Right Relationship by Patrick Carolan

For thousands of years, humans have created religions based on fear. I remember as a child I was taught that to love God, I first had to fear God. When I was misbehaving, as I often did, my mother or a teacher would reprimand me: “If you don’t stop acting up, I will put the fear of God in you!” We experience this attitude in our sacred writings that speak of “trembling” before the Lord and “fearing” the Lord.

In the Catholic Church it is considered a sin not to attend Mass on Sunday. Do we attend to be in community with each other, to celebrate God’s love and share our connection through God with each other, or do we attend out of a sense of obligation and fear? Do we go to church to check off the box and fulfill our duty, to alleviate our fear of the consequences of not going? Are we more concerned about being sent to hell because we missed church on Sunday instead of how we have lived our lives?

We have created a theological story that is centered on redemption and salvation. Christians are taught to believe that we are born in sin, and it is only through the fear of God that we can receive the grace to be saved. We like to pretend that it is through love that we are saved, but we often act otherwise. Because we believe that we are born in sin, we create rules and regulations, rights and rituals focused on appeasing a demanding God. Our salvation thus becomes individualistic: working towards the “common good” is appropriate and right only insofar as it helps our personal salvation.

We are living in a world with constantly changing technology and unprecedented economic disparity. It is difficult, if not impossible, to create a world centered on unity and the common good when we believe we are created in the image of a God of separation, punishment, and damnation. This has left many of us questioning our spirituality and searching for a new way to come together as one. Our spiritual evolution has to start by reimagining God. Regardless of our faith traditions, one of the first and most important lessons is that we have to be in “right relationship” with God. We do so in a variety of ways depending on our tradition—everything from private, quiet meditation to song-filled community worship. Once we are in right relationship with God, then we can go out and evangelize to help bring the rest of the world into right relationship.

To be in right relationship with God, we first have to be in right relationship with all of God’s creation. This is a relationship that is centered on love, beauty, and the understanding of the interconnectedness and oneness of all creation. If we experience the Christian God as one who is separate, distant, and not really all that concerned with the everyday action of creation, it will be more difficult to enter this right relationship. Such an understanding also denies the reality of the incarnation, where God, through Jesus, enters into relationship with us. As the activist and spiritual teacher Barbara Holmes has noted: “If we take seriously the notion of a faraway, unconcerned God, there are terrible consequences.” She cites a historical example: “What this meant during slavery was that the master’s wife could ground her faith in a God far, far away without any concern about attending a lynching with a picnic basket.”  

Religious practice should not simply be a set of rites and rituals, a list of do’s and don’ts, but rather an engaged practice for how we live each and every moment. The end goal of religion is not about being a “good” Christian or Muslim or Buddhist; it to nurture and strengthen the understanding that we are all connected to each other and to all of creation. We all have the divine spark in us. It is that spark that connects, unites, and transforms. Richard Rohr reminds us that while Jesus is described as the “light of the world” in the gospel of John (8:12), Jesus also describes us as having that same light when he says, “You are the light of the world” in Matthew 5:14.

In the 13th century there were two men who were considered to be among the holiest of holy: one a Sufi mystic and poet, Rumi; the other a Christian monk, Francis of Assisi. These men had different religious beliefs and rituals, yet one only needs to read their writings and reflect on how they lived their lives to understand that they were vibrating on the same spiritual frequency. They both viewed God not as some separate, distant being who judges and punishes; they saw God as love, and all of creation as connected through love. “Nothing I say can explain to you Divine Love,” Rumi says in a poem, “Yet all of creation cannot seem to stop talking about it.”

Rumi and Francis believed that every act of creation was love. They understood that through love, all creation is connected and part of the One. While they held different beliefs about the nature of Jesus, they both modeled their lives after his. Francis’s vision of Christianity is in some ways parallel to the Sufi interpretation of Islam. Both teach us that we are all part of the same universe, a universe created by God out of love, and that we express love by being in relationship with all creation.

Francis would often go out and preach the Gospel to the birds or trees. When asked why, he would say, “God told me to preach the gospel to my brothers and sisters, and these are my brothers and sisters.” The 13th-century Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus wrote, “God is the artist, creation is the work of art. Nothing exists out of relationship to everything else.” It is this belief of our interconnectedness with all creation through love that both Sufis and Franciscans understand and practice.

In a 2020 article, “Social Justice without Cosmic Theology is Blind,” another visionary Franciscan theologian, Sr. Ilia Delio, OSF, writes, “God liberates when God becomes fully alive in the human person and in creation. If we want a different world then we must become a different people.” To become different people, we have to reimagine our sacred stories so they are not centered on individual salvation and redemption. Jesus told us that “you cannot pour new wine into old wineskins.” Perhaps we do live on the cusp of a new age, the beginning of another transformation of humanity. ♦

Patrick Carolan is a Catholic activist, organizer, and writer. He served as the Executive director of the Franciscan Action Network for ten years; he co-founded the Global Catholic Climate Movement and Catholics Vote Common Good. His writing and activism are centered on his understanding and belief through Franciscan spirituality of the connectedness of all creation and God.

Image: Marek Studzinski / Unsplash