RICHARD ROHR is a celebrated writer on Christian spirituality — rightly so, in my view. I first came across him years ago in his writings on the Enneagram, but it was his brilliant work Falling Upwards that really captured me more than a decade ago. This enlightening book is in the same vein, published since he reached the age of 80 and has been suffering from ill health. It is a wonderfully mature piece of writing, which I thoroughly recommend.
Rohr has a great gift for expressing imaginative insights and profound truths accessibly. In so doing, he opens up new horizons for his readers in their spiritual journey. In this book, he invites us to engage with the Hebrew prophets.
His basic thesis is that the prophets generally begin with righteous indignation at the injustice of the world and then, as they speak of this, they confront confusion, denial, doubt, love, and, especially, epiphany. “Maturing prophets let these experiences change them, allowing themselves to evolve into non-dualistic and compassionate truth-tellers.”
By non-dualistic he means not projecting all evil “out there”, dividing the world into good and bad people and insisting that the latter be punished. What we see in the Hebrew prophets is an evolution in their understanding of God, and it is into this movement that he invites us: from anger at evil through what he terms “holy disorder” to tears and sadness, before these eventually morph into pure compassion as a mature response to evil.
The phrase the “tears of things”, lacrimae rerum, was coined by Virgil: he has Aeneas use it in the Aeneid as he contemplates a mural of the Trojan War and the tragedy of the death of his friends and compatriots depicted in it; and Seamus Heaney tells us that “There are tears at the heart of things.” Only tears, Rohr says, can move both Aeneas and us beyond paralysing anger at evil, death, and injustice without losing the deep legitimacy of that anger.
His final crucial associated conviction is that we shall not escape from the violence with which the world continues to be gripped as long as threats and promises remain the “overarching frame of Christianity or of any religious or secular creed”. Such dualism — the notion of an infinite God’s being driven by “a naïve reward-punishment worldview must be undone by the deeper gospel of unconditional love and respect”. Amen to that, I say.
The Rt Revd Dr John Inge is a former Bishop of Worcester.
The Tears of Things: Prophetic wisdom for an age of outrage
Richard Rohr
SPCK £21.99
(978-0-281-09095-2)
Church Times Bookshop £19.79