Ray Suarez: We're all seekers searching for answers to life's biggest questions, but our busy lives offer little time for reflection.

♪ There are people who have made it their life's work to examine, to explore, and uncover the wisdom we all seek far out beyond the dissonance and clamor of modern life.

♪ In this episode, we speak with leaders in faith and ethics about the search for togetherness in times like these filled with crisis and tumult... Man: It's out of that crisis that we begin to ask questions of the soul-- what we believe, why we believe it.

Different man: All nations are fundamentally communities of strangers in the sense that they're too big for us to know one another.

♪ Woman: There are times when we remember that we're related to each other.

We know that there's a fundamental oneness that connects all being.

Different woman: I call it God.

Other people can call it goodness.

They can call it love.

Suarez: and later on, delving deeper, we'll visit with theologian Father Richard Rohr in Albuquerque, New Mexico, exploring the work we can do on ourselves in the quest to lead lives filled with truth and compassion.

Rohr: Tears are the opening to compassion.

Move beyond what your normal, dualistic, judgmental mind says.

That naked self is what authentic religion is supposed to help us find.

Suarez: This is "Wisdom Keepers."

♪ Pastor Bernard, welcome to "Wisdom Keepers."

Thank you.

My pleasure to be here with you.

Let me use you as a social diagnostician for a moment.

We've just come through a difficult phase in our national life.

We're divided culturally, politically, regionally, economically.

If I needed a workup, a diagnosis, how would you describe the current state of affairs?

You know, there's a wonderful passage in Proverbs, and it says, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick," and the word "sick" in the Hebrew... is not just speaking of physical illness... but it means to have your patience and tolerance exhausted, and I think that's what we're seeing with these old conversations, these unresolved issues: racism-- some will call it America's original sin-- inequities in our systems and structures.

It's a cycle.

When we came out of World War II, America experienced a great deal of prosperity; with the nuclear weapons that we created-- we dropped bombs on Nagasaki, Hiroshima-- let the world know that we are to be respected; and then the Sixties came... and every revolution imaginable was taking place.

[Crowds shouting] Man: We will define Black Power.

Bernard: There was that awakening, and we entered crisis: ♪ the assassinations of JFK... ♪ of course, Malcolm X for me, Dr. King.

I think it stunned our nation and raised the American consciousness in its relationship to government that just maybe there are forces at work, even within our own nation, who have determined that they know best how democracy should be managed... and that our elected officials are simply there as a front, so we began to think conspiratorially, and we began to push for change.

Some of it was good.

Some of it was not thought through carefully, and here we are, generation later, and we're experiencing the effects of it.

♪ Woman: I think people are very tired.

♪ I think that people have been divided against each other and turned against each other through rhetoric and, you know, intentional stirring up of those feelings: feelings of hate, feelings of distrust.

♪ There's so much uncertainty.

People are afraid.

When people are afraid, they retract.

They become-- One way they can become is closed off to others.

♪ Clearly, this country was divided in similar ways before.

it was divided clearly this way in the lead-up to the Civil War, but that's not a very good omen, um, if that's where we are.

What the Civil War showed was that we couldn't solve the problems through politics.

We had to solve them by having the bloodiest war of the 19th century.

Woman: The soul of who we are as a people is at war with itself.

Are we going to be a nation and a people that lives into the highest aspirations of who we can be as human beings, or are we going to be a sort of xenophobic, bigoted nation and that doesn't include everybody?

So our soul's at war with itself.

♪ Suarez: Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, in the mid sixties, Lyndon Johnson flew to Liberty Island in New York Harbor and signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened up the world to immigration to the United States, and in the speech he gave at the Statue of Liberty, he referred to this as "a nation of strangers"... ♪ and that made me sit right up in my chair when I read that speech recently because when you get off that boat in Ellis Island or that plane in Los Angeles, um, you are a stranger.

We aren't open to that idea that we are brothers and sisters who share this space.

All nations are fundamentally communities of strangers in the sense that they're too big for us to know one another.

Aristotle thought that the polis, the kind of city-state he lived in, was the right size for polis because he thought that the citizens should, as he said, be able to judge each other's character.

That requires knowing your fellow citizens.

No modern state is small enough to do that.

Countries are counted in the millions and the tens of millions and the hundreds of millions, so when someone in the French Revolution spoke of fraternite, of brotherhood, in France, it was literal nonsense.

They're not your brothers.

You don't even know the names of most of them.

You don't even know the names of the towns of most of them, and yet it meant something, that sense that there is something, There is a family that we all belong to, is the national family.

That's the the mysterious power of the nation, that it can take 100 million, 200 million, 1.5 million people and allow them to imagine themselves as brothers and sisters and then to do things because of that, to do the sort of things that you wouldn't do for someone who you didn't have that kind of feeling of solidarity with.

If we lose the capacity to bring people in in that, into the brotherhood, then we lose the capacity to do the magnificent things that nations can do when they have a sense of shared purpose.

I wonder whether we have lost the knack for making common cause, coming to common wisdom, seeing each other as fellow citizens, as also engaged in a shared endeavor of making this place livable and decent, and if I let myself, I think I'd get to some pretty dark places because there's a lot of bad news right now.

I'm normally an optimistic person, but I've had many dark thoughts recently about this question because I think there's something about the new media and the Internet and so on that's making it harder, that's drawing people more easily into isolated groups of shared identity, political identity, who then never bump into anybody of any other view.

It requires one to imagine somebody with the convening power and the goodwill to create the institutional contexts in which people will get together in the ways that produce that willingness to give and take and not to see things as just a matter of winners and losers.

One can get pretty clear about the problem, but solutions don't immediately suggest themselves.

Rabbi Timoner, for a large number of Americans, if you grew up in the postwar decades when the melting pot was the ideal, we all come from various places, but now we're all the same, and now everybody's saying, "I identify as..." ♪ The language of identity seems to be so potent, especially among young people.

I wonder what you make of it.

What's this language of identity all about?

♪ Timoner: What it brings up for me is the relationship between the particular and the universal.

Everybody has particular things that make them who they are, right?

We all come from somewhere.

No one is born universal, right?

Everybody's particular, so this moment in which people are embracing very specific identities, embracing the particular, is actually, I think, a portal into the universal.

When you have a politic of identities, it also goes hand in hand with-- or should-- a recognition of other people's particular identities, and then you're creating a space where there is room for saying, "OK. We're all different in these myriad ways, and yet here we are sharing something," and that...tension but also meeting place is very rich, so, you know, I think there's a danger of extreme universalism.

There's a danger of extreme particularism, but they also then have the possibility of meeting each other.

Extreme universalism would homogenize... Mm-hmm.

right-- just be a good American and don't put any signifiers-- or it would be about hegemony, like what it is to be a good American is a particular kind, like white or something.

Extreme particularism could be, you know, separatism: "I'm only gonna be with the people "who share this identity, and no one else matters to me."

We want neither of those, and the particularism I see happening now-- this identity, this focus on identity-- I see very much going hand in hand with a calling for space for all the other uniquenesses.

Suarez: Kelly Brown Douglas, you're a soul doctor.

We are insisting on our right to be as individual as a thumbprint while we're trying to do the hard work of being a people in a country in a world, and that's hard work.

Yeah, but you only have to assert your identity because your identity has been so trampled upon and your voice has never been heard, and so people are simply trying to assert their personhood, a personhood that has never been respected.

Part of the work that we've been talking about-- about where do we go from here, that kind of portfolio of identities, all the things that make me who I am-- is it important to get that out there in order to do this work?

Yeah.

I think what's important is not only to get that out there, but it's important for people to respect it.

♪ We live in these binary realities-- male/female, Black/white, hetero/nonhetero-- but--guess what-- the world that has been created by whomever we call our creator was never binary.

♪ What we need to do is catch up with creation, catch up, in the language of my faith, catch up with God's world, catch up with God, and so when people assert their creative uniqueness, they are just laying claim to a personhood that has been so long ignored, so long attacked and disregarded.

I do think when we can get to a place where you don't have to assert that, then we're on the way.

I've also observed on many occasions something I guess I'd have to call particularization where it is possible to believe that Mexicans are largely lawbreakers, undesirable, foreign-born, not us, but also know Javier at work...

True.

who's a good guy and a decent guy, and whose kid goes to your school, so you celebrate Javier as an exception while still holding on to those beliefs about the people from which Javier comes.

You particularize what's desirable about the people you know and continue to demonize the people you don't know, so instead of that softening your hard edges, you find a way somehow to keep your hard edges.

Yes.

That whole process relies on another piece of our psychological equipment, which is the way stereotyping works, and it works by the use of what linguists call generics, like Mexicans are this, women are that, gays are that, Muslims are terrorists.

You say that because you've seen 3 Muslim terrorists, and you know that if somebody said to you, "You do realize there are Muslims who aren't terrorists," you wouldn't say, "No.

They're all terrorists," but you treat the Muslims who aren't terrorists, as you said, as exceptions.

You can do that even if the exceptions turn out to be 99% of the population, so a very famous example, we say mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus, and everybody nods their heads and biologists nod their heads, but then you say to them, "How many of the mosquitoes?"

and they say, "Oh, it's about 1% "or little bit less than 2%, something like that," which means that you can say mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus while knowing that most of them don't, and that's how these kind of negative stereotypes work.

You can even know that most Muslims aren't terrorists in some sense and still say to yourself, "Muslims are terrorists," and what that means in practice is, when you meet a Muslim you don't know, you think he might be a terrorist.

It's not always the case that when you point out to people these kind of illusions of thought that they can do anything about them, but I do think it's useful when someone makes a generic remark about anybody to say to them, "Do you want to say many of them?

"Do you want to say most of them?

"Do you want to say all of them?

"Do you want to say 1% of them?

Let's get specific here."

I think we can reduce the tendency to let ourselves get away with it.

One of the elements of our current dysfunction is that people are more intensely divided in their partizan allegiances than they actually are on policy.

If you actually settle down with people and say, "Look.

Couldn't you give "a little bit on this, a little bit on that: "maybe not abortions in the ninth month, "but also maybe not locking up doctors who do abortions in the first trimester?"

an awful lot of Americans will sort of muddle their way to a set of compromises unless the compromise is seen as giving in to the other side, and what that means is that on many topics which haven't got the character of shibboleths of the tribe, haven't got to be the things where you know what a conservative or liberal is supposed to think, on those topics, actually, you can probably make progress unless they get partizanized and politicized, and there are an awful lot of things which-- you know, which should be like that, I think, and which could be like that.

♪ Suarez: One piece of contested terrain in American life right now is whether and what the nature of any obligation we have to each other is.

♪ Do we owe each other anything: loyalty, care, concern, empathy?

If we do owe anything to each other, what is it?

♪ It's interesting that you use the word "obligation" because ever since studying Judaism in depth, I've become aware of a contrast in worldview in that in Judaism, the language is obligation, mitzvos, commandments in Torah.

They're obligations.

There's not a rights language in Judaism.

Rights is not a Jewish concept.

You know, of course, this country was founded on the idea of rights, of inalienable rights, and we have the Bill of Rights, and things are termed in terms of what I deserve, but a Jewish outlook is that we are all intertwined and fundamentally obligated to one another.

Emmanuel Levinas, who was a French Jewish philosopher, talks about, first of all, that we're born into relationship and live our whole lives in relationship and that what happens in relationship is being confronted with the face of the other, and once we see the-- once we actually behold the face of the other, we are automatically obligated to that other, and the question is, what are those obligations, exactly?

And in Judaism, our obligations are to care for the well-being of others in balance with ensuring our own well-being, but we are absolutely obligated to, for example-- You know, one of the most frequent statements in Torah is God saying-- that God hears the cry of the orphan and the widow and the stranger and that, therefore, we must, uh, stand against any form of oppression against the orphan and the widow and the stranger.

We must welcome them.

We must love them because God is most attuned to whoever we might not feel obligated to, right?

Whoever has no power in the society, whoever's at the margins, whoever might be forgotten, whoever doesn't have means to care for themselves, that is who we are first and most obligated to, and I think that in Judaism, there's this interesting idea.

The rabbis talk about mochin de gadlut and mochin de katnut, big mind and small mind.

There are times when we are in big mind and we remember what's ultimately important, and we just naturally in big mind know that we're related to each other, that we're kin, we are all kin.

We know that there's a fundamental oneness that connects all being.

We know that we want to just contribute to the benefit of all.

That's just in us naturally-- that's big mind-- and sometimes because we're afraid or because we get angry or we feel insecure, we shrink into small mind, and then I'm just out for me because I'm feeling-- I'm narrow in my thought and I forget.

I forget really who I am and really what I'm a part of.

They're all natural to our condition.

People are afraid, and one of the things in Jewish scripture you see again and again and again is, "Don't be afraid."

Al tirah.

That's what it-- Mm-hmm.

Is this a necessary piece of eternal wisdom, a reassurance, a calling out?

Don't be afraid.

That's pretty good advice, wasn't it?

It's really good advice always, both recognizing that fear is part of what it is to be human and what does it mean to not be afraid.

It's not to not have the feeling of fear because you can't decide that you're not gonna have the feeling of fear, but it's, when you have the feeling of fear, what are you gonna do about it?

♪ Courage is not the absence of fear.

You can't even be courageous unless you're afraid.

Courage is what you do with your fear.

♪ It's a confusing moment, and it's an uncertain moment, and that makes people afraid, and it's natural that they're afraid, so the question is, what does courage look like in this time?

So, yes, the command not to be afraid, the Israelites are standing at the sea.

Pharaoh's army is coming behind them.

They're facing the sea.

They don't know what to do.

They're panicked, and the command is, "Don't be afraid," and in that moment, the thing to do was to walk right into that sea toward their freedom, so in this moment, what's the equivalent of that, right?

We're--there is.

It's a moment of panic.

People don't know where we're going.

Our national politics are in tumult, and... it's frightening to think about, and there are global trends that are frightening.

We haven't even talked about climate change, right?

We're afraid that we're not gonna have a future on this planet, and so you can't have a more existential fear, and so the fear is natural.

The question-- and whenever I see "al tirah," "don't be afraid," in Torah, I translate that myself to be it's not that not have the feeling.

It's, "OK. You're afraid.

"Don't let that stop you from the things that must be done," so what must be done now?

What must be done now is a lot of what we're talking about.

It's digging deeper.

It's remembering what's most important in life.

It's remembering that we belong to each other, and fundamentally, we have to turn toward each other and find each other again, and there's a hunger to be together, to be in community.

I feel that people want to be better than this and are ready to rise to something higher.

♪ Douglas: People, kids don't come into this world hating.

♪ They don't come into this world not trusting.

♪ They don't come into this world with all of these biases against people who may not look like them.

♪ We have to teach our children not to trust, and we do that for sometimes for their own good, right?

We have to teach our children, "You can't go to everybody.

You can't trust strangers," and all of that because they naturally trust... and when I... first saw my son when he was born, first, I had this feeling that I had never had before.

I used to think that I could never ever think of killing somebody, but I thought, "Oh, no.

I could if it did something to my son," and so there was this deeper sense of love, and then I also recognized his innocence, which was really his goodness.

There have always been traditions, whether we call them humanism and humanist traditions, where people believe in the goodness of humanity, but you can believe in the goodness of humanity without believing in a transcendent being.

I happen to believe in a transcendent being, but that isn't what makes you good.

You don't have to believe in that.

Look.

I believe that, in the words of sort of Howard Thurman, that it's a room with many doors, and in the middle of that room, I call it God.

Other people can call it goodness.

They can call it love.

They can call it whatever it is they want to call it, but it is that which represents the best of who we can be and transcends the limitations of who we are, and it doesn't matter how, what door you come through.

You come through the door that is most appropriate for you.

One door isn't any better than the other door.

The thing that makes the door not so good is when you stand and you admire your door and "How great my door is.

My door is better than your door," and--guess what-- when you're standing admiring your door and talking about how good your door is and how better it is than the door next door is, you don't open it and go into the room, so it doesn't matter as long as we open our doors and get into the room, and that's where we'll find our common humanity and the best of who we can be.

I call that God.

I believe we're essentially good.

I also believe that we are wounded, broken human beings.

Then we carry that brokenness and that woundedness into the systems and structures, and they have to be checked.

We take that good that's there, and we bring those evil propensities under subjection to a set of moral values, and out of that comes a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning.

I believe deeply from my faith tradition, of course, that we're part of something much greater than ourselves, and I'm thinking and praying and hoping that civility can be restored, that we can actually have conversations where we are listening to each other and not demonizing each other, not dismissing an individual because of their political or social or religious identification, but judging the content of their words, the merit of their argument.

I think it's out of crisis that we're forced to reestablish these things, and I'm hoping that that's where we are as a nation.

♪ [Birds chirping] ♪ Suarez: Reconnecting, finding a way to live together, looking inward: they're are all parts of necessary healing.

To explore the notion of healing more deeply, I visited theologian Richard Rohr, one of the 21st century's best-known and most-admired writers on spirituality.

♪ In his monastic life among desert plants and the strong New Mexico sun, Father Richard Rohr lives a life of contemplation, prayer, and study.

From here comes a steady stream of work about how to live in the world, how to want less, and love more.

Rohr: I was on my porch gazing.

You see each thing in its non-necessity, in its ordinariness, and the ordinary becomes beautiful.

♪ You see things as God sees them: ♪ every springtime and every flower, every beautiful child.

You see, God keeps creating beauty, so it's not hard to believe that God is good.

♪ Father Richard Rohr, welcome.

Very good to be here.

Thank you.

In preparation for spending the afternoon with you, I've been reading a lot of Richard Rohr lately.

Have you?

I have, and I wonder if-- I kept coming back to this again and again in the different books.

You write that rage, anger, and disappointment have become widespread in Western people.

Our whole country appears to be angry today.

Yeah.

It's a pretty snarly time right now, isn't it?

"Snarly."

That's a good word.

Yeah.

It's a shame that many men are angry and think it's a virtue.

Forgive me.

I'm gonna refer to the prophets a lot because I've been writing this book for a year.

I entitled my next book "The Tears of Things."

That's from Latin literature: "Lacrimae rerum," "Everything has tears."

Everything is worth crying about at some level.

That's brilliant because I think that's true.

It's the essentially tragic nature of life, and everything deserves tears, not judgment, but if you stop at the early stage of anger, you give it your judgment instead of your tears.

Tears are the opening to compassion.

I don't mean you physically have to cry.

I always wish I cried more.

I don't that much, I'm sad to say, but I've been around too many beautiful tears to doubt their authenticity.

They really open the soul.

Women are blessed to be able to do it easier than we men are for some gender reason.

In fact, for years up here at Ghost Ranch, I gave men's rites of passage to hundreds of thousands of men in the end, and there was one one-liner that I'd give that would invariably bring the whole room to a white-faced halt, and I'd say, "A lot of you think you're angry, "and you probably are, "but you know what?

You're really sad."

I never had-- Years of teaching that, then unpackaging it, I never had a single man fight me on it.

"I'm not.

"I'm not really angry "like my father thought he was.

"I'm very sad, and I don't know how to fix it."

Well, let's talk about that a little more because I'm wondering whether for men in our society, anger has not just become a more acceptable way of being sad because sadness involves a certain amount of vulnerability...

Vulnerability.

You got it.

and rather than show people that I can be reached in that way, let me be mad instead.

You said it.

I don't need to add anything.

That's the truth.

Anger is a male virtue, shows your firm, macho, you know what you're about, but, you know, what the New Testament says is, "Don't let the sun go down on your anger."

Just don't hold on to it too long because finally, it destroys you, and you're not a communicator of life or love or anything else but just your damn anger.

Where can you begin the conversation?

You noted the increasing secularization of the society.

You know, one thing that's easier to talk about-- it's just a switch in language-- is the language of health and unhealth, pathology.

I'm a post-Vatican II Catholic, where we integrated psychology and anthropology and philosophy into the language of theology.

I think the modern mind thinks that way.

It's not being saved from.

It's healing it.

Well, if you and I were to head out the doors of this chapel and plunge into the world, we would see a lot of anger and disappointment.

What do you make of that?

Here's one thing.

By the middle of life, we all become aware that there's an unwholeness within every one of us, and I say that after 55 years as a priest.

Just, people are so aware that there's a crazy part of them, an afraid part of them, an angry part of them.

The most common word used today is "broken": "There's something in me that's broken."

My earlier books are on the true self and the false self, helping people to distinguish between who they think they are-- and their thinking doesn't make it so-- and who they really are in God.

Who you are in God is untouchable.

It's unchangeable.

It's eternal.

We created a word for it.

We called it the soul.

You all have it equally.

There's no good souls and bad souls.

There's all this bit of participation in God, and what healthy religion is about is the discovery of your soul and then living from that source, and it'll feel like you're drawing from inside.

Your inner voices and God's voice will be harder and harder to distinguish, but you've got to go deep.

If you get trapped in the superficial level of identity politics-- you know, "I'm white," "I'm gay," "I'm American," "I'm rich"-- oh, don't draw from that source.

that's precisely what's gonna die when you die.

In God's eye, who were you before you were American?

Who were you before you were Black?

Who were before you were lesbian?

That naked self is what authentic religion is supposed to help us find.

Once you're working with that, religion is healthy and holy and happy, but unfortunately, a lot of religion itself is dressing up the false self, making my white self feel superior, you understand, making my gay self feel inferior.

The only stable self is, as St. Francis told us, who you are is who you are in God, nothing more, nothing less.

You can't improve it.

You can't lose it.

It's absolute, and it exists forever, and it is loved by God infinitely because I can't prove that.

But can you nurture and be aware of that authentic self that you've just been extolling and still recognize that in order to live in the world, you still have to take on guises take on necessary masks that just act as social grease to get you through the day and get you through the week and-- You have to.

You have to begin with your false self, your identity self, and that's where you do your battles.

That's where you do your growing up.

You try to gain all your credence and credibility because you're wealthy or because you're white or because you're American, and they have to disappoint you.

You have to see in a moment of rare honesty it's not true.

You're not any better because you're white.

You're not any better.

Well, I'm going to say the hard one for-- You're not any better because you're Christian.

That comeuppance, that moment... Yeah.

you talk about that and teach about that and write about that a lot.

Is that disappointment an absolute necessary precondition to the kind of growth, full spiritual maturity that you're looking for in people?

You know, the word got translated poorly.

It's the first word out of Jesus' mouth in two Gospels.

The word got translated as "repent."

The Greek word is, as you've probably been told by other preachers, is "metanoeo," which means literally to "meta," move beyond, "nous," the mind, move beyond what your normal, dualistic, judgmental mind says.

You know, many have said better than I can say it: "You don't know what up is until you've gone down," and it's not just being clever.

You have to have failed and lived with a bit of self-doubt, and maybe more than a bit of self-hatred, even, to know what heaven might be or why you want it, so, yes, that will always be a disappointment.

It'll always be a bit of a scandal, a bit of a loss, a losing.

Only in the second stage is it experienced as a finding, the necessity of making amends, some responsibility for the self and its stupidity, healthy self-critique-- that's the prophets again-- knowing your shadow.

What a waste of time in not seeing our own shadow, so we don't have that luxury anymore.

The shadow seems to be showing itself everywhere, and everything has a shadow, everything.

America has its shadow side.

The U.S. Army has its shadow side.

The Catholic Church has its shadow side, and once you accept that instead of, "Oh, we pretend we don't have it"-- That's when you're in trouble.

We've got to move beyond the lowest level of motivation to invitation, to joy.

Disconnection.

Yeah.

What do you mean, and disconnection of the self from who?

Disconnection normally means you're overly boundaried.

You're overly protected.

You're overly defended.

You're overly secure.

You've got to take away by travel, by visit, by hospital care.

You've got to get outside of your defended world and know in your gut that everybody isn't just like you and doesn't need to be, doesn't need to be-- you're not the reference point-- or you'll never understand the poor, the immigrant, the marginalized, and you won't, and when you can allow other people to be the reference point, you've started in the school of compassion, I think.

"Compassion" is a great word because it implies suffering with... With.

There you go.

others, and certainly in the 21st century, there's no shortage of people, sadly, who need our compassion, yet the world is so overwhelming at the same time.

I know.

I know.

What's the individual, the individual who says, "I should be doing something, "but I don't know what, and I don't know for who, "and I don't know whether "it's gonna make any difference.

"I feel this, but it feels impotent because I'm not sure what I should do."

Is that feeling for others a necessary ingredient or precondition in becoming a whole self?

Yes.

It is because otherwise, you're trapped in what we call egotism, the egoic personality that thinks they are the reference point for everything: "What I think, what I feel, what I want, what I need, what I like."

A good spiritual director will say to you, "Who cares what you like?

Who cares what you like?"

Now, at first, a narcissistic person will think that, "Well, how dare you insult me?"

but they're doing you a favor.

In the great scheme of things, what you like and what you don't like really doesn't matter.

It's what is, and a saint is an utter realist.

They love what is, not what they like it to be or want it to be or wish it were... and then it goes further.

My more recent old-age definition of a saint is not someone who just accepts reality, but can forgive.

I feel like--this is so arrogant, really-- but I feel like I got to forgive everything, everything: me, starting with me, starting with almost every friend I've ever had, every dalliance in love.

Every new idea, I'd eventually discover its dark side, damn it, and I'd have to forgive it.

And I wonder if that what you may be calling for is nothing more complicated than redrawing our hierarchy of values.

You recognize that we've got one.

Unpackage that.

Yeah.

Let's move ourselves down a couple of notches and let's move love up a couple of notches and let's, you know-- I'm gonna recognize that all those things are in there, but maybe they're just not in the right order.

Is that fair?

That's perfectly true.

When you're defending thinking it's your job to defend things, then who told you it's your job to have to have opinions?

Opinions are judgments that you're strongly attached to, and in this addictive society, we're filled with opinions.

The Buddhists are better at this than Christians, in helping their practitioners become detached from their opinions.

I'm afraid we get too attached, and they--our opinions control-- They have us instead of us having them.

There's nothing to have there.

It's got me by the throat.

I mean, you'll hear it in the quivering of the voice, the quickness of the-- the stridency of the voice when people get to express their sacred opinions, and this could destroy us.

This is no small thing.

It's just scary, the nature of our politics, the nature of our civil discourse, and no wonder so many of our kids have mental and emotional problems.

They say, "This is the world "I'm gonna grow up in.

"I have to be like that with strong opinions that I can defend."

Who said you have to, really?

No one said you have to.

You said you have to.

Opinions in the age of the capital sins would have been called judgments and would have been judged as a vice, not a virtue.

So there may be somebody watching this interview who thinks, "OK. "I'd like to be a better person than I am.

"I admire people who aren't on the treadmill, but I know I can't necessarily be that person."

"How, then shall we live?"

they might say.

They want to-- They know that if they sit in nature and just meditate, they'll eventually starve to death.

That's right.

They've got to be in the world doing something to provide for themselves and people who rely on them, but, what, not too much?

I mean, is some of this about what the ancients might have called a balance of the humors, where we are gonna recognize that some of this is just a necessary precondition to getting through life, but you just don't want it to get out of hand.

Yeah.

Ha ha!

Perhaps the greatest word we mistranslated was, we made faith to believing certain ideas to be true or certain doctrines to be true or certain moralities to be trustworthy.

If we would have translated the word "faith" as trust, we would have done much better.

The opposite of faith is not doubt.

Doubt, in fact, is valued by the mystics deeply, where it's through darkness you come to light.

The opposite of faith is certitude.

That's where we Catholics used to be, but the reason I'm answering you this way is, I think the answer is trust... trust that it's OK, that it's radically OK and not just someone else is in charge, but something good is in charge.

That's a leap, but it's not an irrational leap.

That's how we get back to love again.

To love another person, animal, object, event, they become littler and littler, the things you're able to choose to love, the gratuity of this seashell.

Why?

You know, they call it the first philosophical question: why is there something rather than nothing?

In my gazing the last few days, I've just been gazing around this big parking lot I live by, and I look at the dumpster, and I look at the asphalt, and I look at the old, raggedy fence, and I say, "It is, "and someone is letting it be, "so it must be OK. "It must be all right.

Why can't I let it be all right, too?"

and that feels like a choice for love.

I'm in love with it.

I like the fence more today than I did Saturday, but at my age, I say, after all is said and done, I've met much more daily beauty and goodness and truth and love than I have deceit and oppression and injustice.

Somehow God is big enough to allow both of those to coexist.

Here's my little coexistence partner.

Come here, Opie.

You want to come up, huh?

Ha ha ha!

See?

Univocity, one voice.

God is being, angels are being, humans are being, and little dogs are being, too, and they all reveal the same mystery-- what, what, ha ha-- and I think we're less hesitant to dismiss the rest of creation, as we see it keeps revealing its mysteries, its beauty.

The most simple answer is invariably the truest answer.

Once you don't have to rely upon a whole bunch of assumptions, a whole bunch of proveabilities, explanations, shave it down, shave it down, shave it down.

get to the simplest answer, and that is almost always going to be the truest.

As sentimentalized as the word "love" has become-- we've made it into a Valentine-- it's all about love in the end, and if you don't end up there, you don't end up.

Richard Rohr, thank you so much.

It's been a pleasure.

You're welcome.

You ask good questions.

♪ Suarez: A sense of awe, an open heart... ♪ the recognition of something greater than ourselves.

♪ Seekers, no matter who we are or where we come from, look inward and are driven by a desire to grow, help shape the world around us, ask questions, and find a deeper connection to one another.

Thanks for watching.

I'm Ray Suarez.

♪