Welcome to the Off the Page podcast from Franciscan Media, a podcast featuring Franciscan conversations
with authors, artists, and educators.
My name is Stephen Copeland, and I am Franciscan Media's book editor.
Today's episode is a treat, and we're incredibly fortunate to be joined by someone who's not
doing many interviews these days, but has agreed to join Off the Page.
It is truly an honor to present to you our next guest, one of the most renowned spiritual
teachers of our time, Father Richard Rohr.
Richard Rohr is a globally recognized ecumenical teacher whose work is grounded in Christian
mysticism, practices of contemplation and self-emptying, and compassion for the marginalized.
He is a Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque,
New Mexico.
Father Richard is the author of many books, including the bestsellers Just This, What
Do We Do With Evil?, The Universal Christ, and The Wisdom Pattern, Order, Disorder, Reorder.
The Center publishes Father Richard's daily meditations, free reflections that are emailed
to hundreds of thousands around the world.
You can learn more at cac.org.
Father Richard, as many of you may know, is such an integrative thinker, a master weaver,
I would say, of theology, psychology, and spiritual practice that an hour-long interview
with him could have gone in any number of directions.
This interview focuses on his book, Eager to Love, The Alternative Way of Francis of
Assisi, which will be released this year by Franciscan Media as a 10-year anniversary
edition, along with an accompanying companion guide that provides prompts and reflections
for contemplation.
Eager to Love was an important book in my own life.
It provided for me an on-ramp to the Franciscan tradition at a time when I was looking to
reconstruct my broken faith in theology.
I know Father Richard's work has had a similar impact on hundreds of thousands of spiritual
seekers around the world, letting us know that Christianity and the Church are large
enough to stretch into the margins, for that was where the lives of St. Francis, St. Clair,
Bonaventure, Scotus, and so many other mystics unfolded.
It's not every day that you get a chance to interview your intellectual heroes, and I'm
thrilled to share this conversation with you.
So without further ado, here is Father Richard Rohr.
As I was saying, Father Richard, I'm just really thankful that you're here with us and
agreed to do this interview.
I think I speak on behalf of a lot of our readers and listeners when I say that your
work has really helped us, really opened us up to a new way of living, seeing, believing,
and maybe, at least in my case, helped to save my faith.
So welcome and thank you for joining us on Off the Page Podcast.
The honor is mine.
I'm in your hands.
Lead me where I would rather not go.
No, I was going to say that's dangerous.
I'm happy to go.
You go ahead.
Well it's been 10 years since Eager to Love was first published, and it's been 11 years
of Pope Francis's papacy.
Why do you believe this book is still important today?
Well, I'm not the man to ask.
I don't know.
I would like to believe because there's some wisdom in it, some loving wisdom.
I chose the title because that's what I saw in Francis and Claire, two people who weren't
eager to be church people.
They were eager to be loving people.
And that kept it so simple and so forthright.
And isn't that true today?
So many of us, we feel like we're living in a country, a world, and to be frank, isn't
very loving.
The word hate is used a lot.
So I hope it's an antidote to that terrible instinct toward unlove or even hatred.
It's such a succinct but profound three words, eager to love.
Can you go deeper into that for me and why Francis and Claire really embody this notion
of being eager to love?
See, I see the Holy Spirit as implanted love in the human person.
It's subjectively there, subjectively who you are, subjectively given.
Now when you access that, when you trust that deeper inner voice of love, you're quite simply
in the Spirit.
What I see in the early Franciscan movement is a movement of the Spirit, a group of people,
not just as individuals, but early Franciscanism, the early poor Claire's were overwhelmingly
in touch with the Spirit.
And that's what gives a sweetness to Franciscanism.
It's not concerned with being orthodox, it's concerned with being loving, loving of everything,
nature, animals, brother, son, sister, moon.
And that's a different focus than wanting to be a church man or wanting to be a nun.
They wanted to be lovers.
And you can feel it in their writings, in their action.
Have you been to Assisi yet?
I have.
I went in October almost a year ago and Sister Margaret Carney was one of our guides.
Oh, you were lucky.
We were very spoiled.
Yeah.
Well, then you know what I mean.
They say you can't look any direction in Assisi without seeing beauty and wanting to take
a picture.
That's the truth.
Yeah, it is true.
Yeah, I like the word you use there.
I think it gets to something that's at the heart of Franciscanism and that word is sweetness
and your bridging of that to love.
Can you go a little bit deeper into that for me?
I know Francis famously said that the leper who was once bitter to him became sweet.
But this is an expansive notion, correct?
This goes into so many different aspects of Franciscan spirituality.
I assume I used the term in the book, alternative orthodoxy.
We emerged almost as a complementary movement to the Dominicans who were frankly the smart
boys from the university, the good Dominicans.
They took a role that was given to them to preserve orthodoxy in the Catholic Church.
It became their gift and their curse.
Francis was on a different path where he wanted the orthodoxy of lifestyle, of how you live
in the world, how you relate to the world, how you love the world.
We call that here at the school, our living school, an alternative orthodoxy, making lifestyle
the focus, not verbal or academic orthodoxy.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
That was not our emphasis.
It made us lightweight in a lot of people's minds, or even not to be taken seriously.
Franciscans were these holy fools running around Italy, and we capitalized on it because
it was who we were.
But it also is our weak point, too.
We were never quite as disciplined as the Dominicans, or later the Jesuits, never quite
as academic because we saw God in things more than in ideas, correct ideas.
And that gave us our sweetness.
I think that's why—and I think I'm fair in saying this—you go anywhere in the world,
and I've had the privilege of doing that, and you wear your Franciscan habit, the people
will choose you every time.
It's trustworthy in most people's minds.
Here in New Mexico, I just the day before yesterday, took two friends to an old Franciscan
ruined church built for the Indians.
That was the case.
I didn't wear my habit, but the people at the location, they said, why didn't you wear
your habit?
They love it when we do.
I wanted to go back to one thing you just mentioned, this idea of holy foolery, being
a holy fool.
Yes.
But what do you think that looks like today?
It was more taken up, Stephen, by the Orthodox Church.
The love, especially Russian, ironically, which in most people's minds appears so
stern.
But there was the holy fool who walked the roads of Russia, just preaching good news.
I have an icon in my little hermitage of one of them.
It never took off as much in Roman Western Christianity until Francis.
It was always suspect because there was no tradition of holy foolery.
We were serious about our Christianity, ferreting out heretics and looking for sinners.
That made us, in my opinion, overly serious and taking ourselves far too serious.
One theologian called Western Christianity a giant exercise in sin management.
Where are the sinners?
How can we ferret out the sinners?
How can we find the sinners and prove to them they're not going to heaven?
Holy foolery isn't sin-centric.
It's joy-centric, God-centric.
It's more on the mystical path than the Orthodox path.
Which I think probably is true in many cases made us lightweight not to be taken seriously
by the academy.
We aren't known for our universities because getting PhDs was never the goal of a Franciscan.
I was lucky enough to be taught by some who themselves had PhDs and were wonderful Franciscans.
We didn't produce a lot of them because that wasn't idealized.
Our idealization was more to hang out with the marginalized, the poor, the rejected,
or those on the edge of society.
Like here in New Mexico, why we built these ruins now out in the desert was we came here
to work with the native peoples who are nothing in the eyes of Europeans.
And that's probably the reason I'm here today.
I was sent to Acoma Pueblo when I was a deacon in 1969.
And it made me fall in love with the native peoples, with the sky, the blue sky, and the
desert of New Mexico.
It's a decision I've never regretted.
We were the whole church here for over 200 years.
There was no priests except Franciscans.
You said that that time of your life was very formative, very transformative for you.
And perhaps one of the reasons why you're in New Mexico today is you reflect on that
time.
What's that like for you?
What lessons rise up?
What experiences rise up in your heart or mind?
I was 26.
When you're young, you're looking for especially a man.
That's what got me into my men's work on the hero's journey and the initiation rights.
You're looking for a big vision.
And it's hard to beat nature itself.
It's hard to beat the natural world, brother, son, sister moon, a love of animals, a love
of being out in the woods, forest bathing, they call it now.
And that was certainly true for me.
I just couldn't get enough of the mountains and the desert.
And the early friars believed that the first Bible was creation.
God wrote to us who he was.
He wrote it in the creation of the world.
And if you want to know who God is, this is said in Romans 1.20.
Everything you need to know about God is contained in creation.
If you learn to reverence it, respect it, honor it, draw close to it, you'll get all
the big lessons.
You really will.
Bible can't do any better than creation.
And we're in a unique position to say that.
I think it's why Francis was seen as the patron of ecology and nonviolence.
So we're very proud of this connection with the cosmos.
I wonder if we would have destroyed the planet the way we have if we had had a little more
Franciscan spirituality, which saw the Bible as the first revelation.
It has to be.
What else could the world be but the body of God?
Let there be light.
Let there be.
And each thing was a manifestation of the one who created it.
So if you want to know what God's like, look at creation.
We've got a message that Christianity is always going to need to keep it from getting
too heady and too righteous.
How do you get righteous about Brother, Son, Sister Moon?
How do you condemn someone to hell while looking at the sun and the moon and the stars and
the animals?
My little dog is here at my feet, right under my chair.
OP, you want to be on TV?
No, we're not.
Yeah, what have you have had some beautiful I think it was the universal Christ where
I was tearing up just in the dedication.
What have your pets, what have dogs taught you about being eager to love about your own
Franciscan spirituality?
You know our English word animal comes from the Latin word anima, which means soul.
Now I don't know the etymology of the word, but there has to have been some early recognition
that animals were ensouled beings, that they weren't just inert matter, that they were
capable of relationship, capable of communion.
Dogs have been a big part of my life.
I've had one for almost 30 years.
I think this one will outlive me, OP.
I've had him six years now.
He's a little Jack Russell terrier.
You know, I mean he teaches me so much about humility, service, a kind of caring that doesn't
expect anything back.
He just seems to love, he's eager to love like the title of our book.
He begins licking me before I begin petting him.
He takes the initiative and he's so forgiving.
If I leave him for several hours alone, I know he hates it.
He just hates it, but he never holds it against me.
He holds back for 30 seconds when I returned to punish me a little bit.
And it hurts too, doesn't it?
Yes, it does.
And then he starts licking.
He can't resist the desire to love.
And each of my four dogs has been a little different in the way they did that.
So far, we've talked about, we just now talked about the dogs that have been your great friends
and companions throughout your life.
We talked about Brother Sun, Sister Moon.
We're nearing the 800 year anniversary of the Canical.
Any thoughts or reflections on that?
Well, you know, it's a masterpiece and I'm sure you know it's considered by students
of Italian literature.
The first authentic piece of Italian literature was written by Francis of Assisi in Latin,
which was the vernacular language.
Educated people spoke Latin in the 13th century.
Francis was not a highly educated person.
He spoke in the vernacular.
Thank God.
So Italians to this day, even though it's now ancient Italian, it'd be like us reading
Shakespeare.
They love it because it's their language in its most primitive form and poetic form.
Yeah, you see it written on a lot of walls in Italy and you hear it sung quite frequently.
What does it mean to you?
Well, I think what I like and I had to study it to appreciate this, the Italian preposition
pair, may you be praised through, may you be praised God not for Brother Sun but through
Brother Sun, through Sister Moon.
And then he goes through his whole listing until he gets to Sister Death.
So it's very incarnational spirituality.
How did Francis learn this?
Because he didn't study theology like I was lucky enough to do.
But the incarnational spirituality says reality is already a sacrament of the divine, a sign
of an outward sign of an inner state, an inner truth.
And he achieved that by just using one preposition correctly.
And I've asked Italians if that's true.
I say yes, pair means through.
We praise you through Brother Sun.
So it's not as if subjects and object are different.
Subjects and object reflect one another.
That makes any sense.
Yeah.
Yeah, gosh.
Yeah.
The expansiveness of through.
So much of Christianity has left that out.
Yeah.
It is very, yeah, it's very interesting that Francis intuited that.
Intuit it.
And as you know from the book, I presume, I consider Francis not a college educated
or even highly educated Catholic.
He's just a natural spiritual genius.
And it took men like St. Bonaventure and John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and later
teachers who took it to the intellectual level.
He was not an intellectual.
In fact, he mistrusted them.
It was only when he met St. Anthony, who he called my theologian, that he said, Anthony
is a brother whose teaching you can trust.
Because it wasn't based in the head, it was based in the heart.
And so Francis became our first theologian based in the heart.
Just as Francis preached to birds, Anthony preached to fish.
Yeah.
He was one of us.
Yeah.
I think when I first picked up this book, you see my two and a half year old is marking
it up already too.
Oh, you're a father.
I am.
I don't sleep much.
How many children you have?
We have a two month old and a two and a half year old.
Two and a half year old.
Yeah, so it is pure chaos and beauty over here in the Copeland household.
But yeah, I didn't know much about the Franciscan way before picking up your book.
I mean, gosh, this was six, seven years ago.
And I had seen Francis kind of caricatured and you called it Bird Bath Franciscanist.
Where it's, okay, it's this guy who's, you know, he has these moments of euphoric oneness
and he preaches to birds and, you know, he calls, you know, the sun brother and the moon
sister.
And, you know, he kind of, for me, like the caricatures made him seem out of touch.
And yet, naive is a word that some have used.
And yet when I picked up your book, you start off first chapter, second chapter, I think
as well, you're talking about suffering and how Franciscan spirituality integrates suffering
in the real darkness of life.
Can you go deeper into that for me?
Sure.
The greatest ally of God is reality.
What is?
And I just offer that to any listener for a touchstone of Orthodox teaching.
If it's too pretty, if it's too sweet, if it's too comfortable, if it's too bourgeois,
middle class, all about being nice and proper, too much purity code and not much solidarity
with suffering.
It's probably on the wrong track.
Really, I say that intentionally.
Francis never loses touch with the lepers down in the plane, you and down to the port
C. Uncle below us easy and sister Margaret made us pronounce porzi on Cula because we
kept botching it.
I probably just now botched it.
Oh, we say port C. Uncle.
Is that correct?
Margaret's right.
Not me.
That sounds correct.
Better than the little portion, the little portion.
Yeah.
We that was our calling.
And when we disidentified with the minores, he put it in our initials, OFM, not maiores,
the upper class, but minores, the lower class, to keep us even in our title, officially identified
with the underclass.
That could have changed everything.
Now it did, but it didn't, if I'd be honest.
After the Reformation and the Council of Trent, I hate to say this is probably an overstatement,
but all religious orders sort of became the same.
We all became Roman more than Catholic.
Roman Catholic more than ecumenical or dialogical.
And I remember being told once, you Franciscans are, not that this is a put down of diocesan
priests, but they said it that way.
You're just diocesan priests in brown robes.
You're not preaching a different message.
And I'm afraid in many cases that was true after the Council of Trent.
We needed to unify the Catholic Church to keep ourselves formed in relationship to Protestantism,
which was overtaking Europe.
I say that with a good Protestant sitting here at my left hand.
Most of our school is recovering Protestants, our living school, because we're still working
for reform.
And now it's reforming imperial Christianity.
It has to prove it's the best, it's number one, it's the only one that's true, it's
the only one that God loves.
That's just no good.
That doesn't create humble people.
And Francis, now they did teach us humility in my time in formation, novition and seminary.
We should not take ourselves too seriously.
That was part of the Holy Fool thing.
And that saved us.
But our theology was still Roman Catholic, more than a bit righteous.
Because we all believe the same thing in relationship to what was seen as the enemy, which was Protestantism.
And that was very true here in America, where we were a Protestant country.
And we came in as the Johnny-come-lately's, particularly in the big cities of the East
Coast, where you sort of live.
So we Catholics had a siege mentality.
I'm not sure if you've heard that.
We felt under siege.
We built our Catholic schools, our Catholic universities, not really.
I think I'm being fair.
I hope I'm being fair.
Not to teach the Gospel, but to teach the Church.
Can you feel the difference?
Churchy Christianity.
Yeah, and it's kind of bringing it back.
You talked about this kind of downward trajectory.
Like being in Assisi, it was interesting how my understanding was that it kind of mirrored
the class system of that day, where in one evening we did a walk where St. Clair possibly
would have gone on her run.
Where she ran out the gate.
Yeah, and it's straight down.
And then of course that's Francis's trajectory as well.
I just sense that the Franciscan way is one that goes downward.
It goes into the fringes.
It goes to the edges.
It goes to the places that are less glamorous.
It's theology, it truly integrates darkness and complexity.
Any thoughts there?
You're saying it better than I can.
Yes, I think in one of the chapters of the book, I call it the inclusion of the negative.
Yes, yep.
Not the exclusion.
But the divine perfection is the ability to include imperfection, not exclude it, not
excommunicate it, not punish it, not send it elsewhere, but say, that is me.
That also is me.
To find your own shadow as you stop running away from the world's shadows.
What the world hates.
And he says it in his testament.
What the world hates, when I learned to embrace it, what before was hateful to me became sweetness
and life.
This is conversion in one sentence.
Beautiful stuff.
Beautiful.
When you're not into sin management, recognizing who the sinners are, who the unorthodox are,
who the bad people are, that's what's made our problems with racism, sexism, homophobia,
always looking for the bad people that we can exclude.
My earliest book that sort of sold well was called Everything Belongs.
And I always felt the only reason it sold well was because people loved that title.
They knew that if it was of God and was reality, God was sustaining it in life and existence,
it had to belong.
And it wasn't our place to decide that one belongs and that one doesn't.
Which I'm afraid has been much of our history, ferreting out the unorthodox, the heretics,
as we call them.
That was never preoccupation for Franciscans.
Yeah, well that reminds me of one of my favorite phrases from Eager to Love in your phrase,
edge of the inside.
Thank you.
What does that look like to you today?
Unless you're at home on the edge, you tend to idealize what the culture idealizes, which
is always power and money and sex.
I'm not saying that in a negative way, but it doesn't get you very far.
We see it in our politics, the idealization of being a winner and not a loser, being rich
and not poor.
The path of descent, which is my word for what you call going downward, keeps us idealizing
the loser, not the winner.
It almost sounds like that can't be right.
It has to be right.
Or we'll keep excluding people, we'll keep looking for who's inferior to me, as if I'm
so wonderful, as if I'm so perfect.
When we can find divine perfection in imperfection, then you're free.
Please trust me on that.
In one of my later books, I don't think that was put out by your friends.
The Wisdom Pattern, did you put that up?
Oh, you did.
It's easiest to start with order, some grand plan to the meaning of life.
But as you grow, you eventually face the exceptions to the rule.
As we used to say, the exception proves the rule.
The rule isn't always the rule.
When you include disorder with order, you don't throw out order.
That was the mistake of the protesting ones, the Protestant ones.
They thought all about Catholic was bad.
Some was not so good.
They're right.
When you can include order and disorder, exception, correction, reformation, then you have what
I call reorder.
That's the rule with exceptions to the rule, the inclusion of the negative, creating a
new, we call it here in the teaching of contemplation, third-way thinking, where you can not just
think either or, but both and.
It gives you a third something.
That's a rather good description of a mystic, of a saint.
They see things in the third way.
Jesus' whole Sermon on the Mount is reading the law, his Jewish law, in a third way.
The law has said, you have said, I say, and he includes the exceptions to the rule.
That's what we mean by contemplation.
I don't have the time to teach it here as we do at the school, but you've got the hint
of it there.
It's interesting you bring up order, disorder, and reorder.
I actually had this written down.
That has helped me tremendously in my own life.
I know it's helped a lot of people that I know too.
I'm wondering, you brought it up a little bit, but societally, when we navigate this
time today where it's almost as if everyone's living in completely different worlds of,
it's almost like there's no grounding for truth.
You're right.
Keep going.
What does order, disorder, reorder look like in the state of our own society today?
I know people in the past have talked about axial ages and that period of chaos building
to this point where you do end up going in a new evolved direction.
I would be curious, you're such an integrative thinker.
What's your opinion of what we're all navigating right now in America?
Paul says it well, when I was a child, forgive me, my voice is so old now it's hard to listen
to.
I fought as a child.
Now I'm a man I think as a man.
Early stage religion can only be heard, and you're going to learn this with your two little
ones through the ears of a child in a childish way.
That initial order is never it.
It's never a mature, inclusive way of understanding reality.
It's always about my culture, my country, my religion, my group, my ego.
It's entirely too egocentric.
The ego has to be defeated.
And as Jesus says, unless the single grain of wheat die, the single grain of wheat we
would now call the ego, it remains just a little single grain of wheat.
But if it dies, if it can shed its boundaries, its shell, it will bear much fruit.
It's just a much more poetic way of saying order, disorder, reorder.
What you first hear, you hear in a childish and even self-serving way.
And we learn this here in the school because we're very ecumenical.
There's people here from all denominations and even all religions.
And am I supposed to tell the Buddhists they can't know God?
That's clearly not true.
Some of them are more godly than I am.
And that's just said by experience.
So we need a little humility.
All of us do.
All of the world religions.
And here again, I believe Franciscanism is prepared to teach humility.
We were reminded in the novitiate that the word human, humus, earth, and humility all
come from the same root of the earth.
And there's a statue, I don't know if you saw it, in Assisi in the great basilica where
you have Francis gazing at the Holy Spirit.
I hadn't seen a piece of art my whole life where the Spirit is in the dove descending
from above.
But on the left side upper chapel, the artists have the wisdom to plant the Holy Spirit in
the mud, the dove in the mud.
And Francis is looking down in awe, in adoration.
It's a transposition of place about where greatness is to be found.
And the world is learning this.
It's wonderful we're saying this during the Special Olympics.
It took till the 21st century for someone to be smart enough to think of the Special
Olympics.
And we can idealize and love and honor people who can't walk the way we walk or use any
of their limbs the way we do.
It's beautiful.
It teared me up at times.
And I'm proud to say it was, at least as I understand the history of the Special Olympics,
it was largely initiated by some Irish Catholics, Irish American Catholics who had that incarnational
theology that we call Franciscanism.
Yeah, that's encouraging to reflect upon.
Because I think sometimes just in this period that we're navigating as a country, it's easy
to feel lost in the noise.
And yet that is a beautiful example of celebrate.
And I think of John Dunst Skoda's term of thisness.
Like you're we're really celebrating.
Yeah, and well educated.
Thank you.
Not too many young people know that.
Go ahead.
Well, you should tell my professors that until it's just a beautiful thing of, you know,
like the Special Olympics is a great example of you're elevating the thisness of people
and you're not just paying attention to them, you're celebrating them.
Yeah, it's just a really Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that up.
Good, good.
When you find that perfection, divine perfection is the inclusion of imperfection.
You're there already.
And it's so simple, which is drawing upon another one you might not have studied another
Franciscan of the 13th century, William of Ockham.
And he taught Ockham's razor.
Did they teach you that?
Shave away all unnecessary assumptions and explanations.
And the simplest answer is most likely the true one.
I still study it in philosophy class more than theology.
The simplest answer is most likely the true one.
Because once you have to prove loads of assumptions, you get lost in complexity.
So find a message where you don't have to prove a bunch of assumptions, or it's not
your job to prove it.
That gives you Franciscan simplicity.
In fact, it leads you to back to eager to love.
Yep, love is the beginning, the middle and the end.
It's all about love.
It's not about law.
It's not about performance.
It's not about achievement.
It's not about intelligence even.
It's about love.
It's almost too simple.
Yeah.
And I know we've been focusing on the book.
But as we wind down here, I was wondering, what are you learning about yourself right
now?
What are you learning about God right now?
You know, in the last 10 years, I've had five unrelated cancers.
And all five of them I've been—I'm in remission from.
The doctor wants to do a genetic study on me.
Why do I get cancer different, unrelated to one another, and why do I keep being healed
of it?
I don't know.
But I'm leading up to—I'm just having to live with a much weaker body.
Like if I'd be on—I'm getting tired now.
I just get tired real easily.
You see I've got a cane here.
I'm always afraid of falling.
I feel like I'm on the edge of falling.
I hope it's falling upward when it happens.
You're familiar with that book?
I am.
Yeah.
I'm familiar with all your stuff.
I'll be honest with you.
You're so humble.
So there's—like yesterday was the feast day at Acoma where the Indians danced.
And I was going to take a carload of friends here, including Michael, who was right here.
I had to call him early in the day.
I just don't have the energy.
I can't do it.
That is so hard to admit when you're old that you can't do a bunch of things.
Then you're waiting for the next irritant, the next body part that doesn't work right
or doesn't work well.
So God is very humble too.
He lets us die gradually, little by little by little.
Enjoy your youth, Stephen, while you have it and your little kids need it.
Yeah, I think what you just said too about—it's a very interesting connection that you made
about God's humility to human frailty.
Of course, this can be age or any number of things.
I think that brings us back to the God that Francis fell in love with, right?
This humble God.
Well put, he loved the humility of God.
And then we made God wrathful and righteous and judgmental.
It's so un-Franciscan.
Yeah.
Well, I want to be respectful of your time, Father Richard.
Can I ask one more question?
Sure, you can.
I wasn't trying to beg out of it.
Go ahead.
No, no.
I'm just so grateful for your time.
It's wonderful to finally connect with you.
I was wondering, I mean, you have accomplished so much throughout your life as an author
and in ministry and through the Center for Action and Contemplation.
You've hit on several different phases of your journey during this conversation.
As you reflect on your life and journey, what impact do you hope that you've had on the
world?
You know, my two patron saints are Francis and Therese of Lusus.
I don't know how much you know about Therese.
She was a Carmelite, but she called her understanding of the gospel her little way.
And it was what we've already been saying.
She was a feminine Saint Francis.
Let me put it this way, that you come to God by doing it wrong and not by doing it right.
Surprise of surprises.
I'm convinced that's the truth.
Otherwise, it's not good news.
Because if we got to take some comfort in doing it right, only the proud are going to
get there.
But when we can humbly admit that, no, I haven't done it right, yeah, God has used me in a
lot of ways, but I have no doubt, no doubt, God has used me, as Mary says in her Magnificat,
in my littleness, in my nothingness.
When I was studying in Cincinnati as a young man out in Mount Healthy at the seminary,
I was a B student.
I was never an A student.
I was, what do you call it?
I mean, even professors have told me, they say, we hate to say this to you, Richard,
but you weren't very outstanding.
I wasn't.
I wasn't outstanding at all.
And I know that by not trying to be outstanding, it seems in some ways God was able to use
me.
I'm not by nature ambitious.
And I look at all my books I've written, I said, my God, where did that come from?
I was paging through Eager to Love this morning in preparation for talking with you, and some
of those paragraphs are really fine.
Where was I when I wrote that?
All you can do is thank God for His mercy.
That's how Therese begins her autobiography and how Francis lives his whole life.
We thank God for showing His mercy by using an unworthy instrument.
We come to God not by doing it right, but believe it or not, by doing it wrong.
It's the greatest surprise in the religious world.
Does it make sense to you?
It does.
I'm not saying it's wrong.
But no, yeah, I mean, that's the falling upward.
Yeah.
I know you published that book, but yeah, yeah, it's the best selling of my books for
a good reason.
Yeah, I got it for my dad when he retired.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I wasn't planning on asking you this, Father Richard, but I just think this would
bring together so much of what we've been talking about.
Would you mind concluding by reading, you have a beautiful summary of Franciscan heterodoxy
at the bottom of page 100.
Would you find it, please, Michael?
100.
I can't wait to read it.
Okay, I'll read it with joy.
First, there must be the living, which must lead to a giving.
Then you realize you do not yet know love.
So you re-enter the circle of living and giving.
You make steps backward, all waiting to go forward, and you actually do go forward.
Because secretly, if you stay inside this circle, it eventually creates one human life,
which can never happen just inside the mind.
It's not a matter of correct thinking.
We might call this the virtuous circle, as opposed to the...
What's our expression?
Vicious circle.
We all use that expression.
There is no straight line to goodness, to love, or to God.
And thank God, grace is always retroactive.
Oh, I'm glad I wrote that.
The real spiritual journey is a virtuous circle, but it's one that God leads us through in
spite of ourselves.
And thank God, grace is always retroactive.
You're a beautiful man, Stephen.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thanks for joining the podcast, Father Richard.
I think I speak for a lot of people.
We're very grateful for your mind, but more than that, I think we're grateful for your
heart.
So thank you.
Aren't you beautiful?
This is more about you than me.
Have a beautiful day.
Say hello to everybody at St. Anthony's.
Again that was Father Richard Rohr discussing the 10-year anniversary edition of Eager to
Love, The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi, which will be published on October 1st, 2024,
along with an accompanying companion guide that provides prompts and reflections for
contemplation.
Other Franciscan media titles by Richard Rohr include From Wild Man to Wise Man, The Wisdom
Pattern, Breathing Underwater, and Things Hidden, among many others.
You can browse his section of our store by visiting shop.franciscanmedia.org and click
on Richard Rohr in the top banner.
Thanks to Father Richard and the Center for Action and Contemplation for making this interview
possible.
And thanks as well to Father Cyprian Concilio for providing the music for this episode.
This is Stephen Copeland signing off.
Peace and all good.