The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder

by Richard Rohr

The endless telling of “this is me” stories eventually becomes self-validating, self-imprisoning, and, frankly, boring. Personal anecdotes become too small and aimless, unless they are a part of some larger life narratives. That is the genius of family stories, mythologies, and the biblical mind.

This is probably why most religion is inherently conservative. The genius is to distinguish between healthy conservatism and mere self-serving maintenance of status-quo structures. People can look conservative and merely be afraid of larger truth, imagination, intelligence, risk, and, finally, faith. God deserves more than that. True traditionalists are not always conservative by temperament. True traditionalists just know that there are some old boundary markers that were put there for a reason.

True faith, which always includes hope and love, is a predisposition to “yes.” I would say that a foundational “yes” is the most distinguishing element between a secular agenda and one that is guided by the Spirit of Jesus. You can spot the different energy in a moment! “With him it was always ‘yes,’ and however many the promises God made, the ‘yes’ to them all is in him” (2 Corinthians 1:19b–20). Jesus was a “yes” man in the deepest meaning of that phrase.

But deconstruction is rather useless without reconstruction, without a positive vision.

An awful lot of activists on the left and reactionaries on the right have no positive vision, nothing they believe in, no one they are in love with. They are just overwhelmed with what’s wrong and think that by eliminating the so-called “contaminating element,” the world will be pure and right again.

That is the major illusion of people on both left and right. In different ways, they are both into a politics of expulsion. It’s just the object of their expulsion that is different.

One day, the mainline Christian movement will itself recognize that Jesus was never into expelling or excluding—o...

The Western mind refuses to be in awe anymore. It is only aware of what is wrong, and seemingly incapable of rejoicing in what is still good and true and beautiful.

That is the paradox, and all dualistic language will henceforth fail us. When the divine image is no longer present, why should I respect you, or anything? Why should I talk to you with tenderness if you do not reflect the divine image, if you are just another market product?