Father Richard emphasizes the clarity and simplicity of trusting in divine grace:
The early English Franciscan brother William of Ockham (c. 1285–c. 1349) had an overriding principle that’s called “Occam’s razor” (using the Latin spelling of his name). As he put it, “The answer that demands the fewest assumptions is likely the correct one.” If his students wanted to discover the truth of something, he encouraged them to “shave” away as many assumptions, beliefs, or complicating explanations as possible. Great truth might well be mysterious, Ockham believed, but it is never complex. The better answer is almost always the simpler one was his conclusion.
I’ve found that mature prophets are those who simplify all questions of justice, reward, and punishment by a simple appeal to divine love. God’s infinite, self-giving care is the only needed assumption, cause, factor, or possible variable in the drama of creation. All else must be “shaved” away as creating needless and useless complexity—which only confuses the soul and the mind.
This is the nature of mature, mystical religion—simple and clear. We shave away as many religious assumptions and judgments as possible and reground religion on one lone conviction—a divine love that can only be experienced and not proved by rational logic. The prophets claim such divine experience and tell us that we can and must, too. This is their one absolute foundation and their radical center on which the entire rest of their message is built, and it makes them unlike any other kind of teacher. Anything that gets in the way of this divine and absolute love must be shaved away. This is the purpose of the sacred criticism practiced by prophets like Amos, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah.
The prophets—and Jesus—are the ones who have the courage to make God’s way of loving action the source, the goal, the criterion, and the standard for all human morality and behavior. The questions for all of us should eventually be What is God doing? and How does God act?
We cannot dismantle the violence we find in the world if we allow threats and promises to be the overarching frame of Christianity, or any religious or secular creed. This dualism—the idea of an infinite God being caught up in a naive reward/punishment worldview—must be undone by the deeper gospel of radical grace, unconditional love, and true respect, or nothing will ever change. The loving people I’ve met across the world seem to know that if it’s love at all, it has to be love for everybody. As soon as we begin to parcel it out, we’re not in the great field of love.
The prophets want us to love God above all else,
And be loved by God above all other partners.
Which will, and must, lead to a universal love.
The kind that sets out to rescue those we’d much
rather condemn.
That is the prophets’ hard-won conclusion,
Their tear-filled victory.
Is there any other kind of winning?
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage (Convergent, 2025), 142–143, 151, 157, 159.
Image credit and inspiration: Geentanjal Khanna, Untitled (detail), 2016, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Unearned and unmerited generosity is an element or extension of the divine, revealing itself in our lived experience—spontaneous, unplanned, sometimes messy, as small as a drop of water—requiring open hands to receive it.
Story from Our Community:
I am 96 and still growing. I dedicate each day, each moment, and each second of my life to the wonder of God’s creation. Some time ago, I wrote the following poem:
Now at the end of all my things / I stand outside the camp on shifting sands / Still amazed, still thinking the unthinkable / And still singing in my chains like the stars. / Balanced between the gravity of earth / And the grace of heaven, I patiently wait / Beyond the reach of earthly powers / Still singing in my chains like the stars.
—Tim C.
