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?
As one might have expected, ‘the modern self’ does not impress Rohr: [it is] ‘insubstantial, whimsical, totally dependent and calling itself “free”.’ What it is dependent upon, according to him, are the reaction and approval of others. Given our hopeless condition, one might expect Rohr to assert that our salvation lies in an outside divine power. He doesn’t: ‘unless you’re in right relationship with at least one other person on this earth, unless there is some place you can give and receive love, I don’t think you have any reason to think you’re saved. Salvation is not as antiseptic, unreal and sterile as we’ve made it.’
After decades of counselling, pastoring and ‘clumsy attempts at helping people’, Rohr doesn’t think he’s achieved much. Most of the people he’s tried to fix still need fixing. He believes that most of our helping is like hoping for first class accommodation on the Titanic. It feels good at the time, but it’s not going anywhere. People need to be touched at the core: ‘Call it grace, enlightenment, peak experience, baptism in the Spirit, consciousness, growth or surrender, but until such a threshold is passed, people are never helped in any true, lasting sense. After the early stages of identity and belonging are worked through, real transformation does not seem to take place apart from some kind of contact with the Transcendent or Absolute.’
The problem is, of course, that most people are not much interested in contact with the Transcendent. Why should they be, if everything is going well? Rohr says somewhere that it is only through suffering that people are brought to recognition of this need.
There seems to be something in this. Suffering can be a source of freedom in that it may loosen the hold that our past has on us. At last, we are able to be attracted to something new and better. But, as is all too evident, suffering may not have that effect. It may make us bitter and resentful. It depends on how we let it affect us.
Rohr writes well about the higher reaches of religion. He quotes the famous Ibn Arabi, to the effect that God is delivered from solitude by the people in whom He reveals himself. Rohr has a telling metaphor when he writes that we are all partial images slowly coming into focus, to the degree we allow and filter the Light and Love of God.
The seven pathways to your deeper self, mentioned in the subtitle, are not so good. They all need further discussion. Rohr has been labouring in the vineyard too long. He needs a holiday.
What The Mystics Know. Seven pathways to your deeper self by Richard Rohr. Crossroad Publishing Co. ISBN: 9780824520397. £16.99.
Comments
But the labourers are few.
By Richard on 1st April 2016 - 11:58
“Rohr says somewhere that it is only through suffering that people are brought to recognition of this need [for Transcendence]”. This is not altogether true: the search for transcendence may also be engendered by a deep question or curiosity about the real nature of life, the universe and everything.
By JohnE on 19th January 2017 - 21:22
If you read Rohr’s new book, he says exactly thesameas you.
By Richard on 20th January 2017 - 8:23
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