The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe

by Richard Rohr

To arrive there, we must endure, learn from, and include the disorder stage, transcending the first naïve order—but also still including it! It amounts to the best of the conservative and the best of the liberal positions. They hold on to what was good about the first order but also offer it very needed correctives. People who have reached this stage, like the Jewish prophets, might be called “radical traditionalists.” Loving their truth and their group enough to critique it. Critiquing it enough to maintain their own integrity and intelligence. These wise ones have stopped overreacting but also overdefending. They are usually a minority of humans.

Conservatives must let go of their illusion that they can order and control the world through religion, money, war, or politics. This is often their real security system; their intense religious language often shows itself to be a pretense and a cover for a very conservative politics. True release of control to God will show itself as compassion and generosity, and less boundary keeping. Liberals, however, must surrender their belief in permanent disorder, and their horror of all leadership, eldering, or authority, and find what was good, healthy, and deeply true about a foundational order. This will normally be experienced as a move toward humility and real community. They must stop reacting against all authority and tradition, and recognize these are necessary for continuity in a culture along with basic mental health—which allows them to belong to something besides themselves.