If God is Trinity and Jesus is the face of God, then it is a benevolent universe. God is not someone to be afraid of, but is the Ground of Being and on our side.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that a benevolent understanding of God shapes our view of the universe positively, emphasizing God's supportive nature.
Richard Rohr's quote presents a theological perspective that views God as a loving, supportive force rather than a being to fear. By identifying God as the Trinity and Jesus as the 'face of God,' Rohr emphasizes a relational understanding of divinity that invites humanity to see the universe as fundamentally benevolent, rooted in the idea of God being the 'Ground of Being' which provides support and love rather than fear and distance.
In practice
In a sermon about acceptance and love in faith.
My scientist friends have come up with things like 'principles of uncertainty' and dark holes. They're willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of 'faith'! How strange that the very word 'faith' has come to mean its exact opposite.
The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
I cannot illustrate huge differences between male and female spiritualities except in their starting points, style and fascinations along the way. This is significant, however, and has huge pastoral implications: men must be challenged in the world of doing; women must be challenged in the world of relating.
Much of the Christian religion has largely become “holding on” instead of letting go. But God, it seems to me, does the holding on (to us!), and we must learn the letting go (of everything else).
We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.
I was suffering from a peculiar and persistent sense that I was being pursued, and also the conviction that under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning.
Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.
Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.
There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.
Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God, by definition, is uncreated simply begs the question. Any being capable of creating a complex world promises to be very complex himself. As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed repeatedly, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.
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