.
*4 Richard Rohr, Just This, 7 (Center for Action and Contemplation, 2018), “Awe and
Surrendering to It,” 2018.
*5 Bruno Barnhart, Second Simplicity: The Inner Shape of Christianity (Mahwah, New Jersey:
Paulist Press, 1999), part 2, chap. 7.
*6 Richard Rohr, The Naked Now (New York: Crossroad, 2009), ch. 2. In fact, the holy name
YHWH is most appropriately breathed rather than spoken, and we all breathe the same way.