IMMORTAL DIAMOND

Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar, is also the author of The New York Times bestseller The Universal Christ. Rohr is the founder of the Centre for Action and Contemplation, a school of transformative spirituality and social action in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Not only does Rohr live and teach at the Centre, he lives and teaches from the centre—the centre of his spiritual being. In this book, Rohr exemplifies the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson—'If he has found his centre, the Deity will shine through him.’

And shine it does. One of the brightest moments of divine light shining through Immortal Diamond is found in a footnote that accompanies the following sentence: ‘For me, the Holy Spirit, resurrection, and evil are all very real and even physical force fields.’ The footnote reads:

I was writing this section on a late February day in 2012 and waxing eloquent about my belief that the Holy Spirit is a force field, similar to an electromagnetic or gravitational field. When you are aligned in love, you can expect lots of coincidences, providences, ‘usings,’ and synchronicities in your life.

But as he was writing this, Rohr thought his readers would consider him ‘flaky, new age, or unorthodox,’ so he ‘stopped writing with great discouragement.’ The rest of the footnote describes what happened next:

I tried to distract myself by checking my e-mail, and in five seconds I pulled up an attachment from a recent theological acquaintance at a conference. He was sending me his doctoral thesis. . . . There on the screen appeared a title I had never seen before: ‘The Holy Spirit as a Field of Force in the Theology of Wolfhart Pannenberg’!

Rohr’s observation that synchronicities such as this occur when ‘you are aligned in love’ resonates with the insights of author Linda Kohanov in The Tao of Equus. Kohanov says that after her book was published, several readers wrote to her saying that they, too, had ‘experienced a connection’ with horses that ‘went far beyond rational explanation.’ After her readers had shared their ‘extraordinary experiences, dreams, coincidences, and connections’ with her and joined her ‘to delve deep into their own psyches,’ Kohanov felt they ‘were waking up, both to the true presence of the horses they were partnering with and to their authentic selves.’

From Kohanov’s perspective, it was the genuine love that her readers shared with their horses that blessed them with these mystical moments, and from Rohr’s perspective, it was his alignment with the Holy Spirit’s force field of love that activated the synchronicity described above. Rohr believes this force field is present in our lives when we are ‘drawn in by the calm and loving inner authority (the indwelling Holy Spirit) of prayer, practice, and inner experience.’ Our evolving consciousness of this love leads us to our true self, our ‘inner destiny.’ Rohr also refers to the force field of the Holy Spirit when he says that ‘beauty, or inner coherence, is a deep inner knowing that both evokes the soul and even pulls the soul into its oneness.’

When differentiating between our false and true selves, Rohr says that our false self is our small self, our ego. Our true self is larger and more expansive; it is the ‘Great Self, the Christ Self, the God Self, the Buddha Self.’ The transformation from the false to the true self requires ‘losing the self and finding a larger self.’ Rohr quotes St. Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle to illuminate the magnitude of this larger self: ‘The soul is spacious, plentiful, and its amplitude is impossible to exaggerate . . . the sun here radiates to every part . . . and nothing can diminish its beauty.’ Rohr says, ‘This is your soul. It is God-in-you. This is your true self.’

Rohr believes there is a continuous ‘process of loss and renewal, death and resurrection’ in our lives—and that resurrection lifts us to the understanding that, like Jesus, we too ‘are larger than life.’ We too are ‘Being Itself,’ and we are ‘therefore made for something good, united, and beautiful.’ Like Jesus, our ‘perishable nature will put on imperishability,’ and our ‘mortal body will put on immortality.’ According to Rohr, the resurrected Risen One is ‘the icon of full consciousness,’ which is both human and divine.

Rohr says that our consciousness is also both human and divine and that, “as in the universe itself, we move toward an ever-greater aliveness, a greater consciousness, a deeper union.” The “ever greater aliveness” that we feel emanates from the animating spirit of eternal life that dwells both within and beyond us. The “deeper union” is the convergence of that spirit with our human consciousness. The deeper the convergence, the more we are able to perceive the “dazzling white” light of the Risen One. In this book, Rohr awakens us to that light, leads us to our sacred center, and shows us the radiance of the divine, infinite love that is our true self and our immortal diamond.