Chapter 1
makes the point that “information is not necessarily transformation” and
contrasts ready-made answers with the exciting process of “participatory
knowing” that connects the dots.
On one side
is “the overwhelmingly shame-and guilt-based church and culture we have today
in the West” with churchgoers that are “overwhelmingly passive or even
passive-aggressive” and religion that is “merely ritualistic, moralistic,
doctrinaire and largely unhappy.”
On the other
side are those who have “inner experience of how God works in [their lives]”
and who will “substitute the text” in places where it goes backward (in the
direction of vengeance, divine pettiness, law over grace, form over substance)
“for the real inner spirit” evident in places where the text moves forward
(towards mercy, forgiveness, inclusion, nonviolence and trust).
I bristle at
the same things that rubbed me up the wrong way in Rohr’s Falling
Upward. It is not that there is no truth to the statements he makes about
the vast majority of people who are a foil to the spiritually enlightened. But
by and large it is a caricature that I do not recognise. There are “religious” who
feel the need to impress God and to win his love by their good works or
faithful exercise of religious duties, but I do not find this a plausible
characterisation of the majority of people inside the church, let alone
outside.
Rohr believes
that to begin with almost everybody assumes “that if you get the right answers,
God will like you.” Is this true? I am not conscious of ever having been even
so much as tempted by that idea.
Do “religious”
people prefer abstractions over the actual, as Rohr suggests? Are they
disappointed that so much of the Bible is about ordinary folk rather than pious
saints? Even if this might be true in some contexts, I do not believe it to be
universally so.
For all his
urging against dualistic thinking in favour of ambiguity and mystery, Rohr
comes across to me as rather black and white. Even if there is a journey we all
have to make (from building containers in the first half of life to letting go
of them in the second, if I remember Falling Upwards correctly),
I do not find Rohr’s sweeping
generalisations helpful. They do not sufficiently ring true to me and thus many of his swipes at “religious” people
simply baffle me.
I also wonder
whether Rohr is going to offer an integrative vision or another variety of
dualism, pitting vengeance and law over against grace and love.
In addition,
the motif of the journey seems to operate at the level of human history as
well. With his comment on guilt- and shame-based culture being “at the heart of
most of the European Reformations–on both sides,” Rohr does seem to suggest not
only that he has a deeper experience of God’s love than the majority of
religious people today but also a better grasp of grace than Martin Luther,
John Calvin or Francis de Sales
I conclude
this post with a positive responses to two statements:
“Suffering of some sort seems to be the only thing strong enough to destabilize our arrogance and our ignorance. I would define suffering very simply as ‘whenever you are not in control.’”
The
definition of suffering in the second sentence strikes me as worth pondering
and I appreciate the use of the first person plural in the first sentence which
guards against the “them” and “us” so frequent elsewhere in the chapter.
“All healthy
religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to
do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. If we do
not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.”
The statement
in italics voices a common place but it is nonetheless worth saying and underlining.
The statements about “all healthy religion” and “great religion” confirm that,
having beaten the drum for the scandal of particularity, Rohr is not averse to generalisation.
I wonder how much mileage there is in those statements. Can these categories be
sensibly defined? Was Stoicism a religion? Was medieval Catholicism a “healthy
religion”? Is Buddhism a “great religion” or far too diverse a phenomenon for
the question even to make sense?
