A Shoulder to Lean On (ChatGPT as Richard Rohr on Divine Comfort)

Published by

Dr. Ernie

on

May 14, 2025

God Comes Alongside

Most of us begin the spiritual journey hoping that God will fix things. We pray, we strive, we bargain—hoping the Divine Hand will swoop in from above and “make it all better.” But somewhere along the road, if we are honest and awake, we discover something deeper:

God doesn’t come to fix us.
God comes to dwell with us.

The true comfort of God is not the anesthesia of escape or the adrenaline of solutions. It is Presence. Loving, enduring, undefended Presence.

The Comfort of the Mother and the Father

Human comfort usually falls along familiar lines.

A mother comes under to carry: she holds us in our vulnerability, gives us space to weep, to fall apart, to be fragile without shame.
A father comes over to fix: he offers direction, resources, safety—he builds the bridge or clears the path.

Both are beautiful. Both are needed. But both are ultimately limited. They point us toward, but cannot fully contain, the Divine Comfort.

God as the Alongside

The Holy One does not hover over us to dominate, nor kneel beneath us to indulge.
God comes alongside.

Like the Paraclete (John 14:16)—the “one who walks beside.”
Like Jesus on the Emmaus road—unrecognized, but present.
Like the Spirit groaning within us (Romans 8:26), not fixing, but feeling with.

This is comfort not as escape, but as transformation through companionship.

The Shoulder That Holds, Not Carries Away

We often cry out, “Lord, take this burden from me!”
But divine comfort is more likely to say, “Let me carry it with you.”
This is not the comfort of erasure, but of endurance.

A shoulder to lean on is not a solution; it’s a sacrament.
It says: You do not have to bear this alone. I will be with you. Even unto the end.

The Invitation

True comfort doesn’t anesthetize; it awakens.
It softens us toward compassion, because we have been companioned in our pain.
It doesn’t remove suffering, but it remakes us through it.

The story God is telling in you, in me, in the Church—is not one of control or certainty.
It is the slow, hidden unfolding of a people who learn how to be shoulders for one another—because they have first leaned on the shoulder of Christ.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
—Matthew 11:28

Not rest from your burdens, but rest in your Beloved.

And that is the only comfort deep enough to hold the human soul.

Radically Happy