Birthday Boy's Prophetic New Book
Richard Rohr is 81 today
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
Book Launch Tomorrow
Richard Rohr is 81 years old today.
Tomorrow Penguin Random House will release his book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage.
I have nearly finished a review copy of the book, a slim volume that packs a timely and contemplative wallop.
It is Rohr’s first book since The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe, which debuted at Number 12 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list in March, 2022.
Father Richard brought a copy of The Universal Christ for Pope Francis to their meeting at the Vatican in July of that year. The Pope said he had already read it.
He shared three times very directly, “I want you to keep doing what you’re doing, keep teaching what you’re teaching.” For this Catholic boy from Kansas, that is a wonderful, hard-to-believe affirmation coming from the Pope himself, for the whole Christian contemplative movement.
In telling the story at his Center for Action and Contemplation website in 2022, Rohr called The Universal Christ “my end-of-life book.” Not quite, as it turns out. Thank the Lord.
I love Richard Rohr. He is a writerly writer, a deep contemplative, and a humble sprite of a prophet. In an online appearance a few years ago he made light of his failing health by saying he had become a member of “the Stroke-of-the-Month Club.”
What makes The Tears of Things excruciatingly well timed is its arrival on Day 43 of the second Trump presidency.
Rohr in The Universal Christ wrote that transformation and growth entail passing through “a usually painful and seemingly unnecessary disorder.”
As Leonard Cohen puts it, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Your wife dies, your father loses his job, you were rejected on the playground as a child, you find out you are needy and sexual, you fail an exam for a coveted certification, or you finally realize that many people are excluded from your own well-deserved “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Prophets in the Bible made people uncomfortable by pointing out the failure of the existing order. They were agents of disorder. Some of them lived long enough to proclaim what Rohr in The Universal Christ calls “reorder.”
There is no nonstop flight to reorder, Rohr writes. We have to endure the disorder stage, transcend the previous naive order while still including it, and arrive at “the best of the conservative and the best of the liberal positions.”
That destination itself might sound naive in the hyper-polarization of the moment. But naive is not a word I associate with the likes of Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel.
Rohr calls them “radical traditionalists” who love their truth and their group enough to critique it.
These wise ones have stopped overreacting but also overdefending. They are usually a minority of humans.
We need that minority of humans now more than ever.
Happy Birthday, Richard!
