Mike Petrow:

Friends, welcome back to the Everything Belongs podcast with Father Richard Rohr. Each season we’ve been exploring one of Richard’s books, and each episode we travel over to Richard’s house to discuss the chapter with him. And then after that, we’re joined by a special guest who helps us live the teachings forward. We think about Richard’s teachings in new ways, asking new questions in an evolving and rapidly changing world. But this season is extra special because we’re exploring Richard’s next and he claims last brand new book, the New York Times bestselling, The Tears of Things. As a reminder, you absolutely don’t have to read the book to follow along with us, but we would actually love it if you felt inspired to pick up the book and read along with us as we take this journey for the rest of the year.

As we head into chapter one today, we’ll talk about walking the full path of the prophets. When Richard explores the Hebrew prophets, he teaches us that he sees a pattern that applies to all of us no matter where and when we’re living. When we take a hard look at the injustice and the cruelty of the world, we often first feel a deep, deep sense of anger. Richard encourages us not to run away from that anger. In fact, if we can feel that anger fully and let it be our teacher, often what happens is we find underneath it a very deep sadness. In fact, this is why Richard named his book The Tears of Things. Richard writes, “Both the prophets and the mystics remind us all things have tears and all things deserve tears.” We’ll look to find our own tears together as we go through this book with Richard.

Finally, and most importantly, we’ll explore how this is an invitation to grow up. We grow up in how we read the Bible. We grow up in how we think about religion. We grow up in how we respond to the injustice in the world. And especially, we grow up in how we show up to love ourselves and love our neighbor.

Later in the episode, we get to talk to Pete Enns, host of The Bible for Normal People podcast. And Pete talks to us about the value of uncertainty in our lives and how it makes room for the new. He talks to us about the need to evolve not only in how we look at our scriptures, but again how we show up for the world, how we show up in the face of injustice, and how we show up for each other. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Everything Belongs. We’re so glad to take this journey with you.

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.

Paul Swanson:

Richard, do you mind opening us up with a prayer?

Richard Rohr:

Good God, thank you that you are good, so it makes it easy to trust you and to trust that you even hear our prayer. May whatever I’ve written in this book be for the good of people who read it, for our own staff here, and for the world in so far as they allow it to matter. Thank you for giving me this guidance and may we all be guided now as we record a few thoughts. Amen.

Paul Swanson:

Amen. Thanks, Richard.

Mike Petrow:

Amen. Gosh, can you believe that this book is out in the world, Richard? Are you excited?

Richard Rohr:

I have to say I am because I know for most people this will be original thought. It isn’t the way the prophets have mostly been presented if they were presented at all. Maybe students in seminaries got a little semester on the prophets, but their absolutely central importance, usually not. So I hope this makes them centrally important. It must be presumptuous of me to think that, but I hope that. I hope that.

Paul Swanson:

I love saying the full name of your book because I think the subtitle is just as delicious as the title, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. And today we’re going to focus our conversation on chapter one, which shares the chapter title with the book, Tears of Things. And this is a significant note to make because I know at one point you received some pushback about the title, The Tears of Things, but you were adamant that this title is what represented this book best. Can you share where does The Tears of Things come from and why does it hold so much importance for this particular piece of work?

Richard Rohr:

When I had to study Latin, the one Latin piece of literature that my professor especially emphasized was Virgil’s Aeneid, the Journey of Aeneas. It’s always a journey in Greek and Roman Latin literature. And in the very first chapter, he has what probably was originally thought as a throwaway phrase, in Latin, lacrimae rerum, the tears of things. He’s observing a fresco painted on a wall in Carthaginia. And it’s just a field of dead soldiers both on the Roman side and the Carthaginian side, and all he can do is lament.

But that single phrase has been picked up by history, literature, poetry, music, Pope Francis. It’s one of those quotable lines for people who were educated, at least in the classics, the tears of things. There was no preposition in the phrase which allowed it to have two meanings, and I believe Virgil wanted both of them to be true. Everything is crying, everything has tears, and everything deserves tears. Both are true.

Our phrase, in my opinion, I don’t know if others would say it the same way, it’s Virgil’s way of saying the tragic sense of life or what we Christians refer to as the cruciform shape to reality. Everything suffers, everything dies, even animals, nature. I knew that the prophets guide us toward tears, and so I knew that had to be the title. And we’re already told by the German speakers and the Spanish speakers that it does not translate directly, so they have to give the book an adjusted title, The Tears of Things. It sort of works in English.

Paul Swanson:

Well, I think it’s a wonderful kind of stamp to put on the front of the book because-

Richard Rohr:

I do too. Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

… it carries throughout.

Richard Rohr:

Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

And like you said, there’s nuggets throughout all our literature and philosophy where this little nugget has been picked up and then held onto, focused, and you’re following in that tradition of naming the tears of things, the tears for things.

Mike Petrow:

And it’s so great, the subtitle, Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. It’s so, I mean really-

Richard Rohr:

What we’re going through as a culture.

Mike Petrow:

My God, yeah.

Richard Rohr:

The whole of Western civilization, postmodernism, nihilism, just everything is crying.

Mike Petrow:

So I think about you right here. If we stay with our rage and resentment too long, we will righteously and unthinkingly pass on the hurt in new directions and we injure our own souls in ways we don’t even recognize. This is killing our postmodern world. And I feel that in the age of outrage, we just keep passing the anger back and forth and yet at the same time, we need to speak out. So how do we balance anger and love when we need to speak truth?

Richard Rohr:

I start with that poem that I quoted last week. It has to include both, the necessary rage at the loss of human dignity. Pope Francis is speaking so much to this, that human beings are just chattel and we don’t have to care about them. So you can’t let go of that rage at foundational injustice, and yet it has to be included with the opposite and understanding that most people, that’s the best they can do. Without spirit, rage does not transfer into compassion. Without tears, the injustice of life does not move toward caring. It just becomes, not just rage, but righteous rage that I’m above this, I figured it out so I can get angry and remain pure. In fact, my anger gives me my purity. And this is where we must convict the left as much as the right, which shows me when we’re able to do that, we’re dealing with the prophets. That’s the core of their genius. They refused to be politicized, weaponized, one side against the other.

Mike Petrow:

So helpful to hear that. I so appreciate, Richard, what you just said there about necessary rage. How do we hold that? Are you experiencing necessary rage at all in your own life?

Richard Rohr:

Well, I really Am. when I listen to the news, which I do less of, I just want to scream at people, “What are you doing? What are you allowing to be done to your mind, to your soul that you think this is okay?” I mean, I was raised to think so highly of America and I still want to, but it’s harder and harder. And I think you’re going to talk to me in part today that they aim at the collective, not the individual center. It’s the culture that would elect a president who’s shown his cards without any doubt. That’s what they would do, say, “What are you, America, that you can’t see through this?” That’s the way the prophet would talk.

Mike Petrow:

That’s so helpful. Richard, you say that if we don’t transform our pain and egoic anger, we transmit it in another form. And I’m also thinking about Carl Jung who says that we inherit unfinished problems and unanswered questions from our parents and grandparents. Do you think that part of this also is that we inherit outrage and unhealed anger from the generations before us?

Richard Rohr:

Inner generational grief? Yes, absolutely. When you sensed already as a little child, mommy’s easily angry or daddy’s too easily cursing, we wonder where does that negativity come from? And it begs for resolution because I don’t think the soul is meant to live in anger. It’s too constrictive a vision, too constrictive a seeing. It eventually becomes too righteous. It always thinks, “Well, I’m above that and that’s why I can name it and see it and curse it because I am above that,” that the spirit hasn’t been able to work in your soul yet to show you, no, you’re not above it, you’re a part of it.

Speak of Augustine again who coined the phrase original sin. The early notion of sin that he taught and was deeply believed for much of the 2000 years is that sin also was a collective and you inherited it by being part of the people, part of the group. You could not stand above and apart by pointing out the sinners. We’re all sinners. We all participate in a broken, bleeding culture.

Mike Petrow:

It’s so helpful to think about. I know for me, when I deconstructed my original Christian upbringing, I hated this idea of original sin that-

Richard Rohr:

Did you use it too?

Mike Petrow:

Absolutely, yeah.

Richard Rohr:

Oh, you did both. Oh.

Mike Petrow:

This idea that something happened before I was born, that I had no control over it and that I inherited it and I couldn’t get away from it. And yet as I’ve learned about trauma and healing, it’s become more real to me that I-

Richard Rohr:

It’s true.

Mike Petrow:

… things I have inherited that I had no control over, and that’s part of the play to being human. And I appreciate that you reframe that also as inherited grief.

Richard Rohr:

Yes, that I have to mature enough to take ownership of the collective sin of humanity instead of picking out, oh, he’s bad, presuming I’m not. We’re both suffering from the same wounded humanity and it is a suffering. Here’s where AA work has really helped us. When AA, about 40 years ago, 50 years ago, started saying addiction is not a sin, it’s a disease, that was a new language. They were leading us in the prophetic direction. We’re all suffering from the disease of a wounded humanity, wounded-ness that just seems too big for tears, too big for expression, and people hating themselves for it or hating others instead of recognizing the compassion it gives you for the whole, the whole. We’re all in this thing together.

So I think the gospel that Jesus gave us was a gospel of solidarity with sinners. That’s why he ate with them, he chose to surround himself by them. Solidarity with sinners is such a diametrically different approach to Christianity than pointing out sinners. Eat that for all it’s worth. Solidarity was, listen, I’m one of you. I mean, I just was given enough grace by my, again, collective upbringing inside the church at a period in the 1950s when it was rather healthy. It was a good subculture, it was happy. Of course, we separated ourselves from you Protestants. And at the blue level of spiral dynamics, as long as you stay in your homogeneous group, which we all did in the ’50s, you can just compartmentalize sin. It’s in the prisons, it’s in the bars, but it’s not here in the Catholic Church.

Paul Swanson:

And when you compartmentalize, you’re not experiencing the tears of things because the tears of things are over there.

Richard Rohr:

That’s right.

Paul Swanson:

Well, I know I certainly enjoy hanging out with you sinners. It’s good to be a part of this sinful circle. Richard, thinking through this chapter, and I want to read something that you wrote about how this prophetic and mystical way joins together. So you write, “Prophets and mystics recognize what most of us do not, that all things have tears and all things deserve tears. They know that grief and sadness are doorways to understanding life in a non-egocentric way.”

And so we’ve been talking about this, but I want to take this another step further into your thinking. As you named this connection between sadness and anger, that to first feel this anger, even this righteous rage at injustice, oppression, and war, is quite necessary. And it’s the thing I want to point out and ask it more from is the necessary salvific tears to grease the wheels of understanding in a non-egocentric way?

Richard Rohr:

That’s right.

Paul Swanson:

How do the tears become salvific in this non-egocentric way?

Richard Rohr:

Rage allows you to think that sin is over there. Tears are the moment when you recognize that, let’s say our wars are not just Russian, China and military armaments, but wars are what keep me living at this high level of consumption called America. It isn’t over there anymore. I couldn’t live with the comfort I live with if we didn’t have a lot of good wars. Keep projecting the evil always over there, the other empires, but not ours.

When you first come to that realization, all you want to do is cry. All you can do is cry, but your righteousness is over, thinking it’s just Putin and Korean dictators that are causing the evil in the world. Don’t waste your time. You can’t be happy with what they’re doing, but we are the protected ones who benefit from the compartmentalization of good and evil. We’re not the evil ones.

The level of consumption in America now is just beyond belief. It’s just things, things, things, not recognizing those things have tears, have a price. And then you’ll see on the evening news here, it’s brought into our life, little starving children in Africa, and we don’t draw the line between our things and their starving.

Paul Swanson:

And you make this connection of you say somehow the prophets knew the soul must weep to be a soul at all.

Richard Rohr:

You know which lines to remember. Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

Would you say in your own home communities, you think about the blessed are those who weep? The teachers that invite you into that weeping soul are the ones that are trying to point with prophetic-

Richard Rohr:

In solidarity with instead of judgment of.

Paul Swanson:

Solidarity with instead of judgment of.

Richard Rohr:      

See? And the ego starts with judgment of and it solidifies the ego. Tears for, puts you in the same puddle. I’ve never said it that way before.

Mike Petrow:

Gosh.

Richard Rohr:

And it’s a truer puddle. I’m a victim of this world and I’m benefiting from these sins that I’m condemning.

Mike Petrow:

I love this idea that you’re inviting us to read scripture in general and the prophets in particular as a journey of growing up, that God speaks to us in the language we can hear. First it’s anger, then it’s grief, then it’s love. What advice do you have for our listeners in learning to read as a journey of growing up?

Richard Rohr:

Try to recognize that hidden inside of your anger is always a judgment that she, he, they did this wrong and I am enlightened enough to see it as wrong and name it. This puts me in a, well, the word is used very commonly in the New Testament and the sin is called righteousness. Righteousness, when judgment and anger are working together to disguise one another. Now that’s the construct that falls apart by grace when you recognize I have benefited from the sin of the world, I am benefiting right now. I’m benefiting by being able to think of you as inferior to me because you’re gay, because you’re Black, because you’re Protestant from my side.

What a waste, the time we’ve wasted on that trying to prove that our church was the one true church. Just the very notion of one true church comes from righteousness, false justice. It’s not true justice. It’s trying to create justice in my mind, why my group, my city, my political party, my gender, now that’s the recent argument, is right. We don’t know how to grow up individually, so we make our group, our city, our people superior, which actually makes us less grown up and not enlightened.

But when you’re willing to carry the burden of the other, that she, he, they are as fooled as I am and I have compassion for that, instead of hating it, separating it, judging it there. Once you see this, you can’t stop seeing it, again, the widening circles, all marginalized groups, the poor. The poor are looked down upon in almost every culture. So what does Jesus do? Lives with the poor, tells us to give away everything and give our money to the poor. How come we don’t see that? I’m preaching now. Sorry.

Mike Petrow:

That’s great. Amen.

Paul Swanson:

Amen. I think about that, of that ever-expanding circles of solidarity.

Richard Rohr:

Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

That drops you into humility. That’s Jesus’s starting place. That is not our natural starting place, even as those who call themselves followers of Jesus. This is part of what the prophetic invites us into. And we’ve touched on how the prophetic journey is also a mystical one and seeing that wholeness through this participation. And you name a few stages about this progression of the prophets, I want to just highlight.

Richard Rohr:

Let me hear them. What did I say?

Paul Swanson:

We’re talking about bargaining, conviction, epiphany, then deeper God experience followed by extended passages of further threat, seductive promises, warnings and fear until they lead you toward and through their own needed deconstruction and into their eventual reconstruction. So I can imagine somebody reading this or listening to this and thinking about that pathway and saying, “I’m not up for that, that path of solidarity, that humble beginning point of siding with-”

Richard Rohr:

I am not like them.

Paul Swanson:

I am not like them, exactly. What do you say to them who say that it seems like too much or they’re meeting fear in that sense of that prophetic progression, knowing that prophets also aren’t just individuals, but they are a part of a collective history?

Richard Rohr:

Yes.

Paul Swanson:

What do you say to somebody who is thinking about once they hear that progression and that it sets their nerves on fire?

Richard Rohr:

The big collective lie that religion has allowed itself to believe is what you’ve heard me call religion as a cult of innocence. It relies upon purity codes. Compare a cult of innocence, I am not a sinner, with solidarity with sinners and you realize Jesus has a very different starting place. He has no interest in purity codes. In fact, he flaunts them. They criticize, “Why do your disciples and you not wash your hands before you enter the temple?” They apparently didn’t, which would have been very daring. What’s this thing about purity? I find it in all religions at the earlier stages. You’ll find them in forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, washing, washing.

Mike Petrow:

I also think about what you’re saying with the washing and the purity, and I think about Lady Macbeth washing her hands over and over again.

Richard Rohr:

Lady Macbeth.

Mike Petrow:

And never quite getting them pure and realizing. I don’t think that we are totally depraved. We are made in the image of God, we are loved. And yet this notion that we can ever be completely pure is foolish. Like you always say, the only perfection available to us is our ability to accept our imperfection. And from that place we use the prophetic voice. This is healing and helpful for me. Thank you for that insight.

Richard Rohr:

Well, it is for almost everybody. The real sins of malice, the oppression of the poor man, the vain, placing yourself above others, those are the sins that the prophets point out.

Paul Swanson:

Yeah, and this is why the tears of things, the tears themselves are so helpful as this sense of what we need to be invited into.

Richard Rohr:

Thank you.

Paul Swanson:

One of the things that you point out is how we can’t mandate tears. We can only allow.

Richard Rohr:

No.

Paul Swanson:

Or join in.

Richard Rohr:

Allow, yes.

Paul Swanson:

Or follow them, as you say. What happens to us when we don’t weep over things or for things?

Richard Rohr:

We righteously judge things, we compartmentalize and divide things, always placing ourself in the higher echelon. Weeping is the visible physical act of solidarity where the body feels its helplessness. And that’s why it’s often hard to even distinguish between tears of joy, am I helpless with joy, or tears of sadness?

Paul Swanson:

Wow. Let me hit you with this one quote of yours, “A heart of stone can not recognize the empire it builds and the empires it worships.” What I’m hearing you say in this is it hardens the heart-

Richard Rohr:

Yes. Very good.

Paul Swanson:

… this lack of weeping and very uncritical, unconscious participation in the building of your own empire and also in the collective empires that you participate in, hence, not being able to criticize my own consumptive life because these wars from afar are paying it for us.

Richard Rohr:

Yes. You know that phrase that was used by Jesus, and a lot in the medieval church, was to do penance? I think this is what they were trying to get at, the reversing of that engine where I live in union with the suffering of things instead of in judgment of the sin of things. Thank you, Lord, for letting me say it that way. That’s it in a word. Francis, in his earliest autobiographies, “The Lord allowed me to do penance,” he says, and unfortunately later became interpreted as beating yourself, not eating meat, all the externals, always. But to live a life of penance for Francis was to live a life in solidarity with the marginalized, to move down from upper Assisi to the plains and make camp at the Portiuncula, which was the little chapel of the lepers. It’s still there, still there 800 years later.

Paul Swanson:

And what a practical example.

Mike Petrow:

Gosh.

Richard Rohr:

Oh, it really is. Then if you go, you’ll see the medieval church or the late Renaissance church built a huge monstrosity of a church over the little tiny one. And when you, I hope you go there someday, you’ll open the big back doors and you see a little tiny church right in the middle of the gigantic church and you just want to run toward the door and you say, “This is where he got it.”

And it’s emblazoned in stone. You look at the upper stonework and it’s literally very poor stonework. It’s still standing though, but Francis of Assisi and his first followers literally put those stones back in place. It just gives you chills. And he said, “This is where we began.” He says, “You can let them take everything else away from us. Don’t give up this little spot because this symbolizes what we’re about, making a little church out of the big church.”

Mike Petrow:

When I think about that image, I can’t help but ask, how do people figure out what is their stone to move to rebuild the church? How do we know what is ours to do and how do we show up in the world right now as we take all this journey together over the next few months to explore The Tears of Things?

Richard Rohr:

What comes to mind is where the Lord gives you compassion, where the Lord gives you understanding to see what abandoned widows suffer and you have a heart for them, or orphan children, or gay people, or Black people. Find your place where compassion comes naturally, easily. That’s your beginning place. And you’ll find it was very often preceded in your younger years by hatred of that very group. So find that place where you can live in natural union with God. Trust that place and build from there, walk from there, dragging the circle outward. But usually it’s the compassion that you did have to find, you weren’t born with it, but now it comes naturally.

Mike Petrow:

I appreciate all of that. I’m inspired by so many folks that I’ve talked to, so many of our listeners, so many friends, so many directees, who’ve talked about in this moment just trying to find a way that they can volunteer, make a difference in the world around them, get more closely connected to the people around them that they care about, to build loving community and get really discerning about how their voice and their actions can make a real difference in the world. I had a friend recently who was talking about less posting, more hosting.

Richard Rohr:

That’s great. Oh, good.

Mike Petrow:

And he’s like, “I want to stop shouting on social media and I want to start hosting conversations with people who are different than I am to try to get somewhere.” But I love all that. Richard, would you say a blessing for our readers as we continue on in this journey of exploring Tears of Things chapter by chapter?

Richard Rohr:

Good God, it is your blessing residing within us that makes us want more of it because we know with blessing comes freedom and even joy. We want such freedom, we want such joy and not just for ourselves, but for the world and for those around us. Amen.

Mike Petrow:

Amen.

Paul Swanson:

Amen.

Mike Petrow:

Everything Belongs will continue in a moment.

Drew and I now get to sit down with a good friend of the CAC and Richard’s, Pete Enns. Peter Enns is Abram S. Clemens Professor of Biblical Studies at Eastern University. He’s written several books including The Bible Tells Me So, The Sin of Certainty, and his latest, Curveball: When Your Faith Takes Turns You Never Saw Coming. Pete’s also co-host of the popular podcast, The Bible for Normal People. The focus of his work centers on understanding the Bible as an ancient text and thinking through what it means to read that text well, today.

Pete Enns, Drew Jackson, it is so good to see both of you today.

Peter Enns:

Thank you, Mike. Appreciate it.

Drew Jackson:

Thanks, Mike. Good to be here, Mike.

Mike Petrow:

Pete, I remember ironically listening to Richard on the first, I think, or maybe second episode of your podcast, The Bible for Normal People.

Peter Enns:

Yeah, back in the day.

Mike Petrow:

Back in the day.

Peter Enns:

Back when we had tin cans and string and that was our audio system. But it worked, it was fine.

Mike Petrow:

I listened to this podcast episode again over the weekend and what’s so cool about it is you can actually hear the genesis of Richard’s book on the prophets in the conversation the three of you had in that episode. Because at one point, he starts talking about how people don’t know how to read the Bible as formative and normative because they don’t read the prophets, which was great. And we’ll get into that in a second. Yeah, what a great full circle moment.

So jumping right into it, Richard has this sort of roadmap that he absolutely loves, and he refers to it lately as the wisdom pattern. And he owns that it’s in no small part taken from the work of Walter Brueggemann. And it’s this idea that we grow through a rhythm of order, disorder, and reorder. Some prefer the terms construction, deconstruction, reconstruction. You could argue, and I would argue actually, that this sort of three-beat rhythm here that he’s describing goes way, way back in Christian teaching. I mean, you could argue that Origen to Pseudo-Dionysius to Evagrius and on and on and on in the tradition, folks have been talking about these three seasons that we move through. And in the middle season things sort of fall apart a little bit.

But the big argument from Richard and from all of these teachers is that you can see it in the Bible and in scripture. So you’re the Bible guy, I’m going to ask you if we can see it in scripture. But before I do that, I have to ask, in the interest of being honest in our own experience, and especially for some of our listeners who may not be familiar with your own journey, have you experienced anything like this rhythm of order, disorder, and reorder in your own life?

Peter Enns:

Yeah. I don’t say that lightly because when you’re in order, everything’s fine and you don’t think about anything. But I’m 64 now, I can trace back, beginning in my mid 30s, when I could see cracks in the order. And I think ever since then I’ve been really living in that rhythm and accepting them for what they are and feeling ordered, but also realizing that, well, that’s not going to last because I’m just a person, I’m a human being. I don’t have omniscience. And that’s not the path of humanity to be thinking that way. So it’s very much a part of my thinking.

I think another term we can throw in is evolving. Faith is evolving. It’s not an extra thing that you add onto it. It is what faith does. It evolves, it changes because we change, right? And I wouldn’t have it any other way. And if you take off the table things like God’s retribution for having disordered times and needing to reorder, if you take that off the table, which I think makes all the sense in the world, the pressure goes away of that need to be correct. So yeah, I’m very much there. And Richard and Brian McLaren and others have been people that have given me coherent language to express that in my life.

Mike Petrow:

So you have a book called The Sin of Certainty. How does letting go of certainty and also how does letting go of the fear that God’s going to get you if you let go of certainty play into our navigating these moments of disorder?

Peter Enns:

I mean, The Sin of Certainty is my attempt to articulate in my own way without using the language of order and disorder and reorder, but it’s really dealing with that first step. It’s not sinful to feel certain about things. It’s I think a shortcoming in the Christian faith when we feel like that’s the thing we have to keep coming back to. So I’m not suggesting, and people have misunderstood the title, that I mean people are sinful because they feel certain, not at all. I have conviction. I have things that I believe are true. I have to hold them lightly, but I believe there are things that are true.

So for me, I would put that whole journey, the threefold recurring cycle is rooted in the awareness of certainty being, I don’t want to say an illusion, but it’s more something you just can’t count on because we’re the ones processing it and we’re fallible, limited human beings. So it’s rooted in acknowledging that. And I think that the next step is not being afraid of that reality because you’re not supposed to question things too much. That’s sort of how the faith is supposed to work. But I think there’s a ton of questioning, to get to your point, in the Bible as well. And I think people, they don’t always see it and not because they’re blind. I think they don’t see it because they’re taught not to see it.

Mike Petrow:

Well, it’s interesting, there’s that old adage that the best antidote to biblical literalism is literally reading what the Bible actually says.

Peter Enns:

Oh, yeah.

Mike Petrow:

And so I think this is a great question, especially for our listeners who grew up in a world where the Bible was sort of infallible and the only thing that mattered. Where does scripture lead us into disorder and ask us to let go of certainty in your experience?

Peter Enns:

Well, how much time do you have here? I mean, I love talking about it. To me, this is a very important topic. I won’t be long-winded here. I just want to start out though, there’s a big difference here between the Hebrew Bible and then the second Testament or New Testament, whatever people want to call it is fine with me.

In the New Testament, you have the story of Jesus and it covers a few decades of time and it’s a triumphal time. It’s the son has come, he’s been raised from the dead, and it’s just a matter of time now before this whole thing comes to its eschatological conclusion. I’m convinced just because I can read the Bible that this is exactly what they thought in the first century. They thought, “This is not going to take long.” And, “Paul, but what about my mother just died?” 1 Thessalonians. “Well, that’s okay. There’s a plan for that.” I almost trying to hear Paul working it out, but there’s a triumphalism to it.

In the Hebrew Bible, a lot of time has passed and there’s ample chance for people to have faith crises. Depending on who you ask, it’s about a millennium of tradition in the Bible from about 1200 BCE to about 200 BCE, where this text is being written and compiled and re-edited. And all the different political contexts and ideologies that they dealt with, whether it was Egyptian or Assyrian or Babylonian or Persian or Greek or then later Roman, there is so much time for things to not make sense that we have that.

And in that sense, I try to remind my students, the gift of the Hebrew Bible is very explicitly modeling a journey for us. This is Walter Brueggemann that I’m channeling here too. You have the main testimony, he calls it, from Genesis through 2 Kings. And there basically what you meet is a God who’s somewhat transactional, not all the time, but a lot of the time. That’s the main testimony. Then you have the counter testimony, which is Ecclesiastes or Lament Psalms or Job or some places in the prophets that say, “I don’t think it works that way very well.” That’s why I love Job, and Jonah is like that as well. These books just, they make you think. They unsettle the order.

In that sense, the Bible on a grand scale, the Hebrew Bible on a grand scale has the order and their elements of disorder, and then the reorder is oftentimes a vision of the future. It’s not mapped out perfectly, but it’s like, “And one day, everything will be fine again. There’ll be a king sitting on the throne where the lion will lie down with the lamb,” and things like that. I would say that culturally, Israelites experienced that order, disorder, reorder. And in that sense, it is a valuable companion for people like us who experience that really maybe on a personal level.

Drew Jackson:

That’s so good. Pete, you talk about this disruption of order that is like baked into the story, that is part of the journey. And to turn our conversation more squarely to the prophets, Richard claims that the prophet is the voice that leads us to disorder and through disorder. And in his book, he uses the language of holy disorder. So I wanted to ask you, I mean, just how would you define a prophet?

Peter Enns:

Yeah, great question. Let me use other language that I think overlaps with what you just said. Actually, I get this language from Victor Matthews. Victor Matthews is a Hebrew Bible scholar. He’s got a bunch of books. One is the Social World of the Hebrew Prophets. It’s a really nice book to explain things. He uses the language that the prophets are crisis managers. There’s a crisis that they’re managing and the crisis is blowing up the order, we could say that, and they’re offering then a way to navigate the disorder and move to another level. And those moments of crisis are boiled down to basically three events in the Hebrew Bible.

And we should know, the writing prophets, they’re not active until the mid-late 8th century because that’s when the first crisis emerged, the Assyrian invasion and the exile of the north. So that had to be explained and the prophetic word came. The second one is, as you know, the Babylonian crisis about 110 years later. And likewise, there are two, it’s the same things happening again, the same things. It’s just now happening to us in Judah, we have these people coming, going to take us away. And so you have that crisis that had to be managed. And then the third one was after the return from exile. You’d think they were trying to make Israel great again, if I can use that term here, but it wasn’t working out and we’re hearing the same problems. And that’s when you have some angry prophets, like 3 Isaiah, for example, coming in and talking about that.

So we have these crisis moments that, again, I think I’m channeling Richard here when I say it’s the crisis moments, it’s the pain that drives you from order to disorder. And I love the fact that we see that in the Bible. It keeps it from being a simplistic sort of textbook we quote verses from to tell us what to do or how to behave. It’s laying out for us the reality of a spiritual journey that we have to morph and adapt and transform in our own times and places. We can’t just do what they did back then, but there’s a model for us that is, I think, actually crucial to spiritual health.

Mike Petrow:

I feel like we read so much in scripture of these moments of collective lament. I love what you said there, that pain drives us from order to disorder. That’s really powerful.

Peter Enns:

Yeah, well, I mean, Richard says it’s pain or love. And in my experience, love hasn’t done it for me. It’s actually been pain that’s done it for me. That’s the wake-up call.

Drew Jackson:

How do you see the prophets guiding us through disorder?

Peter Enns:

I mean, this is getting into a big issue I think about from time to time is I’m not sure how set up the Hebrew Bible is to guide me in anything, but I can choose to be guided by it and I can see things in it that for me … In that sense, scripture then becomes a means of grace, sort of like Eucharist or contemplation or anything where you can connect with God. So I don’t want to fiddle with words and I know you guys aren’t saying this, but in the back of my evangelical head, I hear God’s talking to you through the Bible telling you to do things. And I think the relationship between God and me and my Bible is a lot more subtle than that.

But having said that, I think that hearing a prophet come in and say things like Amos, for example, “Don’t bother me with your sacrifices.” You have the ritual, you have the system, you have that centered bit of order, this doesn’t do it. And if you don’t combine that with justice and righteousness and how you treat other people, it’s essentially worthless to me. But the thing is that I think to go back from that moment, like in an 8th century prophet like Amos, to go back and to try to see Torah, law, as a gift to Israel. “Your word is a light to my path.” A word, it’s law in that Psalm.

And it reminds us that, see that’s part of that larger structure of scripture itself, that something that starts out as good, can become encrusted and old and misused and is in need of reform. And realizing that encrusted-ness of it, to me, that’s the disorientation and then something else comes from that. And I think when the prophets model that, I mean, Amos models it too, because he’s not happy. He’s not happy at all with what’s going on, and he’s saying the system doesn’t work, and he’s throwing wrenches in it left and right. He’s accusing them. But then at the end, there’s this wonderful few verses that talks about restoration and someone will show up in the line of David. And most scholars think, and I do too, that this was added in the post-exilic period after Judah returned from exile, which I think is the only thing that makes sense to me.

But that’s not even the point. The point is that that’s the pattern of the prophetic book itself, to take you from the downside and to put your nose in it, and in that sense, I think forcing a disorientation moment for the people. It’s not just, see, you’re picking up on how this is not working. He’s telling them that it’s not working. I think prophets are good at forcing that period of disorientation on people because they don’t see it. They don’t have the pain yet. They’re rich. That’s the problem with Amos and other prophets. They got money, they’re loaded. They need to be awakened to the problem.

Mike Petrow:

Yeah, because what struck me in the book, and what I appreciated about your question, Drew, is that Richard seems to be implying that the prophets not only lead us through disorder, but they first lead us to disorder. They shake things up and they wake things up a bit. And I know it’s not a one-to-one, look at a pattern in the past, find a contemporary example, but I still have to ask, Pete, do you see a need for that now? And without necessarily having to name names, do you see folks in the contemporary world that we live in holding that space of trying to lead people to areas where things are broken and need to be recognized as such?

Peter Enns:

Well, I do think it continues. I mean, contemporary now, yeah. I happen to be teaching a course on the prophets right now. We’re halfway done with it. And I showed them a clip of MLK’s last speech. And not to pander, this is an example of a prophet. What’s he doing? He’s giving a vision for the future. He’s calling out abuse of power in the present. He does it by citing the tradition again and again and again. Sometimes it’s the Bible. He has this ringing refrain, somewhere I read, and he quotes the constitution. Somewhere I read. Poetic rhythm is a biblical prophetic rhythm, which is poetic. The biblical prophets, their words are written in poetic style with some exceptions, like parts of Jeremiah, for example.

So I think we have contemporary models like that, and there are many people out there on social media. Lisa Sharon Harper, for example, is one person who just comes to mind immediately who’s all over this stuff. I think AOC is trying to be a person who is holding space for people and trying to remind us that things don’t have to be like this and aren’t going to be like this forever. We need that reminder today to alert us as to the very grave problem that we’re confronted with, but also to give hope.

And sometimes the best we can do is just as for me in my house, I’m going to be a kind person. I’m not going to be a polarizing force in the world. I’m going to try to do something else. But we definitely need that today and we have it going on and by people who aren’t on social media, by people who aren’t famous, by people who are just doing their stuff.

Mike Petrow:

I love that you used Amos as an example, because Amos is the next chapter in the book, and it’s what we’ll be talking about with Richard in our next episode. I think one of the things that struck me in this book, and when you hear Richard in the podcast episode that he did with you in 2017, and then you read the book, the new component that he added between those two things is this exploration of the emotional journey of the prophet, or at least the emotional journey of what it must feel like to carry that kind of energy, to offer that much-needed critique, to stare down collective evil that is 10,000 times more bigger than you are.

And so he identifies this pattern as we, or the prophets and he implies us as well, initially respond to injustice with anger. And then after feeling the full fury of that anger in a way that in no way de-legitimizes it, we find a wellspring of sadness underneath it, and then underneath the sadness we find love. And if we’re angry, it’s because something we love is threatened, which leads us to the grief. Do you feel like that is reflective of what we see in scripture and in the prophets? And more to the point, to the degree that it is or it isn’t, how useful do you think it is for us today in standing in those spaces?

Peter Enns:

Well, I think it’s very useful to articulate a process like that because it gives language to something that, as you said, doesn’t de-legitimize the fury. There is a righteous anger, but the righteous anger has to lead to something constructive that people will do to help frankly just make the world a better place.

I’d probably want to think more about whether that specific pattern can be found in any one prophet, maybe more collectively. But that doesn’t bother me in the least bit. Ever since there’s been a Bible, first Judaism and then Christianity has been highly creative in how it navigates the biblical tradition and adapts it for uses that were not on the minds of the biblical writers. Again, that’s part of the gift of scripture, that it is multi-vocalic. That’s the buzzword today, but it’s a good word. It’s multi-vocalic, it’s written over long periods of time by different people, different circumstances, and blah, blah, blah. We had these different points of view, and together, they can give us a pattern like what you just mentioned, Mike.

Mike Petrow:

Permit me a very nerdy question then as a follow-up. It’s so interesting to think about holding this tension of one, not being completely subjectively anachronistic and going, “I’m going to force something that I want to see into an ancient text.” But two, I love what you said there about the multi-vocalic. Here at center, we talk about living the teachings forward, which is looking at a foundational teaching, asking it new questions based on the moment that we’re in, and allowing it to give us something relevant for today that doesn’t erase what was intended by the original teacher and the original audience. This feels to me like where you live all the time. What has been most valuable for you in teaching folks how to hold that tension?

Peter Enns:

I picked a lot of this stuff from James Kugel, who was my doctoral advisor, is a Jewish scholar and has written a lot on Second Temple interpretation and things like that. He says that immediately the text was out of date because language changes, circumstances change, but this is the tradition, this is the story of our people. And in order to keep that tradition alive, you must adapt it to new situations. If you don’t adapt it, it just dies, it becomes a relic.

And that results in things like the Mishnaic tradition, which was certainly pre-Christian, but codified around 200 CE. And that resulted then in the commentary upon the Mishnah that becomes the Talmud. And if you ask a Jew what can I do on the Sabbath or not do, they’re not going to go to the Bible necessarily and say, “Here are the verses.” They’re going to say, “Here’s what the tradition has worked out.” That evolves, that changes. And those voices of the past are valuable as we study today, what we should do in our circumstances.

And I think that the Christian faith has not done a good job thinking that way. And I should say the modern evangelical fundamentalist faith has not done a good job of doing that. The medieval church did and there are multiple senses of scripture. There’s the literal meaning, which is boring, and plus most of the time it’s irrelevant. So what drove these interpreters is the need for scripture to be relevant for their circumstances. And for much of the history of the church, that meant some type of allegorical interpretation where the words aren’t as important as how those words open up something to you that you can see.

Not too dissimilar maybe from Lectio Divina. What’s the word? Don’t worry about the context, don’t worry about how that word fear is used in this parable. What’s coming up for you that you can commune with God more clearly as a result of that? I think this is an impulse of Christianity, and again, bearing witness to the fact that if the Bible is not adapted, it ceases having any relevance. And I think every sermon that we can possibly listen to will make that point. Even if they don’t want to make it, I think we make that.

And that’s part of the beauty of the scriptural tradition and why I don’t have a lot of patience with hardened, well, I shouldn’t say with people, but with the positions of like a hardened inerrancy or something like that, which is I think an attempt to put that tradition under a glass that never changes. Well, it’s so multi-vocalic, what do you mean it doesn’t change? It’s changing within itself. It has unresolved issues because of different voices speaking. Even basic questions like, what is God like? Well, does he hate the Assyrians, Nahum? Or does he love the Assyrians, Jonah?

I mean, there you have it right there. What do you do with this God? And I think, to come full circle here, it’s modeling for us what I call elsewhere our sacred responsibility for wisely adapting the tradition in community. Not just yourself, but in community, in the vein of the prophets, to speak to matters of injustice.

Mike Petrow:

I love that you referenced James Kugel. I think he wrote a book called How to Read the Bible.

Peter Enns:

Oh, yeah.

Mike Petrow:

One of my favorites of all time. And in it, there is an example, which I’m probably going to get wrong. The way my memory holds it is he used the example of maybe a couple on a honeymoon, something like that, takes a picture standing in front of the World Trade Center.

Peter Enns:

Keep going. This is ringing a bell. You’re right, yeah.

Mike Petrow:

Okay. And then what he says is, “At the moment that they took that picture, it meant something. And then when the towers came down, the meaning of the picture changed because it’s now a memory of something else. What did the World Trade Center mean before it came down? What does it mean now after that disaster?” And so he says, “When we look at that picture now, it has so many layers of meaning, but none of them invalidate each other.”

Peter Enns:

Right.

Mike Petrow:

“It doesn’t change what they intended when they took that picture and what they were feeling in that moment, but also there’s so much more.” And he says, “Scripture is like that.” And I remember that was a game changer for me.

Peter Enns:

I think that’s a great point. I mean, for me, the big takeaway is that that original snapshot isn’t the thing we have to try to get back to because if we don’t live in those times, it’s not for us to get back to it. That’s biblical scholarship trying to talk about what’s the context of that original photo? When was it taken? Well, clearly it was taken before 9/11 because the towers, we had these historical things and there were clues in the picture about what they were wearing, maybe what part of the country they were from, all this kind of stuff. Yeah, I love that analogy. I think it’s a great one.

Drew Jackson:

Mike is a Jungian mythologist and I’m a poet, and both of us were/are preachers. And so some people can get very nervous when we talk about scripture as poetry or as mythology based on … I know the way that I was taught scripture was that very literalist interpretation of things. So I’m always curious about this question, but I wanted to ask you what changes when we read the prophets as poets? How does that change how we interact with the text? And then even more broadly than that, can you speak a little bit to the importance of genre in the biblical text?

Peter Enns:

Well, that’s a great question. I guess the way I see it is that poetry is a different kind of communication than narrative, but even there’s a side issue. Biblical narrative was probably invented in the 10th century in order for Israel to tell their epic story. Others told their epic stories poetically. The biblical writers did something a little bit different. But again, if I can channel James Kugel, he says that, “But you know there’s a lot of biblical narrative that feels poetic because it’s highly repetitive.”

“Now, Abraham was old and advanced in years, and the Lord said to Abraham, ‘Abraham, you are old and advanced in years.'” It’s very, very repetitive and that’s because the poetic element is the base and the narrative is an innovation from that. So even in the narrative, you can talk about poetic resonances. And the thing about poetry is that it’s emotive language. It doesn’t spell things out for you. You have to ponder with the words a little bit, how does it resonate with you? Images that cannot mean one thing, they mean multiple things depending who’s reading it.

And again, to me, that’s part of the gift of the scriptural tradition, that you have things in there that are meant to be pondered and not just read and filed away as simple fact. Once you start thinking about it, I don’t care who you are, the imagination starts taking over. I mean, Walter Brueggemann’s very big on the role of imagination in the task of theology. And I think we have that, and that does make people nervous, as both of you guys know, and I understand why. If the order is all important, if the order is the point, and getting back to order is always the point, not to any order, but getting back to the previous order, it’s difficult for people who are in that space to talk the way we’re talking right now about the Bible and they would see that as a threat rather than as a gift. But I see it as a gift.

My friend and my colleague, Kent Sparks at Eastern University says he thinks the biggest problem in dealing with the Bible and teaching the Bible to people is genre recognition. It’s just a failure to understand, what am I reading here? And even like the law, like what’s the law? Okay, but calm down for a second, because the law in Deuteronomy on Hebrew slaves is different than the law in Exodus and different than the one in Leviticus. So even there, we have to be careful that we don’t overlay, just because we use the word law, to overlay our notion of law as being a consistent body of legislation and imposing that onto the biblical text.

So our genres have to be sensitive to antiquity and the genres of antiquity. That’s why things like discovering Mesopotamian creation myths and then saying, “Boy, this looks like Genesis 1,” those things have helped us calibrate the genre of Genesis 1. We can’t call it historical, even though a lot of people in church history have, and understandably so. We can’t, we have to think differently about this. Struggling with genre, I think is a non-negotiable when it comes to trying to read and understand the biblical text.

Mike, you’ve mentioned a couple of times that podcast. The thing I will always remember from that podcast is his analogy of a tricycle, which I love, and I tell my students that and they’re like, “Huh?” I’m like, “Oh, wait. Yeah.” So you have three wheels. The back wheels are tradition and scripture, the front wheel is experience. The front wheel drives how you see the other two things, again, which makes some people extremely nervous and cautious.

But the longer I live, the more I say, “How can it possibly be any other way? We’re people, you know?” And my theology is rooted very much in how I’ve navigated my experience with maybe scripture and various traditions that I’ve been a part of, but it’s not the Bible that drives it because you’re still a person of experience engaging this text, right? How do you get around that? I don’t know. Why do we even want to? Why do we want to pretend we can actually find objectivity here?

Mike Petrow:

I feel like a lot of people don’t get that experiential component. They don’t understand that Paul, through his learning and experience, is interpreting Jesus, Jesus is interpreting the law and the prophets, the prophets are interpreting, and so on and so forth. And then even this idea that there may be an allusion in a Hebrew scripture to a myth or a text from outside of that, that doesn’t mean that they’re plagiarizing this idea. Or like you said, the end of Amos may have been written later and edited together. That doesn’t mean that someone in a secret conspiracy necessarily altered the text.

But we’re trained to read this way because we’re so literal that it’s this idea … If we got off this call and I said to Drew, “Wow, that was really great, the force is strong with this one.” And someone recorded that conversation and like a thousand years looked at it and was like, “He’s plagiarizing the movie Star Wars. Look at that.” I don’t know if this question even makes sense, Pete, but I wonder about helping people wrap their head around the conversational nature of what scripture is, that it seems always to be in dialogue with itself and the culture around it. And that’s not new, right?

Peter Enns:

It’s humanity, and this is why to be able to say boldly, the Bible is a thoroughly human book. That doesn’t mean it’s not inspired. You just have to play with these terms a little bit to try to bring clarity to them. But there is not a syllable in the Bible that is from outside of the human context. And again, I’m speaking here to more conservative friends who might say, “Yeah, but the Bible is revealed and it’s inspired.” Okay, that’s fine, but however you define those terms, the Bible is not less than a human book. It’s a thoroughly human book. However God’s role plays out in the production of the text or in what the writers wrote or didn’t write, it left us with a multi-vocalic text that has internal inconsistencies and contradictions.

This little story I tell my students, it’s all made up, of course, but Moses one day approaches God and says, “Lord, we’ve had these great conversations, you and I, and all this stuff, and I was talking to some of the fellows, we’d like to have this written down.” And God said, “That’s a bad idea.” And Moses says, “No, let’s do it. I think it’s a great idea.” He says, “No, it’s a bad idea.” “No, let’s just do it.” “Listen, Moses, you don’t understand. People are going to think that I have nothing else to say, and I’ve all said it here, and this is going to sort of put it engraved in stone. I don’t think it’s a good idea.” So Moses says, “Yeah, but we really want to.”

“Okay, Moses, I’ll do it. But just so nobody gets the wrong idea, we’re going to start off with two contradictory creation stories, and the first 11 chapters are going to have contradictory genealogies. We’re going to have two flood stories woven together just so nobody gets the wrong idea that this is like objective truth that’s going to deliver everything to you, you ever wanted to know. And it’s going to have all sorts of questionable moral activity even by me. I just don’t want people to get the wrong idea that by reading this book, they can stop seeking and stop listening and stop trying to become aware of God’s presence when I just have the book, that’s all I have to do.”

If that’s not the history of much of Protestantism, I don’t know what is and that’s a shame, I think. Well, that’s why they’re rediscovering contemplative theology or orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism.

Mike Petrow:

Yeah, I so appreciate that because it lets us hold the mystery. And that was my background was I was taught everything was literal, and then I started literally reading it and I was like, “Well, the details don’t make sense.”

Peter Enns:

Right.

Mike Petrow:

And then I got lucky because I landed in the study of mythology and it gave me better tools to where the vitality came from the variance, right? That’s where it got really fun and really interesting, and it’s an invitation into the conversation.

And I’m realizing for some of our listeners who maybe don’t know Richard’s tricycle metaphor, it’s such a good one, that there’s these three wheels of wisdom, that there’s scripture, gives us really good teaching, there’s the tradition, which for folks who don’t even know that word, this is the centuries of good teaching on what it means to be a Christian, how we interpret scripture, and then our personal experience is the third wheel that’s always driving it. But what I love about what I hear you saying is we are invited to participate in the conversation. And is there inspiration there? Can scripture be as inspiring as it is inspired for there to be inspiration in how we’re talking right now?

Peter Enns:

I mean, short answer is, yeah, I hope so. The fact is that scripture keeps working through these dynamic adaptations of the tradition itself. And that’s part of what I mean by rethinking or maybe expanding the notion of inspiration. I mean, theologians talk about this stuff all the time, but I mean for regular people who might have one particular way that they’ve been taught about the Bible and inspiration. Inspiration means perfection. Inspiration means no contradictions, historical accuracy, and even for some people scientific accuracy. That’s what it means for a holy God to speak a text into existence.

And my response is, “Good theory. Have you read it?” I mean, that’s a little snarky, but it’s a good theory, but if you have a theory that the data don’t make sense of that theory, you just need a new theory. It might be something that’s important, like, “I have to hold onto this.” Okay, I understand that. We can talk about the need to hold onto these things, but the fact that you need it doesn’t mean it’s true. It doesn’t mean that it’s an accurate descriptor of the text itself.

Drew Jackson:

Mike mentioned earlier the pattern that Richard talks about in this chapter that he sees in the prophets, whether that’s individual prophet’s journey or collective over time, that anger to sadness, to love journey. And I thought it could be a good place for us to land to just talk about this love being the destination.

Peter Enns:

I would put it this way, the ultimate expression of the prophetic word, which I think is always pushing towards justice, is for those in the Christian faith further fleshed out in a God who participates in humility and humiliation in crucifixion, and then resurrection, which is the renewing of all things in love. To me, the prophets more than anybody in the Hebrew Bible, more than anybody, it’s the prophets that push us in that direction.

Sometimes the New Testament doesn’t really, I think sometimes. It’s like Paul’s really angry in 2 Corinthians. I don’t really know if I’m getting much out of this, but anyway, that’s for me and my therapist to talk through, I don’t know. But I think the trajectory is there, and I’m not saying it’s absent in Judaism and only in Christianity. I’m not saying it’s absent in the Hebrew Bible, but there is a certain unexpected twist in the New Testament, which is the honor and shame issue that is so prevalent in the Hebrew Bible gets pushed aside by God participating in humanity in a unique way that we can’t understand.

To me, the prophetic voice is part of that, and Jesus is absolutely a prophet in that sense. He says and acts like a Hebrew, especially Jeremiah, I think, but he acts like one throughout. That’s why I think if anything, for people listening, just thinking of that connection between Jesus and the prophets. I might just say Walter Brueggemann’s book, The Prophetic Imagination is one that really drives that point home how Jesus continues the prophetic tradition and how the church is called likewise to embody that Christo-prophetic tradition in our own existence. And I’ve gotten a lot out of thinking about that.

Mike Petrow:

Thanks for this great conversation. And I know you’re going to be talking to Richard about the book soon as well, so we’ll encourage folks to check that out. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you,

Peter Enns:

Michael, thank you very much. And Drew, thank you too. It’s good to be with you both.

Mike Petrow:

Oh my gosh, Drew, what a great conversation with Pete, what a profound chapter, and what an amazing way to begin this journey together.

Drew Jackson:

Yeah, there was so much in that conversation with Pete. We could sit here and unpack it for hours together, but it was so rich, Mike.

Mike Petrow:

Yeah. What I loved about our conversation with Pete, and what I think it really resonates with this in this chapter is that Richard is inviting us on a journey, and it’s a journey of growing up. And it’s a journey of growing up that he sees in the scriptures and that I think he’s suggesting that an honest look at the scriptures also invites us into.

Thinking about these two passages I love, Richard’s talking about reading the prophets, and I think reading in scripture in general. And he says, “If you read it closely, you begin to see a pattern that I’ve long taught about the way we progress as human beings from order into what seems to be disorder and finally reaching some kind of reorder. It seems to be a journey of refining the real message, fire by fire, until we reach a final state of joy and hopefulness. This is the clear trajectory of all human life. All of us, prophets included, usually must do it wrong or partly wrong many times before we can do it right. It cannot be any different as a good parent knows.” I love this invitation to let scripture be imperfect, to let our prophets be imperfect and to let ourselves be imperfect as we take this journey together in the coming months.

Drew Jackson:

It’s such a beautiful invitation, and I love the way that Richard frames that and the invitation to imperfection. And I think one of the things that I hear in Richard, when Richard is inviting us to that, is that as we see that imperfection, both as we experience it in ourselves and our own stories, as we see it and experience it in the world and we wrestle with the anger around that, but then dip into the sadness around that and then move into the love, the embracing, the acceptance of that. That invitation to sadness is something that I’ve been sitting with, the invitation to tears. The book is called The Tears of Things. And I want to just read this passage, and I think Richard captures this so well. And I think it’s an invitation for all of us in our journeys to connect with the inherent grief in everything as we wrestle with the imperfections in the journey.

And he says, “There is an inherent sadness and tragedy in almost all situations, in our relationships, our mistakes, our failures, large and small, and even our victories. We must develop a very real empathy for this reality, knowing that we cannot fully fix things, entirely change them, or make them to our liking. This way of tears and the deep vulnerability that it expresses is opposed to our normal ways of seeking control through willpower, commandment, force, retribution, and violence. Instead, we begin in a state of empathy with and for things and people and events, which just might be the opposite of judgmental-ism. It is hard to be on the attack when you are weeping.”

And then he says this line that I really think is the heart of it, he says, “Prophets and mystics recognize what most of us do not, that all things have tears and all things deserve tears. They know that grief and sadness are doorways to understanding life in a non-egocentric way.” I know it’s certainly an invitation for me, and I think for all of our listeners, even that phrase, all things have tears and all things deserve tears, if we could sit with that phrase and let it do its work in us and open us up to the inherent sadness and grief and to connect with that in our own selves, I think we’ll have enough to sit with and reflect on for a long time.

Mike Petrow:

I love that, Drew. I think often about this phrase from Richard, the only perfection available to us is our ability to accept and love our imperfection. And what you said there reminds me that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t break our heart along the way. And I think that place of heartbreak over our imperfections and the imperfections of the world can be a place we meet. Yeah, thank you for that.

And listeners, thank you for joining us. We look forward to seeing you again in a few weeks when we take up again with chapter two. We hope those of you who are reading, you’ve been enjoying reading the book and you’re finding friends and good conversation partners as you continue to join us in the conversation going forward. We’ll see you again soon for chapter two of The Tears of Things.

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:

Sarah Palmer.

Dorothy Abrahams:

Dorothy Abrahams.

Brandon Strange:

Brandon Strange.

Vanessa Yee:

Vanessa Yee.

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.