Tag Archives: Richard Rohr

Shakespeare, Richard Rohr, and Prayer

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I just listened to the beginning of a sermon by my beloved “Brother” Richard Rohr from 1999.  He was speaking about prayer and explaining that it is more than most of us do when we pray, very aware that, as T.S. Eliot noted, “Prayer is more than an order of words, or the sound of the voice praying, or the conscious occupation of the praying mind…”  He explained about prayer being an attentive, keen awareness of the Presence of the moment, a “Presence” which is God Him/Herself.  Rohr knows that this is a moment of attunement with that Ground of our Being which is everything that we are…in our Essence.

A quip from Shakespeare immediately came to my mind about this meditative focus from another dear “Brother” of mine, William Shakespeare.  In his play, “Hamlet,” King Claudius was kneeling in prayer, not knowing that his stepson Hamlet was approaching with a drawn sword, preparing to take vengeance on the King who, though he was the brother of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, had killed the king so that he could marry young Hamlet’s mother. Hamlet roiled with the notion of the “incestuous bed” that Claudius and Gertrude were sleeping in.  Still not hearing the approaching footsteps, Claudius prayed, “My thoughts fly up but my words remain below.  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

This memorable line from the play stunned me from the first time I read it decades ago.  It revealed a grasp of language that was finding an entryway into my own heart at that time, beginning a 35 year trek into the intricacy of language.  Shakespeare knew that the word was not the thing, that words were only pointers as in the Buddhist wisdom, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.” That moment in 1986 was the beginning of a life-changing transformation for me, my first “tippy-toeing” into the depths of my own heart, a venture which is giving me today some faint understanding of the human heart.

(Rohr is the founder and director of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  I invite you to check out his daily blog at—https://cac.org/category/daily-meditations/)

A Caveat About Judgmentalism

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The excerpt from Paul Tillich’s book, “On Boundaries” I shared recently is a prophetic word for us.  And in pointing out what “ails us” a prophet is “doom preaching” in some manner and one of my readers definitely took it that way.  I appreciate his “like” of the post and his “bothering” to share with me his take on the Tillich shared there, though I disagreed with its tenor.

Tillich lived and spoke with hope as did many Germans of his day, Dietrich Bonnhoeffer and Hannah Arendt for example. Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and Arendt were seers, prophets in a very real sense as they were keenly “aware of the present moment,” this “awareness” a gift to one with a prophetic voice.The gifted historian William Irwin Thompson noted that a prophet, “is not so much having the ability to foretell the future but the ability to be aware of the implications of the present.”  We have them in our world today in the art and literary fields as well as with spiritually astute individuals like Richard Rohr, Marriane Williamson, and the Reverend William Barber, to name but a few.

But the reader’s response made me aware of the “tenor” of what I think, say, do, and “write” in this venue.  Even the very profound excerpt from the Tillich book, “Boundaries” makes a statement about the one who was writing and is sharing.  Someone once said, “Give a kid a hammer and everything is a nail.” Yes, the post of yesterday is another example of a “kid with a hammer” in a very real sense.  Yes, “in a sense,”  I am a very judgemental person and occasionally realize that in the formative years of my life, I would even say early moments, I “felt” judged and thus became a “judge” in a sense.  But mercifully I see this on occasion and “tone it down” a bit, look around for a moment and see the beauty of the world that surrounds me.  

For example, let me share with you a visit from Beauty which I was blessed with on Sunday morning last.  Shortly after awakening, I walked into the living room and noticed the bird-storm outside my windows, the flurry of birds delighting in the feeders I have out to win their favor.  This alone always quietens the din of heavy-handed, ponderous, pontificating that is always so ready to lure me from the Grace of simply “being here.”  There was a warm fire crackling in the wood stove to my left, a cup of hot coffee before me, and my beautiful little dachshund, Petey, curled up beside me.  Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” was playing on the Dish-satellite music channel. In a few moments my lovely wife began to rehearse on her Grand Piano for the music program at a nearby little Methodist church a bit later, via Zoom.  The old hymns from my youth stirred my soul as she played them and sang along, Petey joined occasionally when he deemed the key in tune with his musically sensitive ears.  (Admittedly, Petey’s “singing” would be dismissed by less refined listeners as a lot of barking and whining!)  In an hour or so, Petey and l shifted venues in our house to the sunroom as my wife joined her church service.  Petey and I call the lovely sunroom on this occasion, “the penalty box” as it keeps his highly-skilled and sophisticated voice from interfering with the church service. There Petey and I are delighted with the view of a sun-filled desert behind our house, the back-splash of which is the stunning Taos Mountain Range, snow-covered from recent snow-fall.  According to local lore, these mountains are sacred and their “call” leads some people to move here and take root which we did seven years ago.  We are honored because these mountains did not “kick us out” as, per local lore, will happen to some who move here but who don’t last long.  We passed the ancient test of these mountains and are honored.

Whatever out thoughts, whatever their tenor, they will pass.  As someone said, “We are not our thoughts. are the ones having them.”  Therefore, “Don’t believe everything you think!!!”

Meditation Reining In the Spinning of My”Monkey Mind”

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In 2011 I stumbled into a meditation class at an Episcopalian Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas in which Eastern and Christian meditation were equally emphasized.  The class was exploring a book by Richard Rohr, “The Naked Now,” a Franciscan priest in Albuquerque, New Mexico who was the founder and director of The Center For Action and Contemplation.  It was this class and luminaries such as Rohr, Thich Nat Hanh, Thomas Merton, et al who brought to my consciousness the relentless “spin” of my religious mind/heart.

That class taught me there was no “right” way to meditate.  I learned that meditation was about reining in the incessant chattering of the “monkey mind” and that any daunting of that relentless mantra of the egoic mind was the goal.  The basic instruction was, “When you find your mind, wandering away, merely bring it back to a mantra, a ‘sacred word,’ or even one’s breath.  The goal was merely “reining in” that mind, not doing anything “perfectly.”  One thing I quickly realized was just how much my spiritual life was about “getting it right,” aka “perfectly.”  I gradually became aware of the relentless unconscious mantra, an internal dialogue which had haunted my life, “Do it perfectly.” This venture into the discipline of meditation brought to my consciousness the tyranny of self-talk which was a piped-in “muzak” drone designed merely to fill the otherwise pregnant void of my life.

This experience was the advent of “the light of day” to my life, inviting me to “listen” better to what I was hearing “out there” but also to the incessant grind of unexamined internal dialogue.  “Ears to hear that were ‘hearing not’” were beginning to hear for the first time; eyes that had never seen before were beginning to see for the first time.  One could even say I was being “born again” in a very real sense though without the hysteria of the “born again” culture.  I want to share here a relevant observation from a noted teacher of meditation, Laurence Freeman, who is the founder of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM):


To see reality as it is, or at least to free oneself progressively of its
filters, is a major act of faith. It expresses the trusting face of faith
because our attachment to the beliefs and rituals of our tradition can
become a false and falsifying security. And so, many deeply religious
people feel an aversion or antipathy to meditation because it seems to
(and indeed does) undermine the secure boundaries that protect our world
view and our sense of being superiorly different from others.

A way of faith, however, is not a dogged adherence to one point of view
and to the belief systems and ritual traditions that express it. That
would make it just ideology or sectarianism, not faith. Faith is a
transformational journey that demands that we move in, through and beyond
our frameworks of belief and external observances—not betraying or
rejecting them but not being entrapped by their forms of expression
either. St Paul spoke of the way of salvation as beginning and ending in
faith. Faith is thus an open-endedness, from the very beginning of the
human journey. There is, of course, value in a framework, a system and
tradition. [But] if we are stably centered in these, the process of change
unfolds and our perspective of truth is continuously enlarged.

NOTE:  Laurence Freeman, WCCM, and meditation culture are a gift to me as a result of blogging.  Freeman and many others I would never had heard of without having cyber “met” a woman from Toowoomba, Australia.  Thank you, Anne-Marie.

Meditation Can Intervene With One’s “Monkey Mind.”

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The “spin” that I have kicked around the last few posts pertains also to religion, even mine! I was given by birth the Christian tradition, which I still greatly respect, but which I realized I was given in a socio-cultural context from my birth in the American South in the early 1950’s, coming with a particular “spin” which taught me that my hyper conservative Baptist church was very “special”; it was  so “special” that even the Southern Baptist Convention of which we were a spin-off was “too liberal.”  There was a sense in which my little denomination, the Landmark Missionary Baptist Church, took for itself the exalted position of the “bride of Christ,” an honor that awaited us when we got to heaven. These were good people, very, very,  good people, who afforded me this “spin.”  If I had not been given that “spin”, I would have been given another; we all get a “spin.”  Many of the generation I grew up in did not take it as seriously as I did and were able to slough off the spin-dimension  more readily than I was; they were secure enough to not take themselves so seriously.  I was very thin-skinned, very wounded and needed the specialness “spin” to protect me from the vulnerability that would have otherwise overwhelmed me.

My spirituality has, therefore, always been “all about me” more than I could have imagined.  This is still the case and will always be.  In a sense, “I can’t help it” for I am a mere human and can only “hold this treasure in an earthen vessel.”  My ego, still with its infantile baggage, wants to believe otherwise and have the assurance that the viewpoint I have on spiritual matters is beyond question, is “objective” in some sense.  But we are never as “objective” as we think we are and this leads to delusional thinking, especially in religion…and politics. But once you “see” a dark dimension of your heart, it is not eradicated but its power begins to diminish; that “diminishment” process follows one the rest of his life.

Beginning about a decade ago when I stumbled across the work of Richard Rohr and a meditation class at a lovely church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, this narcissism began to crumble.  St. Paul’s Episcopalian Church offered many treasures, one of which was a Sunday School class which emphasized Eastern and Western meditation wisdom and practice.  There this “monkey mind” of mine became more visible, its shrieking and chattering more apparent for what it was.  Next time, I will explore a bit more the importance of meditation in my life.

An African American Theologian Addresses Racism in Christianity

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I’ve often cited Fr. Richard Rohr in my blogging.  He has been an important figure in my spiritual life for over ten years; and, having moved to New Mexico five years ago I have even had the honor of meeting him at his headquarters in Albuquerque.  In his daily posts that I receive via email, he has introduced me this week to an African American theologian that I had not heard of before, Howard Thurman. Thurman lived through the horrendous racial turmoil of the 20th century in my country, passing away in 1981.

In the excerpts Rohr has shared this week, I have become painfully aware of just how racism has haunted my life and how it has predicated my life in a very subtle fashion.  Racism shaped my emotional/spiritual life when I was growing up in the 50’s and 60’s in the American South.  It cemented into my heart and soul an “us-them” paradigm that I will never totally escape…though “awareness” is helping me mitigate its abysmal ugliness. The Thurman excerpt today helped me to see so clearly how racism was egregiously present in the spiritual tradition that I was born into, a spiritual tradition which nevertheless even today provides an Anchor in my life as I venture into the phase of life so beautifully captured by W. B. Yeats, “An aged man is a paltry thing.  A tattered coat upon a stick.”  (Though there is no “cane” in my life yet, and my coat is not “tattered”, I am living in the frailty of aging that Yeats had in mind.)

This vulnerability is priceless.  It helps me to learn from the daily emails…and the books…of Fr. Rohr and to appreciate the wisdom of “unknown” figures like Thurman. This Thurman wisdom offered today speaks volumes about my Christian tradition, pointing out the sinister manner in which innocent-minded and very good people can use the teachings of Jesus to bring a distorted version of Christianity into the world.  And, of course, when one is so ensconced in a distorted view of any dimension of life, there is a deep-seated aversion for considering that “distortion” might be present.  The ego wants it that way.

Here is Thurman’s wisdom from today’s Rohr email:

The burden of being black and the burden of being white is so heavy that it is rare in our society to experience oneself as a human being. It may be, I do not know, that to experience oneself as a human being is one with experiencing one’s fellows as human beings. Precisely what does it mean to experience oneself as a human being? In the first place, it means that the individual must have a sense of kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate kinship of family or the organic kinship that binds him ethnically or “racially” or nationally. He has to feel that he belongs to his total environment. He has a sense of being an essential part of the structural relationship that exists between him and all other men, and between him, all other men, and the total external environment. As a human being, then, he belongs to life and the whole kingdom of life that includes all that lives and perhaps, also, all that has ever lived. In other words, he sees himself as a part of a continuing, breathing, living existence. To be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world. . . .

If being Christian does not demand that all Christians love each other and thereby become deeply engaged in experiencing themselves as human beings, it would seem futile to expect that Christians as Christians would be concerned about the secular community in its gross practices of prejudice and discrimination. If a black Christian and white Christian, in encounter, cannot reach out to each other in mutual realization because of that which they are experiencing in common, then there should be no surprise that the Christian institution has been powerless in the presence of the color bar in society. Rather it has reflected the presence of the color bar within its own institutional life.

On the other hand, if Christians practice brotherhood among Christians, this would be one limited step in the direction of a new order among men. Think of what this would mean. Wherever one Christian met or dealt with another Christian, there would be a socially redemptive encounter. They would be like the Gulf Stream or the Japanese Current tempering and softening the climate in all directions. Indeed the Christian would be a leaven at all levels of the community and in public and private living. Of course, such a situation may lend itself to all kinds of exploitation and betrayals—but the Christian would be one of the bulwarks of integrity in human relations in an immoral society.

 

 

Ash Wednesday Thoughts: “Dust Balls” Are We.

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In my youth, Catholicism was the epitome of “them.”  It was a given that Catholics were not even Christian for they “believed in Mary.”  But as I’ve aged I have increasing respect for them, not unrelated to my discovery of a Franciscan priest in Albuquerque, NM, Richard Rohr.  I received via email yesterday an email from a blogging friend in Australia which included a powerful poem about “Ash Wednesday” which I will share at the end of this post.

I have faint memories of the term “Ash Wednesday” from my youth and young adulthood but these memories were tainted by the anti-Catholicism.   This brings to mind another blogging friend who I kidded with the label “Dust ball” in reference to her interest in “Mother Earth” and the biblical notion of us being “dust of the earth.”  For we are all “dust balls” bouncing around on this granite “dust ball” for a few decades with the innate, egoic tendency to take ourselves more seriously than we are.  This absence of humility fails to appreciate the emphasis that the Catholics offer with this Lent season event, symbolized with a smudge of ash on the forehead.

Humility is often confused with cravenness.  But this is related to what Carl Jung noted as two extremes of the same human egoic complex—ego inflation and ego deflation.  The “inflation” is taking our selves too seriously, but the “deflation” is not taking ourselves seriously enough, failing to respect the glory of just “being” here.  But in each instance the emphasis is on our “self” as in our ego.  The alternative would be true humility, “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.”  Human nature is prone to focus on what we know to be reality, always a self-serving endeavor, failing to recognize that this “knowing” usually excludes so many who lie beyond that culturally contrived pale.  Humility involves letting that “pale,” i.e. “boundary,” dissolve a bit so that we can include some of those that we have heretofore excluded.  Sounds a bit like Jesus, huh?

Blessing the Dust
A Blessing for Ash Wednesday

All those days
you felt like dust,
like dirt,
as if all you had to do
was turn your face
toward the wind
and be scattered
to the four corners

or swept away
by the smallest breath
as insubstantial—

Did you not know
what the Holy One
can do with dust?

This is the day
we freely say
we are scorched.

This is the hour
we are marked
by what has made it
through the burning.

This is the moment
we ask for the blessing
that lives within
the ancient ashes,
that makes its home
inside the soil of
this sacred earth.

So let us be marked
not for sorrow.
And let us be marked
not for shame.
Let us be marked
not for false humility
or for thinking
we are less
than we are

but for claiming
what God can do
within the dust,
within the dirt,
within the stuff
of which the world
is made,
and the stars that blaze
in our bones,
and the galaxies that spiral
inside the smudge
we bear.

–Jan Richardson

Self-awareness and Bullying

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In my last post, I shared thoughts about bullying and self-consciousness or “self” awareness.  A couple years ago when I was on Facebook an upper classman when I was in Jr. High at my small Arkansas high school shared his shame and regret about bullying a helpless, self-conscious, insecure lad in his class. This gentleman had been a star athlete himself, later to have a tryout with the Arkansas Razorbacks; he was handsome, intelligent, and headed to success in his life.  On Facebook he shared about his effort to reach out to this man he had bullied to apologize but had received no response.  This gentleman had found awareness and now sincerely rued his cruel behavior to this “nerdy” and perhaps handicapped classmate.

Self “awareness” is something we mature into, slowly becoming aware of the “presence” of other people in our world and becoming sensitive to their reality.  There are times, however, when this maturity never comes and, furthermore, there are times when people are ensconced in a social milieu where this “self” awareness is discouraged.  The best example I find of this occurred in the New Testament with the crucifixion of Jesus, as explained by Fr. Richard Rohr who interpreted the famous words of Jesus on the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” as, “Father, forgive them for they are not aware (or conscious) of what they do.”

These men did not awaken that morning, convene down at Starbucks, and suddenly decide, “Hey, let’s be mean and nasty, violent and brutal, and put that guy to death who does not see this world as we do.”  They had many meetings at that coffee shop in planning their deed and came to the firm conclusion that they were going to do the right thing, the “lord’s will,” if you please. They were firm in their convictions and many of them I’m sure were morally upright men, probably in a respectable position down at the local church….or, “synagogue” in that day.  They were probably members of the school board, members of the Lions Club, active in what used to be called, “benevolent societies,” and faithfully they bought Girl Scout cookies each spring.  And I’m sure that there were young, unmarried men in the mix also, those who avowed that they didn’t, “smoke, drink, chew…or go with the girls they do.”  But it is possible for good men to do bad things when they are driven merely by ideology, steeped with preconceived ideas about their world and the deep-seated conviction that they objectively understand the world.  When men and women are addicted to their ideas, regardless of how “noble” those ideas may be, they lack “awareness” and are capable of great evil in what they deem as service to the good.  T.S. Eliot summarized this problem, “Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done, and done to others harm, which once we took for exercise of virtue.”

Spirituality in Cultural Captivity

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When working on a Master’s thesis in history at the University of Arkansas in the 1980’s, I focused on American religion, specifically the fundamentalist Christian response to the influence of modernity in the late 19th century.  One book I stumbled across me was entitled, “Churches in Cultural Captivity” by John Eighmy which described how the Southern Baptists had unwittingly been “captured” by their culture, disobeying one of their basic maxims, “To be in the world, but not of the world.”

Any spiritual tradition faces the peril of enculturation as any spiritual truth has to be conveyed through human contrivances like ritual, art, and language.  The essence of spirituality is a dimension of the human experience which is ineffable and therefore not accessible through these or any other cultural contrivances.  These contrivances are but pointers to the spiritual dimension of life but immediately they are likely to fall prey to people who will take them literally, who will not allow these symbols to make any ingress into the depths of the heart where they can be meaningful.  Language, for example, will never get beyond conceptual formulations, words and phrases (i.e. jargon) which rattle around in the cavern of the mind and have all the value of what the Apostle Paul called a “sounding brass and a tinkling symbol.”  Or, to borrow from comedian Jerry Seinfield, they will amount to, “Yada, yada, yada.”

Often these sterile thoughts and ideas rattling around “up there” might contain great value.  But if they are only ideas, devoid of any engagement with a heart that is connected to a body, they will only be dogma and usually will serve the purpose of satisfying some cultural dictate.  One simple cultural dictate is simply to fit into the comfortable confines of the tribe which in my case meant “getting saved” and becoming a Christian.  Furthermore, these sterile ideas will likely gain power to the point that they make the individual extremely amenable to the prevailing sentiments, values, and more ways of the prevailing cultural milieu.  Thus, early in my spiritual life, it was definite that women should be submissive to their husbands and stay in the home, that blacks were inferior to whites and should be kept “separate but equal” with not so much emphasis on that “equal” part, that everyone who did not subscribe to our biblically correct view of the world was likely to spend eternity in hell.  For, when spiritual truth is only conceptual, i.e. “the letter of the law”, there will be no internal discernment and one is likely to be innocently imbibing what the Apostle Paul called “the wisdom of this world.”  This does not make these people “bad people” it just means they have been captivated by their culture and have not allowed the spiritual wisdom of their tradition to sink down from the head into the heart.

Spirituality of this fashion will always be very formulaic, legalistic, and judgmental.  This is a cognitive faith, one that is emphasizes thinking over the affective dimension of life, the phenomenon described by the Apostle Paul as “the letter of the law.”  These are the people who Jesus encountered in the person of the Pharisees and he immediately saw right into the “foul and ragged bone shop of their heart” and called them hypocrites.  That quotation was from the poet W. B Yeats who also noted, “Oh God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone.  They who sing a lasting song must think in the marrow bone.”  Yeats saw the dilemma of the “disembodied word” and those in whom their words have not become “enfleshed” are apt to practice great evil though always in the name of what is “good” or “godly.”  This is a matter of experiencing an integration between heart and mind so that we don’t merely talk a good game, but our behavior “speaks” a good game.  Or, as I heard Richard Rohr say one time, “Speak the gospel everywhere you go; and, if necessary use words.”

These “gospeleteers”, whose daily functioning draws from a mélange of rhetoric in their heads, can’t act for any purpose beyond themselves for they cannot see one.  They “have eyes to see, but see not; ears to hear, but hear not.”  These are not necessarily bad people.  They are merely people who have been enculturated too well and/or have never stumbled across a church or spiritual teacher who challenged their spiritual preconceptions, forcing an encounter with subterranean regions of their heart.  This makes me think of a fear that Ralph Waldo Emerson voiced in the 19th century, the fear of coming to the end of his life and realizing that he had not really lived his life at all.  Or, to put it in the words of Jesus, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and lose his own soul.”  Jesus was telling us that if we spend out whole life only skimming along on the surface of things, especially in the realm of spiritual things, we will have lived without every tapping into an authentic dimension of our own life.  He was saying, for example, that if we spend our whole life “christianized”, we will miss the point and experience of being a Christian.

Jesus was not and is not about fire insurance.  Jesus was about getting God “down from heaven” onto the earth, expressing his graciousness, kindness, and love as his Presence is woven into the very fabric of our being.  That will not leave us as some damn Christian geek running around bible-thumping and trying to make you see the world like he does.  Even more so it refers to the “working” out of an imminent deity that Jesus taught is within us already, as in when he reminded us, “the Kingdom is within.”

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A VERY NECESSARY CAVEAT:  I am using terminology from one particular spiritual tradition.  Remember, “the word is not the thing.”

 

S

The Ego and “Distinction Drawing”

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Fr. Richard Rohr today offered observations about the ego which are relevant to my present focus on the “distinction drawing” that is an essential part of our identity.  He pointed out how the ego is concerned only about itself which is just a basic dimension of being human and only becomes toxic when it metastasizes and begins to project its shadow outside onto “them” and in extreme attempts to obliterate “them.”  The best example is Isis but the same phenomena is found with any extremist group.

Ordinary ego functioning is, yes, “egotistic” but it is usually benign and helps provide group/tribal coherence.  It provides an identity which always sets one apart from “them.”  I shared recently about my upbringing in a conservative Landmark Baptist Church and it does provide an example of an inordinate need to “draw distinctions” and thus overly emphasized the biblical admonishment, “Come out ye from among them and be ye separate” and “Be ye a peculiar people.”  I often facetiously note to friends that my little church clearly succeeded in this endeavor and, with chagrin, admit I won the prize for “peculiar”!  But let me assure you that in my little central Arkansas community these people were not toxic, were very good people, and did a great job in providing me the social and educational structure that would allow me to now be able to “discourse” about them.  Conservative groups, with non-toxic ego needs, are the backbone of any tribe and even of the entire world.

But when the toxicity metastasizes, we find phenomena like Isis and Westboro Baptist Church, the latter of which is a caricature of Baptist churches.  In these groups the “distinction drawer” has become so powerful due to repressed fears and anxieties from the reptilian brain that there is a need to strike out at somebody.  In a way they are so much under the grip of the unconsciousness that they are powerless which is how Rohr interprets Jesus’ dying words on the Cross, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”  Jesus knew that those who hated him to the point of wanting to kill him merely were not conscious of what they were doing.

When distinction drawing becomes too rigid, when the need for boundaries becomes paramount, it always leads to an over emphasis of what sets the group apart rather seeking for common denominators with others. It is not accidental that one of the most appealing dimensions of Donald Trump is his promise to “Build that wall” to keep out the Mexicans.  And it is not often remembered now but not long after he started this emphasis one of his competitors went to the absurd extreme of proposing to build a wall between our country and Canada also!  Trump’s message appeals to frightened people who see their out dated certainties threatened.  The message of “building a wall” is a symbol that resonates with the need to “set boundaries” and keep change from happening, not recognizing that “change” is an essential dynamic of life and must be embraced rather than opposed.  Otherwise we would still be living in the Stone Age.

The Tyranny of Being Right

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One of the earliest “distinction drawings” I learned after becoming conscious was that the world was divided into two categories—“saved” and “unsaved.”  And from that font of binary thinking I learned there were Baptists and then there were other religious denominations who did not understand the Bible “right.”  And even worse, there were the “Mary-worshipping” Catholics and also the Jews who weren’t even Christian!  And even within Baptist ranks, there were my particular brand of Baptist (Landmark Missionary Baptists) and then those “liberal” Southern Baptists from which we Landmarkers had split off from in the late 19th century.  And even within Landmark churches there would often arise doctrinal squabbles which would lead to a split and the start of another church.  Note that the phenomena of needing to draw distinctions was a fundamental premise.  And in my denomination, there was even the phenomena of the Bride of Christ which was an honorary place in heaven for Christians who had belonged to the church which most closely adhered to the gospel and could trace their historical roots back to Christ.  Yes, I was honored to learn that this was my church.  Yes, even in heaven there would be distinctions drawn.  Gawd it was comforting to know that I was so special.

And please note that this “distinction drawing” was not the exclusive domain of Christianity or even fundamentalist Christianity.  It is merely part of being human and is toxic only when we never mature enough to make the need of drawing distinctions less important than finding common ground.  It has always been present in human history and will always be present as it is inherent in cognition itself.  BUT, it is possible…I am finding…to be a thinking human being and realize that some of the distinctions I have drawn with such rigidity in my life are not quite as black and white as I had been taught.  But for those who are stuck in what Richard Rohr calls “binary thinking” cannot help but obsessively seek for distinctions which leave them separate from others and thus “right.”

One result of this emphasis on my early life was the need to be right.  I quickly learned that there was “right” and “wrong” and learned that “right” consisted of basically adhering to the rules that constituted “right.”  I now realize that existentially, in the bowels of my young heart, I had perceived myself to be intrinsically bad but that I could be “good” and be “right” if I followed the rules, if I would be a “good little boy.”  This put me on the path of being a very good hypocrite, for the word hypocrite merely means “to act.”  I am not denigrating myself in the least with this point.  I was only a child and had learned how to find validation and that was in “acting” right and I did so with utmost sincerity.  Richard Rohr has pointed out that most of us spend the first half of our life as an actor in all respects and only then begin to wrestle with the under-lying dimension of life which always involves opening Pandora’s box in some way.  But it is hard to impossible for a guilt-ridden Christian to admit they have been “acting” for doing so would be to acknowledge and embrace the feelings of “wrongness” which have always tyrannized them into outward compliance with rules.  They would have to realize they have been living in bondage to “the law” albeit a “Christian” version of bondage.  They have been socialized or enculturated into their faith…which is a necessary stage of faith…but at some point it is important to acknowledge the “act” they have been putting on and allow the “Spirit of the Law” to begin to flow.  James Alison, who will share the stage with Richard Rohr in a couple of weeks, has written a book entitled “The Joy of Being Wrong,” describing the release he found when he no longer had to be constantly trying to be “right.”  And of course, in the need to “be right” I constructed various constructs in life in which I could be “right” and “they” would be wrong.  Oh, how comforting it was.  And how hypocritical.