What the mystics knew
Reg Naulty reviews a new book by Richard Rohr
Richard Rohr is a seventy-three-year-old American Franciscan. He has been writing about spirituality for a long time, and it’s beginning to show. He seems to have something like an ageing writer’s version of in vino veritas, which may be interpreted thus: ‘Damn it all! I’m going to write what I really think!’ The result is irritating, sometimes brutal and sometimes uplifting. His latest book is What The Mystics Know: Seven pathways to your deeper self, which draws on essays spanning nearly twenty-five years. Some passages in the book would make saint Augustine and John Calvin sit up in their graves and smile: ‘Sin is not something we do, it is something we are.’ And, in the same vein: ‘Human culture is in a mass hypnotic trance. We’re all sleepwalkers.’ That one’s over the fence. What about the advances constantly being made in medicine, the encouragement now being given to minorities and what about mass tertiary education?
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