Richard Rohr, OFM

The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But transformation, the mystery we’re examining, more often happens not when something new begins, but when something old falls apart.

Living in a transitional age is scary: It’s falling apart, it’s unknowable, it doesn’t cohere, it doesn’t make sense, it’s all mystery again, and we can’t put order in it.

There’s a moral realism in healthy and grounded people. They’re not ideological, on the left or the right. They can accept people whom others have judged for one reason or another.

For us as Christians, the highest value should always be love. If we’re going to accept the Judeo-Christian heritage as meaningful and authoritative in any way, we have to admit that love comes first and last. That puts us on a different track and forces a different set of questions. The deepest questions are not those of rights and power, or whether or not we’re getting everything that society owes us. The deepest questions are those of how love can be expanded and increased. How can we “defer to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21)?

G.K. Chesterton spoke of the “mystical minimum,” which he defined as gratitude. When we stand in the immense abundance of the True Self, there is no time or space for being hurt. We are always secure, at rest, and foundationally grateful. The grateful response for what is given—seeing the cup half full— requires seeing with a completely different set of eyes than the eyes that always see the cup as half empty. I don’t think it’s an oversimplification to say that people basically live either in an overall attitude of gratitude or an overall attitude of resentment.