Mike Petrow: Welcome back yet again, friends to the Everything Belongs podcast with the one and only Father Richard Rohr. Each season, we’ve explored one of Richard’s books. Each episode, we travel over to Richard’s house to discuss a chapter with him, to lean all the wisdom we can from him. And then we’re joined by a guest who helps us live the teachings forward to think about Richard’s teachings in new ways by asking new questions that apply to a rapidly changing world. This season has been extra special because we’re exploring Richard’s latest and he says last brand new book, The Tears of Things. As a reminder, you don’t have to read the book to follow along with us, but we hope you have. We would love it if you do, and maybe this will inspire you to go ahead and pick the book up in the future. This episode, we come to the last chapter, chapter 10. It All Comes Down to Love.
And I got to tell you, I’m not quite ready to close the book yet. I’ve so enjoyed wading into the wisdom found in these pages. In our last chapter, It All Comes Down to Love. It’s kind of all there in the title. Richard tells us that what the prophets are consistently trying to remind us. Is that if we’re angry? It’s because something we love is at stake. If we’re sad, it’s because something we love is at stake. Dialing into that love gives us the strength and the sustenance to show up, to speak truth to power, to look at ourselves with a loving yet critical lens so that we can grow and also to expand the boundaries of who belongs until it includes everything and everyone. Richard writes, “Somehow the loving people I’ve met all across the world seem to know that if it’s love it all, it has to be love for everybody.” As soon as you even begin to parcel it out, you’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 universal love. The kind that sets out to rescue those we’d much rather condemn, that’s the prophet’s hard won conclusion, their tear-filled victory. Is there any other kind of winning? I’m so thrilled for you to join Paul and I in the hermitage as we talk to Richard. And then after that, we sit down with our fellow co-hosts, Drew Jackson and Carmen Acevedo Butcher to look back on our journey through these 10 chapters and share with each other what we’ve learned, the questions we’re still wrestling with, and how we hope to grow into the reality of love that Richard invites us into. Without further ado, friends, let’s head over to hermitage. I genuinely can’t wait for you to hear these conversations.
From the Center for Action and Contemplation, I’m Mike Petrow.
Paul Swanson: I’m Paul Swanson.
Carmen: I’m Carmen Acevedo Butcher.
Drew Jackson: And I’m Drew Jackson.
Mike Petrow: And this is Everything Belongs.
I can’t believe we have come to the last chapter.
Richard Rohr: No.
Mike Petrow: I could cry. This has been such a good journey. And this chapter in particular, I feel like each chapter that goes by, I think, “This is my favorite chapter.” This is one of my favorite pieces of your writing ever, Richard.
Richard Rohr: Really?
Mike Petrow: Really is.
Richard Rohr: You’re so supportive.
Mike Petrow: I have a confession to make to both of you. Richard, you know I love your writing and I love your teaching. I’ve always struggled with the notion completely that everything belongs.
Richard Rohr: Oh.
Mike Petrow: Yeah. Which is hysterical because it’s the name of our podcast. But I’ve prayed to God often and I’ve asked you directly, if everything belongs, why does it have to hurt so bad? And I feel like in this chapter and in the journey we’ve taken in the last few weeks, the last few months, and even the last few years, as you’ve talked through writing the book with us, I think you finally gave me an answer I can live with. When you were talking to Oprah, the penny dropped for me, you were saying, as you’ve said many times, that there are two paths available to everyone.
Richard Rohr: Everybody.
Mike Petrow: Even before religious and spiritual wisdom.
Richard Rohr: Existed.
Mike Petrow: And they are the path of great love and the path of great suffering. Years ago-
Richard Rohr: Those were available to the Stone Age people.
Mike Petrow: That’s what first hooked me years ago to your teaching was this idea of the path of great love and the great suffering, but I think what you finally got me to realize in that conversation with Oprah and in this chapter is not just the primacy of great love and great suffering, but in my question, if everything belongs, why does it have to hurt so bad? I think I’ve finally come away with the answer that the only sane response to the reality of great suffering and all the anger and the sadness that comes with it is great love. Richard, this is my question for you as we come to the end. Is great love the only answer to great suffering?
Richard Rohr: As long as you know that that great love doesn’t come easily and isn’t sentimental, it’s walk in the plank. Love is a harsh and dreadful thing. Is that Dostoevsky or is it Tolstoy?
Paul Swanson: Tolstoy.
Richard Rohr: Tolstoy. One of them said it. Love is a harsh and dreadful thing. You pay a big price. I think of people who’ve been in difficult marriages for 20 years and have finally chosen one another long enough to know they mean it, to keep choosing that even when they don’t feel it.
Mike Petrow: I think of every tear that’s been shed at every funeral that I’ve attended that I’ve officiated and how every shed tear is proof of love.
Richard Rohr: Of course. Well said.
Mike Petrow: So, I guess there can’t be great love without great suffering, huh?
Richard Rohr: Yeah. Once you say I love you, you’ve walked the plank and you’re inevitably going to suffer for the one you love. Just wait, maybe it’s 40 years, but you have to pay the piper for the dance of love eventually.
Mike Petrow: Well, so going all the way back to our most ancient ancestors, they had these two paths available to them. What do we learn from great love and great suffering?
Richard Rohr: That is walking the path of union, unitive, consciousness, connection, relationship, surrender, forgiveness. Use all of those words. They’re almost synonyms. That it’s all about that. It’s all about connection, relationship, forgiveness, union. And everything is a school starting with your first girlfriend, your wife, your child, all of school, nature. If you don’t learn that, you really aren’t saved. And I think that’s why the tradition maintained a belief in an existence of what they called purgatorial hell. It has to be logically possible to not choose the way of love.
Mike Petrow: Well, and I think so few of us start out loving everything, right?
Richard Rohr: How could we? How could we?
Mike Petrow: It seems that the path is to love one thing deeply.
Richard Rohr: One thing deeply. Right.
Mike Petrow: And let that teacher reminds me of saying how you do anything is how you do everything, but does loving one thing deeply teach you how to eventually love everything?
Richard Rohr: I think so. That’s why most of you are called to marriage, to one love relationship that you’re faithful to. If you don’t learn through marriage, you got to learn it somewhere else. I think for a lot of people, it’s in the final days, hours of life. And I’ve had hospice workers tell me that, that at the very end, they let go of their need to hate or need to punish.
Mike Petrow: I once heard you say that it’s very often birth and death that are the greatest teachers of unconditional love.
Richard Rohr: Birth and death. Yeah, yeah.
Mike Petrow: Paul, you were at our much beloved teacher, Dr. Barbara Holmes, who passed away a few months ago. You were at her funeral. I wasn’t able to get there. There was a story that I heard that in her last hours she was saying, “Forgive everyone everything.”
Paul Swanson: Yeah, it was a beautiful story that one of her sons told about being at her bedside as she was kind of coming in and out of consciousness. And one of the things that she relayed to her son with increasing almost like force and expression is forgive everyone for everything. And when he shared this at the funeral, he said it in increased insistence and volume in a way where your bones were like being rattled by how this had impacted him. And how he had promised her he’d share this at her funeral.
Richard Rohr: Wow.
Paul Swanson: Forgive everyone for everything.
Richard Rohr: That’s beautiful.
Paul Swanson: Really, really stunning to-
Richard Rohr: That’s universal love.
Paul Swanson: Yeah.
Richard Rohr: Yeah. And that’s the goal.
Paul Swanson: That’s the goal. And as we stand with this as our goal, we can also look at our culture, our religious structures where the lens is often one of reward and punishment, where this dichotomy is set up, this binary where universal love is actually bigger, beyond, underneath beyond reward and punishment.
Richard Rohr: Beyond winning and losing.
Paul Swanson: Beyond winning and losing.
Richard Rohr: Yes, that’s right.
Paul Swanson: And you have this beautiful passage at the end of the book. And I’m going to tee it up. I’m going to ask you to read the last piece. You say this. “My final conviction is that we cannot dismantle the violence we see 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 unconditional love and respect, or nothing will ever change. We cannot understand or absorb the compelling message of the prophets so long as we allow fear, threat, and self-interest to dominate the story. Something must break us out of the reward-punishment frame. It is too small and too self-serving.” You were just touching on that.
“It makes the God of the ever-evolving and ever-expanding universe seem equally small and petty and has already shown itself to create far too many small, petty, largely competitive, and happily vengeful humans. Yet in spite of it all, the universe remains one giant self-revelation of the fabulous nature of God. Not a small stage where one slice of the human species can show itself to be a winner or a loser. Somehow, the loving people I’ve met all across the world seem to know that. If it is love at all, it has to be love for every body. As soon as you even begin to parcel it out, you are not in the great field of love.” And Rich, can you share how you close that?
Richard Rohr: The prophets want us to love God above all else and be loved by God, above all other partners. If you’ve seen it in a human being, you know God has to be greater and all of us can think of one person, hopefully our mother or father or partner. Be loved by God above all other partners, which will and must lead to universal love. The kind that sets out to rescue those we’d much rather condemn if we’d be honest. That is the prophet’s hard won conclusion. Their tear filled victory. Is there any other kind of winning?
Paul Swanson: It’s a great encapsulation.
Richard Rohr: I’m still learning how to live it, but I’m glad I wrote it.
Paul Swanson: And as we take all this bill into this moment, I know your friend Camaldolese Benedictine monk, Cyprian Consiglio, he speaks the sequencing of the prophetic commission following theophany. Or in other words, an experience of God comes before responding to God with, “Here I am, send me.” As the true taste of a God experience, help us shift our motivations from a disconnected reward-punishment lens to a universal love embodiment that sets out to welcome those we’d rather condemn.
Richard Rohr: You can only give away what you’ve been given. It’s so simple and the givenness is an allowing, a surrendering because you know you’re so damn unworthy of it. I used to say in one of my earlier books, “Grace is a punishment.” Believe it or not, because damn it’s the one thing I can’t prove I’m worthy of. So, I stand empty, undeserving, unmeriting, and yet receiving. Every great love relationship has moments where it has the power to communicate that. Divine love. You’re saved once you know that. Once you receive it, and it’s always a receiving, it’s always a surrendering. It’s never an achieving, like a loss of my identity in a new identity that is we instead of me. And that’s the beginning of the ocean of mercy, the ocean of compassion. You live in a we world where you see everything communally, collectively. You can’t go back to thinking, “My life is about me.” My life is about we. And that isn’t an intellectual statement. It’s an experiential understanding.
Paul Swanson: I know you’ve been using examples too of feeling that experience through the love of a parent or a partner or a spouse.
Richard Rohr: Yes.
Paul Swanson: And those might even be ways that some folks would wish they could experience. I’ve also heard you say it could be through even just loving your own little piece of soil that you see every day, a flower or a pet. But it doesn’t have to be something as grandiose as a vowed relationship, but it could also be in the tenderness and particularity of something that might seem quite small to others, but it doesn’t matter what size or length it is.
Richard Rohr: No, it doesn’t. It still is a surrendering to the littleness, the unimportance of that flower, that animal. I saw special on bugs. My God, how beautiful bugs are. Close up.
Mike Petrow: So colorful, right?
Richard Rohr: Oh, my God. They’re just glorious little things. Not all of them, but why did God bother to create beautiful bugs? Now, to allow yourself to rejoice in that and to find it hard to kill them like Michael just did when he caught a wasp in my living room before we started recording and he found a way to capture it inside a glass and put it outside. That was today’s act of unconditional love to something that could hurt us. And you still loved it. Thank you. A wasp.
Mike Petrow: It’s such a different way to love than so many of us-
Richard Rohr: I know. I know.
Mike Petrow: … originally started out with. And I think moving beyond reward, punishment, good, bad, doesn’t mean that evil’s not an issue, right? Recognizing that everything belongs doesn’t mean it’s all good or it’s all easy. Because particularly if it’s supposed to be all good and it’s supposed to be all easy and it’s not, which it so often isn’t, then when things aren’t as we think they’re supposed to be, we look for someone to blame so often, right?
Richard Rohr: Yeah.
Mike Petrow: I really love this passage. You write, “It’s common for us to think of evil as an interruption of an otherwise smooth functioning order, how things should be. And I think the more privileged that we are, the easier it is for us to think that way.”
Richard Rohr: That’s right.
Mike Petrow: “That hardship is an interruption usually caused by someone else,” you say. But then you remind us, “But evil and death are parts of the deal mixed in with all life, part of the common domain shadowing all our best efforts and intentions. Death itself is an intrinsic part of existence. Idealists often cannot or will not see this, but prophets are not idealists. They are truth tellers and utter realists.”
Richard Rohr: Realists.
Mike Petrow: I feel like that’s a passage that should be read over and over and over again. Richard, when you tell us to stop being offended and confused that evil and suffering exists and grieve that reality and accept it and respond in love, you’re not telling us to just lay down, throw our hands up in the air and be like, “Well, there’s always going to be evil.” How does accepting the reality of death and suffering leave us better equipped to respond to it?
Richard Rohr: I don’t know how the chemistry works. That’s why I use the word alchemy in the middle of the book, but I know it’s invariably people who have gotten a raw deal who make the breakthrough. They’re led to utter powerlessness and the surrender somehow happens. If you don’t contact the divine power, and this is the only definition of the evil I can come close to, you align with power for its own sake. And you’ll see in people who do evil, this need to be against. It’s Satan, the accuser, need to be bitterly oppositional to something, some idea, some group, some race. Now it’s moved to the other gender. Keep your eye open for this energy of againstness. It’s always the first steps into evil. Divine power is power of vitality, of graciousness, of forgiveness, of liberation. Evil power is always fighting a battle of its own creation, in its own mind. I’ve got to get rid of whoever you’ve decided you got to get rid of.
Mike Petrow: Yeah.
Richard Rohr: And it’s your decision. Black people, gay people, poor people, smelly people. That’s your problem, thinking they’re not worthy of love.
Mike Petrow: That’s so helpful. I really appreciate that. Beware of againstness because-
Richard Rohr: Beware of againstness in any form.
Mike Petrow: My favorite thing you say is that the only perfection available to us is our ability to love our own imperfection.
Richard Rohr: To include imperfection in whatever perfection is.
Mike Petrow: And I think a lot of people live the opposite of that. I think for a lot of people, the only perfection available to them is to ignore their imperfection and then to project it and attack it in someone else.
Richard Rohr: And think they can eliminate it from themselves and from the world. That’s what I mean, what Jesus meant by purity codes.
Mike Petrow: Yes.
Richard Rohr: Looking for impurity, unworthiness.
Paul Swanson: And letting the weeds-
Richard Rohr: Attack it.
Paul Swanson: Oh, go ahead.
Richard Rohr: Go ahead.
Paul Swanson: And letting the weeds and wheat grow together.
Richard Rohr: There you go.
Mike Petrow: Yeah.
Richard Rohr: Let the weeds and the wheat grow together. He made it so simple.
Mike Petrow: I don’t want to give you too much work, Richard, but would you mind flipping to page 144, I think? There’s a sentence that starts with, “We need to stop being surprised.”
Richard Rohr: Okay. I don’t know what I’m going to read, but I’ll read it.
Mike Petrow: Hit me.
Richard Rohr: Since I wrote it.
Mike Petrow: All right. Here we go.
Richard Rohr: “We need to stop being surprised or shocked by reality and recognize that evil flourishes best when it is denied. Evil relies on being considered rational, necessary, and expedient by otherwise good people. Witness the ravages of communism and Nazism when everyday people could not see how their shadow slide in completely different ways was causing them to demonize and kill millions of their fellow humans. You can’t see what your group can’t see, but once you out the demon, the real hidden problem in any group or in any issue, it loses much of its potency. Thus, it should be no surprise when we identify evil with darkness because it is darkness, a state in which we cannot see and goodness as a form of delight in which even our darkness is illuminated.”
Mike Petrow: Can we read just a little more?
Richard Rohr: “This leaves us with a world of contradictions if we look at it honestly. You can attack your chosen enemy and appear saintly and heroic all while holding on to the same us versus them assumptions that got us into trouble to begin with. Love, however, is willing to accept and forgive a tragic sense of life, the tears of things. It does not allow a desire for the perfect to become the enemy and the obstacle to simple goodness.”
Mike Petrow: I mean, you kind of said it all right there, but what more would you share with us about letting love guide us into accepting imperfection as opposed to denying it or worse, attacking it in other people?
Richard Rohr: Psychologically speaking, you’ve got to get the insight of what we call the ego. That part of you that doesn’t care, it just wants to be right. You have to catch yourself living out of that space and recognize the ego self knows nothing about love. It sees love as an enemy, but you have to see it in yourself, not in other people. That’s conversion. That’s transformation. That’s why psychological language has been very helpful. Jungian language, as you know, Michael, has been very helpful to help us clarify that. Yes, there it is.
Mike Petrow: At the end of Jung’s memoir in a chapter, I think called Final Thoughts, he says, “In all the teaching and writing I’ve done, there’s one mystery that’s always been too big for me to tackle.” And there’s this passage and people refer to it as his hymn to love and he expounds on how big and how beautiful love is. And he says, “When I come to this, like Job, I put my hand over my mouth and say nothing because it’s too big.”
Richard Rohr: There you go.
Mike Petrow: I think that’s how I feel sometimes thinking about things like this. It all comes down to love and love is just, it’s the biggest thing there is. Always bigger than the words we have for it and the words we have for it are always too small when we see it in action around us.
Paul Swanson: Yes. The limitations of words in the face of great love, especially as we think about how we understand and relate to this God of love, because we often see our own selves in our image of God, whether it’s a retributive God or one of great love.
Richard Rohr: God must just smile. A wry smile. Go ahead.
Paul Swanson: No, that’s great. But this is all pointing to, as we grow in our own consciousness, also our image of God also changes.
Richard Rohr: That’s right.
Paul Swanson: And we have to grow up as our image of God also grows up and vice versa.
Richard Rohr: That’s right.
Paul Swanson: I always tell, I don’t know if this is helpful or not to my kids, but I’m like, “My image of God, if it doesn’t shatter every few years, I feel like I’m not expanding enough because God is always beyond what I can imagine God to be.”
Richard Rohr: You become the God you worship.
Paul Swanson: Yes.
Richard Rohr: You become the God you worship. So be careful who your God is.
Paul Swanson: What do you think Richard’s being asked of us as we seek to grow up into this grownup God of love?
Richard Rohr: To be much more generous hearted in our judgments because they’re never true completely as we make them in our mind. You heard me say judgments, say it.
Paul Swanson: You said that we were out at this-
Richard Rohr: Where was that?
Paul Swanson: The AYNI Institute. They’re doing that beautiful education for social movement leaders. I got it right here because you said judgment is analysis without presence.
Richard Rohr: Yes. Where you go on analyzing until you’ve made your conviction clear in your damn mind, but go sit with that person, hear their story, look in their eyes, and you still might find reason to dislike them, but not to hate them. You see invariably how much of a victim they are or what they were not given, how they were abused or it just creates a great sympathy. The Tears of Things.
Paul Swanson: Yeah. How does that help shift our cosmology? In those particular ways, it changes our cosmology when we show up with that presence.
Richard Rohr: Well, God cannot be less than the most loving person we’ve met. It’s obvious. And I met a lot of loving people. I got no excuse.
Mike Petrow: Wow.
Richard Rohr: Amount of people who put me to shame. And of course, we’re always meeting everybody at different stages of their own journey. So don’t judge them by the thing they said when they were 25. Give them time. Give them time. They’ll hopefully talk better at 35 and 45 and 55.
Mike Petrow: This whole chapter is highlighted, but I love when you write, “I’ve met too many saintly people in a confessional context whose holiness is the result of years of struggle with their darkness and their ego, which they could never completely overcome. In fact, such folks with the quite obvious norm. Our job like that of the prophets is to guide their struggle towards love, not to deliver them all together from struggle.”
Richard Rohr: To sit in what we used to call the mercy seat, the confessional, people at their most vulnerable, they have no need to impress you. They come with the direct intention to tell you the worst about themselves. That’s just a setup for meeting people at their most beautiful. And I did. I don’t hear confessions. Well, I should say Catholics don’t go to confession anymore, but those were glorious years when I did because you had immediate contact with ordinary people at their worst, giving you a chance by God’s grace to be godly. It wasn’t your godliness. It was the mercy that was passing through you toward them. And therefore, I absolve you on a gift.
Mike Petrow: Well, it’s sort of the path of the prophet, I think that you lay out in this book.
Richard Rohr: I hope so.
Mike Petrow: Oh, I can’t bring myself to say this.
Paul Swanson: It’s got to be said at some point.
Mike Petrow: As we start to bring our conversation to a close on this last chapter, God, what a journey. I have to reflect on this path that you lay out for us that we start with this idea of how things should be, which you call order. And we often get angry when life fails to cooperate with our schema.
Richard Rohr: When our order doesn’t work out.
Mike Petrow: Gosh, why isn’t life acting like it should?
Paul Swanson: Didn’t they get the memo?
Mike Petrow: Seriously. And then we try to make it be what it should to make it fit or to come up with a philosophy that’ll match. And you told us this in our first exploration together of Falling Upward, the first book we explored that sooner or later, if we’re on any kind of a classical spiritual schedule, we fail at something or something fails us. And our sense of order just crashes. Our internal GPS goes offline and we fail to make the world fit or to be the way it’s supposed to be. Our ideas of justice and fairness go off the rails. And if we’re honest and we stay with how things really are and we face the reality of great suffering, we drop into great grief and we encounter the tears of things and this holy disorder. And somehow that grief, I think you’re telling us can lead us to a solidarity with all human beings in their suffering.
Richard Rohr: It really can. It’s the normal path of enlightened people. And you feel the embodiment in that rather than a head exercise of even what we teach, letting go of thoughts and letting go of mind. And that’s all true, but this is much more gutsy.
Mike Petrow: In The Universal Christ, you wrote a sentence that I was reminded of recently. “The point of the Christian life is not to distinguish oneself from the ungodly, but to stand in radical solidarity with everyone and everything else. This is the full, final and intended effect of the incarnation symbolized by its finality in the cross, which is God’s great act of solidarity instead of judgment.” That’s a good sentence.
Richard Rohr: That’s the heart of it.
Mike Petrow: That’s what I think you’re getting to. The solidarity instead of judgment, if we stay with The Tears of Things, right? It leads us-
Richard Rohr: Thank you.
Mike Petrow: … through great suffering to great love.
Richard Rohr: You’re a good reader, Michael. Thank you.
Mike Petrow: Well, I love this because for me, it takes me from how things should be to how things really are, and it leaves me at how things could be. It reminds me that great love is the only sane response to the tears of things.
Richard Rohr: Yeah.
Mike Petrow: Richard, where does this leave us in action? What does it look like to act this out in the world? This movement from order to disorder to reorder? This movement from anger to sadness to love. What does it look like to roll up our sleeves and live this?
Richard Rohr: I’m preaching to myself whatever I say here. It won’t lead you to reading more books or attending more classes or going on more retreats. Now, don’t hear that as an absolute either. A few retreats are probably real good, but it will be solved. The problem will be resolved outside the mind in relationality, in service, in compassion, in caring. It has to be resolved outside the mind. The mind is still my order. You’re still trapped in order there. The suffering things includes disorder. She’s still an imperfect woman, person, but I choose to let her give herself to me and me to give myself to her or him. What is the line you cross that allows you to do that? I still don’t know, but you meet people who have crossed that line, who stop weighing, measuring, and counting.
Mike Petrow: I love that. Reminds me of what you say about how we need people who are wholesome, educated on the issues, both insiders and outsiders, the loyal opposition who know how to be loving and respectful towards all sides. We know folks who are on the loving but critical edge of any developing in group, truth-seekers who’ve dealt with their own wounds. Wounded healers are what we need. Wounded wounders.
Richard Rohr: If you’re a healer, you’ve licked your wounds, your own wounds. Thank you for forcing me to say these things.
Paul Swanson: Thank you for your willingness to say these things.
Richard Rohr: Oh, thank you, Paul.
Paul Swanson: The invitation, the impetus for us to seek how do we stand in solidarity with the suffering of the world from a place of great love, from this path of the Tears of Things. And Richard, as a way to close this out, would you be willing to offer a final blessing, not just for those of us in this room, but those who will hear this on the day comes out, those who will hear it years from now as they discover it down the road, who are seeking to live in the challenges of what it means to go through the heartache of this prophetic path in small or large ways.
Richard Rohr: You have blessed us with your gospel. We bathe in its freedom and light. We ask your forgiveness, for we misused it to judge people and to exclude people. Bless everyone who reads this book or hears these words to be a blessing for the world as generously as they have been blessed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Amen.
Paul Swanson: So, now, Richard, we just need you to write another book so we can keep this conversation going on.
Mike Petrow: Oh, that’s right. We need something else to talk about.
Richard Rohr: More and more books, Rohr.
Mike Petrow: All right.
Paul Swanson: Like it, we got plenty more to talk about.
Mike Petrow: Goodness gracious.
Everything Belongs will continue in a moment.
Welcome back, friends. Before we jump into our last conversation, I just want to take a moment to say thank you. These conversations have been so amazing and you, each one of you are the reason that we get to have them. We have genuinely felt your presence in the room with us each time we get together with Richard and with every single guest. So many amazing guests this season have helped us consider how in this moment, an age of outrage, it still all comes down to love. Such a deep bow, so many thank yous to every single guest who’s been with us. But I also have to tell you, I’ve learned so much from my fellow hosts, Paul Swanson, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, and Drew Jackson, from their questions, from their reflections, from the way I see them wrestle this wisdom into lived reality. So, we thought for this last chapter, it would be so great to have one final closing conversation with all of us and with all of you.
So, we invite you to pull up a chair or a cushion and join us as we look back on all we’ve learned, all the questions we still have, and all the ways we hope to grow.
Oh, my gosh, friends, Drew, Paul, Carmen, it has been a minute since we all got together to do a recording together for Everything Belongs, but it has not been a minute since we all got to see each other because we were all just together at CAC’s Fall Revision Conference asking the question, “What do we do with Christianity?” And I got to say, it was so great to look each of you in the eye, get a hug, have conversation in real time. And it’s great to be here again with each of you. How are you doing and are you still buzzing from the conference?
Carmen: I’m going to say I’m still buzzing. I even got a high five from Drew on the sidewalk. That was a great joy for me. So, many good vibrations from Revision. Yeah.
Drew Jackson: Yeah. Still buzzing. So much goodness. And I do remember that high five, Carmen.
Carmen: Right.
Drew Jackson: It was fresh off of our conversation about Howard Thurman and I was just living in the joy of that conversation. And so there was so much contained in that high five on the sidewalk.
Carmen: I will not forget it.
Paul Swanson: And neither of you have washed your hands since, just to keep that. The sting of the high five alive. I love the fact that we can do these digital connections, but there’s nothing that beats being in person and just the touch and feel of embodiment as we carry these conversations in our daily lives. So, yeah, great to be here again and great to see you just last week. What a gift.
Mike Petrow: It’s so good. I love y’all so much. It’s so great to get to work with you and that feeling of appreciation when we get to be in a room. Drew, I don’t think anyone would ever guess just from listening to us, how much taller than me you are. And I mean, it’s partially because I’m a very short man, so the joy of leaning up and figuring out how we make a hug work so I don’t end up with my head tucked in your armpit every time, it’s one of my favorite things. It’s so good. Y’all, I learned so much from each and every one of you. I learned so much from each and every one of you. This last year, hanging out with Richard’s book, The Tears of Things, I can’t believe that we finally got to the final chapter. And looking at this chapter, It’s All About Love.
I’ve been thinking about how maybe the most impactful moment for me this season in our recorded conversations was Richard telling Paul and I that disorder becomes holy disorder, and I’m paraphrasing, but disorder becomes holy disorder when we realize that love is always outgrowing the containers that we cram it into. Oh, my gosh, so good. And he says that right at the beginning of this chapter when he writes, “This is the nature of mature mystical religion. It’s simple and clear. We shave away as many religious assumptions and judgments as possible and we reground religion on one lone assumption, a divine love that can only be experienced and not proved by rational logic. The prophets claim to have had such divine experiences 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 Amos, Jeremiah and the other prophets we visited in this book.” And I got to say, coming back from our What Do We Do With Christianity Conference, I hear that echoed there too. It’s just all about love. I’m going to be thinking about that for a long time, but I have to ask each of you, Drew, Paul, Carmen, what stood out for you about this chapter?
Paul Swanson: That passage is underlined, highlighted, starred and exclamation points in my book. I had the thought a few years ago of my image of God should constantly break down because it’s not big enough. And I feel like that is love bursting through the containers of what I think God is. And I feel like Richard is able to distill that and communicate that in a way that I can receive and walk through and be like, “Oh, this image of God that I have is not quite big enough because of these experiences, because of what I’ve learned about the tradition, because of this conversation of somebody or myself in seasons of suffering.” And it just keeps exploding that container into more grandiose love. And I feel like the pathway of tears is what breaks down that wall over and over and over again, where God just keeps becoming so much bigger for me and how I’m participating in that.
And to me, this little nugget that you just read is one of the heartbeats of this chapter that keeps that blood pumping that keeps me moving and excited about where is this boundary going to break next? How is God’s love going to exceed my expectations yet again? And it’ll probably look like something I wasn’t expecting.
Carmen: That’s beautiful. I love, Paul, that you highlight Mike’s paragraph because it’s one that I have absolutely returned to also. And I like the fact that you remind me that this will happen regularly. I know the reason in my experience that my understanding of God breaks down is because I’ve made it so elaborate. And one of the things so rational and like a house of cards in some ways, I love in this chapter how Richard talks about Occam’s razor, the better answer is almost always a simpler one. And then he says, “Prophets are those who simplify all questions of justice, reward, and punishment by a simple appeal to divine love.” And so, my understanding of God often is broken down and a new and realer God appears simply when I return to love. So, I like hearing that this is not just my experience. It’s very helpful.
Drew Jackson: Whenever I think about this chapter, I think about the simplicity of it, that you get to the end of this masterful book, you get to the simplicity of It All Comes Down to Love. It’s just love. On the surface, it’s like, “Wow, that’s so naive, Richard. It’s just love.” But we know that it’s so profound. There’s so much depth. We talked a lot at Revision about living the questions and to me to live the question of love is the constant invitation of the prophets to stay with love. What does it mean to love in the face of my enemies? What does it mean to love in the face of constant injustice? What does it mean to love when I don’t know where this will take me? It’s that constant staying with the question of love that is the invitation and that’s why it’s not simple. There’s no one answer to it because that love is going to show up and it’s going to look like something different in each and every encounter, in each circumstance with every face that I encounter, with every neighbor.
That’s why I love this chapter so much because it just keeps bringing me back to that and I’m reminded of a short poem that I wrote and Carmen will know this one because we talked about it before. It’s a short poem called Growing Down. It simply says, know that growth more often looks like letting go than adding more. Having all the extra stripped away until all that’s left is love. The path toward love, the journey toward love is a downward path, but it’s a path where you just free fall into the love of God over and over again.
Mike Petrow: I feel like this book, all the conversations we’ve had and this journey we’ve all taken together for the last few months has just been an education in love. I know it’s so easy to think of love as naive. I always like to say love without wisdom gets murdered in the street, but wisdom without love dies old, cold and alone. So, we need to figure out how to put the two together.
And I think the question that this whole journey has given me is to ask myself, to keep coming back to this idea, “If I’m angry, it’s because something I love is at stake. And if I’m sad and I’m grieving, it’s because something I love is at stake.” So, when I’m angry or when I’m grieving, find the love inside of that and let it sustain me. And I’ve been thinking about that for months, but what’s become more interesting lately, don’t get me wrong, I’ll spend the rest of my life chewing on that, is realizing that when I encounter other folks’ anger and other folks’ grief, even folks who are ideologically opposite of me, somewhere in there, something they love is at stake.
And how can I let that question, even when I encounter people who are like ideological enemy, how can I let that question, what is it that that person loves that is at stake, help me find compassion even when I know it’s necessary for me to offer criticisms. But I’m curious for the three of you, when you look back, like we’ve spent so much time with this book and in these conversations. Drew, you literally read the book out loud for our audience and the audiobook, what has really emerged for you in this journey?
Carmen: Well, I will say for me, it’s in the title that it’s about tears and it’s what you, Mike, Paul, and Drew have all really talked about. I mean, love and tears are inseparable. And my favorite line from the book has become like a koan for me. It’s from chapter seven, but fits really well with this last chapter. Felt reality is invariably like you can’t escape it. Felt reality is invariably wept reality and wept reality assume compassion and kindness, which is a lot like that line you just gave us about wisdom and love, which I love. I’ve never heard it before. One of my favorite theologians, Walter Brueggemann, said in the prophetic imagination, “Empires live by numbness.” And so I actually really pray to be someone who is open to weeping and really loving my whole life.
And I think Richard returns us to this truth and also to simplicity over and again. I remember one time, you know that magic of driving or walking your children to school. Paul, you and I have talked about this and I know Drew, you’ve talked about dropping kids off. And I remember once driving my daughter to school and she asked me this really profound question and I took a breath in to answer because you want to be a conscientious parent. I mean, at some point in your life, you think maybe you’re going to get an A for being a parent until you realize that’s not the point. And I took a deep breath to answer her question and she goes, “No, no, mom, I want the short answer.” And like not the one you’re going to give to your students at school. And then I realized my students at school don’t want that answer either.
And so, there’s that notion of how Richard always returns us to tears are part of the journey and remaining simple of heart and really listening to others. And that’s hard. I mean, for me it is, to really keep returning to being simplicity.
Drew Jackson: I love that passage too that you read about felt reality is wept reality.
Carmen: Yeah.
Drew Jackson: It makes me think of Bell Hooks in her book, All About Love, which if you haven’t read All About Love, go read All About Love. It is phenomenal. She says, “We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power, if any feeling of vulnerability strikes terror in our hearts.” I think about that often, the inextricable nature of love and vulnerability. When Richard talks about the weeping over reality, how deeply it’s felt that the prophets were those who just felt reality so deeply and wept over it, knew that something was at stake, something they loved was at stake. That’s something that when I sit with it long enough, it actually does terrify me to think about moving through the world with that kind of openness, that kind of vulnerability. It is easier to numb myself to it. I just want to make it through my day. I just want to get to the next thing. I read those passages in the Gospels where Jesus will encounter somebody who’s suffering and it will say he was moved with compassion, right?
Literally his bowels were moved. His insides were turning over with compassion. That’s the kind of tenderness and vulnerability and being moved to tears by reality that the prophets are inviting the people into. That is, if there is a prophetic gift, that’s part of it. It’s that gift of tears that they hold in such a way where they can’t just pass over reality without being deeply moved and it’s not just moved to then weep over it, it’s moved then to moved outward in action to love it, to love the world that they care so desperately about. When I think about this book, that’s the constant invitation that I feel like is there for me because my tendency… I’m a nine on the Enneagram. I want to avoid discomfort at all costs, right? I want to disengage from it at all costs. I feel that the invitation for me is always to stay present to the pain of reality in such a way that I don’t become numb to it, knowing that empires function on numbness, that they require it.
And so, resistance for me is to say, “How do I stay present to the tears in a way that doesn’t just allow me to skim on the surface of things?”
Paul Swanson: As a fellow nine, that preaches and lands with me as well. And it brings up something for me around… I was listening to this talk by this philosopher this past weekend, and he said something along the lines of like, “We got to get over this idea that we shouldn’t be needy. We’re all in need. When we shame others for their neediness, that is actually a shameful act because we are all in need of love, we’re all in need of connection and community.” And for me, this book, that invitation to tears is a recognition of my own neediness. And how much this has been talked about this season about the solidarity of tears, of being in solidarity with those suffering through the recognition of your own fragility and vulnerability and neediness in the wake of political forces, unjust decisions in local communities and in national empires, but to start from this place of mutual neediness.
And that just brings me constantly to the short prayer of Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy because just the need for mercy in neediness and my own tomfoolery helps me keep my heart open a little bit if I can just keep returning to my own vulnerability. And so, I feel like that’s been a throughline that I’ve noticed throughout the conversations this year was it all comes back to the tears.
Mike Petrow: Gosh, I so appreciate that, Paul. And I appreciate. I know that there’s a four. I like to swim in the depths of my own sorrow and suffering, but that can get real narcissistic real fast. And it feels like vulnerability, but it becomes like an internal echo chamber. And I have to remember being vulnerable to others, right? I so appreciate that. I’ve just come back from after the Revision Conference, I went to a conference on suicide and mental health awareness for clergy. And a theme that I noticed that came out in both of those conferences is this idea that loving is listening. And contemplation is so often deep listening and not deep ignoring. We had so many good conversations this season with so many wise guides, and it got me thinking about who I’m not listening to. Carmen, you shared such deep wisdom about listening for the voices of women prophets who are often absent and so many keen insights, one of which being that for women prophets, the journey might not be from anger to sadness to love, but from sadness to anger to love.
Cassidy Hall helped me listen to the idea that there is so much insight from so many folks who are off-center of the mainstream. The insights that come from the margins, the outcasts, the ostracized, or even just the overlooked and the unheard, which are typically the places that Jesus tends to be at work and show up and be speaking. Randy Woodley and Dr. Fluker reminded me that that’s trickster wisdom that subverts mainstream group think. It’s such a gift to get to listen to so much insight this season. I’m curious, Carmen, Paul, Drew, what were standout moments with any of the guests we had in this journey that really helped you hear something new and fresh and think about this in a different way?
Carmen: First to me, Mike was having conversations with you, Paul and Drew, just being in conversation and hearing what you have to say and how it sharpens and gentles my soul and then just being with the guests like Rabbi Or Rose and Rabbi Tirzah Firestone and Connie Zweig and Cassidy Hall for me and so many others and listening to the conversations you all had with everyone else. If I picked one thing, which is like if you just gave me a box of dark chocolates and said, “Which is your favorite?” That would be so difficult. But I would say the one that I’ve really been chewing on recently and when we interviewed her was Connie Zweig, because when I translated the Cloud of Unknowing, it really turned me upside down doing shadow work and really helped me look very personally at what is the shadow.
I know, Mike, at one point you said, and Connie is so good as a Jungian analyst to help us understand the shadow in down to earth terms. You’ve said sometimes it gets confused with original sin and I have come to see the shadow as this kind of unoriginal unawareness because it’s the parts of me. And you know how Adam Becker talks about, and it’s very internal family systems. We have all these persons inside of us who are neglected and Connie helps us see if we can give them names and really start engaging and befriending them and they’re not to be afraid of. And at Revision, I absolutely adored when the Reverend Dr. Jacqui Lewis entered the room, the music struck up and she started dancing. Then she started talking about the world is on fire and as you talk about Mike with origin, we need to be the firefighters rushing into the fire.
And she was saying that. And I was thinking, putting that together, marrying it with Connie Zweig’s wisdom, I want to, yes, also be running into the burning building of my own fear and doubt and uncertainty and worry and the rejected selves, the child sitting in the corner wondering is she loved? Because then as I become better friends with myself, I can really sit with, as you all were talking about, the neediness I have of my own self. Like you said, Paul, when you were listening to this philosopher, the more I can sit with my own neediness, the more I can sit with the neediness of the world. And Connie really helped me with that. She’s so down to earth.
Paul Swanson: One thing that you’ve raised that really strikes me in conversations with our guests is how they invite us into our own interior conversation, our dialogues with the divine, our dialogues with others and our dialogues with the world and all are happening simultaneously. And like you said about the box of chocolates, how do you just pick one? Yeah, which of my children is my favorite? It’s the conversations I was a part of, I just delighted in them. And then listening back to the ones I wasn’t a part of, it’s like evesdropping on goodness, what a gift to have a cup to the door and hear these conversations.
I will say this, typically it’s Mike and I who do the conversations with Richard. And then when I stepped in that conversation with Father Greg Boyle and Father Richard, sitting between these two giants who have deeply impacted me and bringing the spirit hopefully of our conversations to how do these two often considered wise end figures hold their own neediness, hold their own anger, their own sadness and their own love as they move through the communities that they touch and to have these elders open the windows of their souls about how they’ve navigated that. I’m sure if you were to go back and listen to the unedited version of that, you would hear these long pauses of me just trying to catch up to what I was experiencing.
And I think to me that happens on every single conversation we have on here and each guest feels like an honored guest, whether they’re hosting or a conversation partner, so I can’t believe this is my life.
Drew Jackson: So many of the conversations have just been lingering with me from the early conversation we had with Pete Enns to, I think the most recent one, Mike, that you and I have had with Randy. And I’ve been thinking a lot about that one and maybe it’s also because we got a chance to spend some time with Randy at Revision, but to hear him reflect a little bit on… We’re talking about Ezekiel, but the way that he reflected on his book, his new book, How Western Christianity Got It Wrong. And he talked about how domination and oppression run through Western Christianity like the threads of a blood soaked tapestry, how that narrative, that story of domination and oppression has so formed us or malformed us in ways that we don’t even recognize. The prophets are so interested in story. They are storytellers, they’re performance artists.
Ezekiel’s a trickster. He’s got trickster energy. It’s this insistence on a different story, on changing the narrative or re-listening again. As I was thinking about that at Randy’s reflections on that again, I was taken back to Revision and one of the things that Randy was talking about with storytelling and even just like, who are we listening to tell the stories? Who is being brought into the council? Talked about the community of the council of the animals and the council of the plants, being those who are also… How are we learning to listen to the story? How are the animals and the plants major prophets for us? We’re hearing and we’re hearing the invitation of the story they’re telling that is counter to the one of domination and oppression, or who are allowing us to hear that the ways that they’ve been being trampled on by this story we’ve all been buying into.
And so, I’ve been just kind of lingering with much of what Randy shared both in that episode and what he shared again at Revision.
Mike Petrow: Yeah, Drew, wow. I’m right there with you and still really thinking deeply about that, and one of the things I love about Randy’s teaching is he’s not one who shies away, as you’ve shared from criticizing empire, from criticizing actions and intentions that cause harm. And yet, he so counsels us not to lose ourselves in that. And this is something I’ve been wrestling with is how do I practice compassion and criticism at the same time? We talk in this podcast about living the teachings forward. We meet these beautiful foundational teachings from these elders that we so respect, and then they inspire us to wrestle with new questions.
And so, ironically enough, I’ve been having dreams about one of our beloved teachers who passed away last year, Dr. B. And in those dreams, Drew, you’ll appreciate this. She keeps telling me that she reminded me to read Walter Wink when she was alive and I never did it. So, I’ve been reading Walter Wink lately and Walter Wink writes something that feels like it could be found in the pages of The Tears of Things. Walter Wink asks the question, “How do we not become what we hate?” So, Wink quotes Jesus and says, “Don’t return evil for evil or don’t mirror evil or don’t respond to evil in kind, always that you could translate this beautiful teaching from Jesus.” He says, “This refusal of reactive opposition is one of the most profound and difficult truths in scripture. We become what we hate.” Richard loves to quote that line.
We become what we hate. The very act of hating something draws it to us. Since our hate is usually a direct response to evil done to us, our hate almost invariably causes us to respond in the terms already laid down by the enemy. Unaware of what is happening, we turn into the very thing we oppose. And one of the things that Walter Wink teaches us and Richard teaches us in The Tears of Things is there is a way call out injustice and there is a way to work to make love more real in the world that is not returning hatred with hatred. But I got to be honest with the three of you, I find myself living in a moment where I daily need to check my own feelings of anger and grief and hatred and remind myself that in my hatred of evil, I don’t want to become what I hate. And I’m like, “Thanks, Richard. You’ve given me this very, very difficult task to wrestle with.”
I’m curious for the three of you, how are you living the teachings forward? Is there a challenge or a new question that you don’t have the answer to yet that has emerged in your heart as you’ve taken this journey over the last few months?
Drew Jackson: I want to say something to what you just shared in terms of we’ve become like what we hate. I’ve been thinking about that. It’s one of those all important questions for our time. But I’ve been thinking about another aspect to it where I’ve often heard it said we become like what we worship, right? And there’s this whole idea of worship, not being lifting your hands and singing, but this whole idea of attention. What is it that I’m turning my attention to? What is it that I am setting my gaze on? And so when you bring it into the context of become like what we hate, you recognize that, “Wow, I become like what I hate because I put so much attention on it. It becomes the focus of my gaze. I spend so much time obsessing over what I hate.”
This whole idea of becoming like what we worship is honestly rooted in the idea of when the Bible talks about us being created in the image of God, one of the ways to understand that is that we are like mirrors, like angled mirrors. We are created to be those who gaze at love and then reflect love out into the world. And so, the reason that God cares so much about this whole thing of worship is because it’s this gazing thing that we reflect out what we gaze on. And so I think about that in terms of this time, it’s so easy to become so obsessed with the thing that I hate, that I don’t realize that in my obsession over that, it’s the very thing that I end up reflecting out in some form or fashion.
I’ve been thinking about that and I was just like, I’m so glad you named that here.
Mike Petrow: Oh, that’s so good, Drew. I love that. I love, it’s all about love, right? That we would become what we love and what we’re obsessed with, we make in the world around us. That’s so good. Thank you for sharing that. I’m going to think on that for a long time.
Carmen: It reminds me what you just shared about what are we giving our attention to as a definition of worship really. And it reminds me of Dr. B saying, how we manufacture our joy comes from within, from the divine. You’re talking about us being made in God’s image and looking and gazing at love and reflecting that and living it out in the world. And it all reminds me of Richard’s axiom. The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. And that’s something that I sit with a lot. And when I pair that with what you just shared, Mike, that Wink said, “We need a refusal of reactive opposition.” It reminds me how important it is in order to have the strength to have that refusal of reactive opposition and in order to have the attention freed up to do that, how much joy and embracing joy.
I have this little ritual, which I’ve never shared in public. It may sound a little silly, but during the pandemic, I started pouring milk in my coffee cup because I don’t trust that coffee will be there in the morning, so to speak. I’m so excited that I make it the night before and then I just heat it up, which some people might disagree with, but it’s okay. Everybody can do their own thing. During the pandemic, I would pour the milk in the cup and taste the milk, grateful that I could still taste things because the COVID was… I had a lot of friends going through COVID and couldn’t taste things. And then I pour the coffee in and heat it up in the microwave. Well, to this day, I have this ritual that I pour a little bit of milk in the cup and I taste it and I’m grateful for all the good things.
It’s not just the milk, the sweet taste of the milk. But what I mean is that small moment of joy where I’m grateful for my husband, a call from a kind friend, you all as my friends, the joy of collaborating, a student who gets a concept where they felt lost before and just the fact of sometimes being out early enough to see the event we simply call the sunrise, that really for me reminds me that God is so generous and so mysterious. And so for me, living the teachings forward is really me asking God, “What part of love is joy and how do I keep finding it?”
Paul Swanson: Thanks, Carmen. That settles in deep. One thing that you all have been saying is the word attention, what will you pay attention to? And I brought up that phrase, which I’m sure we’ve all heard of the attention economy, and I think about what we’re giving our attention to, how that can, I think, often build an empire of consciousness. Poet Jim Harrison talks about how some people must remain outside. And I think what he means by that is some people who are in the center of empire must learn to step outside, to live on the edge of the inside. And I think how I’m wrestling with that question of living the teaching forward is, “What am I paying attention to? Whose messages am I paying attention to? Is it those with the loudest microphone? Is it those who I see sleeping in bushes and parks in my neighborhood?”
And to me, that’s the continual kind of triggering point of, “Do I know more about some random celebrity that I will never meet, who’s never done anything meaningful in my life than I do my own neighbor who I see in tears?” And I think that is one of the heavy set markers, the bookmark that I’ve been putting in through this book throughout, what am I paying attention to? How am I paying attention to the prophets of scripture and also to the prophets of now, who I just feel are inviting me to step outside in the way Harrison was talking about not to hold the center of empire consciousness, because I’m benefiting greatly from it. And that is not the radicality of the path of the prophet that I feel this whole conversation has been a part of.
One of my great reminders of this is when I’m walking my dog, Charlie, and every time he takes a poop, I pick it up and say to myself, “I am not above this. I am not above the cleaning of excrement from my little dog.” And paying attention to those small things helps me pay attention to the humanity suffering, our planet crying out. I want to step outside of the attention economy. I want to step outside of empire consciousness and be with all my friends there, which I feel like is so much the heartbeat of these conversations.
Mike Petrow: Paul, I so appreciate that. This idea of paying attention, I love that the word payment, right? Pay is in there because empire consciousness, dominant culture, call it what you will, everything around us is demanding payment every moment of every day. I hope for everyone listening that this journey and this book has helped us do a lot of inner work in recognizing our anger and our sadness and our love and where our attention gets hooked, but also leading us to outer work, looking for ways that we can let that help us roll up our sleeves and make love more real in the world, even in a scary time for so many people that we can figure out ways to create oases of agape. These sort of places of love that create the reality that Christ calls us to. I wonder, Drew, Paul, Carmen, as a final blessing or encouragement, what would you leave folks with or invite them into as they live the teachings of The Tears of Things forward?
Drew Jackson: I’ll simply go back to the words of that short poem, but often this time as a blessing, as an invitation. Know that growth more often looks like letting go than adding more. Having all the extra stripped away until all that’s left is love.
Paul Swanson: I’ve been using this book Becoming Fire through the year with the Desert Fathers and Mothers. There’s a prayer that doesn’t have an attribute to it, but to me, there’s something about this conversation that rings true with this. I’m going to read this. “If you seek after God with all your heart and all your strength, then the virtues of your soul and body will turn you into a mirror of the image of God within. You will be so merged in God and God merged in you that each will endlessly repose in the other. Such are the riches of the gifts of the spirit that such a disciple will be and be manifested as the very icon of divine blessedness, a very God by adoption since God is the protector of their own perfection.” And I feel like the path of the prophet brings us into that mirroring of what breaks God’s heart, breaks our heart. And as Mike says, how do we make love more real in the world with this sense of divine blessedness?
Carmen: I keep sitting with, as a prophet, what would I be for? And how can I put that energy in the world, that trickster energy we’ve been talking about? And for me, the blessing starts with, may you and I be kind to ourselves. And remember, we’re all interconnected. When we feel we want to eviscerate ourselves because of a failure or a problem, may we turn to God’s kindness within us and find it there. We always do. And then may we go out into the world to the Post Office, to students, at home with our family, with our friends on the phone, wherever we are, with each other, like here, and may we be kindness because the world really needs kindness.
Mike Petrow: Some words from Richard, he writes, “My final conviction is that we cannot dismantle the violence we see 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 unconditional love and respect or nothing will ever change. We will not, we cannot understand or absorb the compelling message of the prophets so long as we allow fear, threat, and self-interest to dominate the story.”
So, I want to close with the same words I got to share at the very end of the Revision Conference where we asked what do we do with Christianity and listening to all our teachers share, I jotted this down in my journal. I think we need a better story for Christianity and humanity that’s rooted in an old story, moving from control and conquest to contemplation and compassion, from kingship to kin, from kingdom to community of creation, from profiteering to prophecy, from conversion to conversation, from explanation to exploration, from defining dogma to discussing the divine, where the quest is in the questions and asking that is not an acquiring, but is seeking insight from our elders, our ancestors, and each other, where we aren’t Christian soldiers, but first responders, battlefield medics, not heroes, but healers, not warriors but wise ones, where hell is not a place that we avoid, but a place that we invade and heaven isn’t a far off place we go to when we die.
It’s a dream of love. We’re willing to die to make real on the earth right now. So, friends, thank you for joining us for these conversations this season. We hope that each of you tell the story of love and the world around you right now with your thoughts, with your words, and especially with your actions. Thanks everyone for joining us on Everything Belongs.
Paul Swanson: Thanks for listening to this podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation, an educational non-profit that introduces seekers to the contemplative Christian path of transformation. To learn more about our work, visit us at cac.org. Everything Belongs is made possible, thanks to the generosity of our supporters and the shared work of…
Mike Petrow: Mike Petrow.
Paul Swanson: Paul Swanson.
Drew Jackson: Drew Jackson.
Carmen: Carmen Acevedo Butcher.
Jenna Keiper: Jenna Keiper.
Izzy Spitz: Izzy Spitz.
Megan Hare: Megan Hare.
Sara Palmer: Sara Palmer.
Dorothy : Dorothy Abrahams.
Brandon Strange: Brandon Strange.
Vanessa Yee: Vanessa Yee.
Cassidy Hall: Cassidy Hall.
Corey Wayne: And me, Corey Wayne. The music you hear is composed and provided by our friends, Hammock. And we’d also like to thank Sound On Studios for all of their work in post-production. From the high desert of New Mexico, we wish you peace and every good.