Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections

by Richard Rohr

Rather, the primary reason to preach the Gospel to the poor, and why the church has to get back in touch with the little ones and the marginalized, is so that the church itself can be converted; so that the church itself can know again what the questions are; so that the church itself can recover compassion; so that the church itself can discover what God is really like. So that the church can again meet Jesus. God is not asking nor answering the law-and-order questions that culture desires from religion. Jesus never speaks about so-called “family values” or institutional loyalty, which are so often misused by people who want order and control. God is instead asking us to discover our own souls, to save the church and to save the Gospel from any further distortion of the Gospel, to be in solidarity with weakness and truth, to surround ourselves with those sacraments of brokenness so we will have the courage to discover that we also are broken. The broken are no different than we are; they are only more visible sacraments of what we are trying to hide: our own lack of intelligence, our handicaps, our lack of a true home. Those are the deep Gospel truths we are afraid to face.