Father Richard Rohr describes why role models and personal examples often inspire change more effectively than right ideas and beliefs:
Correct ideas and church mandates cannot cause the kind of change that the soul needs. The soul needs living models to grow, exemplars with the expansive energies of love. People who are eager to love change us at the deeper levels. They alone seem able to open the field of both mind and heart at the same time. When we’re in this different state—and that is what it is—we find ourselves open to directions or possibilities we would never allow or imagine before.
When I studied Scholastic philosophy in the seminary, we learned that there were formal causes of things, material causes, efficient causes, exemplary causes, and final causes. After Newtonian physics emerged, most people thought efficient causes were the only way that things could happen, such as strong arms causing a rock to be dislodged from a field, but the kind of cause that especially intrigued me was the exemplary cause. With that kind of causality, someone or some event, just by being what it is, by being an example or model, “causes” other things to happen as a result.
Final causes work in much the same way, by pulling us forward through attraction and allurement. Final causes “cause” things to emerge and evolve in a certain way by offering ideals, models, and seductions that pull us forward. Saint Bonaventure taught that our destiny or goal (telos) finally determines our meaning. If our end goal is clear to us, we have our North Star for a coherent life purpose. It will quite truthfully and inevitably pull us forward and give us a clear trajectory.
When I taught in South Africa, again and again I heard how Nelson Mandela initiated a cultural leap forward for many African men, especially when they saw pictures of him hoeing in the fields, which they still thought of as women’s work. He was a good example of both an exemplary and a final cause. He changed the tangent and the possibility for many people.
I believe the gospel itself, and the Franciscan vision of the gospel, is primarily communicated by richly symbolic human lives that operate as prime attractors and exemplars: through actions visibly done in love; by a nonviolent, humble, simple, liberated lifestyle; by a happy identification with poor and excluded people; by obvious happiness itself; and by concrete and visible people who “give others reasons for spiritual joy”—as Francis said when he rubbed two sticks together to play an imaginary violin and as Pope Francis did when he washed the feet of prisoners, women, and Muslims. When such people then speak or act, their words burn, and their actions convict!
Surely this is what Jesus meant when he told us to be “a light on a lampstand” or to be “leaven” and “salt” (Matthew 5:13–15, 13:33). He knew that holiness is passed on through contagion.
Love Draws Us Forward
Father Richard points to the transformative power of St. Francis and other more recent mystics and prophets.
Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) was a living exemplar of where we are all being attracted and led. Just as the Cosmic Christ serves as the Omega Point (Teilhard de Chardin’s term) for all of history, Francis is also a prime attractor, or what medieval theologians called a “final cause.” Christ and Francis draw humanity forward just by walking the full journey themselves. Transformed people quite simply transform people and set the bar of history higher for all of us. That is one of the ways we fundamentally “help” other people.
If we ourselves are totally focused on our own personal security or on a need for answers and explanations, we have almost no ability to even minimally understand the what, why, and who of persons like Francis, other mystics, or even someone like Jesus himself, who operate out of a completely different level of consciousness. Such people know that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). We tend to drag down such profound humanizers and divinizers to our own comfortable level and actually have little curiosity or ability to care about their major message.
Developmental experts state that the best we humans can do—on a very good day—is perhaps understand someone a bit beyond ourselves. Being invited forward by prophets and mystics—though they invariably face great resistance—is the clear pattern of history. We sadly know this to be true in recent centuries from the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai, Dorothy Day, many UN secretaries-general, and Martin Luther King Jr. Tragically, we don’t usually love and embrace more advanced people, but quite often hate and fear them. Francis is really an amazing exception. He somehow succeeds in being loved, admired, and imitated even by non-Christian religions and very secular people to this day.
God gives us highly evolved people to pull us all forward. The Christian word for them was simply “saint.” We cannot imagine something until we see it through a living model or archetypal figure. Then it constellates in our consciousness as maybe possible for us too. Through his story, Francis is still greasing the wheels of consciousness and holiness. It then rubs off and spreads out by osmosis.
I felt this strongly when I was invited to accompany the Dalai Lama. He said little beyond, “My religion is kindness,” but the stadium was packed. The lines just to see him, or perhaps touch him, reached across the Ohio River bridge to Louisville. Many pointed out the direct line between that event and Thomas Merton’s presence down the Kentucky road at Gethsemani Abbey. Merton, Mother Teresa, Pope Francis, and the Dalai Lama are all good examples of prime attractors in our own time.
===============================
| Learning from the Mystics: Mechthild of Magdeburg. from John Chaffee |
| Quote of the Week: (This is a dialogue between Mechthild and the Lord.) “Lord, you are constantly lovesick for me.That you have clearly shown personally.You have written me into your book of the Godhead;You have painted me in your humanity;You have buried me in your side, in your hands and feet.Ah, allow me, dear One, to pour balsam upon you.””O One dear to my heart, where shall you find the balm?””O Lord, I was going to tear the heart of my soul in two and intend to put you in it.””You could never give me a more soothing balsam than to let me unceasingly lie weightlessly in your soul.””Lord, if you were to take me home with you, I would be your physician forever.” – From Book III of The Flowing Light of the Godhead Reflection Mechthild occasionally wrote dreams, lists, poems, and dialogues within her best-known work, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Shown above is just one of those dialogues. When we read it, we are gifted with a peek into an intimate conversation between Mechthild and God. The conversation does two noteworthy things. First, Mechthild deeply understands the “mutual indwelling” that all the Christian mystics point toward in their works. At the outset, she states that her whole existence is within God, but then shows Divine hospitality by “tearing the heart of her soul in two,” so that she could put God in there. Second, Mechthild inverts the famous passage from the Gospels… “Jesus answered them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.'” (Luke 5:31) God is understood as the Great Physician who comes to heal the sick, but here it is God who is lovesick and it is Mechthild that offers to be the Great Physician to Him. Mechthild, as well as all the other Christian mystics, often speak of an intimacy with God that might make others blush. It is almost brazen (and some have even deemed it dangerous) how Mechthild relates to God as an equal, rather than maintaining Kierkegaard’s “infinite qualitative distance” to God. Many times, we have been trained into a strict reverence for God that actually can become a wall, a separation, a buffer from the very intimacy that we want with God. In some sense, Mechthild is an example to throw that caution to the wind and to dive right into the immediate, intimate and infinite reality of Divine Love. Prayer Good God, Help us to throw caution to the wind. Do not allow religion to be the safest place to hide from you, and grant us the wildness of heart to express ourselves to you and to receive the very romance that you extend to us. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen and amen. |
| Life Overview of Mechthild of Magdeburg: Who is She: Mechthild of Magdeburg Where: Unknown, Most Likely in modern-day Germany. When: 1207-1282 (possibly 1294)AD Why She is Important: She was the first Christian mystic to write in German. She was a member of the Beguines, a collection of writers and figures from a particular region of Western Europe. What Was Their Main Contribution: Mechthild of Magdeburg often wrote poetry and discourse with God. These poems and discourse are considered a part of the corpus of Mystical Marriage, a genre of spiritual writings that evoke the intimacy and vulnerability between married spouses. |
