Engaging in Good Trouble
Friday, August 21, 2026
Father Richard finds in the prophets an invitation to follow their path of disrupting injustice:
When prophets see that the status quo is not working, they encourage what I call “holy disorder,” a scenario in which the fundamental conditions and relationships of the group are disrupted (as when the Israelites were conquered by the Babylonians or persecuted by their enemies). This disruption can take positive form or negative form. Either God outgrows our present, limited understanding and we grow with God, or we regress due to our inability to love and trust what is happening. Then society reverts to legalism and formality until it ultimately disintegrates. From these disruptions, a new order arises (what I call “reorder”), in which human relations can work at a higher level that is more imaginative, less dualistic, and usually less violent than the first order or the reactive disorder.
The process of allowing and creating holy disorder is surely what Representative John Lewis called getting into “good trouble.” He was referring to the good and necessary trouble of civil disobedience in the pursuit of racial justice, but his philosophy is equally powerful when we think about the prophets. For them, good trouble and holy disorder could draw forth better things—an entirely different consciousness characterized by more justice, more mercy, greater closeness to God. Of course, the process is never linear, and it never stops. The new reorder soon becomes a new order, and we need prophets to keep us from idolizing the new status quo. The only thing more dangerous and more common than narcissism is group narcissism. We have always needed a mechanism for positive change that is organic and comes from within. We must ask, Why has critical thinking always had to come from outside our religious systems and hardly been allowed from within? This is a major problem.
We have tried to reform religion with the same codes of violence and willpower used by corporations, monetary systems, landowners, and nation-states, often leaving the egos and self-interests of hierarchs quite in control. Further, we have a tendency to minimize evil, attacking it in individual “bad guys” instead of exposing and convicting the intergenerational lies that consume most cultures: things like pride, deceit, power, war, and greed.
This, more than any other reason, is why Christianity did little to reform or evolve the Roman, Holy Roman, Russian, French, Spanish, English, or American empires, but instead slept comfortably with every one of them. The evils that ate us alive were seldom called evil because the “priestly” groups were intent on enforcing ritual requirements and purity codes—in which Jesus and the prophets showed little or no interest. Once we lose the prophetic analysis, most evil will be denied, disguised, or hidden among the rules and rituals of religion and the law itself. This is how truth is “discerned” in a dualistic world: by winning the purity and identity contests.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage (Convergent Books, 2025), xvi–xvii.
Image Credit and Inspiration: Valentin Walter, untitled (detail), 2019, photo. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Water flowing steadily over stone echoes Amos’s call for justice to roll down like an ever-flowing stream, and Isaiah’s promise of a peace that outlasts every obstacle in its path.
John Chaffee – Five on Friday, 8-21-26
1.
“God meant for things to be much easier than we have made them.”
– Dorothy Day, Founder of The Catholic Worker
Man, isn’t this the truth?
We are so quick to blame God for the problems in our lives when we should be looking at our own behavior and holding one another accountable for living well.
Add into the mix the fact that we are each immature, acting on partial knowledge, failing to see how we are all connected, dealing with hurts, addictions, or traumas, and it is easy to see that we have made our lives rather difficult.
Sure, we might be angry with God that God did not make a cosmos without pain, but pain is an inevitable part of a universe that is still (even 13.8 billion years later) learning how to be a universe.
2.
“To go against self is the beginning of salvation.”
– Early Desert Monastic Saying
After all, Jesus said, “Pick up your cross daily and follow Me.”
3.
“Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst.”
– CS Lewis, English Author and Apologist
I completely agree.
When we have taken the faith and refuse to allow it to accuse and convict us of things that we need to change, we become living mockeries of the faith we claim allegiance to.
In Christian theology and practice, building on the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we have the terms “cheap grace” and “costly grace.”
“Cheap grace” is grace that excuses whatever we do in life and makes no claim on us to change how we live. For Bonhoeffer, this is an abomination and a distortion of the faith.
On the flip side is “costly grace,” which offers us true grace alongside the demand that we give up “living as we want” and submit to a higher ethical standard. I do not remember where, but someone said, “Spiritual maturity happens when we choose to bend the knee before a Mystery larger than ourselves, rather than to continually fall into greater and greater self-destructive habits.”
I am not aware that CS Lewis or Dietrich Bonhoeffer ever communicated, but I have a feeling that they would have agreed on many points about how a Christian ought to live.
4.
“A saint is not someone who never sins, but one who sins less and less frequently and gets up more and more quickly.”
– Bernard of Clairvaux, The “Last of the Church Fathers”
The saint is simply someone who knows how to apologize, learn from their mistakes, change how they live, and make amends like a pro.
5.
“Let no one deceive you, monk, with the notion that you can be saved while a slave to sensual pleasure and self- esteem.”
– Maximus the Confessor, Syrian Monk and Theologian
Maximus the Confessor has been a growing influence on my life.
He lived in the 7th century AD and was a major proponent of the Chalcedonian Creed, which emphasized Jesus’ two natures (human and divine) as fully coexistent within him.
And, born out of his deep commitment to the early creeds of the church, Maximus also developed a rather robust ethical framework.
If we are still slaves to our pleasures and the need for the approval of others, then we are in an incredibly dangerous place.
The inability to deny ourselves every so often, and instead chasing headlong into whatever gives us a little squirt of dopamine, will lead us and those around us into pain. Think about a toddler who cannot do any amount of impulse control and will seek whatever soothes their own discomfort… If we are like that, then we have much growing up to do.
Add on top of that the need to be liked? The need to get other people’s approval even though we are impulsively chasing after whatever soothes us?
Wow, that’s a recipe for self-destruction, isn’t it?
