Oprah and Rohr explore the transformative power of embracing tears as a path to healing and societal change, drawing on decades of theological study. Father Rohr weaves the wisdom of Old Testament prophets into our culture, showing how their cries for justice and renewal offer examples for our own breakthroughs. Throughout the episode, Rohr responds to questions from guests seeking to embody his philosophy in their careers, relationships, and everyday life.
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HOMECOMING – God Is Bringing Us Home – Richard Rohr
We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
In the Everything Belongs podcast, Father Richard speaks about the spiritual path that winds both away from and toward one’s true home:
The first going out from home we can say is the creation of the ego. While this is a necessary creating, it is also the creating of a separation. It’s taking myself as central. We probably need to do that, at least until we reach middle age. But then we need to allow what we’ve created to be uncreated. Maybe I was a great basketball player, but that’s gone now. Or maybe I was good-looking, but that’s gone now.
When we can say “yes” to that uncreation and still be happy, we’ve done our work. My True Self is in God and not in what I’ve created. My self-created self gave me a nice trail to walk on, and something to do each day, but it isn’t really me. It might be my career or my vocation; yet as good as it is, it isn’t my True Self.
In the metaphor of life as a journey, I think it’s finally about coming back home to where we started. As I approach death, I’m thinking about that a lot, because I think the best way to describe what’s coming next is not “I’m dying,” but “I’m finally going home.” I don’t know what it’s like yet, but in my older age I can really trust that it is home. I don’t know where that trust comes from or even what home is like, but I know I’m not going to someplace new. I’m going to all the places I’ve known deeply. They’re pointing me to the big deep, the Big Real. I do think homecoming is what it’s all about.
Father Richard continues to reflect upon finding his home in God in this season of his life:
Well first, I have to say, I don’t fully know how to live there. I’m used to living for 80 years out of building an education, a persona, a reputation, a career. When we’ve worked at those things for so long, on a very real level we don’t know how to live without them. But thank God, they’re taken away from us. God slows us down, I think necessarily, or we won’t fall into the True Self.
My understanding of the second half of life is mostly homesickness for the True Self. I want to learn to be who God really created me to be. And I think all God wants me to be is who I really am.
Shared by – https://cac.org/daily-meditations/
Lead a Loving Life – Henri Nouwen
Self-knowledge and self-love are the fruit of knowing and loving God. You can see better than what is intended by the great commandment to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself.” Laying our hearts totally open to God leads to a love of ourselves that enables us to give wholehearted love to our fellow human beings. In the seclusion of our hearts, we learn to know the hidden presence of God; and with that spiritual knowledge, we can lead a loving life.
“Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.” – Ephesians 4: 2 (NIV)
Celebrating Incarnation –
Richard Rohr describes why Christmas and celebrating the Incarnation of Jesus is foundational to Franciscan spirituality:
In the first 1200 years of Christianity, the central feast or celebration was Easter, with the high holy days of Holy Week leading up to the celebration of the resurrection of Christ. But in the thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi entered the scene. He intuited that we didn’t need to wait for God to love us through the cross and resurrection. Francis believed the whole thing started with incarnate love. He popularized what we now take for granted as Christmas, which for many became the major Christian feast. Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation when we celebrate God taking human form in the birth of Jesus.
Francis realized that since God had become flesh—taken on materiality, physicality, humanity—then we didn’t have to wait for Good Friday and Easter to “solve the problem” of human sin: the problem was solved from the beginning. It makes sense that Christmas became the great celebratory feast of Christians because it basically says that it’s good to be human, it’s good to be on this Earth, it’s good to have a body, it’s good to have emotions. We don’t need to be ashamed of any of it! God loves matter and physicality.
With that insight, it’s no wonder Francis went wild over Christmas. (I do too—my little house is filled with candles at Christmastime.) Francis believed that trees should be decorated with lights to show their true status as God’s creations, and that’s exactly what we still do eight hundred years later.
And there’s more: when we speak of Advent or preparing for Christmas, we’re not just talking about waiting for the little baby Jesus to be born. That already happened two thousand years ago. In fact, we’re welcoming the Universal Christ, the Cosmic Christ, the Christ that is forever being born (incarnating) in the human soul and into history.
We do have to make room for such a mystery, because right now there is “no room in the inn.” We see things pretty much in their materiality, but we don’t see the light shining through. We don’t see the incarnate spirit that is hidden inside of everything material.
The early Eastern Church, which too few people in the United States and Western Europe are familiar with, made it very clear that the Incarnation of Christ manifests a universal principle. Incarnation meant not just that God became Jesus, but that God said yes to the material universe and physicality itself. Eastern Christianity understands the mystery of incarnation in the universal sense. So it is always Advent because God is forever coming into the world (see John 1:9).
We’re always waiting to see Spirit revealing itself through matter. We’re always waiting for matter to become a new form in which Spirit is revealed. Whenever that happens, we’re celebrating Christmas. The gifts of incarnation just keep coming! Perhaps this is enlightenment.
Shared via https://cac.org/daily-meditations/ – Center for Action and Contemplation
Adapted from An Advent Meditation with Richard Rohr (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2017), video. No longer available.
God Is Being Itself – Richard Rohr
The great chain of being was the medieval metaphor for ecology before we spoke of ecosystems. While it was structured as a hierarchy, with each link in the chain “closer” to God, I view it as a philosophical and theological attempt to speak of the interconnectedness of all things on the level of pure “Being.” Today we might call it “the circle of life.” If God is Being Itself (Deus est Ens), as both St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas taught in the thirteenth century, then the great chain became a way of teaching and preserving the inherent dignity of all things that participate in that Divine Being in various ways. For me, it speaks of the inherent sacrality, interconnectedness, and communality of creation.
These are the links in the great chain of being:
Link 1: The firmament/Earth/minerals within the Earth
Link 2: The waters upon the Earth (snow, ice, water, steam, mist)
Link 3: The plants, trees, flowers, and foods that grow upon the Earth
Link 4: The animals on the Earth, in the skies, and in the seas
Link 5: The human species, capable of reflecting on the other links
Link 6: The heavenly realm/Communion of Saints/angels and spirits
Link 7: God/the Divine Realm/the Mystery that creates a universe as such, which needs a Center, Source, and Ground for any coherence.
Such a graphic metaphor held all things together in an enchanted universe. If we could not see the sacred in nature and creatures, we soon could not see it at all. [1]
As the medieval theologians predicted, once the chain was broken and one link not honored, the whole vision collapsed. Either we acknowledge that God is in all things, or we have lost the basis for seeing God in anything. Once the choice is ours and not God’s, it is merely a world of private preferences and prejudices. The “cosmic egg” is shattered.
Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274), who is called the second founder of the Franciscan Order, took Francis’ intuitive genius and spelled it out into an entire philosophy. “The magnitude of things … clearly manifests the immensity of the power, wisdom, and goodness of the triune God, who by his power, presence, and essence exists uncircumscribed in all things.” [2] Bonaventure expanded on Alan of Lille’s philosophical idea of God as one “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” God is “within all things but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things, but not aloof; below all things, but not debased.” [3] Therefore the origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, fullness, activity, and order of all created things are the very “footprints” and “fingerprints” (vestigia) of God. [4]
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, insert in A New Cosmology: Nature as the First Bible (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2009). Available as MP3 audio download.
[2] Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God 1.14, trans. Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 65.
[3] Bonaventure, Soul’s Journey 5.8; Cousins, 100–101.
[4] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2001, 2020), 149–150.
Truth and Reconciliation – Richard Rohr
Almost all religions and cultures that I know of have believed in one way or another that sin and evil are to be punished and retribution is to be demanded of the sinner in this world—and usually the next world, too. Such retributive justice is a dualistic system of reward and punishment, good folks and bad folks, and makes perfect sense to the ego. I call it the economy of merit or “meritocracy.” This system seems to be the best that prisons, courtrooms, wars, and even most of the church (which should know better) appear equipped to do.
Jesus, many mystics, and other wisdom traditions—such as the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous—show that sin and failure are, in fact, an opportunity for the transformation and enlightenment of the offender.
Mere counting and ledger-keeping are not the way of the Gospel. Our best self wants to restore relationships, and not blame or punish. This is the “economy of grace.” (The trouble is that we defined God as “punisher-in-chief” instead of Healer, Forgiver, and Reconciler and so the retribution model was legitimized all the way down!)
What humanity really needs is an honest exposure of the truth and accountability for what has happened. Only then can human beings move ahead with dignity. Hurt needs to be spoken and heard. It does not just go away on its own. This can then lead to “restorative justice,” which is what the prophets invariably promise to the people of Israel (see Ezekiel 16:53; Isaiah 57:17–19) and is exemplified in Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32) and throughout his healing ministry. We lose that and we lose the Gospel itself.
As any good therapist knows, we cannot heal what we do not acknowledge. What we do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control from within, festering and destroying us and those around us. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus teaches, “If you bring forth that which is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring it forth, it will destroy you.” [1]
Only mutual apology, healing, and forgiveness offer a sustainable future for humanity. Otherwise, we are controlled by the past, individually and corporately. We all need to apologize and we all need to forgive or this human project will surely self-destruct. No wonder almost two-thirds of Jesus’ teaching is directly or indirectly about forgiveness. Otherwise, history devolves into taking sides, bitterness, holding grudges, and the violence that inevitably follows. As others have said, “Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different past.” Reality is what it is, and such acceptance leads to great freedom, as long as there is also both accountability and healing forgiveness.
[1] Gospel of Thomas, saying 70. For other translations of the Gospel of Thomas and links to additional resources, see http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl_thomas.htm
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Breathing under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps 10th anniv. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2011, 2021), 37–38, 45–46.
There are Many Ways to Experience God – Richard Rohr
A very little bit of God goes an awfully long way. When another’s experience of God isn’t exactly the way I would describe it, it doesn’t mean that they haven’t had an experience of God or that their experience is completely wrong. We have to remain with Francis’s prayer: “Who are you, God, and who am I?” Isn’t there at least ten percent of that person’s experience of God with which I can agree? Can’t I at least say, “I wish I could experience God in that way”?
What characterizes anyone who has had just a little bit of God is that they always want more of that experience! Could it not be that this Hindu, this Sufi, this charismatic, this Jew has, in fact, touched upon the same eternal Mystery that I am seeking? Can’t we at least give one another the benefit of the doubt? I can be somewhat patient with people who think they have the truth.
The problem for me is when they think they have the whole truth. The mystic probably represents the old shibboleth, “Those who really know don’t speak too quickly. Those who speak too quickly don’t really know.”
+Adapted from Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate…Seeing God in All Things (Recording).
The Bible Breaks the Pattern – By Richard Rohr
The point that must be remembered is that most of political and church history has been controlled and written by people on the right because they are normally the people in control. One of the few subversive texts in history, believe it or not, is the Bible. The Bible is a most extraordinary text because, again and again, it legitimates, not the people on the top, but invariably the people on the bottom or those who move toward those on the bottom-from Abraham to Moses to Jeremiah to Job to John the Baptist to Jesus. It has taken an amazing degree of denial and selective attention to miss this quite-obvious alternative pattern. After a while, we might get tired of the rejected son, the younger son, the barren woman, the sinner, the outsider always being the chosen one of God! It is the biblical pattern—which we prefer not to see. It takes away our power to exclude “the least of the brothers and sisters” because that is precisely where Jesus says he is to be found (Matthew 25:40)! If indeed women, blacks, members of other religions, gays, and other outsiders are least in our definition, it seems that gives them, in fact, a privileged and revelatory position! They are not to be excluded, but honored. Jesus takes away from us— and from religion —the possibility of creating any class system or any punitive notion. Unfortunately, thus far, it has not worked very well.
+ Adapted from A Lever and a Place to Stand: The Contemplative Stance, the Active Prayer, pp. 98-99.
The Sin of Exclusion – Richard Rohr
Those at the edge of any system and those excluded from any system ironically and invariably hold the secret for the conversion and wholeness of that very group. They always hold the feared, rejected, and denied parts of the group’s soul. We see, therefore, why the church was meant to be that group that constantly went to the edges, to the least of the brothers and sisters, and even to the enemy. Jesus was not just a theological genius; he was also a psychological and sociological genius. Therefore, when any church defines itself by exclusion of anybody, it is always wrong. It is avoiding its only vocation, which is to be the Christ. The only groups that Jesus seriously critiques are those who include themselves and exclude others from the always-given grace of God.
Only as the People of God receive the stranger, the sinner, and the immi-grant, those who don’t play our game our way, do we discover not only the hidden, feared, and hated parts of our own souls, but also the fullness of Jesus himself. We need them for our own conversion.
The church is always converted when the outcasts are re-invited back into the temple. We see this in Jesus’s common action of sending marginalized people that he has healed back into the village, back to their family, or back to the Temple to show themselves to the priests. It is not just for their re-inclusion and acceptance, but actually for the group itself to be renewed.
+ Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, p. 28.
Incarnationalism – Richard Rohr
Whenever the human and the divine coexist, at the same time, in the same person, you have Christianity. I don’t know that it finally matters what Scriptures you read, liturgies you attend, or moral positions you hold about this or that, as much as it is how you live trustfully inside of God’s one world. This creates honest people, people who don’t waste time proving they’re right, superior, or saved. They just try to live and love the daily mystery that they are in the loving presence of God. “God comes to you disguised as your life,” as Paula D’Arcy proclaimed the first time we taught together. Imagine that!
There are basically four worldviews: (1) reality is just matter, (2) reality is just spirit, (3) through religion and morality, you can work to put matter and spirit together (the most common religious position), and (4) the material world has always been the place where Spirit is revealed. You cannot put them together–they already are together, as in Jesus. Only the fourth position, incarnationalism, deserves to be called authentic Christianity. It has little to do with the right rituals, only the right reality.
+ Adapted from Great Themes of Paul: Life as Participation (Recording).
The Blessed Fool 