
Father Richard Rohr describes why role models and personal examples often inspire change more effectively than right ideas and beliefs:
Correct ideas and church mandates cannot cause the kind of change that the soul needs. The soul needs living models to grow, exemplars with the expansive energies of love. People who are eager to love change us at the deeper levels. They alone seem able to open the field of both mind and heart at the same time. When we’re in this different state—and that is what it is—we find ourselves open to directions or possibilities we would never allow or imagine before.
When I studied Scholastic philosophy in the seminary, we learned that there were formal causes of things, material causes, efficient causes, exemplary causes, and final causes. After Newtonian physics emerged, most people thought efficient causes were the only way that things could happen, such as strong arms causing a rock to be dislodged from a field, but the kind of cause that especially intrigued me was the exemplary cause. With that kind of causality, someone or some event, just by being what it is, by being an example or model, “causes” other things to happen as a result.
Final causes work in much the same way, by pulling us forward through attraction and allurement. Final causes “cause” things to emerge and evolve in a certain way by offering ideals, models, and seductions that pull us forward. Saint Bonaventure taught that our destiny or goal (telos) finally determines our meaning. If our end goal is clear to us, we have our North Star for a coherent life purpose. It will quite truthfully and inevitably pull us forward and give us a clear trajectory.
When I taught in South Africa, again and again I heard how Nelson Mandela initiated a cultural leap forward for many African men, especially when they saw pictures of him hoeing in the fields, which they still thought of as women’s work. He was a good example of both an exemplary and a final cause. He changed the tangent and the possibility for many people.
I believe the gospel itself, and the Franciscan vision of the gospel, is primarily communicated by richly symbolic human lives that operate as prime attractors and exemplars: through actions visibly done in love; by a nonviolent, humble, simple, liberated lifestyle; by a happy identification with poor and excluded people; by obvious happiness itself; and by concrete and visible people who “give others reasons for spiritual joy”—as Francis said when he rubbed two sticks together to play an imaginary violin and as Pope Francis did when he washed the feet of prisoners, women, and Muslims. When such people then speak or act, their words burn, and their actions convict!
Surely this is what Jesus meant when he told us to be “a light on a lampstand” or to be “leaven” and “salt” (Matthew 5:13–15, 13:33). He knew that holiness is passed on through contagion.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media, 2014, 2024), 252–254, 266–267.
Image Credit and inspiration: Gerson Pancorbo, Untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Musicians can be inspired by what they witness and then compose music that heals and creates change.
Story from Our Community:
I was beginning a new ministry of preaching parish missions with a Franciscan friar when I heard him reflect on the words, “You are the salt of the earth…. You are the light of the world.” He said simply that the “you” is plural, and the time is always the present, “you are.” That insight continues to transform my life and ministry.
—Peter C.