Challenges

Photograph by kookalamanza

I’m currently reading Richard Rohr’s book Simplicity, The Freedom of Letting Go. Rohr is a Franciscan priest, a well-known writer and retreat master.

I find myself both inspired and challenged by this book. He asks us to see things in different, demanding ways. He uses the teachings of Christ as his bedrock and constantly asks difficult questions about the way we live and the extent to which our lives are in the spirit of Gospel teaching. I am only on page 72, despite having been reading for some weeks, because I have to keep putting the book aside to reflect on what he is saying.

He talks a lot about the spiritual journey, the institutional church, the politics of the priesthood and so on.

These passages especially are staying with me:

From Chapter 1: God the Father - God the Mother?

But faith always invites us to a new and unfamiliar place. Thus we can see in the Book of Exodus how the Israelites preferred to go back to slavery in Egypt rather than be led into the wilderness, where they didn’t have God in the palm of their hands. As we grow, our image of God and our self-image normally move forward on parallel tracks. And if one of the two breaks down, the other has to come apart too. We stick to both of them, and both stick together. Every crisis of faith implies that one or the other side is cracking up. If you are truly to grow in faith, then in my opinion this process of disintegration ought to take place at least every two or three years. This is the darkness of faith: when you’ve had to drop the old for a time but haven’t yet found the new. It’s the terrible space in between, where nobody wants to live. We want to retreat to a spot where I know who I am and who God is - even when our self image and our image of God destroy each other, which often happens.

(Italics my emphasis)

From Chapter 4: Christians and Political Commitment

I believe that what we all need is wisdom. I’m very disappointed that we in the Church have passed on so little wisdom. Often the only thing we’ve taught people is to think that they’re right - or they’re wrong. We’ve either mandated things or forbidden them. But we haven’t helped people to enter upon the narrow and dangerous path of true wisdom. On this path we take the risk of making mistakes. On this path we take the risk of being wrong. That’s how wisdom is gained. On the spiritual path the enemy isn’t pain; it’s fear of pain. We haven’t become wise, because we’re so afraid of pain.

I believe that there are two necessary paths enabling us to move toward wisdom: a radical journey inward and a radical journey outward. For far too long we’ve confined people to a sort of security zone, a safe midpoint. We’ve called them neither to a radical path inward, in other words, to contemplation, nor to a radical journey outward, that is, to commitment on the social issues of our time. We prefer to stay in a secure middle position, probably because these two great teachers, the inner and the outer way, both cause pain. Failure and falling short are the best teachers; success has practically nothing to teach on the spiritual path. But we notice that many of us incline to the one side or the other, on account of either temperament or education. Wherever I travel in the Church, I find people who focus inward and people who are activists. These two types seldom come together, and thus they both miss half the Gospel. They both lack half the truth.

This last section in particular seems to me to echo Christ’s life, with its bursts of teaching and reaching out alternating with periods of withdrawal. A Lenten balance.

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