Center for Action and Contemplation ~ Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation: ”The Real Inspiration in the Bible” ~ Thursday, 24 October 2013

Center for Action and Contemplation ~ Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation: ”The Real Inspiration in the Bible” ~ Thursday, 24 October 2013

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Seven Themes of an Alternative Orthodoxy

Sixth Theme: The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines (Process).

“The Real Inspiration in the Bible”

Meditation 36 of 51

Except for the Bible itself, it took until the second half of the twentieth century for the voices of reform and change to begin to have a wide, public, and legitimate voice. I do not think that is an overstatement. In any swing of the pendulum in the direction of justice, the masses, the bottom, were always considered subversive and traitorous, up until the 1960s! Why not, when even the churches were usually looking down from the top and the Bible had been made into establishment literature—which it clearly is not.

The Bible affirms law, authority, and tradition, as most writings in most of history have done, but then it also does something much more: it strongly affirms reform, change, and the voiceless, starting with the Exodus event itself. This is what makes the Bible a truly revolutionary and inspired book. It affirms the necessity of authority and continuity in a culture (tradition), but against the usual pattern it also affirms the currents of change, reform, the poor, the outsider, and justice for the marginalized groups—starting with the enslaved Jewish people themselves.

The Biblical bias toward the bottom has been called by some “the preferential option for the poor.” But it is an option, an invitation: it is a grace, and it emerges from inner freedom—or else it would not be from God. In the last analysis, the Bible is biased; it takes the side of the rejected ones, the abandoned ones, the barren women, and the ones who have been excluded, tortured, and kept outside. This is all summed up in Jesus’ own ministry: He clearly prefers, heals, and includes the foreigner, the non-Jew, the handicapped, and the sinner—without rejecting the people of power, but very clearly critiquing them.

Adapted from A Lever and a Place to Stand:(The Contemplative Stance, the Active Prayer (CD) The Daily Meditations for 2013 are now available in Fr. Richard’s new book Yes, And . . . .)

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