Paul: A Christ Mystic

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations

Saturday, August 16, 2025

Week Thirty-Three Summary

August 10 – August 15, 2025

Paul: A Christ Mystic

Sunday

The Christ whom Paul met was not identical to the historical Jesus; it was the risen Christ, the Christ who remains with us now as the Universal Christ. —Richard Rohr

Monday

Paul creates the mystical foundations for Christianity. It’s a mystery of participation in Christ. It’s not something that we achieve by performance. It’s something that we’re already participating in, and often we just don’t know it. —Richard Rohr

Tuesday

We have nothing to protect after transformation, and that’s the great freedom and the great happiness we see in converted people like Paul. —Richard Rohr

Wednesday

Paul knows the mysterious truth, which only direct experience can bring home to us, that somehow even in this determined world “all things work together for good to them that love God.”

—Evelyn Underhill

Thursday

Paul recognizes that the greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order. There seems to be a shadow side to almost everything.

Only the unitive or nondual mind can accept this and not panic; in fact, it will grow because of it and even grow beyond it.

—Richard Rohr

Friday

Paul asserts that God doesn’t play favorites. All human beings are on the same level, whatever their religious background. We’re all united in our need of grace. —Brian McLaren

Week Thirty-Three Practice

Putting on the Mind of Christ

Father Richard describes contemplation as a practice of putting on “the mind of Christ”:

In contemplative practice, we refuse to identify with any one side, while still maintaining our intelligence. We hold the creative tension of every seeming conflict and go beyond words to pure, open-ended experience, which has the potential to unify many seeming contradictions.

We cannot know God the way we know anything else; we only know God subject to subject, by a process of mirroring. In Paul’s words, this is the “mind of Christ” (see 1 Corinthians 2:16).

It really is a different way of knowing, and we can recognize it by its gratuity, its open-endedness, its compassion, and by witnessing the way it is so creative and energizing in those who allow it.

Truly great thinkers and cultural creatives take for granted that they have access to a different and larger mind. They recognize that a Divine Flow is already happening and that everyone can plug into it. In all cases, it is a participative kind of knowing, a being known through and not an autonomous knowing.

The most common and traditional word for this change of consciousness was historically “prayer,” but we trivialized that precious word by making it functional, transactional, and supposedly about problem-solving. The only problem that prayer solves is us!