More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Richard Rohr
Read between
January 7 - January 11, 2021
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.
Progress is never a straight and uninterrupted line, but we have all been formed by the Western Philosophy of Progress that tells us it is, leaving us despairing and cynical.
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. —FRANCIS TO THE FIRST FRIARS. Legend of the Three Companions, Number 58
ONE REASON SO MANY PEOPLE HAVE LOST HEART TODAY IS THAT WE FEEL both confused and powerless. The forces against us are overwhelming, including consumerism, racism, militarism, individualism, patriarchy, and the corporate juggernaut. These “powers and principalities” (Ephesians 6:12) seem to be fully in control. We feel helpless to choose our own lives, much less a common life, or to see any overarching meaning in it all.
It’s clear that America is not the only country struggling with these issues. All of this points to a long-standing, deep need for social reconstruction that we must urgently address. More than anything else, I believe, we are facing a crisis of meaning The world seems so complex, and we seem so small. What can we do but let the waves of history carry us and try to keep afloat somehow?
We now see that reading reality simply through the paradigm of science, reason, and technological advancement has not served us well. It has not served the soul well. It has not served the heart or the psyche well. It has not served community well. There must be something more than the physical, because mere science has left us powerful and effective, but also ravaged in the most important areas of our humanity. The inner world of meaning has not been fed.
The soul, the psyche, and human relationships seem at this point to be destabilizing at an almost exponential rate. Our society is producing very many unhappy and unhealthy people. The spread of violence throughout society is frightening. 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.
If we cannot trust in what we thought was logic and reason, if science is not able to create a totally predictable universe, then maybe there are no patterns. Suddenly we live in a very scary and even disenchanted universe—where no intelligence appears to be in charge, where there is no beginning, middle, or end. What’s ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
We find this in the postmodern novel, deconstructivist art, and movies with aimless direction and gratuitous violence. This is the world in which most of those living today were formed. It is star...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Postmodern thinking allows us to discredit and discount everything, which also leaves us in a lonely and absurd state. Philosophically, it’s called nihilism— nihil meaning “nothing.” Nihilism affects us all in some way, but most especially those at the top and the bottom of any society. The elite have the freedom to dismiss and discount everything beneath them. The oppressed finally have an explanation for their sad state. We see this tragedy in most of the minority and oppressed groups of the world, and in the addictive entertainment culture of the wealthy. For the rich it’s a false high, for
...more
Stephen Carter, a first-rate cultural critic, accuses many of his own black brothers and sisters and all of America of holding a nihilistic and inevitably materialistic worldview, except for those who have held onto their religious roots.5 We could say this of most Western groups, but only a black brother could say it of his own. He says there’s no belief in anything except power, possessions, and prestige in America, despite a religious façade. Michael Lerner, a Jewish philosopher and psychologist, says much the same to his audience.6
Another aspect of the postmodern mind is what we call a “market” mentality. In a market-driven culture like ours, things no longer have inherent value, but only exchange value. “Will it sell? Will it win? Will it defeat the opponent?” These are the first concerns, and sometimes the only concerns, of the market mind. It leaves us...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Once we lose a sense of inherent value, we have lost all hope of encountering true value, much less the Holy. Even religious people, if they do not pray, will normally regress to an exchange-value reading of religion. It is no longer about the Great Mystery, mystic union, and transformation, but merely social order and control. Moral codes and priesthoods are enlisted for the sake of enforcement and some measure of civility. 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.
“How can I be more outrageous than anyone else?” “How can I laugh at things before they disappoint me?” There are no heroes or heroines, so the individual feels a kind of negative heroism in exposing all human failings, foibles, and phoniness. I do not really have to grow up myself; I will find my meaning in pointing out that everyone and everything else is phony.
Let’s admit that this is the character of much of our political life too. We are all pulling one another downward in such a scenario, but it is not the downward mobility of humility. It is merely the downward spiral of a universal skepticism.
It is true that lots of folks are angry and alienated and have something to say about it, but we’ve got to listen to some greater minds, some greater hearts, some greater souls who are not just caught in their own self-expression (“this is me”) but are also addressing the greater issues (“this is us”) and, especially, the Great Patterns that are always true. (I will discuss these terms more fully in Chapter Five.) Those are the people who will reconstruct. Those are the people worth listening to and talking with. I think that is what it means to be a part of the great human parade instead of
...more
Owning Our Cultural Biases Every viewpoint is a view from a point. Unless we recognize and admit our own personal and cultural viewpoints, we will never know how to decentralize our own perspective, and we will live with a high degree of illusion and blindness that brings much suffering into the world. I think this is what Simone Weil (1909–1943) meant in saying that the love of God is the source of all truth. Only an outer and positive reference point utterly grounds the mind—or the heart, for that matter.
One of the keys to wisdom is that we must recognize our own biases, our own addictive preoccupations, and those things to which, for some reason, we refuse to pay attention. Until we see these patterns (which is early stage contemplation), we will never be able to see what we do not see.
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.
But chaos often precedes great creativity. Darkness creates the desire for light. Faith actually precedes great leaps into new knowledge. That’s the good news. Our uncertainty is the doorway into mystery, the doorway into surrender, the path to God that Jesus called “faith.”
We are slowly discovering what many of us are calling the Third Way, neither fight nor flight, but the way of compassionate knowing. Both the way of fight and the way of flight fall short of wisdom, although they look like answers in the heat of the moment. When it’s an either/or world, we have no ability to transcend, to hold together, to be creative.
The dualistic mind seemingly has a preference for knowing things by comparison. The price we pay for our dualistic mind is that one side of the comparison is always idealized and the other demonized, or at least minimized. There is little room for balance or honesty, much less love. Wisdom, however, is always holding the “rational” and the “romantic” together: Aristotle and Plato, Aquinas and Bonaventure, Freud and Jung, saint and sinner, Spirit and senses.
Only a few dare to hold the irresolvable tension in the middle. 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).
The Apostle Paul intuits this when he speaks in Ephesians (4:4–6) of “one Body, one Spirit ... one hope ... one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is Father of all, over all, through all, and within all.”
Jesus holds together the tension of opposites, in their ultimate shapes of life and death. Humanity itself could be defined as that which is eternally crucified and eternally resurrected—all at once!
We’re living in a time when the far right and the far left in almost every institution are using the eccentricities and evils of the other end to justify their own extremes. There seems to be an emergence of reactionary and protectionist thinking all over the world, which then serves as justification for people’s overreacting on the political left. This ping-pong game has been so common in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, even within Christianity—which should know better by now—that Christianity, for many, has come to mean anti-intellectual, fanatically narrow-minded people.
When there is no ability to build bridges to the other, or to even understand otherness, we know we are outside the pale of authentic Christianity. Surely Jesus came for more than self-congratulative societies who forever circle the wagons around their own saved identity and their own self-serving god!
Our motto is simple and clear: The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Just go ahead and live positively, “in God, through God, with God.” In time, the fruits will be apparent. In the short run, you will hold the unresolved tension of the cross. In the long run, you will usher in something entirely new and healing. This was the almost intuitive spiritual genius of Saint Francis.
I’ll conclude this chapter with a look at a sad by-product of postmodernism: loneliness. Postmodernism and modernism reject a personalized universe. They dis-enchant the universe. We no longer expect miracles. We no longer expect the transcendent to shine through the tree and the leaf, with “every common bush afire with God.”9 This is our modern state of alienation and anxiety, what the French call ressentiment. One aspect of ressentiment describes a world that is no longer safe, no longer sacred, and no longer home. It is disconnected, fragile, and, therefore, always ready to take offense.
...more
Although individuals have probably often done this, it is only in the last fifty years that it has become a cultural fad. Now we even have inherited victimhood. People gain all kinds of immediate credit because somebody’s great-grandmother did something to their great-grandmother’s generation.
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 great religion has deemed necessary. Now we just have to accuse somebody else of being worse than we are, or of being a member of a race or group that is worse than ours, and that makes us feel like we’re good, moral, or superior. To p...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
We’re actually energized by having an enemy, someone to hate, because it takes away the inner shame and relieves our inner anxiety.
Education is not the same as transformation.
This is not to dismiss or make light of real issues of injustice. Are we to not act until we are sure that our motivation is one-hundred-percent pure? Should we dismiss mere humanists? Of course not! God uses all of us, with our mixed motives. We have been given, not only the conclusion, but also the way to get there. We have been shown how to fight hate without becoming hate ourselves. We have been given a Companion and a Friend, not only a good idea. We have been given joy in the midst of failure, not only a way of winning or being right. Gospel people are basically indestructible.
Before Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013 and took the name Pope Francis I, the Roman Church, at the higher levels, had little ability to be self-critical. We felt that we had lost our boundaries in relation to secular culture, and we were trying to reinforce them by insisting that we were always right and had the full and total picture. This is called a “siege mentality,” which always emerges when a group has lost its former influence and feels that it is under attack.
Yet, the person with a great soul can move others toward the future with compassion and confidence—not judgment, paranoia, or accusation.
Finger-pointing is usually just an avoidance of our own transformation. To continue to move forward calmly, with joy and confidence, is probably as clear a sign of God’s presence as I can imagine. It is also somewhat rare, but those, like Pope Francis, who can do so are the people who will reconstruct. These are the people who will lead us into God’s future. These are the people to whom it is worth listening.
One of the greatest qualities we must bring to the present malaise, the present dilemma, is a sense of history, a sense that we’ve been here before. We’ve seen the overly romantic and the overly rational before. Those extremes have been interwoven throughout history. 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
...more
In Richard Tarnas’ masterful overview of Western thought, The Passion of the Western Mind,18 he describes our entire history of philosophy as a balancing act, a pendulum swing between the rational and the romantic. Seldom does it achieve a balance between the two.
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.
Many feel that the traditional institutions of our culture are impotent and incapable of communicating believable patterns of wisdom and truth. Lacking authority and credibility, they do not have the power to lead or guide us. We don’t give power to them, and they don’t have the consensus or the confidence to take it. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the scandals of the Trump presidency have made us cynical about government and politics. Recent racially charged trials have made us cynical about the legal-judiciary system. Both Catholic and Evangelical fundamentalism, plus the sexual
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
When we take an extreme position, we take part of the responsibility for pushing peopl...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Yet, when I talk to them personally, I can see them living in fear of the judgments of the feminists and the attacks of the liberals. I can see that they have been hurt by such attacks. We all go to a place where we can feel safe.
When we do not feel safe or secure or “at home,” we naturally take a strong stance to defend ourselves. Unfortunately, that puts us in a corner that we cannot escape and where others cannot get to us. That’s not a very good position from which to proclaim the great Good News. Of course, conservatives push progressives to the same reactionary position by their seeming worship of authority and order as ends in themselves. To educated people, most traditionalists appear to have no interest in honest history or critical thinking, but only in soft piety and propaganda passing for religion. So the
...more
Can we take responsibility for the fact that we push people to such extremes when we do not stand in the compassionate middle?
Our assumption is usually: “I did understand you. I know your motivation. I know what you’re trying to say, and I therefore have the need and right to attack you.” Normally, neither of us grows or expands in such a context. The truth is not well served, because neither of us feels secure or respected. Unfortunately, this has become the state of our public discourse, even in places like the senate and among major editorial writers. I wonder if we in the church have shown them a viable alternative.
normally tell people to “listen long enough to me and you won’t get too upset.” I’ll usually balance myself out if they give me enough time, but a lot of people will not give each other enough time.
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.
But that is the way the ego likes to work. Opposition gives us a sense of standing for something, a false sense of control and power. 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. W...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
