Our Time of Exile
Richard Rohr
Beside the streams of Babylon, we sat and wept.
—Psalm 137:1
Father Richard Rohr reflects on the fear, violence, and oppression that empires and nation-states continue to create, challenging us to respond:
Few would deny that there’s a palpable and growing fear and anger in our country. This fear is felt deeply by those who are most vulnerable. As a follower of both Jesus and Saint Francis of Assisi, my primary moral viewpoint is not centered on the wellbeing of those who are on top, but first in those who are at the bottom. For the vulnerable who have now been rendered more vulnerable, I lament and pray and promise to stand with you.
A time of national introspection must begin with self-introspection. Without our own inner searching, any of our quests for solutions and policy fixes will be based in shifting sands.
I suspect that we get the leaders who mirror what we have become as a nation. They are our shadow self for all to see. That is what the Hebrew prophets told Israel both before and during their painful and long exile (596–538 BCE).
Yet the Exile was the very time when the ancient Jewish people went deep and discovered their prophetic voices—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others—speaking truth to power, calling for justice from their own political and religious leaders. Their experience laid the solid foundation for Jesus’s teaching and his solidarity with the poor and the outcast.
Maybe some of us have naively thought that we could or should place our loyalty in one political agenda or party. Remember, Yahweh told the people of Israel that they should never put their trust in “princes, horses, or chariots” (Psalms 20:7, 33:16–17), but only in the love of God. We must not imagine that political changes of themselves will ever bring about the goodness, charity, or transformation that the gospel offers the world.
We must not be afraid to allow conventional wisdom to fail and disappoint us. This is often the only path to wisdom. Imperial thinking focuses on judging who is worthy and who is unworthy, who is in and who is out. We who know about universal belonging and identity in God have a different form of power: Love (even of enemies) is our habitat, not the “powers and principalities,” the kingdoms of this world.
The present disorder is our time of exile and has solidified in us an urgent commitment to our work of action and contemplation. It seems needed more than ever before! Grounding social action in contemplative consciousness is not a luxury for a few, but surely a cultural necessity. Both the Christian religion and the American psyche need deep healing, and I do not say that lightly.
Only a contemplative mind can hold our fear, confusion, vulnerability, and anger and guide us toward love. Those who allow themselves to be challenged and changed will be the new cultural creative voices of the next period of history after this purifying exile.
Exile from the Country We Love Can Happen While We Are Still Living in It
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann describes how praying with the Psalms can be an act of solidarity with our universal humanity:
The Psalms, with few exceptions, are not the voice of God addressing us. They are rather the voice of our own common humanity—gathered over a long period of time, but a voice that continues to have amazing authenticity and contemporaneity. It speaks about life the way it really is, for in those deeply human dimensions the same issues and possibilities persist. And so when we turn to the Psalms it means we enter into the midst of that voice of humanity and decide to take our stand with that voice. We are prepared to speak among them and with them and for them, to express our solidarity with this anguished, joyous human pilgrimage. We add a voice to the common elation, shared grief, and communal rage that besets uss. us all…. When we do, we shall find that the words of Scripture bring power, shape, and authority to what we know about ourselves. [1]
Exiled from Cuba, theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz (1943–2012) found solace in Psalm 137:
When I first read Psalm 137, I remember resonating with most of what the psalm says; I remember feeling it could appropriately voice the pain I was experiencing being away from my country against my will. After the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 I realized that my absence from Cuba was to a be a long one. Shortly after there came a day when my visa status changed from “tourist”: I became a refugee. Psalm 137 became my refuge: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and we wept when we remembered Jerusalem” (137:1).
I recall vividly the day I dared to mention to a friend how much I identified with Psalm 137. Jokingly she answered me, “Are you going to hang your guitar from a tree?”… They were incapable of understanding the sorrow of being away from la tierra que mi vió nacer (the land that witnessed my birth). At times, my friends would ask me to talk about Cuba. Those around me could not figure out why I, who love to sing, always seemed reticent about singing “Guantamanera,” the song that uses for its verses poems from the father of my country, José Martí. One of them says,
Yo quiero cuando me muera
Sin patria pero sin amo
Tener en mi tumba
Un ramo de flores
Y una bandera.
I want when I die
without country but without master,
to have on my tomb
a bouquet of flowers
and a flag.
So I kept saying to myself, “How can we sing Yahweh’s song in a foreign land?” (137:4) [2]
Brueggemann concludes:
The psalms are not used in a vacuum, but in a history where we are dying and rising, and in a history where God is at work, ending our lives and making gracious new beginnings for us. The Psalms move with our experience. They may also take us beyond our own guarded experience into the more poignant pilgrimages of our sisters and brothers. [3]
The Ongoing Dialogue between Faith and Knowledge
What I value most in myself and hoped to pass on to and through my children is that I have learned by experience to try always to not limit either my faith by my fallible human understanding or my understanding by my limited faith. There is a tension often between my personal development in both faith and knowledge, just as there is between any culture’s or religion’s developmental level in both.
I believe this is healthy, though often uncomfortable. When I allow my religious belief system to be challenged by life experience, new or “foreign” ideas, or even my own “twin” to doubting Apostle Thomas, I experience turmoil and insecurity. In fact, as a believer, unless some basic faith has become “bedrock” for me, I probably will not have the courage to face the challenge of growth. And on the other side, unless I have faced the humbling limits of human understanding, I will never make that first leap of faith.
When we begin to think that we have finally “gotten it” in either faith or understanding, we better beware! That may have been Adam and Eve’s downfall, wanting to think they knew it all….no longer having to live vulnerably incomplete and dependent on God.
An unquestioned faith is not faith, but superstition. But understanding that is not open to the risk of a faith that explores beyond understanding is not intelligence, but arrogance.
Often, it seems to me that different personalities tend to lean toward one or the other, so perhaps allowing faith and understanding to live in an ongoing dialogue is one of the most basic challenges of life.
Commitment to this challenge of an ongoing inner dialogue will hopefully give us the freedom to dialogue and learn from each other.
The Timing of Miracles in Lives Differs
It’s a lovely sunny day in Memphis. I’m as usual playing on face book before getting serious about unpacking my mess of decades of writing in hopes of gathering some together to describe my spiritual journey. The point being, that I am convinced that the timing of it differs from person to person. But if open to mystery, to miracles past our understanding, even if finally only in old age, we can recognize that amazing connection of God to our daily lives. It can be in the timing of really small things or recognizing God’s hand in the large and even scary aspects of our lives. I know that I was a weak person and needed immense doses of grace early on to keep on keeping on. But, there are times in all our lives when our natural strengths are not enough. And if we are naturally strong people we may not recognize our limits as gifts. Because they open us to grace in ways beyond our understanding. To the strong it may seem like failure to need that grace, but it’s the gift of Jesus’ life as a human being. His journey is our journey complete with miracles beyond human understanding, because we too have the Spirit of God within us and surrounding us. God is as alive and well in our times and our lives as God was in Jesus’ life, suffering, death and resurrection. The timing of our need for and openness to God’s interventions is different from one person to another. But ultimately we are all called to experience our limits and need for God’s active participation in our daily lives. Admitting our natural limits is harder for the strong than the weak. But it is part of the spiritual journey. The Spirit is within us and outside us. We are a tiny, but needed part of God’s plan for humanity. But recognizing our personal limits and need for an awareness of our connection to God is part of God’s plan for humanity.
An Illusion of Separateness
Father Richard Rohr explores a broad definition of the word “sin”:
The great illusion we must all overcome is the illusion of separateness. It’s almost the only task of religion—to communicate not worthiness, but union; to reconnect us to our original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls that state of separateness “sin,” and its total undoing is stated frequently as God’s clear job description: “My dear people, we are already the children of God; it is only what is in the future that has not yet been revealed, and then all we know is that we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2).
The word sin has so many unhelpful connotations in most of our minds that it’s very problematic today. For most of us, it does not connote a state of alienation or separateness. Instead, it connotes naughty behavior and personal moral unworthiness. But these are merely symptoms and not the state itself! Disconnected people will do stupid and harmful things. Instead, the core and foundational meaning of sin is any life lived autonomous and outside “the garden of Eden.” We cannot ever become perfect or “worthy,” but we can become reconnected to our Source.
Sin primarily describes a state of fragmentation—when the part thinks it’s separate from the Whole. It’s the loss of any inner experience of who we are in God. That “who” is nothing we can earn or obtain. It’s nothing we can accomplish or work up to. Why? Because we already have it.
The biblical revelation is about awakening, not accomplishing. It’s about realization and not performance principles. We cannot get there; we can only be there, but that foundational Being-in-God, for some reason, is too hard to believe and too good to be true. Only the humble can receive it, because it affirms more about God than it does about us.
The ego, however, makes it all about achievement and attainment. At that point, religion becomes a worthiness contest in which everybody loses—which they realize, if they’re honest. Many people give up on the whole spiritual journey when they see that they can’t live up to the performance principle. They don’t want to live as hypocrites.
Yet union with God is really about awareness and realignment, a Copernican revolution of the mind and heart that is sometimes called conversion. (Copernicus, of course, was the first to claim that the world revolves around the sun, not vice versa—a truly shocking revelation in the 16th century!) Following conversion, that deep and wondrous inner knowing, a whole new set of behaviors and lifestyle will surely emerge. It is not that if I am moral, then I will be loved by God; rather, I must first come to experience God’s love and then I will—almost naturally—be moral.
The Mystery of the Cross and Suffering
One of the dialectics that Paul presents is the perennial conflict between “conservative” and “liberal”, to use today’s terms. In his writings, Paul’s own people, the Jews, are the stand in for pious, law-abiding traditionalists; the Greeks provided his model for liberal intellectuals and cultural critics. Paul sees the Jews trying to create order in the world by obedience to law, tradition, and kinship ties. The Greeks attempt order through reason, understanding, logic, and education. Paul has a unique vantage point, with a foot in each world—as both a Jew and a Roman citizen.
Paul insists that strict adherence to neither worldview can finally succeed because they don’t have the ability to “incorporate the negative,” which will always be present. He recognizes that the greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order. There seems to be a shadow side to almost everything; all things are subject to “the principalities and powers” (Ephesians 6:12). Only the unitive or nondual mind can accept this and not panic; in fact, it will grow because of it, and even grow beyond it.
Neither a liberal pattern nor a conservative pattern can deal with disorder and misery. Paul believes that Jesus has revealed the only response that works. The revelation of the cross makes us indestructible, Paul says, because it reveals there is a way through all absurdity and tragedy. That way is precisely through accepting absurdity and tragedy, trusting that God can somehow use it for good. If we can internalize the mystery of the cross, we won’t fall into cynicism, failure, bitterness, or skepticism. The cross gives us a precise and profound way through the shadow side of life and through all disappointments.
Paul allows both conservatives and liberals to define wisdom in their own ways, yet he dares to call both inadequate and finally wrong. He believes that such worldviews will eventually fail people. He writes, “God has shown up human wisdom as folly” on the cross, and this is “an obstacle that the Jews cannot get over,” and which the gentiles or pagans think is simple “foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:21–23).
Questions for Believers
What is the difference between saved and loved? Does being saved mean being finished? Is the Bible the Word of God or is Jesus the Word of God fleshed out for us?
Was Jesus making choices to love more and more people other than his own religion and nationality, even the Roman enemy, a major part of Being the Word of God? Is the WAY of Jesus’ life and willingness to love even those that killed him supposed to be the WAY of Christian’s lives? Did Jesus love unconditionally? Does God love unconditionally? Do we?
What is the difference between need and love?
Could our life journey from the neediness of a baby be a process of becoming able to love unconditionally? Does loving our neighbor mean only loving others whom we know and who are like us? Does loving Jesus mean we get to be rich? What did Jesus say about the rich man? Are our heroes rich? Are they kind? Are they like Jesus?
If, as he was dying, Hitler recognized the horrors he had caused and was stricken with sorrow and regret, would God forgive him?
Is our Spiritual journey more than following a set of ten rules basic to the survival of humans living together? In fact, are the Beatitudes the challenges that Jesus gave us for our adult Spiritual journey to loving BOTH ourselves AND others unconditionally, because Jesus fleshed out the unconditional love of God for all?
Do you love all your children even when they fail, hurt you, and abandon you?
Does God?
Have you ever failed God?
Earth Has No Sorrow that Heaven Cannot Heal
In my sixties, it hit me that most of my misery comes from a misunderstanding about what life is actually about. This life isn’t about being happy, it’s about being transformed. Happiness is the dessert, not the main course. Unfortunately, I ( and probably most of us) don’t change easily. So, it’s the challenges in life that cause us enough pain to accept the need to change and to also admit we need Grace. Later life seems to be about stages of letting go of the many things, pleasures, people, and even achievements that we think we need to be happy. Letting go of these idols is painful. And my desire to protect both myself and even those I love from any suffering often circumvents what God is trying to do in my and their lives. But, Whatever the challenge is: 1. If God is allowing it, there is a purpose. 2. Jesus has been there, experienced it, grown from it, and is in it with us. 3. If it’s happening in this life, it is temporary. 4. There’s a “pony” in it for someone, even if it’s not us. My mother’s fourteen year losing battle with Alzheimer’s was the hardest test in my past life. She came to live with us at the age of sixty-six before we knew what Alzheimer’s was. After seven years, we were in a financial crises so both of us were working, our oldest three children were in college, so we used Mom’s social security to pay for her caregiver during the day. But then she began to run away at night, so we wired our nine doors shut. Then in the middle of the night, she would try to cook and forget and leave things burning on the stove. Finally, we realized that she needed to be in a nursing home for safety. Everything in me protested. The Sunday after we put her in the nursing home, I was driving home in the evening from my job as DRE of Catholic Education at Ft. Campbell, Ky. I had not managed to get to Mass that morning and our church didn’t have a Sunday evening Mass. I felt a great need for the Spiritual and emotional support of Church. Driving home through a poor rural area, I notice people going into a tiny sort of ramshackle church. I thought of stopping and joining them, but they were all black, so I felt a white stranger might make them uncomfortable and I kept going. It had begun to drizzle and I noticed an elderly black man dressed in his “Sunday go to meeting” suit walking toward the church, so I stopped and offered him a ride back to the church. When we reached it, he cordially invited me to join them, so I took it as a nudge from the Holy Spirit and did. The God moment for me was when they sang a hymn about someday understanding their troubles. When I thought of black history in the South, their hundreds of years of struggles put mine and even mom’s in perspective and helped me hang in there with both mom and God in the next seven years of her increased suffering. But shortly after her death I was waiting in my car to meet a friend and her suffering and the sorrow of all those years overwhelmed me. I was shouting angrily at God in my mind, “WHY? WHY?” I didn’t want to be crying when my friend came, so I wiped my eyes and went into a small shop where I was parked. As I walked in the first thing that jumped out at me were the brightly colored words on a card right in front of me. It said, “THERE IS NO SORROW THAT HEAVEN CANNOT HEAL.” God is in the timing. And I cling to these memories as I face my own journey through Alzheimer’s. Neither Mom, nor I knew for many years what was causing her problems. Though knowing is scary, so far awareness seems to be a blessing for me and those who will help me make it through. And I cling to the hope that my awareness may help not only myself, but somehow might help others who are dealing with this.
A Universal Christ
Christianity is the most radical of all world religions
Franciscan sister and scientist Ilia Delio focuses on the theology of the incarnation and the universal nature of the Christ mystery:
The Christian message is that God has become flesh [sarx in Greek or “matter”]—not a part of God or one aspect of God but the whole infinite, eternal God Creator has become matter. The claim—God has become flesh—is so radical that it is virtually unthinkable and illogical. Christianity is the most radical of all world religions because it takes matter seriously as the home of divinity. [1]
So does everyone have to become Christian to know the Christ? Absolutely not. Christ is more than Jesus. Christ is the communion of divine personal love expressed in every created form of reality—every star, leaf, bird, fish, tree, rabbit, and human person. Everything is christified because everything expresses divine love incarnate. However, Jesus Christ is the “thisness” of God, so what Jesus is by nature everything else is by grace (divine love). We are not God, but every single person is born out of the love of God, expresses this love in [their] unique personal form, and has the capacity to be united with God…. Because Jesus is the Christ, every human is already reconciled with every other human in the mystery of the divine, so that Christ is more than Jesus alone. Christ is the whole of reality bound in a union of love.
We are transformed by experiencing the presence of Christ in all things.
Eileen: (And all people.)
I believe this. But find expressing it difficult without it becoming so complex that only theologians can “get” it. In the fifty-eight years since I experienced the incredible unconditional Love of God fleshed out in Jesus, my view of Jesus and Christianity has been expanded, rather than changed, until I realized that we have mostly missed the point of Jesus. Our importance is as a part of the whole…..we are part of God with God’s Spirit within us, but we limit the Spirit because of fear. Fear is literally the root of all evil. It’s the root of Musk’s need for power and my need for pleasure as escapes from the reality of our human vulnerability. We are fragile physical beings in a huge universe beyond even our understanding, never-the-less, our control. Unconsciously, we are all aware that the possibility of heartbreaking disaster lurks in the next minute. We do all we can to make this life pain free……our idea of heaven. We miss the point of Jesus. We want Him to be a “get out of this life’s possibility of being hell free” card. And we consider Him our key to the spiritual country club of escape from it. And we miss the point of both His life journey and His death as the prototype for ours. He grew spiritually. He became aware of the need to balance achievement with simple kindness through his mom. He was literally pushed into the increased danger of becoming known for doing miracles by His mom’s caring about a family’s social embarrassment. He was challenged over and over to love the least of these (lepers, tax collectors, fallen women, Roman Soldiers, people unwilling to help themselves, cowardly best friends, and the leaders of His own religion who had Him tortured and killed) and even God when He felt God had abandoned Him.
This life is not meant to be heaven. It is school. It is the journey from Self as number one, to being willing to lay down our lives for not only those who are different from us, but those that would kill us. That takes Growth through Grace with a capital G! Ultimately it takes a willingness to die to what we value most in our lives and ourselves.
This may not sound like the “good news,” but it’s a letting go that ultimately frees us from the fear that controls and corrupts us, so that we can ultimately Love all others unconditionally.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 