Without a doubt, a huge inspiration for my upcoming book, Love and Suffering, is the American Franciscan priest and writer Richard Rohr. I am incredibly indebted to his body of work and that of his organization, The Center for Action and Contemplation, for deepening my understanding of Christian theology, mysticism, and contemplative practices.
Rohr was one of the first signposts that pointed me towards knowing how love and suffering transform us. Years ago, I dove into his 2009 work, The Naked Now, and was struck by his insight that,
“Love and suffering are a part of most human lives. Without a doubt, they are the primary spiritual teachers more than any Bible, church minister, sacrament, or theologian.”
Every one of Rohr’s books is wonderful to read, but he is even more wonderful to listen to. A jovial character with a joyous Santa Claus-like demeanor, he has a robust belly chuckle and self-deprecating humor that disarms any critic. He also practices what he preaches, which is a love and acceptance of everyone and all creation.
Always Evolving
I don’t blame you if you have never seen or heard of Richard Rohr. He is not very well known outside of the Christian world (although he has been on Oprah). Many of us in the new-age, yoga studio, Buddhist meditation, tantra, backpacking-southeast-Asia, spiritual-but-not-religious crowd began on this path because we rejected the predominant religions of Western Culture.
Growing up, I saw many problems created by Judeo-Christian religions. I saw the hiding of sexual abuse by priests, ostentatious displays of money and Megachurches, fringe sects promoting polygamy, the subjugation of women, the destruction of indigenous cultures and peoples, and using scripture to justify war, violence, and bigotry. I saw politicians reject this Earth in favor of the afterlife and reject the reality of climate change and environmental destruction.
While I now know the true teachings of loving thy neighbor and thy enemy, at a young age, I saw bible-thumping politicians spew hate at homosexuality and shame all sexual expression. Such scandals and hypocrisy compelled me to search elsewhere for spiritual transformation.
I’m sure I’m not alone in how my exploration of Eastern thought began with the rejection of Western religion and an attempt to live a rich spiritual life without all that baggage.
So it can feel like a breath of fresh air to see the same critiques of organized religion, but instead from someone on the inside who is coming from a place of love. My sense of Richard Rohr is that he preaches to congregations from the stance of “I love you and I love what we are doing here, but we can do so much better, and I’m dedicated to helping us improve.”
In The Naked Now, Rohr points out the exact reasons many people cite in their avoidance of Abrahamic religions and why many have left organized religion entirely. He writes (p. 42),
“Elitism, classism, torture, homophobia, poverty, and the degradation of the earth are still largely unaddressed by the ordinary monotheistic ‘believer,’”
Instead of dividing up the world into good and bad, sinners and saved, Rohr encourages a breaking out of such limited dualities to see each other as God sees us: with love.
True Orthodoxy
While his ideas might seem radical to most people today, Rohr emphasizes that his views are quite Orthodox, as long as you are willing to look past current religious dogma and go back a few hundred years. He often says what he’s teaching is “Incredibly Orthodox” or an “Alternative Orthodoxy” and uses scripture to make his points. Rohr doesn’t shy away from saying that mainline Christians have interpreted a verse completely wrong, or that they need to be reminded of what the Bible actually says.
Again, in The Naked Now he writes,
“Jesus’ direct and clear teachings on issues such as nonviolence, a simple lifestyle, love of the poor, forgiveness, love of enemies, inclusivity, mercy, and not seeking status, power, perks, and possessions: throughout history, all have been overwhelmingly ignored by mainline Christian churches, even those who call themselves orthodox or biblical.” (p. 94)
Rohr is pointing the Church forward by actually pointing backward. He has certainly studied the Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), who joyfully affirmed the goodness of creation, the dignity of the human person, and the value of embodied life.
He often cites St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), who saw all of creation as a means of encountering the Divine. While modern religion has focused on morality policing, Bonaventure knew that real transformation comes not from fear or doctrine, but from love. St. Bonaventure wrote the incredible Contemplation of Creation’s Sevenfold Splendor, which features the lines,
Whoever, therefore, is not enlightened by such splendor of created things is blind;
whoever is not awakened by such outcries is deaf;
whoever does not praise God because of all these effects is dumb;
whoever does not discover the First Principle [on the Origin of things] from such clear signs is a fool.
And, of course, Rohr is a Franciscan, an order established in 1209 in Assisi, which has always emphasized service to the poor and the dignity of all creation. St. Francis, sometimes referred to as the Father of all the Mystics or the “Nature Mystic,” knew what it means to embrace all of creation. St. Francis praised Brother Sun and Sister Moon, embracing all the creatures of the world as part of God’s family. Rather than claim that God gave man dominion over the beings of the Earth, St. Francis taught of the “creation of kinship,” and was said to preach to the flowers and the birds.
Personally, I never understood the rejection of environmentalism by the religious right in America, and some of the left (a duality that Rohr rightly points out is part of the problem). I can think of no better way to honor the Creator than by honoring and taking care of His Creation. I cannot think of a better way to learn about God than to observe the dynamic, vibrant aliveness of the world.
“Every creature is a book about God,” wrote Meister Eckhart, who deeply understood that life on Earth is not a temporary and meaningless stop before a much truer reality in heaven. “Creation is the primary and most perfect revelation of the Divine,” confirms Thomas Aquinas. From waterfalls to whales to the bees making love to the flowers, such a wondrous and diverse array of beauties represents images of the divine just as much as the man mentioned in Genesis 1:17.
Richard Rohr also confirms that we can see the whole world as the Body of God. Rather than the common proclamation that the Earth is 6,000 years old, Rohr confirms that the scientific age of the universe is not contradictory to true Christian belief. In his essay in the book Spiritual Ecology, Rohr writes,
The incarnation of God did not happen in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. That is just when some of us started taking it seriously. The incarnation actually happened approximately 14.5 billion years ago with a moment that we now call “The Big Bang.” That is when God actually decided to materialize and to expose who God is.
In Rohr’s vision, the universe itself is not a distraction from God, but the very dwelling place of the Divine.
The Tears of Things
After reading many of Richard Rohr’s works and seeing him speak, I continue to follow him. Thus, I was excited to see that he released a new book this year called The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage.
In the introduction, Rohr continues his approach of reprimanding mainstream Christianity in hopes of seeing it improve and thrive. He challenges the separation of faith and reason by questioning,
“We must ask, Why has critical thinking always had to come from outside our religious systems and hardly been allowed from within?”
Indeed. Ever since Galileo was punished and forced to recant his belief that the Earth revolved around the Sun, the Church has been at odds with the advancement of science. Rohr seeks to bring these two disciplines together by reconciling what science has found with the wisdom of antiquity. Since we know now that there are as many galaxies in the Universe as grains of sand on all the world’s beaches, as Rohr says, “We need a God at least as big as the Universe.”
The great mystics and theologians mentioned above embraced this natural world as a message from and a pathway to the Divine. God is everywhere and in all things, confirmed in all mystical awakenings. Rohr continues this point and reiterates the importance of seeing this world as a living and breathing miracle. He writes,
We can learn to love others by closely observing how God loves us and all of creation. Often this will mean observing and imitating nature’s universal song of praise, just as Saint Francis, Hildegard of Bingen, William Wordsworth, John Muir, and Mary Oliver all did.
Just gazing for an extended period at a spring bulb pushing up from dark soil or a robin hopping across the lawn—or at anything in nature—will reveal God’s utter gratuity and the sacredness of every created thing. That is how God sees.
Rohr is not afraid to go outside the world of Christianity to prove his points. He uses the Buddhist Heart Sutra mantra in his book as well. His reference to the poet Mary Oliver reminds me of her Poem, On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate (Psalm 145),
So it is not hard to understand
Where God’s body is, it is
Everywhere and everything; shore and the vast
Fields of water, the accidental and the intended
Over here, over there. And I bow down
Participate and attentive
It is so dense and apparent.
Contemplatives like Richard Rohr and Thomas Merton understand that the greatest tool humans have is our awareness. If we can learn to pay attention, we will learn everything we need to know. The divine is right here in front of us, if we can learn to see it.
As Rohr wonderfully points out, we still have much to learn from those throughout history who were able to see this world in a different way. Not just biblical prophets Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Isaiah, but the modern ones too: Dorothy Day, Thurgood Marshall, and Etty Hillesum.
Love and Suffering in the Tears of Things
It was comforting to find very similar themes in The Tears of Things, as I wrote about in Love and Suffering. My book similarly argues that love and suffering are at the heart of the human condition. I cite the Buddha, who infamously taught that life as we normally live it is suffering, and we will all encounter the archetypal sufferings of aging, illness, and death. Rohr takes a similar approach by reminding us of lacrimae rerum, the tears of things.
There are tears at the heart of things, deep sorrow at the heart of our human experience. Our way of suffering, the way of humanity, is a way of tears. Rohr writes,
“There is an inherent sadness and tragedy in almost all situations: in our relationships, our mistakes, our failures large and small, and even our victories. We must develop a very real empathy for this reality, knowing that we cannot fully fix things, entirely change them, or make them to our liking.
This ‘way of tears,’ and the deep vulnerability that it expresses, is opposed to our normal ways of seeking control through willpower, commandment, force, retribution, and violence. Instead, we begin in a state of empathy with and for things and people and events, which just might be the opposite of judgmentalism. It is hard to be on the attack when you are weeping.”
Rohr has certainly re-ignited my own passion for sacred scripture, for the succinct and profound teachings that cross culture and time. We can be reminded of the shortest verse of them all, John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”
As I write in Love and Suffering, God became man as an act of solidarity, to share in the human condition of suffering. We are asked to weep with the suffering of the world, in solidarity, and in so doing, we are blessed (Matthew 5:4). In his book, The Tears of Things, Rohr uses the wisdom of the prophets to tell us that,
all things have tears and all things deserve tears. They know that grief and sadness are doorways to understanding life in a non-egocentric way. Tears come from both awe and empathy, and they generate even deeper awe and deeper empathy in us.
While we wish to eradicate suffering from our lives, pain awakens something deep within us and increases our capacity to empathize with others going through similar challenges. Rather than run from suffering, the prophets tell us to look for where the suffering is and go there. This is what Jesus did, too.
During times of intense suffering, such as violence, genocide, and war, we often ask, “Where is God?” Why isn’t He stopping this from happening?” After all, wouldn’t a compassionate God end slavery and war?
And while we are essentially begging God for compassion, He is begging us for our compassion. We see suffering and get angry at the sky, when we should be using suffering as a gateway to our compassion and the blossoming of the heart.
Love is at the center of all things. We know God through love because God is love (John 4:8). There are many different ways to formulate this thought, and I have always appreciated Richard Rohr’s perspective that many Christians have largely forgotten that their Divine entity represents a living and vibrant relationship. “In a Trinitarian worldview, all reality is relationship at its core,” he writes in The Tears of Things. Just as the relationship between the proton, electron, and neutron forms the basis of physical life, the Holy Trinity is a living and moving relationship that forms the basis of spiritual life.
Towards the end of the book, Rohr covers the Seven Themes of an Alternative Orthodoxy. The themes represent the foundation of his teachings. The one that most applies to love is his ecumenical theme that “Everything belongs.” Love is all-embracing, the yes we say to ourselves and creation. It is fundamentally inclusive. We are not here to divide up in-groups and out-groups, good people and bad people. God doesn’t love us because we are good; God loves us because He is good.
The theme that applies most to suffering is that of process, “The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.” Embracing the darkness is the missing piece in so many spiritual approaches today. Many people think the spiritual path is one of bliss, of following the path of highest excitement, usually involving decadent excess of material pleasures. But a true spiritual practice does not run from the darkness, but finds the courage to face it.
Final Thoughts
Our current technological society is always focused on the new new new. Everyone wants the newest and fastest phone, to see the latest and greatest movie, to listen to the hottest and newest artists.
Meanwhile, our spiritual and religious leaders continue to remind us of insights written a long time ago. While some critics say that ancient texts are no longer relevant to the modern world, spiritual practitioners know that true spiritual wisdom is timeless. Spiritual wisdom is truth, and what is true never changes.
We must be reminded of these lessons again and again until we finally know them in the depths of our hearts. With “Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage,” Rohr is here to remind us of truths long forgotten.
