UCA SA - Reflection of the Week

Reflection of the Week - 27 May 2025

By Fr. Richard Rohr

Posted May 27, 2025 in Faith

A Broad Wisdom Tradition

I don’t believe that God expects all human beings to start from zero and to reinvent the wheel of life in our own small lifetimes. We must build on the common “communion of saints” throughout the ages. This is the inherited fruit and gift, which is sometimes called the “Wisdom Tradition.” It is not always inherited simply by belonging to one group or religion. It largely depends on how informed, mature, and experienced our particular teachers are.

Most seminaries, I’m afraid, have merely exposed ministers to their own denomination’s conclusions and don’t offer space or time for much Indigenous, interfaith, or ecumenical education, which broadens the field from “my religion, which has the whole truth,” to some sense of “universal wisdom, which my religion teaches in this way.” If it is true, then it has to be true everywhere.

There have been countless generations of sincere seekers who’ve gone through the same human journey and there is plenty of collective and common wisdom to be had. There is ongoing wisdom that keeps recurring in different world religions with different metaphors and vocabulary. The foundational wisdom is much the same, although never the same. As in the Trinity, spiritual unity is diversity loved and united, never mere uniformity.

Here is my succinct summary of this deep and recurring Wisdom Tradition:

There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things.

There is in the human soul a natural capacity, similarity, and longing for this Divine Reality.

The final goal of all existence is union with Divine Reality.

I trust and hope that my writing and teaching contain more than my own little bit of experience and truth, precisely because I have found some serious validation in both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures, along with the testimonies of many other witnesses along the way. I am trying to connect the dots within and between a few thousand years of Jewish and Christian interpretation, mystics, saints, church councils, friends of God, theologians, and philosophers of the ecumenical Body of Christ. This is the force field of the Holy Spirit that we continue to participate in whenever we are living, thinking, and praying in loving union with God and God’s work in this world. I only have courage to talk the way I do because these are not just my ideas!