Love Draws Us Forward

 

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations

 

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

 

 

Week Three: Healers and Changemakers

 

Love Draws Us Forward

 

 

 

Father Richard points to the transformative power of St. Francis and other more recent mystics and prophets.  

Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) was a living exemplar of where we are all being attracted and led. Just as the Cosmic Christ serves as the Omega Point (Teilhard de Chardin’s term) for all of history, Francis is also a prime attractor, or what medieval theologians called a “final cause.” Christ and Francis draw humanity forward just by walking the full journey themselves. Transformed people quite simply transform people and set the bar of history higher for all of us. That is one of the ways we fundamentally “help” other people.  

If we ourselves are totally focused on our own personal security or on a need for answers and explanations, we have almost no ability to even minimally understand the what, why, and who of persons like Francis, other mystics, or even someone like Jesus himself, who operate out of a completely different level of consciousness. Such people know that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). We tend to drag down such profound humanizers and divinizers to our own comfortable level and actually have little curiosity or ability to care about their major message.  

Developmental experts state that the best we humans can do—on a very good day—is perhaps understand someone a bit beyond ourselves. Being invited forward by prophets and mystics—though they invariably face great resistance—is the clear pattern of history. We sadly know this to be true in recent centuries from the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai, Dorothy Day, many UN secretaries-general, and Martin Luther King Jr. Tragically, we don’t usually love and embrace more advanced people, but quite often hate and fear them. Francis is really an amazing exception. He somehow succeeds in being loved, admired, and imitated even by non-Christian religions and very secular people to this day.  

God gives us highly evolved people to pull us all forward. The Christian word for them was simply “saint.” We cannot imagine something until we see it through a living model or archetypal figure. Then it constellates in our consciousness as maybe possible for us too. Through his story, Francis is still greasing the wheels of consciousness and holiness. It then rubs off and spreads out by osmosis.  

I felt this strongly when I was invited to accompany the Dalai Lama. He said little beyond, “My religion is kindness,” but the stadium was packed. The lines just to see him, or perhaps touch him, reached across the Ohio River bridge to Louisville. Many pointed out the direct line between that event and Thomas Merton’s presence down the Kentucky road at Gethsemani Abbey. Merton, Mother Teresa, Pope Francis, and the Dalai Lama are all good examples of prime attractors in our own time.  

 

Read this meditation on cac.org.