Richard Rohr - Every Thing Is Sacred: 40 Practices and Reflections on the Universal Christ

Most of us are familiar with the saying If you want something done, ask a busy person. There are many reasons certain people are in such great demand. I would add that if you want a job done really well, ask a person who both loves the message and trusts the messenger.

Patrick Boland has all three qualities: He is surely in demand, while being loving and trustful too, which you will clearly see in the pages ahead. Maybe the most direct way of saying it is that Patrick is a spiritual son to mesomeone who really gets it!

It has to be divine providence that our staff here in New Mexico discovered Patrick all the way over in Ireland, and invited him here for a visit and a job interview some years ago. Once here, it seemed he could do about a dozen jobs really well! And although I hate to admit it, he got a good Jesuit theological education, which fully prepared him to deal critically with my Franciscan ideas.

At one point, he and I struck up a personal conversation. It went on for hours, as the layers of interest and affirmation bounced to and fro. Who is this young man who gets the message so naturally? I thought. We need to talk further. So we took a short road trip to Taos and then to San Felipe Indian Pueblo to attend their yearly feast day dances and to continue our common excitement under the wide blue sky.

I remember us both choking up as hundreds of earnest dancers came swarming into the plaza, wave upon wave, to the thunderous beat of drums and rattles. This was a living metaphor for the Universal Christ on full display right in front of usthe outpouring of Gods presence in all of creation. The barefoot Natives seemed to recognize that the earth had to be touched directly and joyfullyand from all their extremitiesto honor and show love inside Gods first natural cathedral, the earth and the sky. Almost exactly like my barefoot Father, St. Francis, did.

This is incarnational Christianity! Not God reserved for a few but God available to all in a thousand, thousand visible forms, and celebrated, over and over. Not just a problem-solving forgiver-of-sins God but a God whose greatness made sin by comparison unattractive, undesirable, small, and stifling. Once God models poured-out oneness for us, we are on some level allured into doing the same. Growth by attraction, not promotion, as the twelve-step program might say. Not so much a Christ coming into the world as coming out of a world that is already soaked with Presence.

And that is what both Patrick and I want you to experience for yourself in this little book. Not just warm thoughts but an entire earth and humanity warmed by the Word becoming flesh. This is a message you cannot know with your mind alone. You must come to know it in the very cells of your bodyand see it in the cells of all bodies, which each carry the same divine DNA of their Creator. Think about it. How could they not be?

This book is neither pious nor academic but is filled with spiritual knowing waiting to be transferred to you if you have the right app (if you will allow me to use a mobile device metaphor). The app requires only two functions on your partcuriosity and a bit of love. Yet this book is not a workbook either because it is hardly work at all, nor does it ask for grinding concentration. We might just call it A Guide to Christian Freedom and Fun! (But in a Quite Serious Way). Why not?

Honestly, what Patrick has brought together here is in many ways better than my original book, and I am not being humble or flattering. He is a natural pedagogue and a bring-it-down-to-earth teacher. He knows how to pick out the key concepts, which are still often abstract in my theological mind, and make them sound and sing in your boneswhich is surely what Jesus was talking about when he said that we needed to love the Lord our God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30). No heady, wordy, or textbook religion talks that way. Yet that is what Christianity usually became, except among many of the Celts. (Hmm, I wonder if you are making connections?)

Our hope is that this knowledge of the Universal Christ will not be stored away in disconnected theory but be connected to the here and now, and thus everywhere. One could conclude that we are not talking about religion at all but only about life, and life more abundantly (John 10:10). And God gives away Life through Life.

Richard Rohr

Albuquerque, New Mexico