Reflection of the Week - 3rd September 2024

By Richard Rohr

Posted Sep  3, 2024 in Faith

Faith and Resilience

Resilience is really a secular word for what religion was trying to say with the word faith. Even Jesus emphasised faith more than love. Without a certain ability to let go, to trust, to allow, we won’t get to any new place. If we stay with order too long and we’re not resilient enough to allow a certain degree of disorder, we don’t get smarter, we just get rigid.

Unfortunately, this is what characterises so many religious people. They’re not resilient at all. Then there’s another set of people who have settled down in disorder—believing there’s no pattern, there’s nothing always true. It’s a deep cynicism about reality, and that’s equally problematic. I think such faith in both good order and acceptable disorder—creating a new kind of creative reorder—is actually somewhat rare.

To have faith, to grow toward love, union, salvation, or enlightenment, we must be moved from order to disorder and then ultimately to reorder.

Eventually our ideally ordered universe—our ‘personal salvation’ project, as Thomas Merton called it—must and will disappoint us, if we are honest. Our spouse dies, we were rejected on the playground as a child, we find out we’re needy, we fail an exam for a coveted certification, or we finally realise that many people are excluded from our own well-deserved ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ This is the disorder stage, or what Christians call from the Adam and Eve story the ‘fall.’ It is necessary in some form if any real growth is to occur; but some of us find this stage so uncomfortable we try to flee back to our first created order—even if it is killing us and the very things we love.

There is no nonstop flight to reorder. Various systems call it ‘enlightenment,’ ‘exodus,’ ‘nirvana,’ ‘heaven,’ ‘springtime,’ or even ‘resurrection.’ Reorder is life on the other side of death, the victory on the other side of failure, the joy on the other side of the pains of childbirth. It is an insistence on going through—not under, over, or around. To arrive there, we must endure, learn from, and include disorder, transcending the first naïve order—but also still including it!

Happiness is the spiritual outcome and result of resilience, full growth, and maturity. This is why I am calling it ‘reorder.’ Ultimately, we are taken to happiness—we cannot find our way there by willpower or cleverness. Yet we all try! We seem insistent on not recognising the universal pattern of growth and change. Trees grow strong by reason of winds and storms. Boats are not meant to stay in permanent dry dock or harbour. Baby animals must be educated by their mothers in the hard ways of survival, or they almost always die young. It seems that each of us has to learn on our own what is well hidden but also in plain sight. 

Reference

Richard Rohr - Faith and Resilience — Center for Action and Contemplation (cac.org).

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