I appreciate what Rohr has to say in the quote below. I believe it is important that our spirituality, our faith life, is fully grounded in the here and now, in the concrete of our real life. Healthy Christian spirituality brings wholeness – we are created as physical, concrete beings who are also at the same time spiritual beings. To divide us into one or the other is to diminish what were created to be and how we were created to relate to God. This concreteness in the present in no way diminishes hope rather provides a context for the fruit of our eternal hope.
In my opinion, a theology which divides humans into parts and isolates those parts from real life is not healthy Christianity.
I think Rohr offers us a concise picture of this being worked out.
God apparently loves freedom and risks the smallness and fragility of limited incarnations. Walter Brueggemann calls it “the scandal of the particular.” That is the rub of time and history and our interminable groanings, as we try to find God in the specific, the concrete, the ordinary, and in one very human-looking man in Palestine in one century of time. It is almost too much to believe.
Jesus trusted this process—“a body you have prepared for me” (Hebrews 10:5), and accepted the risk of being in one place at one time. You see, the concrete is always the doorway to the universal. You get the Mystery in one particular place—and then you recognize it is also everywhere! That is how humans learn and grow. It is still a big risk on God’s part, and God would rather have a free, conscious, and loving response than any robotic religion.
Adapted from Near Occasions of Grace, p. 5