ONE reason that the radical reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) did not fully take hold at the time, and even up to this day, is that the Roman Catholic Church was doing quite well, by most measures, in 1965. Parishes were well attended, there was no shortage of quality priests and nuns to staff Catholic institutions, and worshippers worldwide still possessed a strong group identity. Many saw no obvious or felt reason to fix what did not appear to be broken.
Yet a minority of leaders felt a strong need to “throw open the windows of the Church and let the fresh air of the spirit blow through”, as Pope John XXIII put it. Vatican II sought to open those windows by reforming liturgy, preaching, returning to scripture, emphasising the role of laypeople and relationships with other faiths, and even changing the physical layout of churches. Officially, those changes were the new order, but there has been plenty of disorder in their implementation. Latin Masses kept us with a sense of mystery and superiority.
Our criticism had remained firmly aimed outward at Protestants and pagans and modernists. “Why fix what was not broken?” traditionalists shouted, and still shout even to this day. Only those of us who grew up in the old Church know how broken it was on so many levels.
This pattern plays out within all kinds of institutions. Reforms rarely move directly from the existing order to a new order automatically or by a single positive insight. The old order has to somehow show its disorder, its shadow self, its injustices, its wrongness. Then there must be a period of disorder, a fertile time of searching before a new order can be found.
The rule must reveal some exceptions to the rule before any reordering will be sought, trusted, or allowed — and even then all things human will still reveal themselves as incomplete. Religion in its healthy forms gives every culture a method of survival through all of this change process, some form of learning how to “die early”, so that you can keep moving when the world seems — and is — always chaotic and tragic.
The summary word for that method is trust — the kind of trust that occasionally lives in darkness, like Jonah in the belly of the sea monster. We need trust in some initial order (good parenting and healthy religion), but also trust in disorder when it eventually shows itself (good prophets help us here), and then trust in the new, livable, and ever-changing home base called reorder (love, community, and friendship).
I call the starting place, the first order, the “priestly rule”. These are the rules and governing personalities that hold our worlds together as normal and regular. Many call this “Establishment thinking”. It can take military form, royal form, philosophical form, tribal form, or some religious form, but without such primary order, we would all go crazy. We need some point of reference, even if just to push against. (In my book Falling Upward, I wrote that the construction of this order is the important task of the “first half of life”.)
Recently, this innate reverence for order took cosmological form in the near-ecstatic response to a total solar eclipse. There is order and predictability, people seemed to shout. But when personal or historical disorder shows itself — and it always does — we will begin a necessary period of critique, change, or rebellion.
I am calling this disorder the “prophetic rule”. It is always opposed and resisted, and thus needs wise protectors and guides and the strong ego structure that the preceding order provides. An Indigenous person who believed the myths of his or her culture probably had a stronger sense of self than today’s post-modern person, who denies all real or operative transcendence.
The Old Testament frequently mentions prophets, and even bands or “schools” of prophets, which filled this need for dissent within the system. Yet few cultures have had training for these crucial dissenters, apart from the Jewish people. If such internal, legitimated critics are not allowed, let alone encouraged and trained, history will move forward only at the cost of blood and heartbreak.
Growth will not be organic or inclusive; instead, it will be largely exclusionary and punishing of whatever is in that moment considered the problem. Negative energy, or critical energy, does not usually become constructive or useful unless some prophetic types enter the scene early in the process of change.
I FOUNDED the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1987, because of a growing sense that we needed to educate people to be truth-tellers who are inside and effective critics of religious institutions, without becoming negative or cynical themselves — a loyal opposition, as we call it today. We knew that there must be a way to make room for prophecy — what Paul called the second most important spiritual gift for the building up of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12.28, Ephesians 4.11– 12).
Prophets move us beyond uncritical groupthink. Every group and every movement have their shadow sides. We need trained seers who are neither co-dependent on the religious system for their identity (such as clergy) nor seeking to make a good name for themselves.
The CAC’s message became a balancing act between action and contemplation — forming contemplative activists and engaged contemplatives — in the lineage of the mature Hebrew prophets we have been discussing. I am so glad we put this goal in our title: Center for Action and Contemplation.
It holds us in a classic and creative tension, in which and is the most important word. Action comes before contemplation because you do not have anything to contemplate until you have acted in the world and recognised that the real issues are difficult to resolve — tied up in deep motivations like identity, power, and money. Often what you think is the issue is not even the issue at all.
Prophets, as we have seen, occupy an entirely different role from priests and ministers. And we surely need all of them! There is little evidence that most priests are change agents — or even desire to be, except in an in-house, churchy sense. Instead of truth-telling, they are more concerned with maintaining order and orthodoxy within the group. Yet they are offered a ready bully pulpit, a free audience, and a decorated stage every week.
I think we now need a new kind of seminary that includes training for prophets who educate for holy disorder — a breaking down of the expected, the tried and true, the false, the ways in which we are not faithful to the gospel — even if doing so upsets and disrupts. Up until now, we have been too interested in lots of “unholy order”. There is really no reason we can’t have priestly prophets and prophetic priests. (It is no wonder the Old Testament word priest was seldom used in the first three centuries of Christianity, and minister, disciple, and overseer were preferred.)
True prophets will guide us into, hold us inside of, and then pull us through to the other side of what will always seem like disorder. The more you have bought into any kind of absolute and necessary order, the bigger a dose of disorder you will need. A rule follower, for example, might need to confront a situation where their rules just don’t work — and be honest about it. Those who hate gay people might need to have a family member, friend, or someone they care about come out as gay before their perspective can change.
Biblical literalists need to encounter contradictions in the text that cannot be easily reconciled. A self-affirming pastor needs to meet people who expect truth from scientists more than clergy, and so on.
It is in and through such conflicts that we come to third-way thinking and acting, moving beyond the argumentative dualistic mind to the creative contemplative mind where our ego is not steering the ship.
This is how we find creative balance, both as individuals and in our institutions. Certainly not by punishing the “early adopters” and turning them into external critics. Critics can be loyal believers, too, and it is the prophets who show us how.
The qualities of a prophet
UP UNTIL now, we have had two thousand years of Christian “priests”, a title that neither Jesus nor Paul applied to Jesus’s apostles or disciples. But no one was sought, or tolerated, as a prophet after Jesus himself ascended from this world. In fact, one hardly hears the term unless we are looking to the ancient past. After years of study, I see the following ten developed qualities in would-be prophets:
• They can honestly explain the problem within the solution (rather than denying or ignoring it, whatever it is) and thus move toward truly transcending it. The bishops of the Second Vatican Council, for example, tried to take this approach in the 1960s, but they did not have the pedagogical skills to pull it off. They were accustomed to the old command structure doing the job. They modelled in all 16 major documents how to use scripture intelligently and faithfully for a Church that had not taught scripture very much or very well. It was, and is, our Achilles’ heel in most dialogues with Protestants.
• As I mentioned earlier, they are humble enough to have some real detachment from their own opinion and status, because true prophets know the message is not theirs. They are merely being used. I see this in Archbishop Desmond Tutu, in the manner in which he led the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.
• They can still love and respect those who have a different opinion. Rare at first, this quality must be trained and formed. Think of the non-violent teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
• They do not need to be right, first, or best. Think of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement training Christians to live alongside homeless people rather than serving them as superiors or saviours.
• True prophets will pursue some knowledge of theology and scripture, for the sake of good initial boundaries. Without education in the history of wisdom, we will only have our own temperament and culture to guide us. We will not think outside our already provided box. Prophets offer us patterns of what we call “alternative orthodoxy” — living on the edge of the inside and concerning themselves with right practice more than right belief.
Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, was Black, American, and Christian, which best situated him to be both a leader and a critic of American Christians. Positive reform almost never emerges from “what everybody thinks”.
• They have a capacity for some degree of objective thinking beyond their own agenda, ego, and grievances. They have other avenues to truth than just “the Bible says so.”
• They are team players and not just lone rangers. They are loyal to at least a couple of communities. Think of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian Jewish psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust and yet still attended both synagogue and Catholic masses with his wife.
• The issue they are confronting is really the issue, and not merely a means for them to achieve power, importance, or fame.
• All in all, they have purified motivations — what Jesus calls “a pure heart” — or, at minimum, some growing ability to recognise when their motives are mixed or their heart is not pure. Think of Mother Teresa and her willingness to keep going even in her “dark nights of the soul”.
• They manifest the classic “fruits of the Spirit”, both in their person and in the effects of their message. It is hard to improve on St Paul’s inspired enumeration in Galatians 5.22-23: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control”. These are fruits that will last, the surest measure that someone is speaking from solid ground.
This is probably too Catholic, but I think of the women who founded almost every community of nuns, who succeeded with little institutional understanding or support in a Church that just wanted cheap workers. I was taught in elementary school by many such women, many of whom were not theologians but exhibited lots of daily virtue.
No prophet achieves all of these qualities perfectly, but he or she must clearly be moving toward them. They create an absolutely necessary coherence between the medium and the message.
Without those qualities, we see many who are supposedly truth-tellers, yet what they manifest is not the fruits of the Spirit. Many reformers, after all, have been known less for the quality of their love than for the intensity of their zeal. I think of Jonathan Edwards, an 18th-century Puritan revivalist and minister whose message to his flock was more about God’s anger and fear than about Paul’s fruits of the Spirit, as you can see from the title of his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”.
We see this in many American politicians today, where their message is largely themselves and their re-elections: “gongs booming and cymbals clashing”, as Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13.1. Such booming and clashing has much increased in our age of social media and the memorable soundbite. Intensity must not be confused with truth, either in preachers or politicians, although sometimes it is also needed and helpful.
Most of the prophets surely made mistakes before their message could be refined or even heard, as we see in their unhelpful rage and dualistic judgments. A major assertion in this whole book is that they were angry, even depressed, before they were sad and enlightened. Remember when Paul said that “prophesying [can be] imperfect” (1 Corinthians 13.9) and still be prophecy? Good news indeed.
A divine message can be given more effectively by an actively loving person. I suppose that is obvious. Angry or constantly irritated people present resentful, wrathful messages that only embolden their egos and misdirect the audience into more anger rather than pointing them to the truth of the message itself.
The common biblical descriptor for strident, angry messages is righteous. Far from the meaning we normally give that word, the biblical authors are describing everything from the zealotry of youth to a dangerous self-absorption that takes over when passion, rage, and overstatement become one’s operating persona. It takes studied and prayerful discernment to know the difference. When is zeal good? When is zeal mere self-absorption or ambition? When, on the other hand, does it show appropriate passion for a big truth? These are the necessary struggles and growth edges for a prophet, I think, and not an immediate sign that they are wrong.
This is an edited extract from The Tears of Things: Prophetic wisdom for an age of outrage by Richard Rohr, published by SPCK at £21.99 (Church Times Bookshop £17.99); 978-0-281-09095-2.
