FR RICHARD ROHR AND HIS TOXIC MYSTICISM
Fr Richard Rohr said that Christ is everyone. Jesus said that whoever hurt the least of people hurts him personally. They do it to him. But then what about the Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis? Is she Christ? What about the savage Nazi breaking in the door. What about him? If you can identify with her as Jesus you can do it as easily with him. And what if you are identifying with both and thus declaring that if evil is real then Christ is evil as well as good? This doctrine surely but secretly celebrates evil or erases it. It empowers it.
Shameless. Yet what Rohr is doing is a bit more shameless than that! Even orthodox Catholic belief is waffle that hides how men think they are part of God or better than God for they can speak for God and what he is like.
Jesus despite hating and threatening judgement against sinners said they were in need of love and compassion as well. He said that whoever neglects the least of his brethren neglects him. This would suggest that sinners be included. As people will not be able to reconcile both judging and loving it is clear that many will ignore sin as a result of "compassion."
God is regarded as infinite power. Infinite is not a number here. It has no beginning and no end. It is the infinite set. That means the notion of God making a world that is not him is nonsense. If the infinite set is shown as a circle then there is circle inside it that remains part of it where the world is. So if you say there is a God like that you are curving the bullet. What you really exalt is yourself and what you have and enjoy, even the universe, and they are the real God to you. Or you are God while you say you are not. You are what you worship.
The fact is that even if God sustains or validates morality, that does not matter to us at all. You cannot know enough about a God to say you have a reasonable relationship with him. The friend you only meet for a minute a week is not a friend except in your head. Our ideas about God are not God. To treat our idea of God as God is idolatry, the evil of treating what is not God as God. In other words, an idolater adoring a statue is saying it is up to him or her who to worship. This is about what they want not what a God might deserve. It is selfish. But the fact is that believers in God have fallen down the same trap.
Pantheism is a very strong force in religious circles. Nobody knows if any believer who holds that there is a God out there who is not the world but sustains it really holds it. Pantheists have always pretended to be something else.
I am saying that Rohr was toxic before he started going down the mystical woo path. Every priest is a Rohr even as he protests against his excesses.
