The tears of things: why tears? (ch. 1)

Today I will resume my thoughts from Richard Rohr's marvelous book The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for An Age of Outrage. I felt chapter 1 was the best of the book, as it laid the framework as well as gave an explanation for the title. Here's an Ai summary of the chapter:

In the opening chapter, Rohr sets out his foundational theme: that suffering, lament, and deep vulnerability are central to both spiritual maturity and prophetic living. He introduces his three-stage pattern of growth—“order” (a safe dualistic religion of reward/punishment), “disorder” (crisis, confusion, the breakdown of old certainties), and “reorder” (a non-dual, mature way of seeing everything in relation—what he calls the way of the prophet). He argues that the prophets of the Hebrew Bible typify this journey, and invites us to understand that tears—the recognition of tragedy, suffering, and the brokenness of things (“the tears of things”)—are not failure but gateways into a deeper awareness of reality and compassion. The chapter establishes that true prophetic wisdom is not simply moral indignation but a tender, sorrow-filled participation in the world’s pain with the aim of transforming toward love and wholeness.

Here are some of my highlighted parts:

p. 3 - "In the first book of Virgil's Aenid (line 462), the hero Aeneas gazes at a mural that depicts a battle of the Trojan War and the deaths of his friends and countrymen. He is so moved with sorrow at the tragedy of it all that he speaks of "the tears of things." As Seamus Heaney translates it, "There are tears at the heart of things" -- at the heart of our human experience. Only tears can move both Aeneas and us beyond our deserved and paralyzing anger at evil, death, and injustice without losing the deep legitimacy of that anger."

p. 4 - "It is hard to be on the attack when you are weeping." 

p. 6 - "Collective greed is killing America today." "Somehow the prophets knew, the soul must weep to be a soul at all."

p. 11 - "All of us, prophets included, usually must do it wrong, or partly wrong, many times before we can do it right."

p. 12 - Habakkuk's 'Great Nevertheless' (one of my favorite passages in the bible, Hab. 3:17-18) 

 "If you quote or follow the prophets in their immature stages, you might end up eating your children (Jer. 19:9), firebombing the temple, and meeting a God who is mainly known for his wrath, vanity, divisiveness, pettiness, and petulance (Ez. 13)." 

"Only the whole narrative of any book of the Bible really deserves to be called inspired."

 p. 14 - "We have created generations of good people who use the red and yellow verses as if they were inspired, mature statements. But if you read them closely, you will begin to see a pattern I have long taught about the way we progress as human beings: from order into what seems to be disorder, and finally reaching some kind of reorder." 

Yes, what I liked about this chapter was the emphasis that you can't really just pick some verses from the prophets and say "See, this is what they're like"... or even, "This is what God is like." The prophets, like all of us, were works in progress. They thought different things at different points in their journey. As my old theology professor (RIP, Dr. C) used to say, "Write your beliefs in pencil, because they may change over time."

Anyway, this was a good chapter, imho.