A third way

Fr. Richard Rohr has a daily email reflection. The one from Dec. 27th has stuck with me. It has me thinking, but with no definitive conclusion. I’m just sitting with it. I can hear the arguments that many will have with his reflection — many arguments and criticisms because he is touching on many people’s identity, or rather what they think is their identity. But whether we are liberal or conservative, or something else entirely, should not determine whether Rohr’s reflection is accurate. The truth should.

His reflection is below for you to ponder. I welcome your thoughts on this reflection.

“In my experience, liberalism creates suspicious people more than loving people. They begin and end by asking, “Who has the power here?” instead of “How can I serve here?” For them, life is an issue to be informed about or fixed, but seldom a mystery to participate in-even in its broken state. But if liberals refuse to be part of the dirt of history, conservatives refuse to even see the dirt-particularly in their own group! They hunker down and call their evil “good.” The conservative response to reality is usually: “What is in place already should be trusted. It must be true, because that is the way it is.”

“Neither conservatives nor liberals are willing to carry the burden of living tentatively in a passing and imperfect world. So the contemporary choice offered most of us living in the West is between unstable correctness (liberals) and stable illusion (conservatives)! What a choice! It has little to do with real transformation in either case…