Reflection of the Week - 23 December 2025

By Father Richard Rohr

Posted Dec 16, 2025 in Faith

Christ in every thing 

Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
— Colossians 1:15–17  

The Christ Mystery is the indwelling of the Divine Presence in everyone and everything since the beginning of time.

As the twentieth-century English mystic Caryll Houselander said, “Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life.” [1]   

If this seems to us today somehow exotic, it certainly wouldn’t have to early Christians. The revelation of the Risen Christ as ubiquitous and eternal was clearly affirmed in the Scriptures (Colossians 1, Ephesians 1, John 1, Hebrews 1) and in the early church, when the euphoria of the Christian faith was still creative and expanding. In our time, however, this deep mode of seeing must be approached as something of a reclamation project. After the Western and Eastern Churches separated in the Great Schism of 1054, we in the West gradually lost this profound understanding of how God has been liberating and loving all that is. Instead, we gradually limited the Divine Presence to the single body of Jesus, when perhaps it is as ubiquitous as light itself—and uncircumscribable by human boundaries.    

If my own experience is any indication, discovering Christ as the transcendent within of every “thing” in the universe can transform the way we perceive and the way we live in our everyday world. It can offer us the deep and universal meaning that Western civilization seems to lack and long for today. It has the potential to reground Christianity as a natural religion and not one based on a special revelation, available only to a few lucky enlightened people.   

As G. K. Chesterton expressed, our religion is not the church we belong to, but the cosmos we live inside of. [2] Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing “contemplation.”   

Religion’s essential function is to radically connect us with everything (re-ligio = to re-ligament or reconnect). A cosmic notion of the Christ competes with and excludes no one, but includes everyone and everything (Acts 10:15, 34) and allows Jesus Christ to finally be a God figure worthy of the entire universe. In this understanding of the Christian message, the Creator’s love and presence are grounded in the created world, and the mental distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” falls apart. 

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent Books, 2021), 1–7.  

Reference

Fr Richard Rohr, Advent Heals the Hurt — Center for Action and Contemplation

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