Influential author and speaker Richard Rohr appeared in an exclusively filmed video interview with Jonathan Langley at Catalyst Live in Sheffield.
How to stay humble, how to get men involved in church and the importance of learning self-control if we are to enjoy freedom – all subjects touched upon by Fr Richard Rohr OFM at Catalyst Live, via a video shown in Sheffield on 23 October.
In response to a question of how his growing influence might make his ideas a new orthodoxy, Fr Richard stressed the importance of staying humble, saying that honesty makes it easy. Rohr said that he had asked God to give him a “daily humiliation” to help him “remain at the bottom, where Jesus was, where Francis was,” so as to watch his own reactions to not being treated as important.
Rohr also explained his concept of the two halves of life: the first being to “build the container” of self-control, ideas and boundaries, and the second to “fill the container” with God’s truth.
He warned against trying to move into the freedom of the second half of life without doing the task of the first half. “People who haven’t done the task of the first half of life have no impulse control,” he said. “They do very little with their life.” This, Rohr said, cautioned against a “cheap liberalism” that might be associated with the second half of life. But he also said that most organised religion keeps people in the first half – what Rohr described as the “training wheels” of the Law. Loving laws more than God, Rohr said, was too often the outcome of religious teaching.
In response to an audience question about involving men in church, Rohr suggested that it was essential to force men to confront an inner life – an encounter previously facilitated by male initiation. In addition, Rohr stressed the importance of tapping into men’s seemingly natural inclination to be ‘agentic’— problem-solving, actively helping and being practically useful.
But without guidance on their inner journeys, Rohr said, most men would never come back to a church culture that feels like “ritualistic games”.
With a characteristic avuncular charm and graciousness, Rohr presented the contemplative Franciscan ethos in a short glimpse that will be available online for Catalyst Live ticket holders.