We are not against a hierarchy. But if there be hierarchy, because this can be a legitimate cultural necessity, it must always be, according to social-theological reasoning, a hierarchy of service. If it is not so, how can we truly affirm that the church is an icon of the Trinity (persons of equal dignity)?-- Leonardo Boff
With these words to his "fellow travelers on the journey of hope," Boff justifies his decision to remain in the church while leaving the priesthood and Franciscan Order. Richard Rohr, although he chooses to remain a Franciscan priest, writes in Boff's spirit of deep theological renewal, in accord with the charism of the order's founder, St. Francis of Assisi.
Simplicity originated as a series of lectures given by Rohr in Europe, which were taped and transcribed by listeners. The contents emerge from Rohr's life as a Franciscan priest in the greater congregation of the Catholic Church, and the smaller base communities in the United States, including the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, Ohio, which he founded. The author expounds on several themes, including community, church, Christian political commitment, contemplation, and femininity as an attribute of God.
Two major motifs run throughout the book: the interrelationship between action and contemplation and the apocalyptic nature of the contemporary historical moment. In the chapter devoted to contemplation, Rohr says:
[I]n the Western world...we identify ourselves either with our thoughts, our self-image, or with our feelings. We have to find a way to get behind our thoughts, feelings, and self-image ....We have to find out who we were all along in God before we did anything right or wrong. This is the first goal of contemplation.
The human self is a reflection of the divine creator. As our images of ourselves hopefully grow and change, our images of God mature. We can come to know a self beyond positive and negative concepts, and we can come to know a God beyond our desires and fears.
Moreover, when we come to dialogue gently with the most leprous parts of ourselves, the marginal peoples with whom we come into contact are no longer estranged from ourselves, and their issues become our concerns. We are empowered to tough love of their oppressors.
Rohr reflects on the Reign of God arising out of this sense of empowerment. He claims that the women's movement was anticipated in the vision in the biblical book of Revelation, in which the woman in labor wails aloud and finally escapes into the desert to bear her child. The renewed respect for women is giving birth in the West to wisdom which recognizes that "prestige, power, and possessions" are obstacles to true serenity.
Rohr recognizes the desert in New Mexico, where he has founded the Center for Action and Contemplation, as a ground fertile with good and evil. This desert is both the traditional Native American habitat of prayer, and the place where Los Alamos Laboratory designs the instruments of death. And isn't this also true of the Nevada desert where Shoshone land rights collide with federal nuclear testing on the Nevada Test Site?
In the final paragraph of his work, Rohr says, "I have to go into the wilderness, where I let God call me by name, to a deeper place....God is also at home there, and when we return, we have discovered simplicity."
Maureen Hartmann was a freelance writer living in Oakland, California, when this review appeared.
Simplicity: The Art of Living. By Richard Rohr. Crossroad, 1992. $16.95, cloth.
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