Sorting Through the Futility

Ironically, until people have some level of inner God experience, there is no point in asking them to follow Jesus' ethical ideals.  It is largely a waste of time. Indeed, they will not be able to even understand the law's meaning and purpose, Religious requirements only become the source of deeper anxiety.  Humans quite simply don't have the power to obey any spiritual law, especially issues like forgiveness of enemies, nonviolence, self-emptying, humble use of power, true justice towards the outsider, and so on, except in and through union with God.  Or as Jesus put it, "the branch cut off from the vine is useless." (John 15: 5) - Richard Rohr's Daily Devotion 5. 21. 2017

As many of you know, I have been reading Richard Rohr's daily devotions every day for several years now.  This has stuck with me as a devotional practice for longer than most of my disciplines manage to hang on.  Not every day produces an "aha!" moment, but enough of them do to keep me going.  I think Rohr's perspective: Catholic, contemplative, mystic, is just the right balance for me.  I am Protestant, and rather enthusiastically so.  I am not so much contemplative as I am reflective; honestly I don't find the sorts of practices generally extolled by Rohr to be terribly helpful.  Then again, as a life long introvert and lover of solitude it is possible that my reaction to them is more of a "well duh" sort of response.  I sometimes like to think of myself as a mystic, but honestly I am much more of a pragmatist, I tend to want reality and concreteness in my world.  I quickly become either frustrated an annoyed with those who want to dwell in abstraction.
The thing is though, mystery and mysticism intrudes on my world enough that I cannot simply walk away from it entirely.  Thus Fr. Richard's thoughts from two days ago have been kicking around in my head.  I am involved so deeply in church things that I sometimes peek out from behind the curtain of the institution and wonder how it is that so many just seem to live without it.  I remember a time, even when I had experienced something of an "inner God experience" where I hadn't really fully committed to being a follower of Jesus.  I always thought of myself as a Christian, I grew up as one, but the journey towards really being convicted by the "ethical ideals" that were taught by Jesus the Christ didn't really start in earnest until I was actually already engaged in vocational religion.
It's more than a little odd to look at it that way, but I think it proves Rohr's point that you can engage in religious requirements, you can come to some level of mastery of the systems of religion, all the while holding only a tenuous and legalistic grasp of what Jesus of Nazareth might actually be calling you to be and do.  I sometimes describe the process as a sort of erosion, it was like the steady and long process by which wind and water wear away stone.  It took me dealing seriously, academically, and most of all consistently with Scripture, through the process of preaching and teaching, over the course of years, before I realized that the Word actually throws down a fairly clear and unavoidable challenge to the practice of empty religion.
It is all too possible to be "cut off from the vine" and not even know it.  The sort of fruit that that the law points to and the gospels inaugurate is nothing that comes easy to us.  It requires that we move beyond the old dualism of reward and punishment that forms the center of a lot of religious practice. It implies that we grow into Christ, which is rather a bridge farther on than just sort of "believing in him" whatever that means. The implication of the above statement, that it is impossible to make any serious progress on that front until you have been changed by grace, is perhaps the most reformed thing that you will ever hear from a Roman Catholic, but there you have it.  The "religious requirements only become a source of deeper anxiety." I feel like that essentially sums up what I have heard from just about every lapsed Catholic I ever talked to about why they stopped going to Mass.  But we Protestants can ride that wagon too, we're not immune to the process, in fact, in as much as we have tried to buck that tendency we have generally just let more and more people ride off into the sunset.  I know, I'm not at all okay trying to get people to go to church because of guilt, or feeding on their anxiety, that has become anathema to me.
I am confronted though, by the reality that I find so much in Christ that is life-changing, purpose-building, peace-giving, and love-driving. I don't know how to give that gift the way that I should.  I have to say that, at this point, I have really only sorted through some of the things not to do, and Fr. Rohr has been a helper along that way.