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by
Richard Rohr
Read between
February 5 - March 20, 2023
People more easily define themselves by what they are against, by who they hate, by who else is wrong, instead of by what they believe in and whom they love.
It’s much easier to build our identity on our group, our wounds, our angers, our agenda, our fear; that’s the more normal way, unless we’ve been taught the way of Jesus. Almost everybody takes the easier way, because it works better in the short run.
Education is not the same as transformation.
The wonder of the resurrection stories in the Gospels is that Jesus has no punitive attitude toward the authorities or his cowardly followers, and that the followers themselves never call for any kind of holy war against those who killed their leader. Something new has clearly transpired in history. This is not the common and expected story line. All Jesus does is breathe forgiveness.
Only wise people know how to take the information in helpful directions so we can stop victimizing in the future and not be trapped inside the resentful perspective that allows us to justify new victimizations.
Yet, in the supposed peace of today, fear is everywhere. The search for the appropriate enemy is rather non-stop and frantic. It seems the enemy is everywhere because the fear is unnamed and looking for a place to roost.
Jesus consistently undoes historic religion by touching and consorting with and doing the “impure” things. He’s not much of a founder for a self-respecting religion!
We not only remain fear-filled and hateful when we keep projecting our anxiety elsewhere, we also misdiagnose the real evil, the real problem. We normally substitute it with a smaller, closer problem that we can literally get our hands around.
Faith, however, allows us to hold the tension until we can recognize the true evil—of which we are a part. That’s foundational to all compassionate and nonviolent thinking.
What we call Original Sin in Genesis perhaps could, in a sense, be better called Original Shame, because Adam and Eve describe themselves as feeling naked.
We live, not just in an age of anxiety, but also in a time of primal shame.
Guilt, I am told, is about things we have done or not done, but our shame is about the primal emptiness of our very being—not what we have done, but who we are and who we are not. Guilt is a moral question. Shame—foundational shame, at least—is an ontological question. It is not resolved by changing behavior as much as by changing our very self-image, our alignment with the universe. Shame is not about what we do, but where we abide.
Nine out of ten people start with this premise: “If I behave correctly, I will one day see God clearly.” Yet the biblical tradition is saying the exact opposite: If we see God clearly, we will behave in a good and human way. Our right behavior does not cumulatively lead to our true being; our true being leads to eventual right behavior. We almost all think that good morality will lead to mystical union, but, in fact, mystical union produces correct morality—along with a lot of joy left over. The greatest surprise is that, sometimes, a bad moral response is the very collapsing of the ego that
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Christians indeed have a strange image of God: a naked, bleeding man dying on a cross. Let’s be honest. If we were going to create a religion, would we ever have thought up this image of God? If I had been setting out to manufacture a religion, I would have manufactured “seven habits for highly effective people.” I would have a big sun or a big golden orb for the symbol of God and I would have called God “the Force.” But never in a thousand years would I have thought of an image of God as a naked, bleeding, poor man, rejected by both society and religion.
Jesus receives our hatred and does not return it. He suffers and does not make the other suffer. He does not first look at changing others; he pays the price of change within himself. He absorbs the mystery of human sin rather than passing it on. He does not use his suffering and death as power over others, to punish them, but as power for others, to transform them.
In one sense or another, all ancient religions believed we had to spill our blood to get to God. God was distant, demanding, and dangerous. God couldn’t possibly love us in our radical unworthiness. What we have in the mystery of the crucified Jesus is the reversal of all primal religion. No more human sacrifice, no more animal sacrifice, no more Jansenism (beating ourselves so we can be worthy of this God who basically doesn’t like us). Instead of our spilling blood to get to God, we have God spilling blood to get to us!
The cross is a way of winning that tries to bring along our opponent with us. The cross is refusing to hate or to humiliate the other, because that would only be to continue the same pattern and reciprocate the violence. The cross is about authentic newness. It utterly reframes the human question and forces us to redefine success.
Unless spirituality answers the questions of power and powerlessness, there is never any real reform. There is never any real advancement in human history, because the so-called reformers are done in by the struggle. The cross is finally about how to stand against hate without becoming hate ourselves.
How can we stand against hate without letting it frame the question? Isn’t that the fundamental question for all of us? How do we oppose the evil, the hurts, the betrayals, the abandonment, the rejections, the disappointments in our lives, the people who let us down, the people who turn against us, the people who tell lies about us? How do we stand against that without becoming a mirror image of the same thing? The human capacity to hate and kill is the sin of the world and it took a Lamb (see John 1:29) to dismantle what the lions of history could only perpetuate.
The cross was the price that Jesus paid for agreeing to live in a “mixed” world that was both human and divine, bad and good, simultaneously broken and utterly whole. He agreed to carry the mystery and not to demand perfection of God’s creation or of God’s creatures. He lived fully on the horns of the human dilemma and made it work for us. In fact, he said it is the only way. It is in that sense only that Christianity is the “only” way to be saved. We are, indeed, saved by the cross—more than we realized.
Experience of the cruciform pattern of reality always feels like two steps forward and three steps backward. None of us likes it, especially because the three steps backward always feel like dying.
People will think that we’re asking them to compromise on issues or on truth if we talk this way. They will call us moral relativists or something that sounds dangerous, which seems to be what they thought of Jesus. I want to say this very strongly: That’s a smoke screen. That’s a diversionary tactic, even if unintentional. This labeling is a way to avoid the horns of the dilemma, to deny the clearly paradoxical nature of almost everything.
People say they do not want to give way on important moral issues, but far too often they don’t want to give way on the ego’s need to be right, superior, and in control. This mimics that original sin, described as a “desire to be like God” and daring to eat the apple of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It’s the human unwillingness to live in a broken world.
In the illusion of an unbroken world, we do not have to rely upon grace, mercy, and forgiveness. We do not need to be “saved.”
They want to do God’s will. They seek to please God, but, like Thomas Merton (1915–1968) at the end of his life, they are saying, “the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.”17 That very desire is itself a gift of God.
They tend to be afraid to talk about transcendence and God. They tend to be uncomfortable talking about the wisdom and the importance of the past and of tradition, to know that the truth has always been with us and God has always been with us.
Conservative people tend to avoid the horizontal claims of the gospel. They tend to be afraid of breadth and inclusiveness. They tend to be afraid of mercy and compassion, or any breaking of the rules, particularly rules for group coherence.
Human consciousness has only slowly been ready for the full Christ, for the freedom of the children of God.
Our inner myths determine what we do and don’t notice, what we consider significant and what we ignore.
Metanoia, an utter turnaround, involves seeing with a new mind and is seemingly necessary to transform us personally and to help us transform social structures and institutions. In other words, we are, first of all, assumed to be on a course of ego, narcissism, and self-interest, with a what’s-in-it-for-me attitude.
The biblical tradition would say that this turnaround is entirely dependent upon an experience of The Absolute. Afterward, we know at least three things at a deep level: God is good, the world is good, and I am good. That is all we need in order to begin.
Claims to orthodoxy become very weak when there is almost no orthopraxy.
The ability to self-criticize and own our shadow side is a clear sign of health and interior freedom.
During the best of times, they’ve balanced each other. We’re not in that balance now. We’re either cheaply romantic (most media and liberals), or cheaply rational (many conservatives and fundamentalist religions). We’re not open, by and large, to great spirituality or to dealing with things holistically and historically. We just react.
Healthy religion—which profits both the individual and the society—will be both romance and reason, faith and intelligence, symbol and science, experience and essence.
Conservatives romantically hold onto essence while being very rational about experience; liberals rationally hold onto experience while being very romantic about essence. That tells me they both have a kind of truth and wholeness. However, they are each usually incapable of self-criticism or of appreciating the
Many of our social institutions, particularly government, law, education, the church, the military, family, and marriage have been roundly discredited in the last seventy years. Each one is its own sad story of lost authority and focus. Unfortunately, this leaves only the media and the business world to communicate daily meaning for most people. That is scary—and this is probably the first time in human history that we have tried to carry society on two such tiny and fragile shoulders. It is certain to produce fragile people and a very unstable society.
Stephen Carter makes the point that the liberal establishment in America must recognize that it has unwittingly allowed for the ascendancy of the far right through its own nihilism, its throwing out of all boundary markers, its thinking that history began yesterday with us, and its stomping on necessary traditions and “romantic” rituals. Progressive folks have been far too rational and politically “correct” about the needs of the soul.
In hostile situations, we find that Jesus either kept silent, reframed the question, or put a question back to the speaker.
He knew that we never win when someone has a predisposition toward resentment or a desire to shame us. In such encounters, whatever we say will be turned against us. We have all been in such fruitless and impossible conversations. No one wins.
Compassion and humility don’t give us a sense of control or psychic comfort. We have to let go of our moral high ground and hear the ten percent of truth that the other person is perhaps telling. Compassion and dialogue are essentially vulnerable positions. If we are into control and predictability, we will seldom descend into the weakness of listening or the scariness of dialogue. We will not only be incapable of hearing others, but will also be incapable of hearing God. How we do anything is how we do everything. If we spend all day controlling and blocking others, why would we change when
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Faith, frankly, demands faith —not proof, certitude, predictability, control, or the comforts of authority assuring us that we are always right. Our temptation is often to create a non-relational Christianity and non-relational leadership styles, so we can have all the bases covered by custom and statute, and don’t ever have to enter into the scandal of particularity. Prayer, perhaps more than anything, is the school of relationship and particularity. We should be the experts in these areas—if we are people of prayer.
The hunger for meaning and the need for hope in this deconstructed society cannot be satisfied by merely private choices.
Corporate evil can only be overcome by corporate good.
As I have said since the early days of the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, we cannot think ourselves into a new way of living; we must live ourselves into a new way of thinking. It is lifestyle choices that finally change us and allow us to see in new ways. We have to create structures and institutions that think, and therefore act, differently.
More than directly fighting the system, he ignores it and builds an alternative worldview where power, prestige, and possessions are not sought or even admired.
If religion does not give us that sense of belonging to a sacred world of meaning, it is rather useless.
It seems we must begin conservatively—with clear boundaries, identity, and a sense of respect for our reality. Then, and only then, can we move out from that strong center, according to our education and experience.
That’s the necessary and good meaning of Tradition. We were meant to be parts of communities of custom, where some of the problems have already been named and resolved for us, even if we still have to do it our own way.
The normal pattern that I find in mythology and story is that the healthy person always begins with idealism, heroism, and black-and-white worldviews, and then moves toward nuance, compassion, exception, patience, tolerance, and wisdom. We now have it backward: People begin with no boundaries or identity and then overreact by the middle of life and need all kinds of fundamentalist certitudes, clarity, order, and absolute authority!
