Richard Rohr -- cherry picking thread 2

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AlanFromWichita

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My last thread “Harvesting Richard Rohr,” was very good afa I was concerned, even though it went a bit off-topic debating Rohr personally rather than selected “positive” teachings I was trying to stick with.

But it’s getting kind of old, and I really wanted to discuss his email for today … so I’m starting a new thread.

Please abide by the following: If you wish to discuss what wrong things Rohr says and does then please start a new thread – unless it is directly related to the “positive” quotes under discussion. What is a “positive” quote? A quote that somebody on this thread believes would be useful for helping to advance along the spiritual journey.

For example: I don’t want to hear anything about his use of female pronouns for Members of the Trinity. I understand why he does it, but it’s distracting to me just like to many others so we really don’t need to discuss it. Nor do we need to discuss his alleged novelties in saying Mass.

So after too much ado, here is today’s email I wish to share, about the Trinity:

MEDITATIONS ON THE MYSTERY OF THE TRINITY (from email 6/7/2012)

Paul says, “God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1
Corinthians 1:25 1). That awesome line gives us a key into the Mystery
of Trinity. I would describe human strength as self-sufficiency or
autonomy. God’s weakness I would describe as Interbeing.

Human strength admires holding on. The Mystery of the Trinity is about
each One letting go into the Other. Human strength admires personal
independence. God’s Mystery is total mutual dependence. We like
control. God loves vulnerability. We admire needing no one. The Trinity
is total intercommunion with all things and all Being. We are practiced
at hiding and protecting ourselves. God seems to be in some kind of
total disclosure for the sake of the other.

Our strength, we think, is in asserting and protecting our boundaries.
God is into dissolving boundaries between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
yet finding them in that very outpouring! Take the rest of your life to
begin to unpackage such a total turnaround of Reality.

Alan
 
Today’s email from Fr. Rohr directly addresses something I’ve found of critical issue around here on CAF. It isn’t just the fundamentalists who tend not to go deeper than the literal level of scriptures, or to use the scripture to prove we’re right rather than to allow it to change us. Jesus’s teachings never really make sense if they are at the literal-only level of intimacy, and arguing about the literal meaning tends to make us dig in our heels and resist even further, any actual edification we might have gotten. Enough of my words on the matter, take it away Richard …

From Fr. Richard Rohr’s daily email, Jan 7, 2013:
“Fundamentalism”
Misses the Fundamental Number 9 of 57

My dear friend, Dr. Gerald May, made a distinction years ago that I have found myself using frequently. He says spirituality is not to encourage willfulness, but in fact willingness. Spirituality creates willing people who let go of their need to be first, to be right, to be saved, to be superior, and to define themselves as better than other people. That game is over and gone; and if you haven’t come to the willing level—“not my will but Thy will be done” as Jesus says (Matthew 26:39)—then I think the Bible will almost always be misused.

I would like to say that the goal in general is to be serious about the Scriptures. We have often substituted being literal with being serious, and they are not the same! (Read that a second time, please). The point I would like to make is that literalism is not to take the text seriously at all! Pure literalism in fact avoids the real impact, the real message. Literalism is the lowest and least level of meaning in a spiritual text. Willful people use Scripture literally when it serves their purposes, and they use it ‘figuratively’ when it gets in the way of their cultural biases; willing people let the Scriptures change them instead of using them to change others.

Adapted from the webcast A Teaching on Wondrous Encounters (CD, DVD, MP3)
 
Sounds like gobbldeygook to me Alan. How can you possibly know the meaning of any Scripture without taking account of its literacy?
Peace,
Tom
 
sawman said:
Sounds like gobbldeygook to me Alan. How can you possibly know the meaning of any Scripture without taking account of its literacy?
Peace,
Tom
Click to expand...
From a weblog I found “The Four Senses of Scripture”:
There are two basic senses of Holy Scripture: the literal (or historical) and the spiritual. The spiritual sense is further divided into the allegorical, the tropological (or moral), and the anagogical.

St. Thomas cites St. Gregory the Great on the phenomenon of multiple senses in the Bible: “Holy Writ by the manner of its speech transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery.”[1] The Master of Aquino goes on to explain that “The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification.”[2]

I have limited time just now… I’ll bet back to this. 🙂

Alan
 
There, I’m back. 🙂

In my own opinion, which I think reflects Fr. Rohr’s comments, the “real power” of the scriptures are in the “spiritual” part, described in my last post. That is no surprise, because it’s been 12 years since I started doing contemplative prayer forms, such as Lectio Divina. (Divine Reading.)

The literal, or historical meaning, is interesting of course, and to know in our minds what Jesus has said in the literal sense is of course excellent in and of itself is an excellent thing so I don’t mean to diminish that. That’s how most of us begin, I’d imagine.

But how does it transform us?

1 Cor 8:1b-3
we realize that “all of us have knowledge”; knowledge inflates with pride, but love builds up. If anyone supposes he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if one loves God, one is known by him.

So we can see that intellectual knowledge, without spiritual maturity, can puff up with pride. How does one love God? That is a mystical problem, not a logical problem. One cannot explain “do this and that” and suddenly you have Divine Union. Contemplative prayer “achieves real union with the prayer of Christ” (CCC 2724), which is significant because it’s specifically designed to help us access the word at deeper levels. Lectio Divina is designed to allow the Word to access in all senses, including the spiritual ones.

So really the point is that instead of reading and understanding the Bible, we actually “pray” the Bible with our open hearts and minds, letting it influence us how it may without “calculating.” What we cannot do with the will, God can do to our hearts and minds when we go beyond the literal and let the word – especially the parts that don’t make sense – get into us past our normal mental defensive filters.

Alan
 
Well, thanks for the clearing up. What you’ve just posted is clear and sounds not very much like what you posted yesterday. I agree very much with what you’re saying. I am aware of there being different senses of Scripture. To contemplate, pray, read and meditate with the Word is very good and draws us near to God.
Peace,
Tom
 
Not responding directly to what you have just said about Scripture Alan, but one of the best things I ever heard Richard Rohr say was “every point of view is a view from a point.”

But I do agree with what you are quoting from RR about scripture: it’s power is that it is ever new, and always creates. To rely merely on the literal is great, but does no justice to the Power of the Word.
 
Those are quotes I like, but the problem with them is that they can be misused just as surely as Holy Scriptures can.

For instance: if you haven’t come to the willing level—“not my will but Thy will be done” as Jesus says (Matthew 26:39)—then I think the Bible will almost always be misused. That is a beautiful quote, but at the same time, it has to be asked what it means in practical terms. Let us face it: just as literalism is an easy place to hide what is a judgmental mindset, so fleeing the “low” or “literal” meaning is an easy place to hide rationalizations in the moral life. Without the moral life, there is no spiritual life, just a making yourself feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I don’t mean perseverating on other people’s moral lives, mind you. I mean holding our own feet to the fire and I mean being willing to say “this is objectively forbidden” and “this is objectively a duty”.

I would like to say that the goal in general is to be serious about the Scriptures. We have often substituted being literal with being serious, and they are not the same! (Read that a second time, please). The point I would like to make is that literalism is not to take the text seriously at all! Pure literalism in fact avoids the real impact, the real message. Literalism is the lowest and least level of meaning in a spiritual text. Willful people use Scripture literally when it serves their purposes, and they use it ‘figuratively’ when it gets in the way of their cultural biases; willing people let the Scriptures change them instead of using them to change others

The literal meaning is a valid meaning, whether you want to make it low, high, or somewhere else. I would be much more comfortable if Fr. Rohr would say, “sure, the literal meaning is a meaning…but it is only one dimension! As C.S. Lewis says, ‘Come higher up, come further in!’”, because there is more there. Otherwise, yes, you reduce God to a stick figure. Nothing wrong, but so much missing that in practice you have a caricature.

The problem with attacking literalism entirely is that it makes Holy Scriptures into a Rorschach test. Your interpretation reveals a lot about you, but without the moorings of a literal belief in Resurrection, in the Incarnation, in the ability of God to work physical miracles, in what were the obvious moral teachings of the Lord and of the Apostles, the meaning you get from Holy Scriptures does not hold you to a meaning God is revealing to you. I think if you are not willing to read the Scriptures literally because you fear that is “is not to take the text seriously at all”, then you’re going to go astray as surely as if you had no Scriptures at all.

Now, mind you, that is not what he said. He did not say “to pay attention to the literal meaning is not to take the text seriously at all”, but rather “literalism is not to take the text seriously at all”. Having said that, is that not the sense he gives in the overall quote, since there is nowhere that he gives any credence at all to the literal meaning?

Notice also that by negating literal meaning off of the top, you give no one the least way to argue with you by means of invoking some outside authority. In fact, the overall effect of the quote is “if you would argue with me, well, you’re choosing to be right instead of to be spiritual.” Do not get me wrong, there is a place for that, but how can someone say they are devoted to “not my will but Thine be done” while at the same time cut off outside correction? If you preach a Gospel of self-direction, that is where you are ultimately headed.

Frankly, my concern is that the way this point is made has the effect of avoiding one ditch by crossing the road and putting the car into the other ditch. There is a parallel in the life of the Church, I am afraid, too.
 
AlanFromWichita said:
From a weblog I found “The Four Senses of Scripture”:
There are two basic senses of Holy Scripture: the literal (or historical) and the spiritual. The spiritual sense is further divided into the allegorical, the tropological (or moral), and the anagogical.

St. Thomas cites St. Gregory the Great on the phenomenon of multiple senses in the Bible: “Holy Writ by the manner of its speech transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery.”[1] The Master of Aquino goes on to explain that “The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification.”[2]

I have limited time just now… I’ll bet back to this. 🙂

Alan
Click to expand...
thank you for posting this. for a long time i struggled with how to interpret scripture, since there was so much allegory and symbolism i didnt know wether certain events actually happened or not.
so according to aquinas the events in the new testament (jesus walking on water, rising from the dead, etc) both actually happened and have a special symbolic meaning?
 
I really like today’s email. Especially since during my Dark Night/psychosis, I learned what it was to be able to rely on completely nothing in the middle of insanity, except faith, and now the Lord has rebuilt me completely and without the mental flaws I had before the whole thing.

From Richard Rohr daily email Jan 19, 2013:
Doctrines Are for the Sake of Experience
Number 12 of 57

Christians speak of the “paschal mystery,” the process of loss and
renewal that was lived and personified in the death and raising up of
Jesus. We can affirm that belief in ritual and song, as some Christians
do in the Eucharist. However, until we have personally lost our own
foundation and ground, and then experienced God upholding us so that we
come out even more alive on the other side, the expression “paschal
mystery” is little understood and not essentially transformative. It
is a mere theological affirmation or liturgical acclamation.

“Cross and Resurrection” is a doctrine that most Christians would
probably intellectually assent to, but it is not yet the very
cornerstone of their own life philosophy. That is the difference between
mere belief systems and a living faith. We move from one to the other
only through actual encounter, surrender, trust, and an inner experience
of presence and power. Then it is our “secret” discovery too, and
not just a church theology.

From Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, pp. 62, 63
cac.org/store/books/item/746-things-hidden-scripture-as-spirituality-book
 
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