Note: You can watch this teaching on CrossWalk’s YouTube channel.

Below are process questions from the small group series* featuring the teachings of Richard Rohr.

LIVING YOURSELF INTO A NEW WAY OF THINKING

Here are some memorable statements from Richard as he speaks about the priority of orthopraxy over orthodoxy:

1.     You do not think yourself into a new way of living; you live yourself into a new way of thinking.

2.     Every time the church split, we lost half the gospel. The half we lost in 1054 at the Great Schism was contemplative practice.

3.     Let the institutional church maintain the superstructure of creed, ritual and doctrine; that frees us to worry about the structure of our daily lives.

4.     You can be perfectly orthodox and not understand the lifestyle of Jesus one bit!

5.     Begging keeps you at the social level of everybody else, in their lives and in solidarity with their pain.

6.     The great thing about orthopraxy is that there is really nothing to argue about until you do it! You don’t believe something until you have done it.

7.     We got lost in proving our metaphysics and then making others believe it. We spent all our time in enforcement, as if Jesus came to earth to enforce ideas.

8.     I don’t know a single example of any of our churches burning anyone at the stake for not taking care of the widows and orphans.

9.     We live in a wonderful time when we see that faith is not about belonging systems or belief systems. If Christianity is going to be renewed and reformed, it has to move to practice-based Christianity.

10.  The globalization of spirituality is making practice essential, because people don’t believe you any more until you’ve done it. Most of the things we said we believed were no skin off our back!

11.  The wonderful thing about orthopraxy is that it asks something of you. That’s why we’ve avoided it for so long!

12.  Going to a place in my daily prayers where for 20 minutes I have to go into this kenosis—this dying to myself, dying to my feelings, dying to my own angry thoughts—no one wants to do that!

13.  Orthopraxy asks something of you. Orthodoxy allows you to be a policeman of other people and never really do it yourself. This gives you a false high moral ground without deserving it for a moment!

14.  The word orthodoxy is not found in the scriptures. Jesus never encouraged this mentality, in fact, quite the contrary.

15.  Isn’t it ironic that a religion that believes that the word became flesh puts so much credence into words!

      

Imagine a line down the center of your meeting space. This is a continuum. At one end is extreme orthodoxy (#1) and at the other extreme orthopraxy (#10). Of course, there are many points on the continuum between the two extremes (#2-9). Choose a point that represents where you see the measure of your faith life in terms of these two ends of the continuum and go stand there.  Why did you choose that spot?  Are you where you want to be?  Why or why not?  If you want to be somewhere else on the continuum, what might it take to get there?

SOUP BOWL MUTUALITY

Suzanne shares her concern about churches that serve food to the poor and homeless but only on condition that they hear a sermon. She advocates for a principle that says, “In order to get a bed and a bowl of soup you don’t have to join my club.”

In response, Richard offers insight about true mutuality of relationship:

The need to have people join your group to convince you that you are right is much more love of self than love of God.

Christianity has largely been a belonging system instead of a transformational system. We have this attitude in our history that the best thing we can do for “them” is to present the gospel and get them to come to church.

The assumption is that I’ve got the truth and you don’t. I ensconce myself in a superior position. The great thing that our Catholic missionaries learned after they were in the mission for as little as three years can be summed up in this way: “I came to convert them and they converted me.” Until that realization comes, the I-thou relationship of the true body of Christ hasn’t happened.

When the other has as much to teach me even though I’m the one providing the bowl of soup, that’s mutuality. When I know what that other person has suffered and can hear their story and allow that story to influence me, that is the body of Christ re-formed. We can’t maintain this one-sided evangelism where one group ensconces itself as the giver and keeps the other group co-dependent on them as the receiver and call that being like Jesus. I’m sure many people do that with the best of intentions, but very often it preserves them in a kind of hidden egocentricity.”

1.     When have you had an experience anything like that of a missionary in which you were the one converted (transformed) in a situation where you thought that you were the converter?

2.     It’s quite possible that you have not risked the kind of vulnerability and transformation implied in this conversation. What yearning for personal change and growth emerges in you as you listen to Richard speaking about the challenges of the Way of Jesus and the promise therein?

3.     Perhaps your church is involved in service to the poor, to the homeless, to people in extreme economic distress. What practices are in place that ensure that the system isn’t one of co-dependence, conversion, superiority and egocentricity?

4.     Richard makes reference to a passage from the letter of James, James 2:14-18. What meaning does it have for you as you struggle with this matter of a life as envisioned by Jesus and the early Christian community?

 

GOOD THEOLOGY STILL MATTERS

The emphasis in this session on orthopraxy leads Doug to raise the critical matter of concepts and belief:

We are incapable of having a content-less mind. So, what difference does it make what we believe conceptually?

In affirming that good theology is important, Richard raises a historical situation in New Mexico that involved the Franciscans:

When they were withdrawn for political reasons, the Franciscans trained laymen to run the church with no priests. For more than 100 years these sincere, well-intentioned laymen ran the church without any infusion of good theology. In that time the church became very guilt-centered, punitive and moralistic. That’s an extreme example of how devolved Christianity can get if you have no content with good sources. What happens is you get charismatic, manipulative and dominant personalities taking over. It’s true in any institution: the loudest and most manipulative personality controls the show. So, you finally have a choice between good teaching and good thinking, or a cult of personality. I can talk this way because the Franciscans gave me excellent education in theology. You get to know the “big Tradition,” then you can critique the “small tradition.”

 

1.     How do you ensure that your practice is grounded in good theology?

2.     When have you been aware of situations where practice was grounded in bad theology?

 

WAITING FOR THE GOD EXPERIENCE

Richard offers some observations on why it is that most people who have no experience of Holy Presence are unable to sustain a contemplative practice:

The Center has been here 27 years now. I’ve seen the vast majority of people experiment with contemplation but not last. If you haven’t had a previous experience of an actual lover/presence/encounter/person you don’t know what you’re waiting for. You get tired of waiting for an energy or idea or “enlightenment.” If they haven’t had a Jesus encounter of any type—a baptism in the Spirit, as charismatics would call it—I find that by and large most people give up on contemplation.

I find again and again in my own experience here that people who stay with it are people who already know that there’s someone to wait for, that God is real. They’re not trying to manufacture God experience; they’re trying to deepen already existing God experience. It really gives me sympathy and patience for people who give up. They don’t know what they’re waiting for or if it’s worth waiting for. Contemplative prayer doesn’t give you a lot of pay-off if you’re not committed to the practice itself.

      

1.     How are people in your discussion group being sustained in their contemplative practice through a real experience of Presence or encounter with the Divine?

2.     And what about the absence of that experience? How have you been sustained in your desire for a deepening relationship with God even when there is no word? (The word of God was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. 1 Samuel 3:1)

 

FALL ING UPWARD

Doug says: “I’d like to hear you, Richard, talking more about keeping people engaged in pursuing that experience even if they haven’t had it.”

Richard responds:

The reason I wrote Falling Upward is because I feel for the vast majority the falling experience, which is inevitable if you are living a real human life, is the normal path of transformation. I say in Naked Now that great love and great suffering are the classic paths. You don’t fall into great love or great suffering without falling. You don’t go there intentionally. It’s always outside your control: I can’t succeed at this; I don’t look good; I just lost my house…my money…my marriage. We don’t want to wish these things on anybody but, again and again, you see these are the things that catapult people into the second stage of life, or unitive experience. We know we can’t program those, but we clergy were given the impression that’s what Sunday was about. We would program a religious experience.

      

1.     What do you understand to be the significance of the title of Richard’s book, Falling Upward?

2.     In what ways have you experienced this great truth of human life—that the falling experience is the normal path of transformation?

 

ACCOMPANIMENT

The conversation brings the group around to a consideration of the importance of accompaniment: There’s a task we have to accompany people so that they can give language to their experience in a way that leads them beyond the practice to deeper consciousness. We often don’t have the words.

Richard states:

We only have the language of faith as assent to doctrine. That’s totally inadequate to the inner experience. The ministry of spiritual direction (accompaniment) is growing broadly. There is a recognition of it in Buddhism and Judaism as well. In the matter of accompaniment, there have to be elders who are at least one step beyond you. I want someone to be a little ahead of me. Those kind of people as teachers and learners are just proliferating today. It’s wonderful.

 

1.     Who is it who accompanies you in enabling you to put into words and awareness your experience of the divine? What access do you have to someone who is trained as a spiritual director?

 

 

* Adapted from Embracing an Alternative Orthodoxy: A 5-Session Study by Richard Rohr with Tim Scorer, Morehouse Education Resources, 2014)