The True Center
We begin this week’s meditations with a foundational teaching from Richard Rohr on what it means to be “on the edge of the inside”:
The biblical prophets, by definition, were seers and seekers of Eternal Mystery, which always seems dangerously new and heretical to old eyes and any current preoccupations with status and security. The Hebrew prophets lived on the edge of the inside of Judaism. John the Baptist later does the same with Temple Judaism, and Paul then sharply disagrees with Peter and the new Christian establishment in Jerusalem (Galatians 2:1–14). Francis and Clare continued this classic pattern in their own hometown of Assisi as they physically moved from upper Assisi among the majores to the lower side of town and the minores. There they had nothing to prove or defend. It offered the most opportunities to have fresh and honest experience, and to find their True Center. [1]
The starting point for the biblical prophet is an amazing positive experience of theophany (as we see in Isaiah 6, for example) that fills their heart, not with cynicism, not with sarcasm, not with negativity, not with opposition, but with ecstasy that has to be shared. That one experience of the absolute is so absolutizing that it has the effect of relativizing everything else. It even relativizes the institutions of religion, which receive the prophets’ most constant and continuous criticism.
We see this almost perfectly replicated in Jesus. Jesus is constantly critiquing religion and being fought by religion. The prophets come out of religious experience, and yet they find themselves fought most by religion itself. Often, like Jesus, they are killed by the religious establishment. Why is that true? [2]
People hiding inside of belonging systems are very threatened by those who are not within that group. They are threatened by anyone who has found their citizenship in places they cannot control. Christians call this place “the Reign of God.” When one has found one’s treasure elsewhere and is utterly grounded in the passion and pathos of a transcendent God, they are both indestructible and uncontrollable by worldly systems.
If we look at some who have served the prophetic role in modern times, like Martin Luther King Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Pope John XXIII, Simone Weil, and Óscar Romero, we will notice that they all held this exact position. They tended to be, each in their own way, orthodox, conservative, traditional clergy, intellectuals, or believers; but that truly authentic inner experience and membership allowed them to critique utterly the exact systems of which they were a part. We might say that their enlightened actions clarify what our mere belief systems really mean. These prophets critiqued Christianity by the very values that they learned from Christianity. [4]
Inside/Outside People
Father Richard describes prophets as “inside/outside” people, another way of saying they lived on the edge of the inside.
None of the prophets held highly established or institutional roles within Israel. They were by definition inside/outside people. I’ve heard it said that in the world of business and management, after we’re in a company for about two months, we begin to lose our ability to criticize that business or company because we’re a part of it. Unless we somehow retain our distance, and have healthy and balanced outside voices, we become an insider and start protecting the institution. We start shoring it up and building it up. That’s what happens to all of us in any system we get into. Once we accept these rules and this game, to a certain degree, we lose the ability to creatively criticize it anymore.
There are also those people who forever stand outside criticizing. Such people never participate and never become involved. There are those kind of people in every prayer group, and every parish, and every family, and every church. They go to services, but they never lay down their lives. They critique from without, and that doesn’t work either.
We can only criticize something if we walk the narrow line of being an inside/outside person that the prophets dared to walk. I find so few people can do that. I think only the Spirit can create it. There are a few prophets who can love their church, their country, or their company so much that they see it clearly and deeply and are free to criticize it. But there’s a difference when critique comes from anger and rebellion and spite, and when it comes from love. All of our actions and prophetic words must come out of an experience of gratitude for what is given. Only out of the joy and the fullness of what is given can we dare to speak against what is not given. Because if we speak against what is not given merely out of our own resentment and compulsion, we’ll destroy ourselves and probably others too.
How many cynical and bitter people do we know in the church and religious life? How many clergy have lost the ability for that creative balance? No one has taught them how to walk that narrow road of being inside/outside people. Maybe the church didn’t allow many examples to stay around to show us, because for years we’ve eliminated the prophets. Anyone who didn’t speak the party line was deemed a heretic. Anyone who didn’t say it in the one and only orthodox and appropriate way to say it was kicked out. So, we lost those creative models to show us how to be inside and yet creatively speaking from an outside perspective. That’s the wisdom we need. The model of the prophet is one who can love and yet criticize, and who can speak words of correction out of an experience of gratitude.
Love and Criticism
Dorothy Day (1897–1980) lived on the edge of the inside, and the deep love she had for her church and nation expressed itself in passionate critique. Writer Julie Leininger Pycior describes a moment of prophetic challenge Day offered during a conference session on Women and the Eucharist:
Nearing eighty, and long plagued by heart ailments along with arthritis, [Day] was felled by a serious heart attack in September 1976 [not long] after giving a talk to eight thousand people at a Eucharistic congress in Philadelphia. One also could say, however, that that event broke her heart….
As they made their way to the session, Day confided to [her friend Eileen] Egan that she was sick at heart. The congress included a Mass in honor of the U.S. military, and, like the women’s session, was scheduled for August 6, which happened to be the anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. The Catholic Worker leader felt obligated to decry that military theme, even though she considered the Mass more important than life itself, containing within it that most precious of gifts: the Eucharist—and even as the congress, of course, was dedicated to the Eucharist.
For Day, a devout Catholic, her love of the Eucharist compelled her to speak out about war as a sin for which penance is needed, especially with the anniversary of the Hiroshima nuclear attack in her heart and mind:
[Day’s] remarks, which she titled “Bread for the Hungry,” [1] opened with a devoted evocation of the Eucharist. Day shared with her listeners her deep, abiding “love and gratitude to the Church” as nothing less than a mother “who taught me the crowning love of the life of the Spirit.” But love in action can be a harsh and dreadful thing, and now she plunged ahead, noting that this mother “also taught me that ‘before we bring our gifts of service, of gratitude, to the altar—if our brother has anything against us, we must hesitate to approach the altar to receive the Eucharist.’”
Speaking with an anguish made even more dramatic by her careful, understated manner, Day said, “And here we are on August 6th.” Acknowledging other holocausts, notably the Turkish attacks on the Armenians and the Nazi persecution of Jews, “God’s chosen people,” she then sounded like a prophet. “It is a fearful thought that unless we do penance, we will perish,” she firmly stated, reminding her listeners that, at that very moment, military leaders were processing into the cathedral nearby.… She called for “fasting, as a personal act of penance, for the sin of our country, which we love.” Asking why that religious service could not have been held on a different date, “I plead,” she said, “that we will regard that military Mass, and all our Masses today, as an act of penance, begging God to forgive us.” That her audience broke into resounding applause only partly salved Day’s wounded heart, which suffered an actual physical attack a few weeks later.
