The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder

by Richard Rohr

The next and larger realm of meaning is about Us. This is the dome of our group, our community, our country, our church—perhaps our nationality or ethnic group. For young people, it is often their friends, their gang, or even their kind of music. We seem to need this to contain our own identity and security as social beings.

Most of us have multiple memberships: family, neighborhood, religious affiliation, country. These are our schools for relationship, connection, and almost all virtue as we know it.

Only group egocentricity is more dangerous than personal egocentricity. It looks like greatness when it is often no more than disguised egotism.

The second dome of meaning gives us myth, cultural heroes, group symbols, flags, special foods, ethnicity, and patriotism. These tell us that we are not alone; we are also connected to a larger story. We might understand that it is fanciful, but it is shared meaning and that is important.

But a lot of people stop at the level of shared meaning because it gives a lot more consolation and a lot more security to the small self. In fact, the loyalties at this level have driven most of human history up to now.

Men seem especially prone to the consolations of group belonging, perhaps because they are less capable of personal intimacy. Women will die for a child; men prefer to die for a cause.

The great This Is Us dome is summed up in that common phrase, “For God and Country.”

We can’t see what we can’t see. Groupthink ensures a rather total form of blindness.

We just need to be real. Augustine put it most daringly: “Love [God] and do what you will”!42

This is a real problem, because I do believe the second is much more mature and closer to the spirit of Jesus, but we need to understand why Jesus religion normally has to be preceded by John the Baptist religion.

The Patterns that Are Always True (The Story: Universal Meaning) Now let’s move to the third and largest dome of meaning,

Most importantly, don’t think you can separate one from the other. It is not sequential, but simultaneous. Many in our therapeutically focused society think they first must get it together personally and then they will serve groups or search for God. It all happens in a spiral, it seems to me. In fact, there is a natural ecology of checks and balances between the three domes of meaning.

Most people emphasize only one or the other. Think about that, and you will have to agree. Someone who honors all three levels is like a major work of art.

Jesus put it very cleverly, drawing on the psalms: The stone which the builders reject is, in fact, the keystone (see Psalm 118:22, Matthew 21:42). Much of the best teaching in the church has emerged precisely in response to condemnations, denials, refusals, rejections, failures, and sin. If we want the best minds in the world to work on an idea, just have Rome condemn it or Washington forbid it. Many of the great saints had at least one difficult parent, including Francis himself. Limits and edges seem to refine things. Shapelessness is just that.

Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the Danish philosopher and theologian, said that the “aesthetic person” and the “moral person” were the most common disguises and avoidances for the truly religious person.

A truly religious person, according to Kierkegaard, is someone who makes that scary leap of faith, giving up all control and trusting to One they love, rather than safely burying their credit for later redemption (see Matthew 25:14–30). Cult...

we are looking for directions for reconstruction, I think we can usually look at the human need that conservatives are trying to name. The way they express it is usually too righteous and angry and the rigid solutions they offer are often elitist, protective of power and the past, but the need toward which they are usually pointing is legitimate in some form. People do need...

There are many ways of “knowing” reality. Others might use different or broader descriptions, but I’m going to describe seven ways here. By ways of knowing I mean how we come to see what we see. This topic was traditionally the beginning course for all studies in philosophy and went by the word epistemology. It was the first philosophy course we seminarians took. We had to reflect on how we knew, before we could clearly see what we knew, which was called metaphysics. We had to recognize our own lenses and biases before we described what we saw, or we could not trust what we said we saw.

could never adequately treat the seven ways of knowing in this brief chapter, but I will describe them in quick, surely oversimplified form. More than anything else, I hope to help you clean your own lenses so you can really take in the message of this book and, more importantly, the gospel.

Intellect The lens that we most associate with knowing is intellectual knowing. It’s the result of education, and formal education in particular. It has to do with science, reason, logic, and what we call intelligence. Today, it is also common to speak of left-brain knowledge: knowing facts, figures, and information. It’s a good way to know. We’re grateful for it. Most of us are trained to think that it is the only way of knowing or the superior way of knowing. Yet that isn’t necessarily true. Seeing intellectual intelligence as the best or only way of knowing is actually a great limitation. Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking book, Emotional Intelligence,46 has demonstrated this in a rather convincing way. In fact, mere intellectual gray matter is often an actual liability in the “real world.”

Emotion Until very recently, emotional knowing had not been appreciated by the intelligentsia, nor by the church in many ways. As mentioned above, Daniel Goleman demonstrates that it is helpful to have both a good IQ and a good EQ (emotional quotient). In fact, if we have to choose between the two, EQ is a higher indicator of success in life, job, and relationships than IQ!

Senses Bodily or sensory knowing comes through the senses, by touching, moving, smelling, seeing, hearing, breathing, tasting—and especially at a deep or unconscious level. Becoming aware of our senses in a centered way allows us to awaken, to listen, to connect. It allows us to know reality more deeply, on our body’s terms instead of only on our brain’s terms.

As I recall, C. G. Jung believed literalism is the death of the religious instinct. That is certainly true. We must be open to imaginal knowing because this work of reconstruction is not going to be done logically, rationally, or cerebrally. That mode of knowing is simply not adequate to the greatness and the depth of the task. Once we touch the way people imagine a situation, change will happen easily and naturally. That is why Jesus told stories to help people re-imagine their lives and their relationship with the universe. Once the overall gestalt switches, thinking and feeling change almost immediately.

Teresa of Ávila put it, there are at least two wells in the life of prayer. The first well we have to dig ourselves and keep the trenches flowing toward it. For the second and better well, we just wait until water bubbles up.48 That’s contemplation, where we get the false self out of the way and the gift shows itself like an apparition.

These gifts from the second well have a more personal character. They are usually attached to a symbol and filled with unexplainable energy. They seldom take the form of a verbal locution or clear concept. Thus, there is a common need for a guide, a teacher, an interpreter of dreams at this level. It’s also why one picture or poem or gnarl of a tree can blow us away when we are truly centered or at prayer.

Epiphany The last way of knowing, which I’d think religion would prefer and encourage, is epiphanic knowing. An epiphany is a parting of the veil, a life-changing manifestation of meaning, the eureka of awareness of self and the Other. It is the radical grace, which we cannot manufacture or orchestrate. There are no formulas which ensure its appearance. It is always a gift, unearned, unexpected, and larger than our present life.

Jesus’s words to Francis from the cross at San Damiano: “Rebuild my house, for you see that it is falling into ruins.”

“Richard, when you preach, be sure to keep telling the people, ‘God is not out there!’ Thank you.” And then he went on down the path.

True Christianity is totally integrative. There is one world, all supernatural, and God comes through us, not to us. It is imaged by Paul as the body of Christ and by John as the vine and the branches. Jesus speaks of “one flock and one shepherd” (John 10:16), “abiding in love” (John 15:10), or “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).

lex orandi est lex credendi: The way we pray shapes the way we believe.

Our operative worldview is formed by three images that are inside every one of us. They are not something from outside; they have already taken shape within us. All we can do is become aware of them, which is to awaken them. The three images to be awakened and transformed are our image of self, our image of God, and our image of the world. A true hearing of the gospel transforms those images into a very exciting and, I believe, truthful worldview. When we say Christ is the truth, that’s what we mean. Christ renames reality correctly, according to what reality honestly is, putting aside whatever we think it is or whatever we fear it is. Reality is always better than any of us imagined or feared; there is joy associated with a true hearing of the gospel.