Center for Action and Contemplation

Silenced by Shame

2026-03-12T20:21:39Z

Author and CAC team member Cassidy Hall reflects on the cost of making choices out of shame and the “toxic silence” it creates:

For over five years, I actively participated in one of the most toxic silences of my life. I was in a romantic relationship with someone who wouldn’t publicly date me because they weren’t open about their sexuality. At the mercy of someone else’s comfort—or lack thereof—I participated in a silencing of myself in public places, around family members, with friends, at work, even at the grocery store…. This kind of silence, brought on by shame, creates long-lasting damage and knots to be untied for years to come. Silence where love cannot prevail is a place of toxicity, a place of stunted existence.

Hall describes the positive effects of “loving silence” cultivated through contemplative practice:

We need to name toxic silence as the silence that causes harm, shame, minimization, and damage to our world. And we need to name loving silence as the silence that is generative and creative, a silence that deepens our unity with self and others—the kind of silence that cultivates a more expansive and loving world….

When I finally stepped away from that relationship’s hamster wheel of toxic silence, I began to see how I had silenced other parts of myself. Beyond the ways I was hiding my sexuality, I also hid parts of myself informed by intuition—places of creativity and aliveness, places of openness and community, places of clarity and calm—ultimately the places where a loving silence thrived….

In the Christian context, the toxicity of silent bystanders creates and feeds countless acts of violence: the sexual abuse in many church settings and its continuation through empty apologies; Christianity’s lack of reckoning with its history of colonization; denominations’ refusal to honor and elevate the leadership and dignity of women, people of color, refugees, people with disabilities, and people from other marginalized communities; churches filling with Christian nationalism and white supremacy culture; the countless times the silent acceptance of bad theology has caused an LGBTQIA+ person to hate or harm themselves; and more. This is the silence of harm, violence, shame, and toxicity….

Toxic silence is embedded in the fabric of our daily lives…. Yet a [contemplative] loving silence can also be pursued, and we can seek and find it even in the chaos of our days. Sometimes it seeps in with our efforts to repeat an internal mantra or take an intentional pause, and other times it pours in like the colorful morning light through the east-facing window. This is the contemplative silence I continually seek and practice. This silence regenerates, regulates, allows for the emergence of loving presence and action. The more we engage in the silences that aren’t toxic—the beautiful, loving, and infinite possibilities of silence—the more we encounter silence as a creative, generative force and not a destructive one.

Reference:
Cassidy Hall, Queering Contemplation: Finding Queerness in the Roots and Future of Contemplative Spirituality (Broadleaf Books, 2024), 40, 42, 43, 44.

Image Credit and Inspiration: Elianna Gill, untitled (detail), 2023, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. A group of people, regardless of background, welcome each other into community.

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In today’s meditation, I was struck by the line, “Our best questions often sound like doubts, yet I believe curiosity is the most reverent stance a human can take.” In second grade, I asked Sister Ann why I had to go to confession, “Can I not just ask God for forgiveness when I say my prayers?” I was sent to the corner to ask for forgiveness from the Virgin Mary and told, “You never question God.” I am so grateful that over the years of reading CAC’s meditations, I’ve learned that God actually welcomes our curiosity. I think I’m finally getting past the fear of being sent to the corner for being curious.
—Nicki A.

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Grieving Systems of Shame

2026-03-11T19:49:55Z

Theologian Yolanda Pierce grew up in a church that offered her a sense of belonging. She grieves that churches often fail to follow Jesus’s example of welcoming and including everyone:

I grew up in [a Holiness-Pentecostal] church, and in the space of those wooden pews, which were lovingly dusted and polished by the church mothers, my gifts were affirmed and room was made for my talents….

It is only with an adult’s deep gratitude that I can appreciate a space that never shamed me for what I couldn’t do well, never humiliated me for my failures, and also managed to extract gifts I didn’t even know I had. Not a single soul told me that I sounded like a hoarse frog when I sang. No one told me that I missed a line in my Easter speech.… I was simply aware that I could try anything in this church and it would be a safe space to land.

So it grieves my spirit that so many churches, so many religious spaces, have been sites of humiliation and shame for individuals and groups. I mourn that a place that taught a little Black girl that she could go to a college no one had ever seen before is the same place that tells someone else they are going to hell for who they love or who they marry. I lament the private and public humiliations suffered by those whose truths and identities are mocked from the pulpit. I grieve with those whose humanity, vocational calling, or salvation seems under debate by way of narrow-minded sermons and poor biblical exegesis….

These hierarchies, in which those with power and privilege—or those who simply wield the microphone—shame and blame others and reinforce their “superior” social standing, diminish the radical equality God promises in places like Galatians 3:28. These hierarchies fail to recognize that we are all one in Christ Jesus and that our work as Christians is to exalt God, not to shame our neighbors….

I grieve that a place that loved me and propelled me to a rich, full life has been a space of condemnation and castigation for others.

By relinquishing the tools of shame, we become God’s beloved community:

Here is the holy lesson that I have learned: there is no progress unless the wounded among us—those broken in heart and bruised in spirit—have space to tell their stories and share their burdens. Justice is only possible if the ones cast outside of the camp, the city, or the church are lovingly brought back into a changed and transformed community. The discarded and forsaken must be given the lead if we are to move forward in building God’s beloved community…. We build a new foundation for justice and love by releasing the power of the tools of shame and humiliation used by those who try to break our souls. After all, is it progress if we leave the most vulnerable behind?

Reference:
Yolanda Pierce, The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing (Broadleaf Books, 2025), 34, 37–39, 44.

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A Divine Identity

2026-03-11T19:41:23Z

Father Richard describes how the early church followed Jesus’s practice of honoring universal human dignity:

There is a telling phrase used in the Acts of the Apostles to describe this new Jewish sect that is upsetting the old-world order in Thessalonica. Christians there were dragged before the city council and referred to as “the people who have been turning the whole world upside down…. They have broken Caesar’s edicts” (Acts 17:6–7). No one is called before the city council for mere inner beliefs or new attitudes unless they are also upsetting the social order. Almost all of Jesus’s healing and nature miracles were a rearranging of social relationships and therefore of social order. By eating with the underclass, touching the untouchables, healing on the Sabbath, and collaborating with upstarts like John the Baptist down at the river, he turns the traditions of his society upside down.

Jesus refuses to abide by the honor-and-shame system that dominated the Mediterranean culture of his time. He refuses to live up to what is considered honorable and refuses to shame what people consider shameful. This does not gain him many friends. It’s perhaps the thing that most bothers the priests and the elders. In response to his ignoring the debt codes and purity codes, they decide to kill him (see Mark 3:6, 11:18; Matthew 12:14; Luke 19:47; John 11:53). [1]

In an honor-and-shame system, a person’s status, self-image, and meaning are primarily achieved through how others see them. The system around Jesus didn’t ask individuals to think in terms of “Who am I really before God?” (as Jesus did), or “What do I feel about myself?” (as our culture might), but rather, “How does my village see me?” Many cultures to this day are built on some kind of honor-and-shame system. A person’s meaning is almost entirely tied up in how their family and friends see them. It’s a highly effective means of social control.

In New Testament times, shame and honor were in fact moral values that people felt compelled to follow. If a situation called for retaliation, one must retaliate. Not to retaliate would have been considered immoral, because it would have meant abandoning the honor of the individual, their family, and maybe their entire village. For Jesus to say, “Do not retaliate,” was to subvert the whole honor-and-shame system. It is one of the strongest arguments people can make that Jesus taught nonviolence.

Once challenged to live outside their cultural systems, Jesus’s listeners were given a new place to find their identity: in God. Who we are in God is who we are. That’s the end of ups and downs. Our value no longer depends upon whether our family or village likes us, whether we’re good-looking, wealthy, or obedient to the laws. Jesus’s message is incredibly subversive in an honor-and-shame society. Yet, as he takes away their old foundations, he offers a new, more solid one: neither shame-based nor guilt-based, but based in who they—and we—are in God. [2]

References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount, 2nd ed. (Franciscan Media, 2022), 22, 25.

[2] Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan, 75, 76–77.

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Tears roll, and my heart opens, releasing years of Catholic trauma. The invitation to sit daily, receiving nourishment from the mediations, has transformed the fear-based biblical dogma I embodied. Reading the stories through different lenses, the transformative presence of Love is now revealed. I inhale deeply and rest in peace. Thank you, Father Rohr and all the CAC, for sharing healing truth, goodness, and beauty.
—Maureen B.

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Jesus Did Not Play by the Rules

2026-03-11T19:42:38Z

Father Richard Rohr identifies how Jesus challenged the strict laws of his day that governed what was “honorable” and what was not:

In Jesus’s time, the very architecture of the temple revealed in stone what Jesus was trying to reform. The actual design of the building seemed to protect degrees of worthiness, as immature religion often does. At the center stood the Holy of Holies, which only the high priest could enter on one day a year. This was surrounded by the court of the priests and the Levites, which only they could enter. Outside that was the court for ritually pure Jewish men.

Jewish women had access only to the outermost court of the temple, although during their childbearing years, their entrance to that court would be limited because of religious beliefs about blood and ritual purity (see Leviticus 15:19–30). Outside the entrance to this court, a sign warned any non-Jewish people that to enter would be punishable by death.

In the temple, we find structured in stone something all religions invariably do: create insiders and outsiders. Jews defined all non-Jews as “gentiles”; some Catholics still speak of “non-Catholics.” Almost everybody seems to need some kind of sinner or heretic against which to compare themselves. Judaism is an archetypal religion, and illustrates a pattern that is replicated in almost all religions.

On some level, we all create “meritocracies” or worthiness systems and invariably base them on some kind of purity code—racial, national, sexual, moral, or cultural. This material makes up much of Leviticus and Numbers, and also is the compulsion of almost every Christian denomination after the Reformation. The pattern never changes because it’s the pattern of the fearful and over-defended ego.

Jesus was a radical reformer of religion, in large part because he showed no interest in maintaining purity systems or closed systems of any kind. They only appeal to the ego and lead no one to God. Jesus actively undercut these systems, even against his own followers when they wanted to persecute others (see Luke 9:49–56). He showed no interest in the various debt and purity codes of ancient Israel, which are the religious forms of power and exclusion. In fact, Jesus often openly flouted many of the accepted purity codes of his own religion, especially the Sabbath prohibitions, rules about washing hands and cups, and the many restrictions that made various people “impure.” Jesus’s attempts at reform comprise half of the Gospel text directly or indirectly (see Matthew 15:1–14).

I sometimes jokingly say that Jesus appears to relax from Saturday night until Friday at sunset, and then goes out of his way to do most of his work on the Sabbath! It’s fairly obvious that he is provoking the religious system that puts customs and human laws before people.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, rev. ed. (Franciscan Media, 2022), 111–113.

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What Do We Do with Sin?: Weekly Summary

2026-03-05T21:40:03Z

Sunday
Sin primarily describes a state of fragmentation—when the part thinks it’s separate from the Whole. It’s the loss of any inner experience of who we are in God.
—Richard Rohr

Monday
In one way, the doctrine of “original sin” was good and helpful in that it taught us not to be surprised at the frailty and woundedness that we all carry. Yet historically speaking, the teaching of original sin started us off on the wrong foot—with a no instead of a yes, with mistrust instead of trust.
—Richard Rohr

Tuesday
I do not believe that sin is the enemy we often make it out to be, at least not when we recognize it and name it as such. When we see how we have turned away from God, then and only then do we have what we need to begin turning back.
—Barbara Brown Taylor

Wednesday
Is the love of God looking down on a sinful world in need of salvation, or does our God see a broken world in pain and in need of healing?
—Greg Boyle

Thursday
There is a difference between having fallen and being fallen. Sin means that we have fallen. It doesn’t mean we are fallen. We may have fallen, but we can get up.
—Danielle Shroyer

Friday
No one can deny that evil is very real, but what many of us now observe as the real evils destroying the world—such as militarism, greed, scapegoating of other groups, and abuses of power—seem very different from what most people call sin, which has mostly referred to personal faults or guilt, or supposed private offenses against God.
—Richard Rohr

Week Ten Practice
Reshaping Our Stories

What we wear out, God refashions. What we rip, God redeems. What we tear, God mends.
—Laurie Brock, Souvenirs of the Holy

Laurie Brock witnesses how God gathers together the “scraps” of our lives, reweaving them into a unified and beautiful whole:

We all have scraps and pieces and parts that have been deeply worn and torn by suffering and crisis and catastrophe. We can unhelpfully frame these events in life as God’s doing. Some theologies say God does the breaking, the tearing apart, so that God’s glory is somehow revealed. I disagree. God allows life to happen, yes, and life means tearing and mending, sowing and reaping, and wounding and healing. But God doesn’t have to get involved for things to rip and break. We humans do a fine job of breaking each other and ourselves, which no doubt shatters God’s heart.

Instead of forever cushioning us from the consequences of personal and community choices with which we wound each other, God imbues creation with the wisdom of quilting. We aren’t all that adept at piecing and reforming. For that, we need God’s quilting prowess. We need God to remind us that no part of our selves and souls is beyond redemption, beyond being useful in another way. Mistakes are pieced together with threads of God’s compassion. Personas we wore when we were younger but no longer fit can be altered. God’s love provides the framework to sew all these parts and pieces into something renewed, refashioned, and redeemed.

God treasures the things we throw away or stop caring about. God adores these scraps of our selves. God longs for us to sit in the holy space long enough to see the quilt that God creates from what we thought were worthless scraps. God touches those scraps like women over centuries. God fingers them, noting the beauty of small patterns. God reshapes our scraps into new things, useful things, even extraordinarily beautiful things.

Reference:
Laurie M. Brock, Souvenirs of the Holy: Encountering God Through Everyday Objects (Broadleaf Books, 2025), 180–181.

Image credit and inspiration: Balint Mendlik, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. An arrow missing the center reminds us that sin is not our essence. We may be momentarily disconnected from our true aim, but still able to center the next shot.

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Collective Sin and Evil

2026-03-05T21:34:49Z

Richard Rohr describes how moving beyond an emphasis on personal sin allows us to focus on larger forces at play that create systemic harm:

For some reason, the word “sin” now seems old-fashioned and no longer helpful or even clarifying in most discussions. It can send any conversation down a rabbit hole of side comments, judgments, and clarifications that derail the original direction of the conversation.

Perhaps so many of us stopped using the word because we located sin inside of our own small, cultural categories, with little awareness of the true subtlety, depth, and importance of the broader concept. As each culture and religion defined sin in its own idiosyncratic way, the word itself ceased being helpful. Instead, we simply used it to designate various taboos and cultural expectations, usually having to do with bodily purity codes. (Some Christians are into dancing and drinking, whereas others consider it almost obscene).

My assumption and conviction are that sin became a less useful idea for many of us because we needed to move around in a different field to regain our notion of the deadly nature of true evil. No one can deny that evil is very real, but what many of us now observe as the real evils destroying the world—such as militarism, greed, scapegoating of other groups, and abuses of power—seem very different from what most people call sin, which has mostly referred to personal faults or guilt, or supposed private offenses against God. These did not actually describe the horrible nature of evil very well at all. So, we lost interest in sin.

We also lost interest because we usually heard the concept of sin being used to judge, exclude, or control others, or to shame and control ourselves, but seldom to bring discernment or deeper understanding, much less compassion or forgiveness, to the human situation. In my observation, the more sin-obsessed a religion or culture became, the more unloving and cognitively rigid its people tended to be.

If we are honest and perceptive, we surely see that actual evil often seems to “dominate the very air” (a phrase found in Pauline texts such as Ephesians 2:2) and is more the norm than the exception. In fact, evil is often culturally agreed-upon, admired, and deemed necessary, as is normally the case when a country goes to war, spends most of its budget on armaments, admires luxuries over necessities, entertains itself to death, or pollutes its own common water and air. Evil seems to be corporate, admired, and deemed necessary before it becomes personal and shameable.

Sin and evil must be more than personal or private matters. Convicting people of individual faults does not change the world. I believe the apostle Paul taught that both sin and salvation are, first of all, corporate realities. Yet, we largely missed that essential point, and thus found ourselves in the tight grip of monstrous evils in Christian nations, all the way down to the modern era.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, What Do We Do with Evil? The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (CAC Publishing, 2019), 7–11, 12.

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The Universal Christ is a lived experience for me through my volunteer work bringing spiritual care and accompaniment to men living in federal prisons. I meet Christ in them—in their suffering and their longing to be restored to community and their own goodness. Through them, I have come to better understand the endless breadth and depth of God’s mercy, forgiveness, and love. Having been a victim of harmful actions myself, I know that it’s not “I” who is now able to love this way. It is Christ who has graciously come to live in me.
—Rosalie S.

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Missing the Mark

2026-03-04T16:16:33Z

Author Danielle Shroyer shares how the Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek frequently define sin as “missing the mark”:

Though original sin has told us a story of being stuck in our sin, when we turn to scripture, we actually find a very different story. Though modern science has just come to realize how amazingly malleable people are, the wisdom of scripture has told us this all along.…

The most predominant word for sin in both the Hebrew [hatta] and the Greek [hamartia] assumes in its very definition our ability to hit the mark. We can’t miss the mark unless we assume the mark is where we’re aiming, right? In 768 instances of the word “sin” in the Bible, we are described as people who are standing with a bow and arrow, aiming at a target that we miss. That’s not a sin nature, and it’s definitely not total depravity. That’s novice, or perhaps distractedness, or bad aim. It could be any number of things. But the idea that we are not designed to hit the target set before us would be completely antithetical to the way sin is put forth in the vast majority of scripture.

When scripture calls us to goodness, to repentance, to grace, it’s not like telling a fish to ride a bicycle. It’s not something so contradictory to who we are and what we can do that it’s an impossible notion. Salvation is available to us because God has offered it, but also because God has designed us to be capable of responding to it. We can take aim at the target simply because God chose to make us that way. Yes, we miss the mark … but that doesn’t mean we are without any ability to play the game.

In Scripture, sin is often described as an error or mistake, not a condition of our being:

The Bible talks about sin as something that ought to be called out, but not something that ought to be condemning to the point of shame…. Sin is an action, a choice, or if we’ve made a number of them in a row, a path or a habit. There is nothing irreversible or determinate about it. Sin is not a state of being. It is a way of being in the world that is always and every moment in flux, based on our choices. It’s a growth mindset, not a fixed one.

To put this another way, there is a difference between having fallen and being fallen. Sin (hamartia, hatta) means that we have fallen. It doesn’t mean we are fallen. We may be in flux depending on our last action and our next intention, but we aren’t simply tossed around on the waves of our own competence. We reside in the boat of blessed grace, which holds us steady even as we falter and sway from day to day. We may have fallen, but we can get up.

Reference:
Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place (Fortress Press, 2016), 137, 139.

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Healing Acts of Connection

2026-03-05T21:23:45Z

Father Greg Boyle considers how many of the evils we witness today reflect the consequences of our painful disconnection from the God of love:

In the face of senseless gun violence, political treachery and revenge, hate crimes, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks, some people will just say, “Sin and evil are on display.” When we do this, we’ve given up. We’re not even trying. We declare that we will no longer be seeking solutions, because we believe that human beings are somehow stained from the start. Original sin doesn’t explain the terrible. Lots of things do. Original sin is not one of them. There is no sin gene in us. We’re born from love and always invited to love….

I asked a friend to talk to her daughter who had just graduated from a Jesuit [Catholic] university about how she and her peers saw sin. Her daughter said, “We don’t really use the word ‘sin’ or talk about it. Sin is an Old World map.” Now, I suppose some might lament that sin is not on the front burner. It’s actually not even on the back burner. It is nowhere near the stove. And, of course, if you tried to use an Old World map today to get you to, say, Iraq, it would drop you off at Mesopotamia.

We could lament that young folks might see sin this way. Or we could find the invitation in it. Is the love of God looking down on a sinful world in need of salvation, or does our God see a broken world in pain and in need of healing? Scripture has it as “Then your light shall break like the dawn and your wound shall quickly be healed. The light shall rise for you in your gloom. The darkness shall become for you like midday” [Isaiah 58:10]. I endlessly tell gang members that the God of love doesn’t see sin. Our God sees son (and daughter). “I believe that sin has no substance,” Julian of Norwich writes, “not a particle of being.” Then she says, “With all due respect to Mother Church … but this does not line up.” She couldn’t get sin to align with her God of love.

Boyle suggests a shift in emphasis when it comes to behavior:

The moral quest has never kept us moral; it’s just kept us from each other. So maybe we should abandon the moral quest, since it’s an Old World map, and embrace instead the journey to wholeness, flourishing love, and defiant joy. We don’t want to end up in Mesopotamia. Yes, we want to do the next right thing, but what is the next right thing and who is able to choose it? Only the healthy person can. So we help each other, not to make better choices but to walk home to well-being and deeper growth in love.

Reference:
Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times (Avid Reader Press, 2024), 40–41, 49–50.

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Reading Josué Perea’s story of musica divina made me cry. In my own journey, I have often found hip hop to be such a source of inspiration and connection to God. My presentation to the bishop for my place at theological college was entitled “Let them have hip hop,” talking about teenagers and faith. I discovered, as Josué did, that the established church isn’t always open to the idea of grace in unexpected places. But God is in all things, especially hearts that are searching.
—Julia B.

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Disconnected Living

2026-03-04T16:04:22Z

Author Barbara Brown Taylor describes the suffering we experience when we live from a sense of disconnection:

Deep down in human existence, there is an experience of being cut off from life. There is some memory of having been treated cruelly, and—a little deeper, perhaps—the memory of having treated someone else cruelly as well…. Deep down in human existence there is an experience of reaching for forbidden fruit, of pushing away loving arms, of breaking something on purpose just to prove that you can. Deep down in human existence there is an experience of doing whatever is necessary to feed and comfort the self, because there is no one else to trust, no other purpose to serve, no other god to follow.

For ages and ages, this experience has been called sin—deadly alienation from the source of all life. By some definitions, it implies willful turning away from God. By others, it is an unavoidable feature of being human. Either way, it is a name for the experience of being cut off from air, light, sustenance, community, hope, meaning, life. It is less concerned with specific behaviors than with the aftermath of those behaviors. There are a thousand ways to turn away from the light, after all, with variations according to culture, century, class, and gender. The point is to know the difference between light and darkness, and to recognize the pull when it comes.

Though we may make choices out of a sense of disconnection, we can also choose to return to the original blessing of God’s love:

Repentance begins with the decision to return to relationship: to accept our God-given place in community, and to choose a way of life that increases life for all members of that community. Needless to say, this often involves painful changes, which is why most of us prefer remorse to repentance. We would rather say, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I feel really, really awful about what I have done” than actually start doing things differently.…

“All sins are attempts to fill voids,” wrote the French philosopher Simone Weil. Because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside of us, we try stuffing it full of all sorts of things, but it refuses to be filled. It rejects all substitutes…. It is the holy of holies inside of us, which only God may fill….

I do not believe that sin is the enemy we often make it out to be, at least not when we recognize it and name it as such. When we see how we have turned away from God, then and only then do we have what we need to begin turning back. Sin is our only hope, the fire alarm that wakes us up to the possibility of true repentance.

Reference:
Barbara Brown Taylor, Speaking of Sin (Cowley Publications, 2000), 44, 46–47.

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What About Original Sin?

2026-03-05T18:43:54Z

Father Richard shares his understanding of original sin:

The “image of God” in us is absolute and unchanging. It’s pure and total gift, given equally to all. But this picture was complicated when the concept of original sin entered the Christian mind.

In this idea—first put forth by Augustine in the fifth century but never mentioned in the Bible—we emphasized that human beings were born into “sin” because Adam and Eve “offended God” by eating from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” As punishment, God cast them out of the garden of Eden. Original sin wasn’t something we did at all; it was something that was done to us (passed down from Adam and Eve). In this understanding, we’re all off to a bad start.

By contrast, most of the world’s great religions start with some sense of primal goodness in their creation stories. The Jewish and Christian traditions beautifully succeeded at this, with the Genesis record telling us that God called creation “good” five times in Genesis 1:10–25, and even “very good” in 1:31.

But after Augustine, most Christian theologies shifted from the positive vision of Genesis 1 to the more negative vision of Genesis 3—the so-called fall, or what I am calling the “problem.” Instead of embracing God’s master plan for humanity and creation—what we Franciscans still call the “Primacy of Christ”—Christians shrunk our image of both Jesus and Christ. Our “Savior” became a mere Johnny-come-lately “answer” to the problem of sin, a problem that we had largely created ourselves.

In one way, the doctrine of “original sin” was good and helpful in that it taught us not to be surprised at the frailty and woundedness that we all carry. Just as goodness is inherent and shared, so it seems with evil. This is, in fact, a very merciful teaching. Knowledge of our shared wound ought to free us from the burden of unnecessary and individual guilt or shame and help us to be forgiving and compassionate with ourselves and one another.

Yet historically speaking, the teaching of original sin started us off on the wrong foot—with a no instead of a yes, with mistrust instead of trust. We have spent centuries trying to solve the “problem” that we’re told is at the heart of our humanity. But if we start with a problem, we tend to never get beyond that mindset.

To begin climbing out of the hole of original sin, we must start with a positive and generous cosmic vision. Generosity tends to build on itself. I have never met a truly compassionate or loving human being who did not have a foundational and even deep trust in the inherent goodness of human nature.

The Christian story line must start with a positive and overarching vision for humanity and for history, or it will never get beyond the primitive, exclusionary, and fear-based stages of most early human development. We are ready for a major course correction.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How A Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (Convergent Books, 2021), 61–62, 63–64.

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What an awakening! I have prided myself on my analytical skills, so sure that I knew people’s “real” motives. Unfortunately, I have shared those doubts with others, planting seeds of doubt and mistrust. To learn to love others without judgment is always the journey.
—Karen H.

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