In the Name of the Father-Mother, Ron Rolheiser & the Holy Spirit

“All the language about God largely misses the mark.” So proclaims Fr. Ron Rolheiser, who then proceeds to employ language to tell us about God and, going further, to explain what’s inside of God.

Fr. Ron says that “Mircea Eliade, in his mythical schema of things, suggests that, archetypically, at the center of things there sit two thrones. On one sits a King, on the other a Queen. But the two work as one…empowering each other…. The center of things is, of course, where God sits…. Imagine perfect masculinity and perfect femininity making perfect love. That’s what’s happening inside of God….” Fr. Ron allows that “such an image is perhaps more poetic than theological, but, in the end, isn’t all theology just that — poetry meant to inspire?”

Actually, no. All theology is not just inspirational poetry. Catholic theology in particular is language about God derived from God’s revelation of Himself and His will. Catholic theology is not man-made myth. If we at the NOR thought that Catholic language about God “largely misses the mark,” we’d recommend that no one pay any attention to it — or to us!

Fr. Ron doesn’t like it that God is known in Catholicism as Father. Fr. Ron claims that that foul-up happened because “we have no nouns and pronouns that capture both genders….” Well, Fr. Ron is just flat-out wrong. For example, we have the nouns androgyne and androgyny, which have an ancient lineage, deriving from the Latin androgynus and the Greek androgunos. We also have the noun hermaphrodite, which is derived from the Latin hermaphroditus and the Greek hermaphroditos. Let no one say we’re being pedantic here, for this information is available in any decent dictionary. As for pronouns, is Ron unfamiliar with the word it ? That word, our dictionary says, refers to “an animate being whose sex is unspecified, unknown, or irrelevant.”