Mike Petrow:

Oh my gosh, my friends, welcome back to the Everything Belongs Podcast, the podcast where we live the teachings of Father Richard Rohr forward. As you know, each season of Everything Belongs. We take one of Father Richard Rohr’s cherished books and we go through it chapter by chapter, first heading over to his Hermitage, sitting down with him in his living room and just having a conversation about that particular chapter. Then inviting a guest from the outside to have a conversation with us so that we can ask new questions, and apply it to new situations, and gain new insight.

Now, this season has been very, very special because we are exploring Father Richard’s newest and, he claims, very last book, The Tears of Things. If you can believe it, we are about halfway through our exploration of this amazing book. Last episode, we talked about chapter four, Welcoming Holy Disorder, how the prophets carry us through. We got to talk to Jungian psychologist Connie Zweig in one of my favorite conversations.

Next month we will be talking about chapter five, Jeremiah, the patterns that carry us across. We have an amazing conversation with Richard, one of my favorites. I know I say that every single time, but it’s really true. And then we’ll be talking to Dr. Walter Fluker. I cannot wait for you to hear that. But before we go there, there’s so much happening in the world right now. The world is on fire. We had the passing of Pope Francis and the appointment of a new Pope and Pope Leo. The Tears of Things debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list, and there’s been so much interest. Richard has had so many conversations on other podcasts, he’s had conversations with John Deere and Jen Hatmaker and Elise Lohnen. He’s been on the Jesus Calling Podcast, and so many more.

You can look them up, you can track them down. And in the midst of all these great conversations, we are so excited to share with you today a bonus episode, which is our precious teacher, Father Richard Rohr talking, not about a chapter, but about the entire book, the Tears of Things, with his dear friend Father Greg Boyle, who also recently put an amazing book out into the world, Cherished Belonging, the Healing Power of Love in Divided Times. If you don’t know this, Father Greg was a parish priest in gangland Los Angeles. And way back in 1988, he started an organization with the hopes of improving the lives of folks who were trying to get out of gangs in East Los Angeles. That organization, Homeboy Industries, over the years has evolved into the world’s largest and most successful gang intervention and rehab program.

The work that they do is life-changing. It is the gospel in action. It is everything Richard teaches in three dimensions, in real life, taking the power of love to meet people in their anger and in their sadness, and to help them heal, and to change their lives by the power of what Father Greg calls cherished belonging. I cannot tell you how excited I am for you to hear the conversation of these two profound living embodiments of action and contemplation. This is the very first time they’ve recorded a conversation together and I’m so thrilled that we get to share it with all of you as this special bonus episode.

Now, as we always do, before we jump into that conversation, Paul Swanson and I are going to head over to Richard’s house. We’re going to hear from Richard, his thoughts on the new Pope. We’re going to hear how excited Richard is about how the book is going out into the world, and we’re going to get to hear from Richard how excited he was to spend time with Father Greg. You’ll probably get to hear me complain to Paul about how jealous I was that he got to go and be a part of this conversation and I had to stay behind.

But like all of you, I get to listen with bated breath and just hear all the wisdom from these two profound teachers. And I got to tell you, I am so thrilled that you have been a part of this conversation around the Tears of Things with all of us and this continuing conversation about how love can lead us through our anger and our sadness, to work to make love more real in the world around us. Without further ado, let’s get into it, let’s head over to Richard’s house. And then can’t wait for you to hear Richard and Father Greg in conversation.

From the Center for Action and Contemplation, I’m Mike Petrow.

Paul Swanson:

I’m Paul Swanson.

Carmen Acevedo Butcher:

I’m Carmen Acevedo Butcher.

Drew Jackson:

And I’m Drew Jackson.

Mike Petrow:

And this is Everything Belongs.

Richard, I know that one of the most precious moments that I’ll never forget is that Paul and I were with you and all the staff at CAC gathered together for one of our annual all-staff meetings where everyone flies in from all over the country to be together. And in the middle of a conversation that you were having with the entire staff, we got the news that a new Pope had been chosen and we got to watch you react to it in real time, which was absolutely fantastic. I a video on my phone-

Richard Rohr:

I thought I was like a little boy in a candy store.

Mike Petrow:

Oh, you were so excited. For folks listening, how are you feeling about the selection of the new Pope?

Richard Rohr:

Ecstatic still. This man is chosen. I hope to read you a quote if you’ll allow me please that if he says nothing more than this and implements it in a little bit, we’re off to a great start. So Pope Leo said his first weekend as Pope, “Brothers, sisters, I speak to you, especially to those who no longer believe, no longer hope, no longer pray because they think God has left. To those of you who are fed up with scandals, with misused power, with a silence of a church that sometimes seems more like a palace than a home, there he is owning the shadow of the church right at the beginning. I too was angry with God. I too saw good people die, children suffer, grandparents cry without medicine. And yes, there were days when I prayed and only felt an echo. But then I discovered something God doesn’t shout, God whispers. And sometimes he whispers from the mud, from pain, from a grandmother who feeds you without having anything.”

I mean, this guy’s supposed to be an intellectual, knows five languages fluently, and he talks like this. This is, for a Catholic, it’s just mind blowing. There’s no intellectualization of the gospel. “I don’t come to offer you perfect faith.” What? We thought that’s what the Pope was for. “I come to tell you that faith is a walk with stones, puddles, and unexpected hugs.” He’s just too good. “I’m not asking you to believe in everything, I’m asking you not to close the door.” Such an honest… “Give a chance to the God who waits for you without judgment.”

And there he calls Pope Francis, his precious legacy. It is the language of Pope Francis, no judgment. “I’m just a priest who saw God in the smile of a woman who lost her son, and yet she cooked for others. That changed me.” I don’t know if he’s literally saying that was his conversion moment, but… “So if you’re broken, if you don’t believe, if you’re tired of the lies, admitting there have been lies, come anyway with your anger.” It’s what we’re saying in the new book. “Your doubt, your dirty backpack.” Gee, he’s clever. “No one here will ask you for a VIP card because this church, as long as I breathe, will be a home for the homeless and rest for the weary.”

And I know presumably he’ll be Pope the rest of my lifetime. “God doesn’t need soldiers, he needs brothers and sisters. And you, yes, you are one of them.” Brings a doubt to personal election. I mean, it’s just too good to be true that a Pope would talk that way his first days in office. He must be a grand human being. He really must.

Mike Petrow:

That’s so profound. I feel like… So I know you are such a huge fan of Pope Francis and still are, and you feel like Pope Francis legacy’s in good hands.

Richard Rohr:

It’s in very good hands. Maybe he’s even in a unique position to take it farther. For Catholics of the conservative ilk who thought Francis was just a momentary anomaly, two popes in a row can’t be wrong. This is very helpful for what we’ve been trying to say since Vatican II.

Paul Swanson:

You shared the motto of Pope Leo. Oh yes. Can you share that again here of your resonance with that?

Richard Rohr:

Yeah, it’s just a little Latin phrase, [foreign language 00:10:58], we are one in other words. In the one, we are one. He’s saying, “I’m not here to fight with… I’m here to create unity.” Brilliant, brilliant. I mean a Hindu or Buddhist could say that, any mystic would say that. So he has to be a contemplative or he’d never come up with such a motto.

Mike Petrow:

One of my favorite moments when they announced his name and no one in the room knew what it meant. You went, “An American.” And you said-

Richard Rohr:

I did?

Mike Petrow:

You did. You said, “They said there would never be an American Pope.”

Richard Rohr:

No, I assumed that years ago, there’d never be an American. He has to be exceptionally good for the world cardinals to elect an American.

Mike Petrow:

Well, you said the resistance to an American is because we already have too much empire.

Richard Rohr:

We don’t need a pope who’s more empire, but he had proven he wasn’t imperial. Yeah. It’s easy to wake up every morning as a Catholic saying, “Wow, I lived to see the church in good hands.” Thank you, Jesus. Thank you. Yeah.

Mike Petrow:

Last question. You mentioned the significance of him choosing the name Leo.

Richard Rohr:

Leo the 13th, the end of the 19th century. He was Pope into the beginning of the 20th century. And he was known as the social justice pope. He began the tradition of writing social justice encyclicals the most famous being Rerum Novarum, where he clearly said, “The church is changing sides. We’ve been on the side of management long enough, we are on the side of the workers.” And in 1895, that was a revolution, “We’re on the side of the workers.” He meant it and he was from the Italian elite. So how he knew it so well and expressed it so well. But it was clear what Leo was trying to say by taking his name.

Paul Swanson:

Gosh. Well, may we hold in our hearts and prayers for this next season of leadership and continuing that ministry of encounter, I feel like too.

Richard Rohr:

Encounter, dialogue, synodality, to use Pope Francis’s word. He’s already quoted it because he knows it isn’t a common word.

Mike Petrow:

What’s it mean?

Richard Rohr:

Synodality, to make all decisions in communal fashion.

Mike Petrow:

A synod.

Richard Rohr:

So for a pope who has ultimate authority to say, “We’re going to make decisions only after consultation and discussion and dialogue,” that’s huge. Huge. Now, if we can only elect all Popes from now on in that ilk, to not allow them to be dictators. And if some of it rubs off on the would-be dictators in America and the other countries. Because we’re veering toward dictatorship. And so for him to emerge and model the opposite, hallelujah. I hope some of the church rubs off on the political systems. Yeah.

Paul Swanson:

Amen. Thank you, Richard, for sharing about the Pope.

Mike Petrow:

Exciting.

Paul Swanson:

So exciting.

Richard Rohr:

It is.

Mike Petrow:

It’s great to get some good news in the world seeing these days, right?

Everything Belongs will continue in a moment.

Father Boyle is a hero of mine and I experienced him like a modern day Saint Francis. From 1986 to 1992, Father Greg Boyle served as the pastor of the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles in the center of the highest concentration of gang activity in the entire city, during the so-called decade of death that began in the late 1980s and peaked at a thousand gang-related killings in 1992. In response, he the parish and the community members founded what would eventually become Homeboy Industries, which employs and trains former gang members in a range of social skills and enterprises.

Father Greg’s catchphrase, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job,” reveals a foundational work of changing the outer circumstances and creating opportunities for those who might otherwise think that they were trapped in a cycle of violence. But eventually, Father Greg’s work evolved over the years to move deeper into an inner change of identity supported by loving community, changing the outer circumstances needed to be matched by changing the inner circumstances.

And you can see this in some of the titles of his many, many books, some of my favorites, including Tattoos On the Heart, the Power of Boundless Compassion, Barking to the Choir, the Power of Radical Kinship. The whole language, The Power of Extravagant Tenderness. And most recently, the book that we’ll talk about in this conversation, Cherished Belonging, The Healing Power of love in Divided Times. Father Greg’s work has been recognized across the world. He’s received many awards, including but not limited to the California Peace Prize. He’s been inducted into the California Hall of Fame. In 2014, President Obama named Father Boyle a champion of change. In 2024, Father Greg was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. We are so excited for you to join Father Greg Boyle and Father Richard Rohr in conversation with Paul Swanson on this very special bonus episode of Everything Belongs.

Paul Swanson:

I wanted to begin the way that I think every great conversation should begin, and that’s with humiliation.

Richard Rohr:

My daily humiliation.

Paul Swanson:

You talk about your daily humiliation. Greg, you talk about humiliation as a compass.

Greg Boyle:

Of the what?

Paul Swanson:

As a compass.

Greg Boyle:

As a compass.

Paul Swanson:

So what can you guys tell me about the importance of humiliation? What is so great about humiliation?

Richard Rohr:

What a way to start. No one talk has ever started that way.

Paul Swanson:

You want to kick us off, Richard?

Richard Rohr:

Well, as a Franciscan that was just central. We were called Friars Minor, to be a little one and not a great one. It was so basic that you feel like if you’re untrue to that, you’re untrue to Francis. But what’s good about it psychologically is it just keeps you in proper perspective, especially now that we have the Webb Telescope and all. My God, what other responses appropriate, but humility, that we’re a little dot, huh, in this universe? That’s all that comes to mind.

Paul Swanson:

Yeah. Does humiliation always lead you to humility?

Richard Rohr:

Oh, no. I guess not.

Paul Swanson:

That’s fine if it does. It’d be…

Richard Rohr:

No. A lot of times, I’ve certainly seen myself to it. You just fight it to prove it’s not true, “I’m not the terrible person you think I am.” Probably that’s the first ego response is to defend the self. Naturally, we don’t like it.

Paul Swanson:

Yeah.

Richard Rohr:

Yeah.

Paul Swanson:

How about for you, Greg?

Greg Boyle:

Well, I always say it jokingly whenever I say, “Well, humiliation is my compass.” And it’s kind of just like when I fell down the stairs last night and I was caught by Michael and saved from an untimely death. And then I felt humiliated. And then it always brings you back to some kind of anchor or grounding. Ignatius talks about the three degrees of humility. But again, I think we morph humiliation and humility as sort of they all get mixed sometime at some point. But anyway, it does lead you to putting first things recognizably first when you need to kind of go, in terms of the ego and being balanced and centered.

Richard Rohr:

If you don’t somehow admire it, you’ll fight it. You’ll fight it, “I do not deserve this humiliation.”

Paul Swanson:

And I insist that I don’t. I’d love to know how the two of you met. Was it a humiliating experience, or was it friendly first encounter? You guys-

Greg Boyle:

Well, I always remember at the Religious Ed Congress, which is the largest in the world or something, in Anaheim. And we would be both there speaking. And people would come up to me and say, “Father Richard, I love your books.” And they would give him the homey handshake like Father Greg. But that’s what I recall. And we would always end up seeing each other at some point during that.

Paul Swanson:

When you first met Richard, had you read his work before you had met him?

Greg Boyle:

Oh yeah. I had read all his…

Paul Swanson:

Did he live up to your expectations?

Greg Boyle:

Always.

Paul Swanson:

Yeah.

Greg Boyle:

Always.

Richard Rohr:

Don’t be nice.

Greg Boyle:

I remember though, I was in.. This was not long ago, I was in Albuquerque and I was in a church and I was about to speak. And I have so incorporated Richard’s theology that you don’t always say, “Well, as Richard Rohr says.” It is sort of become part of who you are. And then I go, “Oh shit, he’s in the front row.” So I think I’ve pampered a lot of, “As the great Richard Rohr would say, if you don’t transform your pain, you transmit it.” But the heartening thing about that is homies at Homeboy Industries use that phrase.

Richard Rohr:

Do they?

Greg Boyle:

And they use it with each other. And if somebody had a fight and they go, “Here’s the deal, if you don’t transform your pain…”

Richard Rohr:

They say that. God bless you.

Greg Boyle:

“… you’re going to just…” They may not even say transmit. They might say, you continue to-

Richard Rohr:

Pass it on.

Greg Boyle:

… pass it on, or engage in it. I overheard that one day and I thought, “Wow.” I said, “Why are you not acknowledging Father Richard Rohr when you’re saying this?”

Paul Swanson:

We’ll get sued by the lawyer. I would love to ask you both about Pope Francis who we lost this week. He’s no longer walking with us on this earthly plane, but has joined the cloud of witnesses. But he was a Jesuit who had the aroma of a Franciscan.

Richard Rohr:

Yeah, that’s right.

Paul Swanson:

And you both have that …

Greg Boyle:

That’s a great sentence.

Richard Rohr:

He put us together. Yes.

Paul Swanson:

I’d love to know for each of you, Greg, let’s start with you, but what was it about Pope Francis that most inspired you or impacted you, and the way that he lived out the gospel?

Greg Boyle:

Well, I remember when he began his papacy, this is an odd reference, but Whoopi Goldberg said of him with great admiration, “He’s all about the original program.”

Richard Rohr:

The original program.

Greg Boyle:

The original program. And I thought, “Wow, that’s true.”

Richard Rohr:

What a good phrase.

Greg Boyle:

She said he’s going with the original program. So there was an acknowledgment that this was a return to the gospel, kind of a stance on the margins and with the poor and the powerless, and that’s the original program. I always liked that phrase.

Richard Rohr:

I do too. I never heard that.

Paul Swanson:

That’s a keeper.

Greg Boyle:

But the Jesuit thing and the Franciscan things, so a Jesuit who picked Francis as his name, so he was able to merge a lot of… I love the aroma. I think that’s a good… The aroma of the Franciscans.

Paul Swanson:

For you, Richard, what did Pope Francis kind of…

Richard Rohr:

All that’s been coming to mind these days for me is how will we ever match him again? Not that that’s the goal, but it’s going to be hard for people like me anyway to compare as radical as he was while holding such a sacral high priest role. It’s just a rare, rare combination. And he did it without arrogance, but with a calm certitude that this was the original program. I want to use that great phrase. And if it is, then we don’t have to explain it or apologize for it, we just implement it. He was an implementer of the gospel.

Paul Swanson:

It’s fun to hold this kind of space of the Jesuit Franciscan piece. For me personally, I was educated by the Jesuits and then have been working at the Center…Creighton University. And then I’ve been working at the CAC for almost 20 years, so I hold both of these traditions very dear to me. So I would love to know-

Richard Rohr:

And he is evangelical.

Paul Swanson:

Grew up evangelical. Yeah. I’m very confused.

Richard Rohr:

Yes.

Paul Swanson:

Obviously.

Greg Boyle:

Talk about aroma.

Paul Swanson:

Greg, I would love to know what has the Franciscan tradition taught you that kind of added more to your Jesuit formation? And then, Richard, I’ll ask you the same question reverse in a minute.

Greg Boyle:

Well, Francis is always about a return, for me anyway, to the marrow of the gospel.

Richard Rohr:

And he uses that phrase.

Greg Boyle:

And that for me is helpful because when you’re getting caught up in observance or adherence to certain things, just the invitation back to the marrow, and that’s a phrase I love and use of Francis. But even working the experience of Francis with lepers, and the fear even that preceded his, that moment, which you would know better than me. But that always connected to my own 40 years with gang members who were essentially feared, and lepers, and outcasts, and demonized, and disposable and all those things. And yet there was this… It was a moment where he saw leper and there was a dispelling of his own fear.

Richard Rohr:

He describes it in his testament, what before was hateful to me, it’s so beautiful, became sweetness in life. Even the choice of those words so positive, “What before was hateful to me.” He counts the embracing of the leper as the real moment of his conversion.

Greg Boyle:

Oh, really?

Richard Rohr:

Yeah. And that’s where he founds the community down in the leper colony below Assisi. Have you ever been there?

Greg Boyle:

Yeah.

Richard Rohr:

Yeah, you’ve been there.

Greg Boyle:

A couple times, yeah.

Richard Rohr:

Yeah, yeah. But it’s not the movement from the hateful to the tolerable.

No, it’s sweetness and life.

Greg Boyle:

It’s sweetness in life, which is pretty remarkable.

Richard Rohr:

It is. It is. Yeah. He got it. He knew how to be a human being. That’s the best thing you can say of Francis.

Greg Boyle:

But he also knew how to navigate the church because I always… And again, I don’t know this like you know it, but it seemed like he could somehow preach the gospel in a way that didn’t upset the sys…

Richard Rohr:

Wasn’t a putdown. Yeah. My tripartite description of growth is order-disorder, reorder, and he found a way to introduce disorder, a whole new model for religious life. All we had was monasticism, and he didn’t put it down, but he said, “This was my bachelor’s thesis. Forgive me. Don’t speak to me of Benedict.” Forgive me, Benedictans. But he said, “Don’t speak to me of Augustine. God has shown me a different way and that he had that conviction. God has shown me a different way. It was hardly religious life really by the terms up to that point.

How does he interact with this moment that we’re in following up on the-

How would he?

Greg Boyle:

Yeah, the post-Francis time.

Richard Rohr:

I don’t know. Yeah. I don’t know. I know he would not get caught up in the polemics. He’d find a way to gracefully ignore it, I think.

Paul Swanson:

Well, I don’t want to gracefully ignore the Jesuits. So, Richard, I’d love to know what have you learned from the Jesuits that was a complementarian to your Franciscan formation.

Richard Rohr:

I didn’t grow up in any Jesuit world at all, but after the community started in Cincinnati, the Jesuits were my spiritual directors. I needed someone outside of my own community and the Cincinnati province and Detroit province had…

Greg Boyle:

And Xavier University from there.

Richard Rohr:

Xavier and they all… I’d run out a Jesuits house when it got hot and the criticism, opposition. And not that the Franciscans fought me, they really didn’t. They were afraid of where I was going, but they didn’t me. But the Jesuits outrightly supported me. They were good to me, always, trusted what I was doing. “We always thought you were certainly the smarter of the two orders.” The smart guys joined the Dominicans and Jesuits, and we leftovers joined the Franciscans. So we looked up to the Jesuit attitude toward things, and if they said it was okay, it probably was okay. Yeah, so they were a grace to me always. And that continued through all my life really.

Paul Swanson:

So my colleague Mike and I have been talking with Richard going through each chapter of his latest book, Tears of Things, and we were recently talking about Ezekiel. And one of the things that Richard brings up in that book is how Ezekiel was a prophet and a priest, and how that was kind of a unique space to hold both the prophetic role and the priestly role. And I know that both of you have been called a lot of things in your life, but I’ve also heard you both called a priest and a prophet.

And that’s a unique space to hold. If we look at the tradition. Usually, it’s one or the other. So I don’t want you to answer for yourself about how you hold that post, but I’d love for you, Richard, first let speak about Greg. How do you see Greg as holding both the priestly and the prophetic voice and embodiment in our times in his life? Then I’ll ask you to do the same for Richard.

Richard Rohr:

You hold them both gracefully, not pushing the priest role, not pushing the prophet role, just enacting them quietly, but truthfully. Well, maybe not so quietly. It’s putting together order with disorder and knowing that they don’t need to fight one another. The priest being ordered, the prophet being disorder. What seems like disorder, it’s really leading to reorder. And I think you’ve done that for many of us by your enactment of a care for the street kids. Why is that not obvious? The prophet makes the unobvious obvious, and you’ve done that for many of us. So it doesn’t look like something rebellious. But, of course. Of course, this is where… Well, Pope Francis, what did he say? You need to smell like the sheep. What a great line, huh?

Paul Swanson:

Perfect.

Richard Rohr:

You need to smell like the sheep. No superiority judgments. Yeah.

Paul Swanson:

That’s great. Great. Greg, how about you? How would you characterize Richard holding both the priestly and prophetic?

Greg Boyle:

There’s a thing you mentioned in your book about the movement from the 10 Commandments to the Eight Beatitudes.

Richard Rohr:

Eight Beatitudes.

Greg Boyle:

And so part of that is seeing as God sees. So we get stuck in the 10 Commandments as good as necessary as they are, it’s a kind of how we think God thinks. But once you move to this mystical place of how does God love, which… So Richard does that, maybe the prophet points things out, but the hope of a humble priest is that you’ll point the way that somehow, what do we do next, how do we put one loving foot in front of the next? So otherwise, a priesthood sometimes gets stuck in observance. In observance. But it’s interesting, what you just said, it was also about Francis of Assisi. It was like somehow, “Oh yeah, okay. Oh, I see that. “That’s kind of how it was presented, how he presented. As opposed to, I don’t know, flamethrower or something like that.

Richard Rohr:

We called it in the order soft prophecy, that our job was to be soft prophets. Not railing, but-

Greg Boyle:

What do you think about that?

Richard Rohr:

I like that.

Greg Boyle:

Yeah,

Richard Rohr:

Just quietly living it. But visibly living it so the world could imitate and follow. It wasn’t judging people, it was just doing it differently, almost necessarily on the edge of society, which was always in love with its own culture, its own superiority systems. There’s hardly any exceptions to that.

Greg Boyle:

Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Rohr:

Maybe Nepal or somewhere. But certainly, the European nations where we inherited our Christianity from were built on superiority, culturally.

Greg Boyle:

But in St. Ignatius, in the spiritual exercises, on the meditation on the two standards, he has this thing where he just says, “See Jesus standing in the lowly place.”

Richard Rohr:

He says that?

Greg Boyle:

Yes. It’s like see Francis kiss the leper. I mean, it’s not like Francis or Jesus is saying, “Get your ass over to the lowly place.” It’s not that. It’s just see him standing in the lowly place. So it is evocative. You go, “Wow, why is he standing there? How does he seem to be standing there?”

Richard Rohr:

How does he-

Greg Boyle:

Joyful. He’s in the right place. He’s there-

Richard Rohr:

Not judgmental-

Greg Boyle:

It’s not judgmental, it’s not pointing, “Get over there.” And Francis, both Pope and saint, did the same thing. If you’re inviting people to joy and fearlessness, you do it by just standing where you need to be standing and people notice you there.

Richard Rohr:

And let the cards fall.

Greg Boyle:

Yeah. And they almost always fall in a way that people want to emulate, that want to somehow… I think, once they’re freed to be able to do that, where they go, “Yeah, I want to stand there too. I want to feel what he’s feeling,” the joy, the nothing can touch me. A fearlessness that’s really freeing.

Paul Swanson:

Yeah, fearlessness is so contagious.

Greg Boyle:

Especially now. I mean, I think it is. People are saying courage is contagious, people are saying this now. But it’s the same thing, it’s a fearlessness that’s not saddled with all this terror. It is like, “No, we’re going to move this way.”

Richard Rohr:

Fear is so predictable once you have a lot to protect, once you have a lot to prove. When you don’t have anything to prove or anything to protect except your own life lifestyle, you’re free, hopefully.

Paul Swanson:

Yeah, and we know that Jesus said repeatedly do not fear, and I think it does speak to what you’re both saying around how do you stand in love. It is facing that fear, moving past it with the courage. It sounds like you need the fear to be present, to be courageous, to step into that love.

Greg Boyle:

You’re not oblivious to what is the fear, but you’re still moving.

Paul Swanson:

You both have written marvelous books in this time of a lot of folks living in fear. I think there’s always times that people are living in fear. There’s many reasons that that happens. Then right now, Richard, with your book, Tears of Things, and Greg with your book, Cherished Belonging, I read these books in tandem and they read old drinking buddies.

Richard Rohr:

What a nice phrase.

Paul Swanson:

They would kind of finish each other’s sentences at times or drinks perhaps. But, Richard, you talk about this prophetic pattern of moving from anger, to sadness, to love, and Greg at Falcon Cherished Belonging, you’re speaking to the field of love that can hold the anger and sadness. And anytime we talk about love, you can feel like some syrup gets poured on and it becomes almost overly romanticized. But the way that you both write about love in your books, you can feel the texture and the ragged roughness of what actually love entails.

I would love just to hear your responses on how is your book centered on love by adding textures to it, by adding skin to it. Instead of how love often gets overly personified or watered down. Like when you distill something, it becomes stronger. And I feel like love in both of your books is so strong, but it can be hard to articulate in an overly saturated world that talks about love in a very particular way.

Richard Rohr:

The phrase that returns, correct me if I’m wrong, is it Tolstoy who said Love is a harsh and dreadful thing?

Greg Boyle:

Mm-hmm. Dorothy Day would always quote that.

Richard Rohr:

Dorothy Day would quote it, but as always, she got it. She was so right. In this age of sentimentalization of love, being nice and sweet, I think that phrase needs to be spoken and I think a true marriage, Paul is a married man with two children. Well, it isn’t harsh and dreadful, I’m sure. But you still had-

Greg Boyle:

And I’m going to tell her not to watch this.

Richard Rohr:

You still had the nights when you were awakened and the little fights with your wife. And things where you have to choose against sentimentality. Love isn’t a sentiment, it’s a choice. It’s a surrender. It’s an allowing to move into something bigger than yourself. If you’re not prepared for that one, it catches you unaware. It’s hard to garner it at the last second. You’ll normally give an ego response, first of all. It takes much of your life to learn how to love, I think.

Because it isn’t just a feeling, it’s not opposed to feeling, but it enriches, and deepens, and expands feeling. So the feeling is the same toward the enemy, as unbelievable as that sounds, as it is toward the friend, and that’s what you present so well, I think. What I love about your teaching, Greg, is you give an objective basis for love. The inherent, inherent, inherent dignity of all creation and of every human being. If you don’t make it inherent, human culture will whittle away at it and say, “Well, not here. Not there.”

Greg Boyle:

Not you.

Richard Rohr:

And not you. Yeah, exactly. And your work is such a positive choice for positive identity without making people prove it, prove that you’re worthy. Grace is inherent. Grace is implanted in the subject by reason of its creation. I use the term original blessing. Well, you use a whole bunch of metaphors, but you certainly teach it. It’s there and it’s not to be given and withdrawn. It’s there.

Greg Boyle:

I was on a podcast the other day where I said, “Love never fails.” And the interviewer said, “You know, our listeners are going to think you’re naive.” And I thought, “Well, I don’t know how you prove that except to say, ‘I think people…'” If anybody stops to think about how that’s been operative in their life, they go, “Yeah, in fact, in the end, it’s never failed.” And if it feels like it has, it’s just not the end.

Richard Rohr:

It’s not the end. Yeah.

Greg Boyle:

Yeah. But somehow-

Richard Rohr:

Wonderful.

Greg Boyle:

… we don’t have confidence in it. And we do think that it’s more savvy to not embrace love like somehow your head is in the clouds at a time when we need to be doing some things that are concrete. But I don’t think it cancels out concrete action. This is sort of the marriage of contemplation and action that you represent. That you have to kind do this together so that when the ego kind of interrupts and you-

Richard Rohr:

To be strategic.

Greg Boyle:

And you catch yourself. You try to catch yourself so that you can return to sweetness in life rather than tolerating people. No, don’t settle for that. Hold out for sweetness in life because that’s what a confidence in love as never failing will really… It’ll usher in that kind of moment of connection and kinship. I always talk about cherishing because love sort of gets lost. And I always say cherishing is love with its sleeves rolled up. It’s about really seeing people. So at Homeboy, you want to create a place that’s safe where people are seen so that they can be cherished. Because that’s what is healing, that’s how people are brought home to health and wholeness.

Richard Rohr:

Nothing else heals.

Greg Boyle:

Yeah.

Richard Rohr:

What else would heal?

Greg Boyle:

Exactly. A Homie texted me this morning, and just out of the blue he says, “I’m finding that the love here at Homeboy is healing my soul,” he said. Well, I think what does that even mean? What is he experiencing that is soul healing? It’s not one person, it’s not his therapist. It’s a kind of bombardment of dosing of love that’s really at a level of cherishing where people feel known, and seen, and valued in a place where cherishing is not hard to do.

It’s difficult to remember to cherish, but it’s not hard to actually cherish once you’ve caught yourself from winning the argument, or, “What am I going to do next,” when this person’s right here with you. So there’s a lot of things to catch, which is kind of part of our own practice so that we’re more attentive to how do you love and see as God sees. And though the air we breathe is a kind of a judgmental thing that’s hard to shake-

Richard Rohr:

So true.

Greg Boyle:

… we should go, “You know what your problem is? You need to do X, Y, and Z.”

Richard Rohr:

You need to join us.

Greg Boyle:

Yes. Or cut that shit out. You’re always trying to kind of refine their lives rather than love them. Working with gang members, walking with them has taught me that because you’re encountering real resistance, belligerence, battles. And then how do you have a confidence that’s part of the marrow that says love never fails, I know this is true. Even if it feels like it’s not successful in this moment, but it will ultimately be healing for everybody.

Paul Swanson:

You speak to that so well in your book and bring it to life in so many stories. I remember there’s one where you talk about someone at Homeboy saying, “I’ve changed.” And you write, “But are you healed? And how? We don’t want you to just change, we want you to be whole.” And I think that’s a difference of degrees often in a lot of people… We would rather have someone change than be whole. But what I read in your book is it takes the cherished belonging for the healing to happen and change almost flows out of that at a pace not always recognizable, but sometimes so. And so it is the conditions of cherished belongings that you see as the place of healing and also the place of change. Is that fair to say?

Greg Boyle:

So even in the early days when we were saying nothing stops the bullet like a job, we thought an employed gang member will never return to prison. And then even as we started a school and we thought, “Well, an educated gang member won’t ever go back to prison.” But then that was proving not true.

Richard Rohr:

Not always true.

Greg Boyle:

Yeah. But then we kind of landed maybe 20 years ago, 25 years ago, out of our 37 years where we said, “No, a healed gang member will not ever re-offend, period.” And it’s been borne out as truthful. So that’s the emphasis. We do all the other things. All those things are secondary to the primary community of healing where people are receiving doses constantly in a very repetitive way. It’s the repetitious nature of reassurance, affirmation, affection, hugging. I mean, all these things…

And so even if somebody relapses with drugs or returns to gang life for a moment, or goes to jail, we used to fret, we used to say, “Well, maybe they’ll come back.” Nobody says that now. Everybody says, “He’ll be back.” And they all come back. I’m not really aware of an exception. Because they’ll come back because once you’ve had a taste of having been cherished in a way that’s authentic, it’s so compelling. And you write so brilliantly about the 12 steps and how it’s like our American contribution to spirituality.

Richard Rohr:

That’s right. That’s right.

Greg Boyle:

But it honors relapses. It’s going to happen. It works if you work it. So all these kinds of notions that it’s really about healing in a way that’s very full.

Richard Rohr:

When you think of almost the entire ministry of Jesus is healing and teaching, healing and teaching. But we made the healings into miracle stories-

Greg Boyle:

That’s right.

Richard Rohr:

… to prove that this is a miracle. And that proves that he’s the son of God. It’s just the wrong track. It’s just that healing is what it’s all about. He wasn’t healing to go to heaven, he was healing them in this world. It’s obvious. How did we miss that? The corruption of the gospel became this creating tickets for the next world instead of aliveness in this world. How did we do that? I guess we’re all looking for something that’s going to liberate us from the moment instead of allowing us to trust that this moment is also good. This whole reward-punishment thing just so limits the gospel’s possibilities. It’s apocalyptic dualism, someone called it.

Greg Boyle:

We’re still stuck in it and how stuck, how do we… That’s why I think Francis, Saint, was trying to kind of say, “No, this is the road. This is the way to kind of offset that apocalyptic-”

Richard Rohr:

Dualism.

Greg Boyle:

“… dualism.”

Richard Rohr:

Yeah. Tragic on both sides. You get rewarded. So you do good so you can get a reward. Well, that prostitutes the notion of love. No, I do it for love because it’s true, not because it’s going to get me something.

Greg Boyle:

But it’s not just church. It’s also mass incarceration and all these… The punishment, reward notion.

Richard Rohr:

Gun culture.

Greg Boyle:

Yeah, it’s pervasive. So there’s a lot to address in it.

Richard Rohr:

It’s so easier to talk with you. It’s a delight to have someone who agrees with you.

Paul Swanson:

For once.

Richard Rohr:

Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

As the two of you have been talking, I’ve been thinking about the prodigal son stories has come to mind and it’s often been interpreted almost as if the prodigal son leaves and takes the father’s inheritance and the father doesn’t know if he’s going to come back. But when I hear you talking about everyone comes back at Homeboy, it makes me think that what a beautiful interpretation of the prodigal son. Of course, they’re going to come back. And how were all the prodigal son, daughter, child, we’re all going to come back. And it’s just a matter of holding that cherished belonging.

I know a lot of folks, they see the fruits of your lives out in the world. They see the work that you’ve done, the books you’ve written, and you quote scripture in such a way that you can tell that it’s something that you all live with and you work with. It’s malleable. And you talk about the mystical filter and you talk about the Jesus hermeneutic as these ways of which how you interpret scripture, what you hang on to and what you leave behind. I would love to hear from both of you. How do you engage, interpret scripture as you look at our times, as you look at the realities of our suffering world using the mystical filter of the Jesus hermeneutic? Greg, can we start with you?

Greg Boyle:

Well, our mutual friend, Mirabai Starr, says, “Once you know the God of love, you fire all the other gods.” Well, where does the firing happen? And a lot of times that’s sort of the mystical filter or the Jesus hermeneutic. It comes with you have a presumption of Jesus also quoting scripture and stopping short of passages that I’m going to presume he didn’t agree with where he said, “Yeah, this is his own filter, his own sense of the God of love says, ‘This is what I want to say to you, and the blind will see, and the prisoners will be set free,’ and all these things. This is what I want to say to you.”

I’m going to leave out all these other things that I’ve fired. And I think it’s okay, but it’s hard because speaking about the prodigal son, I have this Homie who loves you and reads everything you’ve ever written, and his name is Sergio. And I call him my spiritual director, and he is. Every morning, we wrote this morning based on the readings. He said, “I don’t know about forgiveness.” He says, “There’s too much back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. I just believe in fourth.” He says, “Fourth is mercy. Fourth is the Father running to his kid.”

Richard Rohr:

Running, yes.

Greg Boyle:

He doesn’t want to hear any fake ass apology. He just wants to kiss him, and hug him, and sob. That’s mercy. That’s fourth. And then he says that forgiveness waits. Anyway, it points to a fullness. I mean, you can do a whole thing on forgiveness. But there’s something more full in mercy, and that’s closer to the God of love. So then I think that’s how the filter works, forgiveness is a perfectly wonderful theological notion. But as Saint Ignatius says, “The God who’s always greater, which is always greater-

Richard Rohr:

Always. Always.

Greg Boyle:

“… than this notion.” So it’s okay to say greater than forgiveness. I mean, why would you settle for forgiveness when you could have mercy? There is a kind of sense of there’s something out there that’s even, yes, even larger than that, a larger love. So that’s what we do, I think, as humans is we hope to find the larger love, what’s larger than my judgment of this guy. Well, sweetness in life. That’s larger than, “Get your act together.” There’s something larger. That’s hard to do. But that’s where you catch yourself so you can in your own practice to be able to get to the running down the road, crying, and hugging, and kissing. Rather than, “What do you have to say? Where’s the apology?”

Paul Swanson:

Where have you been?

Richard Rohr:

Yes, where have you been?

Greg Boyle:

What’d you do with all of my money? Yeah. So there’s none of that. He could have settled for forgiveness, but he held out for mercy. Which is-

Paul Swanson:

So gratuitous.

Greg Boyle:

Which is… absolutely.

Paul Swanson:

Yeah. Richard, how does the Jesus hermeneutic help you find that larger love that Greg is talking about with his mystical filter? And do you have to change that filter every three months? Or how does that work?

Richard Rohr:

That’s good. If you take the time to observe how Jesus interprets scripture, he doesn’t seemingly interpret every line as of equal importance. How do you develop that eye in people that God cannot possibly be less than the most loving person I’ve met?

Greg Boyle:

That’s right.

Richard Rohr:

And I’ve met some truly loving people all around the world who just know how to do it with grace, with freedom, with joy, it comes naturally to them. Well, I know God is at least that much. How could he be less than that?

Greg Boyle:

Yeah, that’s right.

Richard Rohr:

How could she be less than that, if you don’t mind? Jesus just gives you all kind of permission, but I don’t know why we don’t take that permission and enjoy it. Instead, we use him to be a enforcer of the 10 Commandments and he himself, in the words we have recorded, says, “Well, it all comes down to two.” He said that, I am not trying to be a reductionist or a heretic. It all comes down to two, love God and love your neighbor. Is that so hard to comprehend? The 10 Commandments are just morality 101, I think I say in the new book.

They’re necessary for basic civilization. You have to stop lying and stop stealing. And we can’t survive without the 10 Commandments, but we don’t thrive. But you jump to the Eight Beatitudes, you’ve an alternative universe. And let’s be honest, doesn’t make sense to Washington DC, to London either, to any of the empires. We like the 10 Commandments, they impose order and that’s good. But we’ve got its order combined with seeming disorder, which you have to not just forgive, but show mercy toward as you just put it. That’s reorder, that is reorder, that’s enlightenment. And that’s the work of God in the soul to show you how to do that, till it comes naturally. It’s hardly a choice. It’s just the natural movement.

Greg Boyle:

But we don’t start there. If we were to love God and love your neighbor, if that was something that we led with that, the Jesus hermeneutic, if we led with that, then no one would have to tell anybody, “Don’t covet your neighbor’s goat,” or something. Because you’re so filled with a sense of alignment with the God of love. You go, “Yeah, nobody needs to tell me not to kill.” So it’s kind of backwards because I agree, you survive with the 10 Commandments, you thrive with the Eight Beatitudes. But we could… The church, I don’t know, could have begun… It was all indictment. It wasn’t invitation. We could have invited each other to the glory of loving and finding your true self and loving. And loving is your home. And the joy of not being homesick because, yeah, loving is who I am.

It’s like in New York Times, somebody was writing about resilience, they said, “We teach the wrong things in school. We need to teach resilience.” But my experience at Homeboy is if people are being cherished, they are sturdy, they are resilient. You don’t have to say, “Here’s our 10-point plan to gain resilience.” I mean, it doesn’t mean you don’t teach things. That doesn’t mean you don’t study things, or talk about things, because that just helps you identify what’s really happening. But I think it’s absurd to think that we ought to be teaching resilience, whereas the byproduct of resilience are people being loved. You know this as a parent, your kid becomes because he or she is so cherished, they know how to cherish. They know what to do, nobody needs to say, “Oh, by the way, here are the 10 Commandments on the lawn of the courthouse, just to remind you.”

Paul Swanson:

From that place of cherishing children, anybody can leave that community and go on the adventures of life and come back, because they have that grounding. And as we read our conversation here, the books that you both have written really concretize contemplation and action through the patterns, through the lived stories. And this is a book, I think often in kind of spiritual circles or church circles, we take a lot of these books just into our head. And both of these books feel like they need to be kind of pierced through the heart and out through the hands and the feet. How do you both hope that readers will practice your book? Richard, let’s start with you this time. How do you hope people will practice Tears of Things, this wisdom prophetic pattern?

Richard Rohr:

I look back at my too many books, and I think one theme that’s largely in all of them is growth, development, process, staging, even the Old Testament, New Testament, Old Covenant, New Covenant, what I call first half of life and second half of life, they allow for growth. You don’t get it unless it’s given to you and you’re a receiver. So you have to teach people how to be in the receiving mode of love and trust it. And that often takes a while, especially if you grew up without it, which you do so well with people who grew up often wounded by family itself.

The place that should be the original school becomes the original wounding. And yet if the wound is… The risen Christ is shown with his wounds still intact. If the wound is the way through to resurrection, which I think is the message, then we’ve got our work straight in front of us. The healing of wounds, not the eliminating of them, the healing of them. And I think that’s what you do so well in your work, Greg. But once you start with, “You shouldn’t have wounds,” we are in trouble because we all do. Even those of us who look like we don’t. Yeah, we know better.

Greg Boyle:

And essential to the, I think is to welcome your wounds because if you don’t, you’re going to be tempted to despise the wounded. And it’s the thing that keeps us separate, which was kind of the bankruptcy of the moral quest has never kept us moral, has kept us from each other. So how do you find a way to bridge this and name things correctly in the process? Because I think we don’t understand even the Jesus hermeneutics that’s trying to tell us, “Well, maybe let’s put another name on that.”

The Pharisees are grumbling because he is having dinner with Levi who’s a public tax collector and sinner. They see sinner, but he talks about the doctor comes for people to bring health. So they see sin, but he sees health. If we name things sin when it’s really maybe about health, that’s liberating. Because then none of us are well until all of us are well. So how do we walk each other home to where we need to go?

Paul Swanson:

That’s beautiful. Very last question, and it’s a question that you write in your book, Greg. So I’m going to start with you first. How do we keep vigilant hearts, not because death is coming, but because life is happening in all the wild contours of the human condition?

Greg Boyle:

I think that comes back to our vigilance is born of our practice. So to the extent that you can be grounded. And none of it’s once and for all. Nobody says, I prayed on five months ago and now I’m good to go. Well, whatever anyone’s understanding of what that practice ought to look like, or how it nourishes you is really a constant thing. Even the 12 steps, they’ll say, “One day at a time.” And I always go, “Yikes, that’s way too long.” Because it’s with every breath, how do you sink your breathing to your cherishing? Really hard because we are the dog that sees the squirrel. Suddenly, we’re running over here and we lose contact with our anchor. So I think the practice is the thing that kind of keeps that true.

Paul Swanson:

How about for you, Richard? How would you respond? How do we keep our vigilant hearts open, not because death is coming, because life is always coming?

Richard Rohr:

I hope what we’re teaching is how to be present. It’s all about presence to the moment, to the person, to the situation. But in this culture, with so much, so many screens, I even see it visually in the airport, everybody, myself included, are present to their screen. Not that that can’t be a true presence also, but it’s a strategic presence, not a loving presence usually. So if you can teach people how to be present, the rest will take care of itself. You’ll know that it’s good, it’s very good. What I love about your work, Greg, is I think we began with Genesis three, the fall. And everything was overcoming the fall. Whereas Genesis one clearly precedes Genesis three. It was good. It was very good.

It’s so clear to begin with original goodness. It is original delight, really. You can delight in things instead of trying to change things, fix things, reorder things. Let them contain a bit of disorder. And that’s reorder itself. Took me all my life to learn that. Because by nature, I’m an idealist perfectionist, I want it to be reordered quickly and it’s my job to get it there. Whereas if I can start with delighting in the original combining of order with disorder and saying they’re both good, especially in their union, now I’ve got a positive starting place. But I’m still working at that. And that’s not me being humble, it’s just true. It’s just true.

Paul Swanson:

We’re back where we begin with humiliation and humility.

Greg Boyle:

That’s perfect.

Richard Rohr:

End on humility.

Paul Swanson:

And thank you both for the way you’ve been elders to so many of us up close or from afar. My generation and those below me and above me, look to you both, and need your guidance and wisdom and lived practice. You live it. And to me, that’s the greatest gift of all as we seek to do the same in the way of Jesus. So thank you so much for-

Greg Boyle:

Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

… being a part of this, guys.

Richard Rohr:

Thank you, Paul.

Greg Boyle:

Thank you, Richard.

Richard Rohr:

God bless you, brother. A joy.

Greg Boyle:

A delight.

Mike Petrow:

Listening to Father Greg Boyle and Father Richard have a conversation together, for me, it’s like watching Batman and Superman on screen together. I can’t tell you, one, how many years I wanted to hear them talk back and forth. And two, how much it so lived up to my expectations. What a fantastic conversation. What did it feel like to be in the room with them having that amazing back and forth?

Paul Swanson:

I mean, it was a joy. It was a dream come true to sit with two elders of this tradition. And I think it was the first time that they’ve actually done anything publicly together. And to be able to just ask the questions at this season in their lives where Richard’s book Tears of Things had just come out and Greg’s book, Cherished Belonging hadn’t come out not too long ago. And there were so many things that dovetailed. And they both carry such embodied wisdom from their own formation, from their own streams, Greg from the Jesuits, and Richard from the Franciscans.

But like you said, there’s so much overlap and it was just kind of like watching them play catch with wisdom back and forth about… And how does this get real and concretized in daily life? Greg, through his work at Homeboy Industries, Richard through his work, of course, starting with New Jerusalem through the jail chaplaincy and Albuquerque and other activism in Albuquerque too and through the CAC just an incredible lived examples of what does it mean to be faithful to the way that God is calling in your life. And that they share that freely and with so much joy and humor, the way that each is so influenced by the gospel, and how they see the world, and how it changes them and their perspectives, to be able to poke things that shouldn’t be poked, to laugh at things that priests are supposedly not to laugh at.

It was a great gift, and I hope that it lands on ears with that same level of openness and curiosity of what needs to be held on and how do we live these teachings further. It was a bummer not to have you there with us. Your presence was felt. I know I referenced you at least once in that conversation. But yeah, two giants in the room, I mean, how did it land on your ears when you heard it?

Mike Petrow:

So I got to say, if we talk about my favorite moments of the conversation, we would be here for another hour. I will say this, one, it was so exciting. Two, it encouraged me to keep walking the path to see these two great teachers, one in his 70s, one in his 80s, who’ve been working this out their entire life. And to hear the trajectory of how they’ve done it’s been a life’s work to Richard to the point, or for him to take us to the point that he turns around and sees this pattern of we start with how the world should be, and then we get angry when it’s not that way. Then when we see how things really are, it breaks our heart, and we weep and we experience the tears of things. But somehow that heartbreak leads us to love. And then from a place of love, we can show up and be prophets, and do our work in the world in a sustainable way, and walk the spiritual path.

And then Father Greg talking about the work that he’s done in the world where he starts with this idea, working with these folks that he loves, this community that he loves so much that are getting out of gangs and getting out of prison. And he says, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” And then he says, “Okay, well, it’s not about that,” right? And what’s the progression? Nothing stops a bullet like a job. Then moving on to the next thing that he says, “Okay, it’s not about that folks need another layer of help and assistance.” Then he moves it beyond that, he goes, “No, folks need another layer of healing.” Then he finally comes to the point and says, “No, what we need to do is we need to create a sense of cherished belonging,” and to see how in his journey he’s learned.

And then you look at the Tears of Things and you look at Cherished Belonging and you see how these books are two sides of the same coin. They’re saying the same thing. They’re meeting in the same place and taking us there. And what a gift. Folks who are listening to this podcast are probably going through the Tears of Things. If you haven’t read Cherished Belonging, I strongly recommend you put it at the top of your reading pile next, or read it, like you said, “Paul, you got to read them hand in hand.”

Because they really, really do describe the same journey of just taking a heart, broken, open with love, and then taking our healing and putting our healing in the service of the world is sharing that love. I could go on and on. I was very inspired and I was inspired to make love more real in my own life and in the world. So thank you for that.

Paul Swanson:

Oh, well said. And one of the through lines for me thinking about it as you shared all that was just their deep humility. The humility that’s been… Learning from mistakes and the way that forgiveness is part of that and moving on, and how all this creates this grace-filled, cherished belonging. I find that so stunning when we have so many public examples of almost like a stifling, or getting more jaded as one moves into their elder years. And here we have these two vibrant elders holding onto their humility and owning their own imperfection. That sense of love, like as you said, making love real in the world, only gets larger. And it’s not human perfection, it’s our imperfection moving into the perfection of God’s love. And that is so radiant in their conversation.

Mike Petrow:

Gosh. And yeah, the joy that they both had in talking about the weight of this journey and the journey to make love more real in the world. This is not light stuff. And yet they brought so much levity to it.

Paul Swanson:

What a gift that this community of listeners we all join in together, trying to walk this path, The Tears of Things to create conditions of Cherished Belonging, to make love more real and concrete in this world, in our lives, in our neighborhoods, in our families, in our relationships. That’s the call, right? And we just got to find our little part to play.

Mike Petrow:

We will be back in a few weeks with our next monthly episode as we continue to explore the book. But I wonder what’s a good invitation to leave our listeners with as they look for the opportunities in their own life to create cherished belonging, to let their own heartbreak at the tears of things, guide them into a sense of cherished belonging. Paul, what do you think? How’s that real for you in your life right now?

Paul Swanson:

What comes up for me is we just got a dog and we were walking… I was walking the dog in our neighborhood park and this park, there’s now a few people who are homeless who are living in the park. And what does it mean, this was a question I was asking a friend, for me to be a neighbor to somebody who is a part of my neighborhood but does not have shelter? What does it mean for me to show up in a sense of cherished belonging for somebody who needs that and who, just by proximity, we are in relationship?

I can rail against the depravity and hardship of what I see as homelessness in our communities, but what does it mean for me to be a neighbor in an issue, and not just have it be an abstract? And that’s the question I’ve been living into as I built relationship. And I want to begin with this sense of cherished belonging, not a sense of fixing. How about you, what comes up for you right now?

Mike Petrow:

I think this thought’s been in the back of my mind that when injustice feels so big that I can’t do anything, I respond by getting real small and exactly what you’re talking about. It’s become not small in the sense of powerless, but getting small in the sense of exactly what you’re describing. I’ve been really, really wanting to connect more with my neighbors and pay attention to the people that I walk past on the street, stop and slow down and acknowledge the depth of humanity, and the miracle that every single person is.

And my next-door neighbors are just days away from losing their very beloved dog of many, many years and thinking, “How can I help make this easier for them? How can I be a loving and sustaining presence in their life in even small ways when this matters? How can I get to know the new neighbor that’s moved in across the street? How can I be supportive and loving?” And there’s bigger work to do and we do that work. But also, how do these intimate close moments of human connection create a sense of cherished belonging in the world right around me? And let that sustain and inform the bigger work that there is to do when the world fears on fire.

Paul Swanson:

The path of the prophet Tears of Things helps create the conditions for Cherished Belonging. And what an invitation for listeners to see how they can step into that in their own lives. So thank you for bringing that question to everyone, Mike.

Mike Petrow:

And we invite all of you, look for the opportunities to create cherished belonging all around you and recognize that nothing’s too small to be a miraculous opportunity to make love more real in the world. God, Paul, thank you for bringing that wonderful conversation to us. Listeners, thanks for being here with us. And we’ll see you again soon.

Corey Wayne:

Thanks for listening to this podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation, an educational nonprofit 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 Acevedo Butcher:

Carmen Acevedo Butcher.

Jenna Keiper:

Jenna Keiper.

Izzy Spitz:

Izzy Spitz.

Megan Hare:

Megan Hare.

Sara Palmer:

Sara Palmer.

Dorothy Abrahams:

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.