Father Richard Rohr describes the necessity of attending to our emotions while not clinging to them:
Emotions are necessary weathervanes, in great part body-based, that help us read situations quickly and perhaps in depth. But they are also learned and practiced neural responses, often ego-based, which have little to do with objective reality and much more to do with the storylines that we have learned and created. Our separate self loves to hold onto such emotions to justify and defend itself and assert its power.
Much of the work of emotional maturity is learning to distinguish between emotions that give us a helpful message about ourselves or situations and emotions that are merely narcissistic reactions to the moment. I dare to say that, until we have found our spiritual center and ground, most of our emotional responses are usually too self-referential to be helpful or truthful. They read the moment as if the “I,” with its immediate needs and hurts, is a reference point for objective truth. It isn’t. The small, defensive “I” cannot hold that space. Only Reality/God/Creation holds that space.
Naming any emotion, even if it is negative, as a “sin” is not useful, because guilt and shame, or any sense that “God is upset” with us, usually only increases our negativity and fear—which causes us to close down all the more. In other words, when we try to shut them down, our emotions become more complex, more conflicted, more repressed—and thus less honest “reflections” of reality. If an emotion does not help us read the situation better and more truthfully, we must release it, let it move through us—for our own advantage.
Most of us are naturally good at attachment, but few of us have training in detachment or letting go. Practicing detachment is one of the great tasks of any healthy spirituality, but, when carried to extreme, it’s counterproductive. (It almost took over in much of early Christianity, which was not helpful.) We must take the risk of legitimate attachment (fully feeling the emotion), learn its important message, and then have the presence and purpose to detach from that fascinating emotion after it has done its work. This is the gift and power of an emotionally mature person. [1]
To be truly conscious, we must step back from our compulsive identification with our unquestioned attachment to our isolated selves—the primary illusion. Pure consciousness is never just me, trapped inside my self. Rather, it is an observing of “me” from a distance—from the viewing platform kindly offered by God (see Romans 8:16), which we call the Indwelling Spirit. Then we see with eyes much larger and other than our own.
Most of us do not understand this awareness because we are totally identified with our passing thoughts, feelings, and compulsive patterns of perception. We have no proper distance from ourselves, which ironically would allow us to see our radical connectedness with everything else. Such radical connectedness is holiness.
A Gift for Experiencing Reality
Father Richard suggests how we might honor our emotions without overly attaching to them:
When it comes to honoring our emotions, we have to say both a strong “yes” and a strong “no.” We must begin with “yes” because so many of us were trained, by family and religion, to not feel our feelings. They thought they were doing us a favor, because they didn’t want emotions to rule our life. Unfortunately, that gave a moral connotation to even having feelings, not just the “negative” ones like anger, resentment, or fear, but the positive ones too, like pleasure, happiness, and even desire. The overt or subliminal messaging “That’s wrong. That’s bad” stunted our capacity to appreciate, and to suffer or to allow the full meaning of reality. Emotions are, first of all, a gift from God so that we can touch reality by a way other than our brain.
Pastor Peter Scazzero affirms that our emotions are central to our humanity and to our relationships with God and people:
Like most Christians, I was taught that almost all feelings are unreliable and not to be trusted. They go up and down and are the last thing we should be attending to in our spiritual lives. It is true that some Christians live in the extreme of following their feelings…. It is more common, however, to encounter Christians who do not believe they have permission to admit their feelings or express them openly. This applies especially to such “difficult” feelings as fear, sadness, shame, anger, hurt, and pain. And yet, how can we listen to what God is saying and evaluate what is going on inside when we cut ourselves off from our emotions?
To feel is to be human. To minimize or deny what we feel is a distortion of what it means to be image bearers of God. To the degree that we are unable to express our emotions, we remain impaired in our ability to love God, others, and ourselves well. Why? Because our feelings are a component of what it means to be made in the image of God. To cut them out of our spirituality is to slice off an essential part of our humanity. [1]
Richard considers the risk of overemphasizing the importance of our feelings:
Because emotions were so repressed and denied and thought to be always faulty, it’s probably one of the major reasons we moved into overly heady Christianity. We’re rediscovering the value of emotions now, but this has the danger of swinging the pendulum to the other side—assuming that emotions are always right, always good. But when taken at face value, emotions don’t have any cognitive balancing. We aren’t asking “Is that a sensible response? Is that a reasonable response?” So, we have a lot of sentimentality and drama, the pumping up of emotions about nothing. We spend hours creating outer dramas, particularly when there’s no inner drama, no inner aliveness or contentment. Inside the frame of the smaller self, we tend to make everything a big deal.
| The Rich Young Ruler’s Second Chance: A John Mark Conspiracy Theory By Anthony Parrott |
| I’ve long been fascinated by the rich young ruler—not because of what he did, but because of what we assume he didn’t do next.Picture him walking away from Jesus in Mark 10, shoulders heavy with the weight of unmet expectations. The text says he went away “grieving, for he had many possessions.” But what if grieving was just the beginning? What if walking away sad wasn’t the end of his story, but the necessary prelude to understanding what it actually costs to follow love? Here’s my favorite biblical conspiracy theory: the rich young ruler came back. And his name was John Mark. The Case for John Mark John Mark first appears in Acts 12, where we learn his mother Mary owns a house in Jerusalem—not just any house, but the house where the early church gathers. Prime real estate: big enough to host the Last Supper, spacious enough for Pentecost when the Holy Spirit shows up like wind and fire, central enough to serve as headquarters for the early Jesus movement.In Acts 13, John Mark joins Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey. Then, in Acts 15, he abandons them halfway through. Paul gets so pissy he refuses to work with John Mark again.But years later something shifts. Later, in Colossians 4 and 2 Timothy 4, Paul calls John Mark “like a son to me” and “useful in ministry.”The earliest church tradition about Mark comes from Papias of Hierapolis (around 125 CE), who wrote that Mark “became Peter’s interpreter and wrote accurately all that he remembered of the things said or done by the Lord.” This tradition—that Mark’s Gospel is essentially Peter’s memoirs of following Jesus—was picked up by later church fathers like Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria. So we have this wealthy young man with serious family money and connections to the Jesus movement, who has a documented pattern of saying yes to following Jesus, then walking away, then coming back again.The Rich Young Ruler’s QuestionIn Mark 10, an unnamed wealthy young man approaches Jesus with a question that sounds spiritually mature but reveals something desperate underneath: “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”Jesus’ response cuts through the performance. After the young man claims he’s kept all the commandments since his youth, Mark tells us Jesus “looked at him and loved him.” Then comes the challenge: “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”The young man walks away grieving “for he had many possessions.” Many sermons end there, with the rich young ruler as a cautionary tale about the seductive power of wealth. Which, you know, we need those sermons. But what if that’s not where his story ends? What if the grief was the beginning of transformation?Hidden Signatures in Mark’s GospelMark’s Gospel contains these strange little details that feel like signatures by the author—moments where the writer seems to insert himself into the narrative.In Mark 14, during Jesus’ arrest in Gethsemane, most of the disciples have fled, but there’s this random detail found only in Mark’s account: “A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.”Why include this seemingly irrelevant detail? What if it’s not irrelevant at all?You have two unnamed young men in Mark’s Gospel: one who owns expensive possessions and walks away from Jesus sad, another who follows Jesus wearing expensive linen and literally leaves his costly garment behind when he flees. Both are wealthy. Both are young. Both are unnamed. Both walk away.What if they’re the same person? What if John Mark is writing his own origin story into his Gospel—not as the hero, but as the one who kept getting it wrong before he finally got it right?This reading reframes John Mark’s later story. His abandonment of Paul and Barnabas during their missionary journey isn’t just youthful irresponsibility—it’s part of a larger pattern of walking away when the cost gets too high, then finding his way back to saying yes.Think about the psychological weight Mark might have carried. If he was the rich young ruler, he’d lived with the memory of walking away from Jesus when directly challenged. He’d experienced the grief of choosing security over transformation. But then Jesus uses his family’s house for the Last Supper. The Holy Spirit shows up at Pentecost in the same space. The early church makes its headquarters in his mother’s home.That’s what conversion looks like—not a single moment of decision, but a series of choices to keep showing up even after you’ve failed. Faith isn’t about getting it right the first time, but about learning that love keeps offering second chances. Why This Matters I love this theory not because it’s provable (it’s not), but because it reframes failure as part of the journey rather than the end of it.The traditional reading of the rich young ruler story often feels like condemnation—see what happens when you choose money over Jesus? But if John Mark is our rich young ruler, the story becomes about redemption. It becomes about a God who doesn’t give up on us when we walk away sad.Jesus told his disciples, who were astounded by the difficulty of wealthy people entering God’s kingdom, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”All things. Even rich young rulers who need multiple chances to learn what it costs to follow love. Even those of us who keep walking away and coming back, saying no and then yes, abandoning and returning.If John Mark really was the rich young ruler, then his Gospel becomes something beautiful and subversive—a testimony written by someone who knew intimately what it felt like to fail Jesus, and also what it felt like to be welcomed back. No wonder Mark’s account feels particularly human, so willing to showcase the disciples’ failures and fears.It also means our stories can be read differently. The times we’ve walked away grieving aren’t the end of our spiritual narratives—they’re the necessary prelude to understanding grace.Following Jesus can’t be about getting it right the first time. It’s about learning that love keeps calling our names even after we’ve walked away sad, keeps setting tables even after we’ve abandoned ship, keeps writing us into the story even when we’re convinced we’ve edited ourselves out. |
