Richard Rohr, OFM

For us as Christians, the highest value should always be love. If we’re going to accept the Judeo-Christian heritage as meaningful and authoritative in any way, we have to admit that love comes first and last. That puts us on a different track and forces a different set of questions. The deepest questions are not those of rights and power, or whether or not we’re getting everything that society owes us. The deepest questions are those of how love can be expanded and increased. How can we “defer to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21)?

G.K. Chesterton spoke of the “mystical minimum,” which he defined as gratitude. When we stand in the immense abundance of the True Self, there is no time or space for being hurt. We are always secure, at rest, and foundationally grateful. The grateful response for what is given—seeing the cup half full— requires seeing with a completely different set of eyes than the eyes that always see the cup as half empty. I don’t think it’s an oversimplification to say that people basically live either in an overall attitude of gratitude or an overall attitude of resentment.

Our world is filled with contradictions needing to be reconciled, inconsistencies within us and between us. Life is neither perfectly consistent and rational nor is it a chaotic mess. It does contain, however, constant paradoxes, exceptions, and flaws. That is the shocking and disappointing revelation of the cross. It is also a great weight off our backs. It leads to patience, humility, non-judgment, and suffering love. Now we have the right sense of proportion, limits, and expectations, with no room for utopianism, ideologies, any “final solutions,” cynicism, or needless discouragement.

If we don’t get forgiveness, we’re missing the whole mystery. We are still living in a world of meritocracy, of quid-pro-quo thinking, of performance and behavior that earns an award. Forgiveness is the great thawing of all logic, reason, and worthiness. It is a melting into the mystery of God as unearned love, unmerited grace, the humility and powerlessness of a Divine Lover. Forgiveness is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the whole gospel, as far as I can see. Without radical and rule-breaking forgiveness — received and given — there will be no reconstruction of anything.