Many of us have had the experience of riding on a bus or a subway, a train or an airplane, and watching as the sunlight streamed through the window illuminating the wrinkled faces of our fellow passengers, the bright eyes of infants and toddlers, the impatient scowls of jaded adolescents, and the intimate whispers of young couples in love.

We have watched middle-aged bodies shifting their weight in their seats and the rubber-tipped canes of elders tapping on the aisle to pass the time away. During such moments, and quite unexpectedly, we have felt a sudden awareness of the universal presence of God. The Rev. Richard Rohr’s new book, “The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe,” is an invitation to enter into such moments of awakening.

Father Rohr introduces his readers to a spirituality that Jesuits have called “everyday mysticism” and D.T. Suzuki described as being “like everyday consciousness, but two inches above the ground.” Christians will find, in the book, a deeper understanding of the incarnation, sacramentality, and the many dimensions of a life lived “in relationship” rather than the illusion of radical individualism and isolation. The author guides his readers to an awareness of how to experience the manifestation of a divine presence in everyday life.

The themes that give the book its shape come from an understanding of “Christ” as: “the transcendent presence of God in every ‘thing’ in the universe”; the “immense spaciousness” of authentic love; the “infinite horizon that pulls us from within and pulls us forward”; and the “fullness” of everything. Father Rohr grounds this understanding in the scriptures.

He draws from the early Christian hymn in Colossians 1: 15-20, which includes the passages: “For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible … all things were created through him and for him … in him all things hold together … that in all things he himself might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell ….” Similar descriptions of the universal Christ can be found in Ephesians 1, John 1 and Hebrews 1.

Father Rohr’s approach to the mystery of the universal Christ makes use of the spirituality of the early Church in which he approaches the mystery by way of indirection, through “waiting” and “the practice of attentiveness.”

This he describes as being a form of Lectio Divina “the contemplative way of reading and listening, and thus being drawn forward.” He notes the difference between contemplative reading and “proof-texting” (reading to settle an argument) that is characteristic of our day. “Contemplation,” he writes, “is waiting patiently for the gaps to be filled in, and it does not insist on quick closure or easy answers.”

Father Rohr promises that the reward of this approach will be an awareness that “the entire physical world … all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place of God.”

He recognizes in this journey what he describes as “the essential function of religion,” which is “to radically connect us with everything,” and to “see the world and ourselves in wholeness, and not just in parts.” This awakens in the reader an awareness that, as Albert Einstein put it, “everything is a miracle.”

It will come as no surprise that some readers might confuse what Father Rohr is saying with a form of pantheism, but that would be a misreading of the text. He clarifies that he is, in fact, a “panentheist,” as was Jesus and Paul the apostle, which is to say, one who teaches that “God lies within all things but also transcends them.”

The readers of “The Universal Christ,” regardless of one’s faith or polity, is likely to experience the world anew. Their experience will not be very different from what Paul experienced in the Acts of the Apostles: “Things like scales fell from his eyes and he was able to see again.”

C. Matthew Hawkins is the third-year theologian at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, studying for the priesthood for the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh.

First Published: April 6, 2019, 1:00 p.m.