Books we like

Jesus as transformer of our consciousness? Sure, says Cynthia Bourgeault, one of the Richard Rohr crowd at the Center for Action and Contemplation. Drawing on the wealth of new information we’ve gotten in the last couple of generations about how the Jesus event entered and spread from the Near East eastward, she offers a perspective wider and older than what we in the west are accustomed to. He is not just saviour, he is teacher of wisdom; his parables are not morality plays, but something closer to koans.


This book saved my life — and I mean that literally. It gave me the concept of the ‘true self’, which is to say, the self you were given, and obscured by the false one you constructed to function in the world. That latter self isn’t by itself bad … but it isn’t enough. You won’t engineer your way to being okay, says the author, Fr. Richard Rohr; you’ll collapse into who you really are, and realise that you really are okay.


I doubt we’re in a post-Christian age, but we probably are in a climate of proliferating popular gnosticisms. That’s not altogether bad. Fr. Thomas Keating has observed that our hunger for the transcendent, even in these extra-scriptural forms, are probably the movement of the Holy Spirit, just misapprehended. (That’s the premise of this very website.) Why don’t they satisfy? Each new Oprah-ism seems to have a very short shelf life. Minnesota theologian Andrew Root says this is because they’re never transformative. And why aren’t they? Because really, they’re projections of the self. He maps 20 of the most popular ‘secular mysticisms’ of the past 5 years and shows how.


There is a universal pattern in knowing and surrendering to reality. Christians do not have a monopoly on this, observes Richard Rohr. We’re all capable of letting go of our manufactured sense of order and trusting the disorder.