UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends. My name is Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Richard Rohr. Richard Rohr is a globally recognized Franciscan friar and ecumenical teacher whose work bears witness to the deep wisdom of Christian mysticism. I’m so excited that you’ll have this chance to hear and connect with Richard Rohr. My heart flows over every time I’m with him. He’s the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, an educational nonprofit dedicated to introducing seekers to the contemplative Christian path of transformation. He’s the author of numerous books including The New York Times bestseller The Universal Christ. With Sounds True, he’s created an audio teaching series called The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis. And now he’s written a new book. It’s called The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. Richard, welcome, great to be with you.
Richard Rohr: It’s wonderful to be back. Thank you. It’s been too long. Forgive my voice. It’s aged a lot. It’s a little crackly, but lead me where I would love to go.
TS: You sound and feel just right to me, Richard.
RR: Oh, good, good.
TS: What inspired you to write a book about “prophetic wisdom for an age of outrage”?
RR: When I started the school, the center here in Albuquerque almost 40 years ago, we were written up in a number of national publications and several of them introduced it as a school for profits, P-H-E-T-S, not FITS. And it wasn’t a name I would’ve attributed and yet it ended up being a major part of what I did teach to most of the students what was unique about the Jewish prophets. And so if I can say so, I got rather good at over 38 years understanding what they might be trying to do. And so it’s become what I presume is my final book to make clear because I don’t think either Judaism or Christianity has gotten it straight, which is very arrogant of me to think that, but I think they’re much more important than either of us imagined.
TS: Tell me what you think we’re missing that’s important, Richard, that you’ve wanted to make sure we’re informed about.
RR: The very word prophet in most of our minds connotes for telling the future and of course Christians made it foretelling Jesus. So you’ll see a prophet in art in European cathedrals and he’s always pointing his finger at Jesus. It’s a little because I would say that’s maybe at best if at all 1% of their conscious teaching, I think they’re creating a runway, a lineage out of which Jesus is able to be understood. And what I hope I’m doing in this book is reestablishing that runway so people can say, ah, that’s why for Christians at least that’s why Jesus talks the way he talks and the heart of it is self critical thinking. They’re the birth of self-critical thinking, which is unknown to most nation states, most religions, most institutions.
TS: You write about sacred criticism. What’s the difference between normal criticism and sacred criticism?
RR: Well, at least the way I’m using it is sacred criticism isn’t accusatory and angry, it’s simply revealing, look what we’re doing. I think a Jungian would call it revealing of the shadow, exposing the shadow self, but it doesn’t seek a place of superiority. And in that sense, I’ve been able, I hope to somewhat critique the liberal just as much as the conservative because liberals and I probably am considered one. We consider our superiority that we’ve discovered where evil really lies and it’s always on the right and that’s what the prophets never did. They always criticized their own team, their own country, their own religion. It’s amazing. It’s never been imitated quite the same since.
TS: What moved me the most about reading The Tears of Things was the prophetic arc that you described that I understood as a template that any one of us could apply to the outrage that we feel at this time being alive. And I wonder if you could share and then we could go through it, this movement through what appeared to me to be three stages of development.
RR: Three, maybe even a bit four, but three does it justice. The reason a lot of people don’t like the prophets is they appear to be so uncontrollably angry and the first part of every prophetic book, they’re just yelling at you, accusing you, judging you. If you had a judgmental father or mother, you just turn ’em off right away. Who likes to be yelled at for being wrong, but what I was able to do from teaching them for so many years was stay with the text in every case, and I asked the writer, maybe you remember to have three highlighters, a red one which highlights well most is unhighlighted. It’s just the narration, but the red is when they start raging at you or at Israel or the city state, they’re trying to then when you first notice some cracks in their armor where they begin to doubt or question and sometimes it’s an epiphany of sorts, a deepening God experience and I say highlight that with yellow, and then you come to what is really the, I would call the inspired text.
I know a lot of Protestant Christians wouldn’t like this, but I don’t believe all sentences in the Bible are equally inspired. Some of ’em are not inspired at all. They’re heretical, they’re ridiculous. I know that’s dangerous to talk that way, but when you do get to the inspired level of the prophets, they talk out of third way thinking, unconditional love this. I know. Oh, that’s job. Well go ahead with job. He isn’t normally considered a prophet, but I try to make him a prophet. I think he is this, I know that my redeemer lives and I will plant my flag here. A paradigm I’ve used a lot is order disorder reorder. When you get to the reorder statements, you can highlight those in green and it is a minor part of every book. A lesser known prophet like Habakkuk, there’s a good name for you. Habakkuk doesn’t come to his reordered statements till the last three verses of his book, all the rest of it. He’s railing and writhing how terrible Israel is.
TS: Now you’re describing this arc right now in terms of order disorder and reorder. My internalization had to do with anger and outrage and upset about the world. Then moving into a second phase of sadness and lamentation and then a third phase of something that I would call unbounded praise and a sense of trust in the benevolence. Now, could you help me understand order disorder and reorder and how that relates to outrage, cosmic sadness and unlimited praise?
RR: Thank you for saying it better than I did because that’s the point. The way you put it is the way I wanted to present it in the book, the move from anger to sadness, first of all, that’s the yellow lines in the book. Where it came home to me was for many years I gave men’s initiation rights here at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico and the third day was called the Day of Grief, and I would after a while just wait for it and make a statement dramatically because it deserved it. I said, a lot of you think your father was an angry man and maybe he was. A lot of you think you’re angry and maybe you are, but listen closely and I’d lean forward to emphasize and say, do you know what? You’re not really angry, you’re sad. And honestly, I’m not kidding. The whole five day retreat pivoted around that statement. Men just became white faced with recognition and sympathy for themselves and very often for their fathers grandfathers that anger is a big cover for sadness. And of course you would recognize, I think this what America is in part experiencing today. There’s rage, they call it outrage the publishers did on the cover, but I think for people who were raised like I was in the forties and fifties and sixties where we were so proud to be Americans, there is like a bottomless sadness. What has happened to this country?
It’s almost, we don’t know what to do with it. How could this have happened? How do you process grief? Now this has become, as you know, a whole science, we call it grief work. It’s a different emotion obviously than anger is, and you have to deal with it differently. So if you get to the sad stage, you can normally get to the hallelujah to use the Jewish word stage and you don’t even know where it comes from. It’s not logical. Why am I in a strange way, even happy, while the reasons for the anger still persist? You still know all that. You have to be angry because so much deserves anger, but you stop being trapped by it. There’s a bigger field of knowing, a bigger field of feeling than anger and it’s sadness which feeds the soul, whereas anger just feeds the ego, in my opinion.
TS: Well, what I want to hear more about is this dawning of hallelujah, because I think some people find themselves in grief and mired in grief especially about what’s happening during this time that we’re in and that hallelujah isn’t coming in. Their experience isn’t coming. No. How can you help that moving through grief, if you will?
RR: Well, I’m glad you said that because one of those, I just have to stop watching the news. I can’t take it anymore. It isn’t an easy or quick hallelujah. It’s a deep and earned one. And you don’t know how you earned it, why you deserve to be happy. But I guess if I can use faith language that there’s still a God who can believe in this universe with what we’re doing to the planet and what we’re doing to one another. You discover the grounds, the foundation of hope, and it has nothing to do with logic. It doesn’t contradict the anger in terms of what we teach when we teach contemplation. You have to be a dualistic thinker first and dualist non-dual thinking, which is mystical. Contemplative thinking is not the elimination of dual, it’s the overcoming of it. The war in Gaza, the war in Ukraine, the war in Sudan, the famines in Africa still have every reason to make you damn angry, but you’re surprised yourself that you no longer feel trapped by it. There’s no logic to it. It’s a gift by going through the anger, through the sadness, not around it, underneath it or over it. It’s the true meaning if you’ll allow me. I think it’s the true meaning of conversion and transformation. The transformation of suffering. You’ve met people like this who’ve had hard lives and can laugh readily, heartily, authentically.
Well, I use the word in the book as you might remember, it’s alchemy in the soul, a word that Carl Jung again used. You don’t understand the alchemy, a new solution which are word solution cio, the coming together of new ingredients that create a new outcome. So I’m experiencing this, Tami, while I’m trying to write about it.
I don’t have fully resolved it. If I listen to the news more than 15 minutes, I’m angry again. Now, am I supposed to stop listening to news forever? I don’t suspect, but I do put boundaries to it. I don’t think the amygdala can handle that much jerking around that much deceit, that much misuse of words, that much unadulterated lying as we’re subjected to, but you’ve somehow created a boundary around it, so you’re not going to let it take away your foundational joy, your foundational hope, and I don’t know, I honestly don’t know how that happens, but I’ve experienced it enough to try to teach about it.
TS: Now, you used this interesting word when I asked you about the transformation from being in grief to this dawning, hallelujah. You said it was earned and at the same time you’re talking about how it’s something that’s given as a type of grace, if you will, and I’m curious what is the earning part,
RR: The suffering through to? I don’t mean a moral worthiness as you know, I’m a profound believer in grace being everything and there’s no earning, but there are processes that the soul needs to walk through stages. I think I talked to you about that in my earlier book, falling upward that you need to go through stages. That is a kind of earning, you’re such a good listener. Even when I said that word, I thought I shouldn’t have used that because that counteracts my own message. I don’t believe there’s any earning.
TS: Well, it’s paradoxical. There’s a paradox here.
RR: Yeah, that’s good. That’s enough.
TS: Now you do talk about with this third phase a type of letting go of control that’s needed and I wonder if you could talk some about that personally because I know that’s been a big part of your journey.
RR: What should I center in on? I turned 82 this week, so I’ve had a lot of time to learn about process and staging and coming and going, coming and going. The heart sutra, ga ate, and that’s just a living mantra for me. I’ve seen so many of my contemporaries pass so many movements, so many celebrities and people I knew come and go, come and go. Now I am in line, in line for my going.
TS: It’s really about letting go of control and you brought up the GA prayer, gone, gone, gone Beyond, and I’m trying to understand your own letting go of control process.
RR: I have had so much in my life past not any big single death, but just a whole lot of little ones of passing ideas, passing people, passing movements, and I had to learn the art of letting go to be happy to survive, to get down to the rock bottom of who am I now? He’s gone now. This idea is gone now the way I thought in the sixties doesn’t work anymore or the seventies or even the eighties or nineties. It’s all keeps passing. That’s the one great gift of living a long life. I never thought I’d live to 82, but it forces you if you’re observant to learn the art of giving up control because you have no control over the movements of history, the movements of ideas, the movements of lives
TS: In terms of the template of prophetic wisdom. You write about how the prophets, the mature prophets knew how to die before they died. How is this part of the prophetic template?
RR: For some reason, those we call prophets face the hard edge of Jewish history early on in their life. They didn’t deny it, they didn’t run from it, they didn’t soften it. That’s what made them prophets. Where they got that grace we would call it, I’m not sure, but it isn’t commonly imitated or copied. Very few religions, if any very few nation states, if any very few institutions have built in positive criticism. I quote as you know in the introduction, John Lewis, good trouble I think of the prophets teach us good trouble how to cause trouble, but not in a negative way, not in a whining way, not in a self-serving way, but a, if you listen to ’em a finely uplifting way, it’s an art form and studying the prophets and seeing their maturity has, I don’t know if I said it in the book, has made me think the most of the world religions are still in their early stages of learning how to transform people because they haven’t developed this art of sacred criticism.
The sacred no, the sacred shadow. Look how long it took us to bring forth a man like Carl Yung who clarified the very notion of the shadow for us that it isn’t evil, it’s just what we don’t want to see. That’s a big difference. Yeah, big difference. And our unwillingness to see it. What we don’t want to see is the problem. The other important point I hope I make in the book is that the prophets against most of the rest of religion localize evil, not in the individual center but in the collective. Like forgive me, I’m not trying to play politics, but with what’s happening in America right now, they wouldn’t be too surprised at who we elected president. They would say, what kind of country is this that can’t see through this charade?
They would critique without any doubt I can say this, the prophets would critique that sin lies in the collective illusion, the collective hubris, the collective almost enjoying being deceived, enjoying being lied to. Where does that come from? That’s young shadow that I believe is much closer to Jesus’ understanding of where sin really lies and it’s not where we made sin lie, which I’m going to say seven times out of 10 was in sexual sins so-called and in the individual always the sinner was the sexual deviant that finds no foundation in Jesus. And I challenge Christians to disprove me on that. It’s almost like my God, we were blinded. He isn’t worried about sexual sinners at all. He’s worried about power and money and war and control.
TS: Just to make this really explicit, Richard, why do you think it’s so important that we shift our critique away from an individual human and towards collective patterns and collective ignorances and delusions
RR: Because that’s where evil best hides and so much so that it doesn’t look like evil. It looks like the way everybody thinks, the way things are in Jesus’ language. He says, woe to you, Beth, woe to you kfar woe to you Jerusalem and he weeps over Jerusalem. Once you can get the collective to all agree that it’s not a sin, it’s not wrong, you’ve won the day. And that’s why Jesus calls Satan, the father of lies. This emergence of a deceit allowing culture is really problematic. It shows we’re in the later stages of cultural decline that we don’t care. So let me pick on our neighboring state here. Forgive me my many Texas friends, but the prophets wouldn’t waste a moment condemning Joe Blow who owns a gun. They would condemn the entire gun culture of Texas and the United States that thinks this is a way to solve problems. It is so well hidden. Evil is so well hidden in the collective that it was only the last Pope in the Catholic world that created the words structural sin and institutional evil and taught rather authoritatively. That’s where evil lies, racism, homophobia, misogyny. They’re always collectives that we sort of agree, well, they aren’t half bad. There’s a good reason for ’em. That’s why that evil can flourish.
TS: And to ask a question, what do you mean by the use of the word evil? I think people have different associations.
RR: Well, that’s a good one. Well, the earliest philosophers that I studied define evil simply as the absence of good. And that sounds like a non definition, but it’s really rather helpful because it’s saying evil has no substance. Goodness in the Judeo-Christian tradition has substance. God created it and it was good. It was very good. Genesis one says, evil is simply not doing that good. Do you understand it? It’s an absence. It’s a non presence of God. Well, forgive me, I am primarily trained as a theologian, so I slip into theological language easily, but I hope it’s helpful. Evil is the absence of God. Now we in movies and literature and art portrayed it as a dark dragon or something like that. That’s the best we can do, but it’s always the opposite of God who is supposed to be portrayed as always and forever. Good.
TS: I found that very helpful. Thank you, Richard. Now I want to talk about something that I find difficult, complicated, and you mentioned it, which is that when we embrace this, you called it non-dual. Yes. And we might, this is the dawning. Hallelujah. We’re talking about this ever present sense of goodness. This is the presence of goodness, to use my language in the context of our conversation here.
RR: That’s good.
TS: And it includes the struggles, the non-dual, the things that we are opposing in the world. It includes that. And I’d like to know how those two things in the same moment coexist for you at a feeling level, how that works for you, Richard Rohr.
RR: God, you’re a good interviewer. How do they do? Still surprising to me. I have to go to the level that we perhaps naively call prayer rare where opposites can coexist, where I still feel the anguish of the violence and deceit. It’s overtaking our country, but I don’t let it destroy me.
I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know why that happens. What is protecting me from complete cynicism? Now, I had to fight direct cynicism in my forties and fifties and sixties every day. I think by temperament I’m inclined to be a cynic, a disillusioned idealist if that’s a definition of a cynic. But allowing that disillusionment and allowing the opposite also to be true. Just a half hour before I came online with you, I was sitting here on my front porch and this little Mexican American couple came up to show off their grandchild to me. And this sweet little girl just runs with delight. That’s a fact. Her smile is a fact. The sweetness of these people is a fact. I’m not going to let my cynicism outdo them. They are happening. I don’t think they suffer the amount of negativity that I have to do have to. As an educated, philosophically trained person, I am so trained to see the dark side, to see what’s phony and narcissistic and untrue. This little girl, thank God she doesn’t see it yet, and her parents, they don’t see it. You know what they do? They come every day around three o’clock to clean the parking lot, just for goodness sake. For goodness sake.
They don’t get paid for it. Why do they do it? I don’t know. But gratuitous goodness is just as wondrous as gratuitous evil. Why is their goodness? And I’ve let those two fight their way out inside of me by observing both of them, not just one, which is what the cynical liberal or angry conservative does, but both of them, there’s plenty of goodness. The trees here are turning green. It’s early spring. I call my prayer now gazing. I can gaze on this porch for an hour and without getting bored, I just gazed. Just look without making any judgements, without any analysis, just unadulterated seeing. And it’s all gratuitous goodness, which I will no longer deny Again, I thank God for letting me live long enough to see both and they don’t cancel one another out. Did you happen to read the poem at the beginning of the book?
TS: Oh yes.
RR: Wasn’t that a poem?
TS: Do you have it with you, Richard? You could read it for us.
RR: Let me read it. In fact, I think Rosemary trauma is from your state, Colorado. It’s called “For When People Ask.” I want a word that means Okay and not okay more than that, A word that means devastated and stunned with joy. I want the word that says I feel it all at once. The heart is not like a songbird singing only one note at a time. It’s more like a two v throat singer able to sing both a drone and simultaneously two or three harmonies high above it, A sound. The two say that gives the impression of wind swirling among rocks. The heart understands swirl. There’s the best answer to your beautiful question. The heart understands swirl, how the churning of opposite feelings weaves through us like an insistent breeze leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves, blesses us with paradox. So we might walk more openly. And then the final two verses into this world that is so rife with devastation, this world that is so ripe with joy.
How about that? Rosemary Ola trauma lives somewhere in Colorado. I hope to thank her one day personally that she let me use that poem for the frontest piece of the book.
TS: Now, Richard, in our conversation when I asked you about the prophetic template and I said there are these three stages and you said three, maybe four, maybe four. I thought I’m going to have to follow up on that. What do you mean? Maybe four? How would you understand that?
RR: Well, the ones you and I made more explicit was anger, sadness, gratitude, compassion. The four is actual praise or hallelujah. There’s a where you’re actually glad that this happened because it’s brought you to a deeper kind of joy. Jesus says, a joy that cannot be taken from you because it’s not logical. So that’s the fourth.
TS: And I’m curious, is there a prophet that you could share with us that you could introduce us to that you feel for you in a personal way embodies all four of these phases? And maybe this will be a way that it’ll make it real for us
RR: If people are only going to be able to read one. I’d read Jeremiah. Jeremiah illustrates all four stages. He states his call right at the beginning, which is unusual. Most of ’em have their call in the middle, but he still goes into the anger, the rage. He says, what is sometimes translated for a Jewish rabbi to speak this way to God? You raped me Lord, and I let myself be raped. That’s one translation of I think Jeremiah 20, his Lamentations are so heartfelt, they became their own book. There’s only one book in the Bible named after a human emotion. And it’s the book of Lamentations. And if you read it by Jeremiah, presumably it isn’t lamenting any one death of a child or failure of a marriage or war in a country. It’s what I’d call universal sadness over the tragic sense of life, the tragic sense of reality. Christians had a language for it that all reality is sign with the cross signed with eventual failure, eventual disillusionment. Our good Buddhist friends say, GA, ga ate. All is gone. All will be gone. We’re all saying the same thing, I think, but it takes a while to see that. So I’d read Jeremiah from beginning to end. He’s most for Christians. He’s most like Jesus. If you get Jeremiah, it won’t be hard to get Jesus. He weeps over Jerusalem just like Jesus does.
TS: You mentioned that understanding the prophets is part of what enables us to understand and appreciate Jesus. Can you just connect some of those dots for me? Why you see it that way?
RR: See, what we did, Tami, is we, Christians were so eager to prove he was the son of God or God as a lot of people just put it that we didn’t notice. He didn’t walk around saying that at all. He calls himself the son of man, not the son of God. We failed to notice that he didn’t call himself a messiah, but what he did identify with was this role of being critical, creatively critical of religion, which is why they killed him. And he says that you killed all the prophets and you’re going to kill me. So he perfected the art of supreme, holy criticism that was oriented toward the transformation of people, not the cynicism or the anger of people. So once you get the highway, if I can call it that, created by the prophets, the lineage is the word you and I would probably use, get the lineage of the prophets or the genre the way they talk.
You’re ready to finally understand Jesus. And Christianity never bothered to get that. If we would’ve, we would’ve had more self-critical popes and priests, but we didn’t because we just weren’t taught how to do positive, creative, hope-filled criticism. I know a lot of people in my earlier years when I was young, I would criticize the church. People would come up angry in a lecture hall, why don’t you just leave Richard? And it always seemed like such a stupid response. If we all leave, what we see is flawed. None of us will belong to anything. Everything is flawed. And once you accept that universal tragedy, the cruciform shape to all reality, you don’t feel like you’re being disloyal. I’ve never felt I was being disloyal to Catholicism in particular when I criticized my own Catholic background. You criticize it enough to critique it. You love it enough, excuse me to critique it.
TS: I think one of the things I want to make sure I understand correctly is your use of the term. I understand sacred criticism in terms of looking at the collective and even the organizations that we’re a part of, but at first when I heard you talk about self-criticism, I was like, oh, what does he mean by that critical of my individual being,
RR: No, no, thank you. Darn. I hope I didn’t leave that vague in the book.
TS: I don’t think you did. I think we’ll just clarify here in this conversation.
RR: Well, as you and I both know, so many people suffer from excessive self-doubt, self-critique, mirroring the voice of their father or mother very often by self criticism, I mean the ability to recognize and to name your own shadow self, your own weaknesses, your own blind spots, your own, where you can’t do it very well, where you’re not naturally virtuous. And we all have it. We all do. It’s what people hate us for. And we almost got to get into a little, oh, I don’t want to say self-hatred, but acceptable, helpful self-doubt, good self-doubt is what John Lewis meant by good trouble. I think good trouble enough criticism to make you truthful enough criticism to make you insightful. And religion has not been known for that, except if I can say so. I’m told, correct me if you’ve read differently, 37% of Jewish people worldwide do not agree with what their government has done in Gaza. I can’t think of any Christian group that would match 37%. So that shows that the prophets still persisted in Judaism by some mirror, in my opinion. I’m not a statistician, but Jewish people have a higher capacity only matched by Buddhism. Buddhism matches it by creating a strict interior method of self-observation and often reach the same, but collectively, they’ve often fallen into the same self worship that we Christians have, that all religions have.
TS: One of my favorite lines in The Tears of Things was that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty.
TS: And I circled that because as someone who was once called Doubting Tam, but have a lot of doubt in my life about all kinds of things, a questioning mind, a question, question, question.
RR: Thank God.
TS: On a journey to deepen my faith, I thought, well, good doubt is not so much the issue, it’s certainty. So explain what you mean by that, Richard.
RR: The love of certainty is too close to love of self, to love of how I presently think. What I have presently agreed to be the truth. And so you can’t allow people to worship certainty because it’s always my certainty that they just happen to agree with. So the birth of certainty, well, I call it the prophets, but it repeated itself in the enlightenment, the Protestant reformation where they poked big holes in the status quos way of thinking, postmodernism would be the form that you and I most suffer from, and I use the word suffer because it makes you a cynic instead of a lover. We don’t need more cynics, but you need to go through cynicism, and that’s probably the self-doubt I’ve always seen in you, if I can call it the self-criticism, it’s it is a recognizing that I’m not always right. That’s a great freedom to, I don’t know how a marriage lasts and I’m not married, so I don’t have the right to say, but how does a marriage last? If one doesn’t develop that gift? I’m not always right.
TS: Indeed. Okay. I have one final question for you, Richard. At the end of the book, you have a summary of the way of the prophet, the qualities of prophets.
RR: You did read the book.
TS: One of the qualities I was like, huh, I don’t know if I know what that means, and I’m really curious about it, is that they’re always drawn to higher levels of motivation. And I wanted to understand from your perspective, what the highest levels of motivation are. The highest level of motivation?
RR: Pure motivation, I’m using theological language, is to do something purely and simply for the love of God. Not because it makes me look good, not because it earns me heaven, not because it gains friends and influences people, but simply to give delight to God. That’s the highest level of motivation. It can be polluted, it can be bought off, it can be sold. And so the saints and the mystics are always seeking to do things just for God, and that motivation cannot be corrupted according to many of the mystics I’ve read. I find it true in my own life when I can wake up and say, today is for you, not for me, not for the CAC, our organization here, not for America, not for the Catholic church, not for the Christian religion, but for whoever you are. Now, I say it that way because it demands a notion of God as mystery that I don’t know what God wants. Really. I don’t know what God, I don’t know how to please God. The closest the mystics have come is to do it for love, for nothing else but love. That’s pure motivation. Now, I know I’m revealing a certain Christian bias, but we learned it from the Jews and now we’re relearning it from Buddhism. They use a different word. They say compassion.
TS: Richard, my heart wells up with you. It wells up and it overflows. Thank you so much. It’s great to be with you.
RR: You make me happy just to talk to you. Thank you. Have a good day.
TS: You’ve been listening to Richard Rohr, the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, and the author of a beautiful new book. It’s called The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. We’ve been talking to Richard from New Mexico here at 82 years of age. What a great joy to be with him.
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