People Who Have Faces

I am sharing an excerpt from Richard Rohr’s book, Things Hidden, that I am reading right now. I hope that this will stir your mind and heart to deeper relationship with God and neighbor. Read and reflect and be blessed!

God, as revealed in the Bible stories, desires not just images or ideas, but persons with whom God can be in very concrete and intimate relationship with. God is creating, quite literally, some friends for Godself! Jesus became the full representation of one who accepted and lived that friendship. In fact, he never doubted it. That must be at the core of our imitation of Jesus, and exactly how we become “partners in his triumph” (2 Corinthians 2:14).

God does not settle for mandated or fear-based relationships but rather desires willing and free relationships with “friends” (John 15:15). It is called a “new covenant” (Jeremiah 31:31; Luke 22:20), but one that is still a quite new and unbelievable possibility for most people. In calling forth such freedom and consciousness, and even love, in humanity, God is actually making possible a certain kind of equality between Divinity and humanity, as strange and impossible as, in short, I see this pattern in the Bible might sound. As Deuteronomy (26:18) states it, God is creating “a people peculiarly God’s own.”

The Judeo-Christian tradition really nurtured and brought forth the idea of the individual that was prevalent among the ancient Greeks. That’s probably why we have this strong sense of individuality in the West, which we often think of in negative terms. But there’s a very positive sense to it too. Humanity had to be pulled out of tribalism, collectivism, and groupthink, which is where human consciousness started.

In many ways, what we’re seeing as we explore the Bible is an observation of the development of human consciousness and human readiness for God. That is why we do see some difference between the earlier and later Scriptures: There’s been a development in consciousness.

In short, I see this pattern in the Bible: 1) We start with Tribal thinking; 2) we gradually move toward individuation through the dialogue of election, failure, and grace; 3) then there is a breakthrough to unitive consciousness by the few who are led, and walk fully through those first two stages (e.g., Moses, David, many prophets, Job, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Jesus, Paul). We could describe it also as 1) Simple Consciousness, 2) Complex Consciousness, and 3) Non-Dual Consciousness or “the unitive way.”

That last stage is utterly mysterious and unknown to people in the first stage, and still rather scary and threatening to people in the second stage. If we are not trained in a trust of mystery and some degree of tolerance for ambiguity, we will not proceed very far on the spiritual journey. In fact, we will often run back to stage one when the going gets rough in stage two.

Thus, the biblical tradition—and Jesus in particular—praises faith even more often than love. Why? Because faith is that patience with mystery that allows us to negotiate the stages. As Gerald May (1940–2005) pointed out in The Dark Night of the Soul, it allows God to lead us through darkness—where God knows and we don’t. This is the only way to come to love! Love is the true goal, but faith is the process of getting there, and hope is the willingness to live without resolution or closure. They are indeed, “the three things that last” (1 Corinthians 13:13), but there are few practical teachers of the way of faith and the way of hope.

In Christ!

Dr. Fitzgerald

¹ Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (New York: Convergent, 2026), 53–55.