The Tears of Things

There must be someone in every age who can tell the faith community, and society at large, Your first egoic glance at life–and God– is largely wrong! And it is largely engendered by fear.”

– Fr. Richard Rohr

I started reading Father Richard Rohr when I was still a reluctant evangelical. It was during the reconstructing of my faith phase where I picked up Falling Upward. If I remember correctly, I had either heard him on a Rob Bell Robcast, or a recommendation from my friend Adam. This book drove me to a place of openness not just about his work, but to my approach of God. While I laugh to myself now about being concerned reading a catholic priests book, the idea of approaching God and others at the time with love over dogma/theological treaties, coming from a Roman Catholic priest, was mind blowing.

In October, I had just finished presiding over a memorial service for a friend when a woman I consider a prophet in our times approached me with a book. We had shared this bizarre end of life journey together with this mutual friend, and given she is a close to 90 year old spiritual director, I tend to listen when she has something to say. It was Richard Rohr’s new book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. The book was accompanied by a card, and part of what she wrote inside said, “I think this may be of interest since Rohr’s contemplating and acting is much of who you are.”

The amount that this card and her thoughts touched me, I cannot properly describe, however, I am still touched by it. Especially since I have now enjoyed Fr. Rohr’s work for well over a decade. Each one of his books build on one another, but for me this one takes the cake. The place of a modern prophet is something I have struggled with, especially considering how most of American Christianity treats the concept of one.

This book is scratching that itch in a way I never thought possible. For quite a while, I have adopted a mantra a friend of mine introduced me to, which is, “the status quo is a bully.”As I am deep in editing my next book, which is a call for peacemaking, I spend time talking about standing against the status quo. So when I read this quote from Rohr’s new book, I had to sit in silence for a moment.

“We have spent the centuries and millennia since constructing the same kinds of self-serving power centers that Jesus and the prophets denounced, and most of us are resigned to this status quo.” pg. 22

Structures and systems exist for a reason, and some of these are good. Some continue to uphold the system for the sake of the system, because we have to keep the system in place to uphold the status quo.

Any “normal” way of business that continues to keep people in states of marginalization and oppression are not “normal” or “moral.”

The want or need to have power over another person is not a “normal” or “moral.”

The federal level of government and how it has treated people in the United States may have been “normalized” over the centuries, it has never been “moral.”

The kidnapping of American citizens is not “normal.”

Abducting heads of foreign states is not “normal” especially when we are not at war is not “normal.”

Friends, look for and listen to the prophets in your life who are calling for the liberation of the oppressed.

Look for the ones who remind us that, as Rohr writes, “we like our illusions, we like having enemies, and we are quite accustomed to our wars and prejudices as much as we insist the contrary.”

Look for the ones calling for leading with love, and accountability for those who have been wronged.

We need them, and you, now more than ever.

Grace and peace.