The Great Chain of Being
anything and everything sacred. Jesus tried desperately to keep us within and connected to the Great Chain of Being by taking away from us the power to scapegoat and project
An excerpt from The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder by Richard Rohr
onto enemies and outsiders. We were to keep the chain unbroken by not hating, eliminating, or expelling the other. He commanded us to love the enemy and gave us himself as Cosmic Victim so we
Francis called all creatures, no matter how small,
would get the point—and stop creating victims—
by the name of brother and sister, because he knew
but we are transformed into Christ very slowly.
they had the same source as himself.
Our inclination to break the chain—to decide —Bonaventure
I
who is good and who is bad—seems to be a basic control mechanism in all of us. We actually are a
would like to reclaim an ancient, evolving, and very Franciscan metaphor to rightly name the
bit worried about the God in whom Jesus believes: who “causes the sun to rise on the bad as well
nature of the universe, God, and the self, and to
as the good, who sends down rain to fall on the
direct our future thinking: the image of the Great
upright and the wicked alike” (Matthew 5:45).
Chain of Being.
If we dishonor the so-called inferior or unworthy
Through this image, Scholastic theologians
members of creation, we finally destroy ourselves
tried to communicate a linked and coherent
too. Once we stop seeing, we stop seeing. Like
world. The essential and unbreakable links in
nothing else, spiritual transformation is an all-
the chain include the Divine Creator, the angelic
or-nothing proposition. Like Jesus’s robe, it is a
heaven, the human, the animal, the world of
“seamless garment.” He wore it and offers it to us.
plants and vegetation, and planet Earth itself
Paul did for Jesus exactly what Bonaventure did
with its minerals and waters. In themselves, and
for Francis. He took the lived life and made it into
in their union together, they proclaim the glory
a philosophy or theology. The seamless garment
of God (Psalm 104) and the inherent dignity of all
is still intact in Paul’s most-quoted analogy of the
things. This image became the basis for calling
body:
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