Richard Rohr
“Center and Circumference”

Biography

Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M., founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a center that trains lay people for the outreach ministries of the church. He’s in great demand as a speaker at retreats and conferences around the world, and is heard by thousands through his widely distributed audio and video tapes.

I would like to begin with a quote from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. In The Second Coming, he says:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats)

We are a circumference people, with little access to our natural Center. We live on the boundaries of our own lives, “in the widening gyre,” as he puts it, confusing edges with essence, too quickly claiming the superficial as if it were substance. As Yeats predicted, things have fallen apart, “the center cannot hold.”

If the circumferences of our lives were evil, they would be easier to moralize about. But boundaries and edges are not bad as much as they are passing, accidental, sometimes illusory, too often needy of defense and decoration. Our skin is not bad; it’s just not our soul. But “skin” might also be the only beginning point available to a modern people. But, we remain on the circumference of our soul for so long it seems like life. Not many people are telling us there is anything more. And maybe the confusion lies even deeper. We have always looked for the soul inside the body. Perhaps, maybe just a different way of thinking, our bodies are merely a part of a much larger Soul. I think that is exactly what the great Wisdom Tradition has always been saying.

Let’s presume there was an earlier age when people had easy and natural access to their soul. I am not sure if this age ever existed, any more than the Garden of Eden, where all was naked and in harmony; but if it did, it consisted of people who were either loved very well at their Center or who suffered very much on their surface — probably both. The rest of us have to rediscover and return to the Garden by an arduous route.

This movement back to Paradise is the blood, guts, and history of the whole Bible. It is both an awakening and a quieting, a passion for and a surrendering to, a caring and a not caring. It is both Center and circumference, and I am not in charge of either one. But I have to begin somewhere. For most of us the beginning point is on the edges of our lives. Yet the teachers tell us not to stay there! The movement beyond the edges to the center is called conversion, integration, or holiness. Often it feels more and more like a Divine trick — especially if you try to resolve it in your head. So let’s go somewhere else.

Less than a block from my house in downtown Albuquerque, there is a sidewalk where the homeless often sit against the wall to catch the morning sun. A few days ago, I saw new graffiti chalked clearly on the pavement. It touched me so profoundly that I immediately went home and wrote it in my journal. It said, “I watch how foolishly man guards his nothing, thereby keeping us out. Truly God is hated here.” I can only guess at what kind of person wrote such wisdom, but I heard a paraphrase of Jesus in my mind: “The people of the sidewalk might well be at the Center, and the people in their houses might well be on the circumference.” (Luke 13:30, Mark 10:31, Matthew 19:30, 20:16)

Now I can probably assume that this street person is not formally educated in theology, or trained in contemplative spirituality. Yet from the edges, this person has clearly understood all that I am trying to say. Did she go through some great healing? Did he pay for psychotherapy? How does this person so clearly recognize the false nature of our self-image and yet the clear sense of being included and excluded from life? This street person has both edges and essence and seems to also know exactly who God is! You don’t resolve the question in your head. The body is probably a better beginning point. Remember, the body is in the soul. Living in this material world, with a physical body, and in a culture of affluence which usually only rewards the outer self, it is both more difficult to know our spiritual self and all the more necessary. Our skin-encapsulated egos are the only self that most of us know and therefore for many people their only beginning place. But they are not the only or even the best place.

This is how our contemporary culture seems to look at it: 1) Our culture no longer really values the inner journey, if it would be honest. 2) In fact, we actively avoid and fear it. 3) In most cases we no longer even have the tools to go inward because, 4) we are enamored and entrapped in the outer self in the private edges of our private lives. In such a culture, “the center cannot hold,” at least for long.

How do you find what is supposedly already there? Why isn’t it obvious? How do you awaken your spiritual Center? By thinking about it? By praying and meditating? By more silence and solitude? Yes, perhaps, but mostly by living — and living consciously. The edges, when they are suffered and enjoyed and felt and listened to, lead us back to the Center where God is obvious.

The street person feels cold and rejection and has to go to a deeper place for warmth. The hero pushes against his own self-interested edges and finds that they don’t matter. The alcoholic woman recognizes how she has hurt her family and breaks through to a compassion beyond her. In each case, the edges, the circumference, suffer, inform, partially self-destruct, and all are found to be unnecessary and even part of the problem. That which feels like pain, also lets it go, and the Center stands revealed and sufficient! We do not find our own Center; we do not find God; it finds us.

The body is in a much larger soul. It is both the place of contact and the place of surrender. I don’t think that we think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking. The journeys around the circumference lead us back to the radical and absolute life at the Center. Then, by what is certainly a vicious circle and a virtuous circle, the Center calls all the journeys at the circumference back into question! The ruthless ambition of the businessman can lead him to the very failure and emptiness that is the point of his final conversion. Is the ambition therefore good or evil? Do we really have to sin to know salvation? Call me a “sin mystic,” or a Lutheran — Luther said sin boldly — but that is exactly what I see happening in my real and honest pastoral experience.

That does not mean that we should set out to intentionally sin. We only see the pattern after the fact. Julian of Norwich, the English mystic, put it perfectly, “Commonly, first we fall and later we see it — and both are the mercy of God.” Wow! How did we ever lose that kind of wisdom? It got hidden away in that least celebrated but absolutely central Easter Vigil Service, when the deacon sings to the Church about a “felix culpa,” the happy fault which precedes and necessitates the eternal Christ. Like all great mysteries of faith, it is hidden except to those who keep vigil and listen.

The overwhelming problem today is that people are creating and letting go of boundaries who have no hint of their own psychological or theological Center. Those who create their own boundaries often end up with hardened and defended edges, without permeability for others to move in or out.

They may become either racists afraid of the “not-me” or co-dependents manipulating the world to meet their love and security needs. Those who too easily let go of boundaries will seek their soul forever outside themselves: She will make me happy. I need him for my sense of self. This church is who I am.

Those who have firmed up their own edges too quickly without finding their essential Center will be the enemies of ecumenism, the enemies of forgiveness, the enemies of vulnerability, and peace-making between nations and classes. Those who let go of their edges too easily often pride themselves on their openness and tolerance. But even here there is both virtue and vice. The tolerance of the believer, rooted in God, is certainly the voice of wisdom; but the too quick tolerance of the skeptic, cheap liberalism, is largely meaningless, usually no more than a need to be liked or a need to be popular. The first is the authentic lover, the faith-based prophet, the grounded agent of change; the second is a “born yesterday” believer, the faddish New Ager. Unfortunately, the second is much more common on the American scene today, even in churches and social justice circles. We have our work to do.

The greatest gift of centered and surrendered people is that they know themselves as part of a much larger history, of a larger symbolic universe. In that sense, centered people are profoundly conservative, knowing that they only stand on the shoulders of their ancestors and will be another shoulder for the generation to come. Yet they are paradoxically open and reformist, because they have no private agendas and self-interest to protect. People who have learned to live from their Center where God reigns know which boundaries are worth maintaining and which can be surrendered. Both reflect an obedience. If you want a litmus test for truly centered people, that’s it: they are always free to obey a voice outside themselves.

Probably the most obvious indication of non-centered ec-centric people is that they are a pain to live with! Every ego-boundary must be defended, negotiated, glorified: My reputation, my nation, my job, my religion, and even my ball team are really all I have to tell myself that I am somebody. No wonder wisdom, understanding and community have come upon hard times!

Toward the end of his career Carl Jung said that he was not aware of a single one of his patients in the second half of their lives whose problem could not have been solved by contact with what he called, “The Numinous,” the one we would call God. (Letters, Vol. I, 1973, p.377). An extraordinary statement from a man who considered himself alienated from institutional religion! Yet thirty years later we find ourselves condemned to live in a world where “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The Center has not held. Most of the gods we have met in our narcissistic age have been no more than projected and magnified images of ourselves. The Catholic god too often looks Roman, the charismatic god looks sweet, the liberal god looks undemanding and the American god looks tribal and pathetic.

We wait for the Word of the Lord. We wait for the season of the Word of the Lord. The falcon must hear the falconer.

Interview with Richard Rohr
Interviewed by David Hardin

David Hardin: Richard, to many people I know, the Center for Contemplation and Action is almost an oxymoron. They view contemplation as a kind of avoidance of life or action.

Richard Rohr: Yes, I think that is why we chose the title. Even though it is a cumbersome title, we knew these classic polarities had to be put together because they are too often separated. I think it produces schizophrenic Christianity if they are not put together. We put it in our title to hold ourselves to it.

Hardin: You are talking about the schizophrenia being contemplation on the one hand and social action on the other.

Rohr: That’s right.

Hardin: Why are they each necessary?

Rohr: I think they are un-whole without the other. I have often used the metaphor of the spring and the stream — contemplation perhaps being the spring and action being the stream. If you just stay with the spring and it doesn’t flow out, it becomes dead water after while. There is, of course, nothing to flow if there isn’t some action. They really necessitate one another. It is like breathing in and out. You can’t do one without the other.

Hardin: A wise friend of mine said that you can’t give what you don’t have. You get the skills and the strength from meditation that perhaps you can then use in the world. What kinds of problems does the Center address?

Rohr: We are probably somewhat unusual, at least in the American church, in terms of training lay people who are working with the disadvantaged, working with refugees, working with a battered women’s shelter. They come to us from all over the country and really the English-speaking world. They live with us for six weeks. In the morning, they work maybe at the homeless shelter, at the jail where I am the chaplain.

In the afternoons, we give them classes on contemplative prayer, Liberation Theology, scripture, spirituality. They have a spiritual director and they live in community while they are there. The community experience itself is sort of the matrix where all of this can happen.

Hardin: Who are these people?

Rohr: They are usually people in the middle of life. Most who apply to come are people who have already gotten in the fray and realize how hard it is. You can romantically idealize the poor, but when you are actually running the soup kitchen, you see the dark side of the ministry.

Often they are people who are losing heart or losing the vision, or who maybe haven’t learned how to pray yet. They come to us wanting to put those together.

Hardin: You mentioned that you work with the people in the jail. There was a horrendous riot in the New Mexico Prison not many years ago. What can we do about people in prisons? What is your prescription for a really healthy prison system?

Rohr: Our assumption is, of course, whatever this means in our minds, that they are bad people. I have been chaplain there for five years. To be brutally honest, the only completely communal thing I have seen is that most of them are poor.

Secondly, most of them did not have good parenting, were not believed in, were not loved. What I would primarily advise is some kind of prison system that really seeks to give these men and women back their humanity. Give them back their dignity, back themselves, back their soul as we were saying in this talk. Merely incarcerating them doesn’t do that.

Hardin: We almost take their humanity away in prison.

Rohr: I’m afraid we brutalize them and we really are not resolving the problem at all.

Hardin: I think we are afraid of being soft, or something like that.

Rohr: There is a bit of a punitive attitude in a lot of us who think that punishment is going to achieve holiness or goodness or reform.

Hardin: Thank you very much for being with us.

Rohr: You are welcome. My delight.

http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/rohr_3606.htm