The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder

by Richard Rohr

Order, by itself, normally wants to eliminate any disorder and diversity, creating a narrow and cognitive rigidity in both people and systems. Disorder, by itself, closes us off from any primal union, meaning, and eventually even sanity in both people and systems. Reorder, or transformation of people and systems, happens when both are seen to work together.

I think this is better language than deconstruction.

Walter Brueggemann teaches three kinds of Psalms: Psalms of Orientation > Psalms of Disorientation > Psalms of New Orientation.1

Christians call it Life > Crucifixion > Resurrection.

Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart... . We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home any who have lost their way.

The depth was an inner life where all shadow, mystery, and paradox were confronted, accepted, and forgiven. Here, he believed

The breadth was the actual world itself, a sacramental universe. It was not the ideal, the churchy, or the mental, but the right-in-front-of-us-and-everywhere—the actual as opposed to the ideal.

We can argue doctrinally about many aspects of Jesus’s life and teaching, but we cannot say he was not a poor man, or that he did not favor the perspective from the bottom as a privileged viewpoint. All other heady arguments about Jesus must deal with this overwhelming fact.

Analysis of parts became more important than a synthesis of the whole.

I remember teachers in primary school telling me in the 1950s that we would have overcome all major diseases by the turn of the twenty-first century. It has not turned out that way, as we all know. Now, in fact, we have a lot of new physical diseases and many unsolvable diseases of the mind and soul.

We’re seeing that the postmodern mind forms a deconstructed worldview. It does not know what it is for, as much as it knows what it is against and what it fears. To have a positive vision of life is almost considered naïve in most intellectual circles. Such folks are not taken seriously. They are considered fools.

The irony is that the same postmodernist also believes that he or she knows more than anybody else—that there are no absolutes, no patterns that are always true. We end up with a being who is both godlike (“I know”) and utterly cynical (“I have to create my own truth because there are no universal patterns”). This is a terrible dilemma with which to live. It is an impossible burden which earlier generations never presumed to carry. No wonder depression and suicide now affect even children’s lives to such a degree!

This the problem in a nutshell.

For many, if not most, Western Christians, it is basically a crime-and-punishment scenario, instead of the grace-and-mercy world that Jesus proclaims.

We think we can dominate the shadow self rather than forgive it, transform it, and embrace it into a larger wholeness. No wonder Jesus did not concentrate on the shadow self at all, but almost entirely on the

We have to know the rules before we can break the rules.

There is too much of the imperial ego and too little room for anybody else, for anything communal and shareable.

Private feelings are our form of truth today, a kind of ultimate self-absorption—understandable because there are no universal patterns. Yet, in expressing private feelings, people really think they’ve done something great. We see this on the talk shows. We realize those people have never read, studied, prayed, or listened to anybody except their own tyrannical feelings. Yet they think they have a right for their uninformed opinions on the welfare system or religion or nuclear warfare to be taken seriously!

If you are an individualist you are surely not a believer, and if you are a believer you are utterly responsible, connected, and aligned everywhere.

Only an outer and positive reference point utterly grounds the mind—or the heart, for that matter.

Yet, the cross itself is clearly a proclamation of disorder at the heart of reality.

Einstein said, “The most beautiful and profound experience is the feeling of mystery.”

Great religion always said that the best we could hope for would be metaphor, symbol, and image. Here, we do not know as much as we are known; we do not make the connections as much as realize that we are connected. Then we can only kneel and kiss the ground. The logical mind gives up its tyranny.

The whole Bible is about meeting God in the actual, in the incarnate moment, in the scandal of particularity, and not in educated theories—so much so that it is rather amazing that we ever tried to codify and control the whole thing.

So sad that we have preferred conformity and group loyalty over real change!

This is it!

I’m seeing people of great faith today, people of the Big Truth, who love the church but are no longer on bended knee before an idol. They don’t need to worship the institution; neither do they need to throw it out and react against it.

It is the “folly” of the cross, where we cannot prove we are right, but only hang between the good and the bad thieves of every issue, paying the price for their reconciliation (see Luke 23:39–43).

For Christians, the abandonment of modernism’s certainty is going to be a journey deeper into both biblical religion and the tremendous mystery of Jesus.

We have no reason to apologize for our Christ. He is a flawless image, especially in his crucified and risen form, of all that God is doing on earth. He is our living icon of transformation.

I move in some circles where the word Christian, unfortunately, is a negative adjective. To them, “He’s a Christian” means he knows nothing about history, nothing about politics, and is probably incapable of civil conversation about anything. Five Bible quotes are the available answers to everything. How did we ever get to this low point after developing such a tradition of wisdom? How did we ever regress to such arrogance after the humble folly of the cross?

Postmodernism and modernism reject a personalized universe. They dis-enchant the universe. We no longer expect miracles.

We know this world is too dead, too empty, too disenchanted—it’s not enough for us. We’re not at home without our spiritual nature.

The sadness of modern people is that we don’t feel at home.

Euthanasia, abortion, capital punishment, and war itself will only increase unless there’s a larger story like the paschal mystery that gives transcendent meaning to human suffering.

Why would anyone settle for the small mind of rationalism or the no-mind of non-rationalism? This is the Great Mind of Christ.

Every age has had its pain, and spirituality, in its best sense, is about what we do with our pain. We do not know what to do with it anymore.

In a culture with no Transcendent Center, there is no one to whom we can hand over the pain. In a culture with no cross-and-resurrection image, there is no meaning to our suffering. When a people no longer knows that God is, God is good, God can be trusted, and God is on our side, we frankly have very serious problems. Our pain will go shooting out in all directions, none of them good.

This is probably the ultimate form of moral blackmail. All we have to do, in this strange configuration of life, is prove that we are a victim and we immediately have the moral high ground. We can also cop out and do nothing, because we now carry this paralyzing wound. In either case, we stop growing and make life miserable for everyone around us.

Playing the victim is an effective way of getting moral high ground without doing any moral development whatsoever.

We don’t have to grow up, we don’t have to let go, we don’t have to forgive, we don’t have to surrender—all the things that g...

Victims have found a way to be superior. The rest of us must concede them moral power—at least if they are fashionable victims. Fashion, as we all know, changes every few years.

It probably only works where people are also rather rich and individualistic, jockeying for power in superficial ways.

It is more than something upon which we gazed and by which we were transformed. Jesus neither played the victim nor created victims. He became a saving and forgiving victim.

The pattern in most of history, and even unfortunately today, has been somewhat different. Most human pain has been transmitted to others. It is normally easier to expel our anxiety and our shame by projecting it onto somebody else. “Let them carry it. I don’t want to,” we say unconsciously—and it sort of works! We feel relieved by having an enemy or a problem out there. It gives us focus and identity.

One of the few generalizations we can make in the field of universal spirituality is this: No one else is your problem. You are always the locus of conversion and transformation. It is always about you first of all—always.

What we’ve done, for some strange reason, is make Jesus into the one who could keep us from pain later. We’ve missed the entire transformative message! Now it is only a message of gambling and bargaining with God, and attending religious services, often for people with low-level resentment who clearly do not want to be there (ask any parish priest!). Somehow, Jesus becomes the great problem-solver and answer-giver for the next world and not primarily the one who teaches us how to live with peace and freedom in this world. It’s fire-insurance religion instead of a banquet right now. That is a big, big difference— an entirely different agenda.

Christians are familiar with this symbol: the lamb who is simultaneously slaughtered and standing. That paradox is the message of the gospel, the message of the cross: We are simultaneously—in one and the same moment—slaughtered and victorious.

The way of fight is what I’ll call the way of Simon the zealot, and often the way of the cultural liberal. These folks want to change, fix, control, and reform other people and events. The zealot is always looking for the evil, the political sinner, the unjust one, the oppressor, or the bad person over there. The zealot permits himself or herself to righteously attack them, to hate them, even to kill them. When they do, they think they are “doing a holy duty for God” (John 16:2).

It is a general rule that when we don’t transform our pain we will always transmit it. Zealots and contemporary liberals often have the right conclusion, but their tactics and motives are frequently filled with self, power, control, and the same righteousness that they hate in conservatives. Basically, they want to do something to avoid holding the pain until it transforms them. Because of this too-common pattern, I have come to mistrust almost all righteous indignation and moral outrage. In my experience, it is hardly ever from God.

This leads us to the second diversionary tactic: the way of flight. This is the common path of the Pharisee, the uninformed, the falsely innocent, and often the conservative type. They deny the pain altogether. They refuse to carry the shadow side of anything, in themselves or in their chosen groups. There will be no uncertainty, no ambiguity. There will be no problems. It is a form of narcotic, and sometimes probably necessary to get through the day.

But the flight people are also subject to hypocrisy, projection, or just plain illusion: “We are right and you are wrong. The world is divided into black and white and I know who the good guys and bad guys are. It’s all figured out in my head, fortified by well-fed emotions and like-minded people.”

But Jesus took the harder path: to know and still forgive, and still understand.