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Sunday, April 4th, 2021 Easter Sunday

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Fourteen: All Will Be Well

A Pattern We Can Trust

All will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.
—Julian of Norwich, Showings, chapter 27

Today we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which allows faithful Christians to trust that, indeed, all will be well. I like to think of the resurrection as God’s way of telling us that God can take the worst thing in the world—the killing of the God-Human Jesus—and change it into the best thing: the redemption of the world.

To believe that Jesus was raised from the dead is actually not a leap of faith. Resurrection and renewal are, in fact, the universal and observable pattern of everything. We might just as well use non-religious terms like “springtime,” “regeneration,” “healing,” “forgiveness,” “life cycles,” “darkness,” and “light.” If incarnation is real, if material creation is inspirited, then resurrection in multitudinous forms is to be fully expected. Or to paraphrase a statement attributed to Albert Einstein, it is not that one thing is a miracle, but that the whole thing is a miracle!

If divine incarnation has any truth to it, then resurrection is a foregone conclusion, not a one-time anomaly in the body of Jesus, as our Western understanding of the resurrection felt it needed to prove—and then it couldn’t. The Risen Christ is not a one-time miracle but the revelation of a universal pattern that is hard to see in the short run.

Simply put, if death is not possible for the Christ, then it is not possible for anything that “shares in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). God is by definition eternal, and God is Love (1 John 4:16), which is also eternal (1 Corinthians 13:8), and this same Love has been planted in our hearts (Romans 5:5; 8:9) by the Spirit dwelling within us. Such fully Implanted Love cannot help but evolve and prove victorious, and our word for that final victory is “resurrection.” Peter states this rather directly: “By raising Jesus Christ from the dead, we have a sure hope and the promise of an inheritance that can never be spoiled or soiled or fade away. It is being kept for you in the heavens . . . and will be fully revealed at the end of time” (1 Peter 1:3–5).

My book The Universal Christ is about the Eternal Christ, who never dies—and who never dies in you! Resurrection is about the whole of creation, it is about history, it is about every human who has ever been conceived, sinned, suffered, and died, every animal that has lived and died a tortured death, every element that has changed from solid, to liquid, to ether, over great expanses of time. It is about you and it is about me. It is about everything. The “Christ journey” is indeed another name for every thing.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (Convergent: 2021, 2019), 99, 100, 179–180, 186.

Image credit: Belinda Rain, Nevada — South Lake Tahoe, California (detail), 1972 photograph, public domain, National Archives.

Image inspiration: A butterfly alights on a flower after rain—a hopeful parallel to the delicate, sometimes hesitant, unfolding of the human soul after storms of life.

Prayer For Our Community

Loving God, you fill all things with a fullness and hope that we can never comprehend. Thank you for leading us into a time where more of reality is being unveiled for us all to see. We pray that you will take away our natural temptation for cynicism, denial, fear and despair. Help us have the courage to awaken to greater truth, greater humility, and greater care for one another. May we place our hope in what matters and what lasts, trusting in your eternal presence and love. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our suffering world. Please add your own intentions . . . Knowing, good God, you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God. Amen.
Listen to Father Richard pray this prayer aloud.

Story From Our Community

I first heard of Richard Rohr in 2018, after having walked the Camino de Santiago. Richard used the religious language of my upbringing, which I walked away from years ago, but I could tell his definitions were what I knew to be true. Fr. Richard has deepened, broadened, and validated my experience by using Christian language and imagery. To quote Julian of Norwich, “All will be well, all will be well, every single thing will be well!” In a real sense, I have come home!
—Robin M.
Share your own story with us.

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Explore Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations archive at cac.org.

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