Center for Action and Contemplation – Father Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation – Monday, 6 January 2014 “Listening and Asking”

Center for Action and Contemplation – Father Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation – Monday, 6 January 2014 “Listening and Asking”

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Yes, And

“Listening and Asking”

Monday, January 6, 2014

Peter Abélard took all of the major theological positions of the Scriptures and the Church and he invited a Sic et Non (Yes, And) approach to understanding them. Peter Lombard (1100-1164) then wrote a book building on Abélard’s work called The Sentences. It was so influential that for almost three centuries, in order to get a theological doctorate from a European university, you had to write a commentary on The Sentences. The goal of both Abélard and Lombard was not to win an argument or to prove that “this is the only way you can believe.” They simply laid out all the arguments on one side and all the arguments on another side and trusted that truth and the Holy Spirit would lead and teach the authentic believer from there. We no longer enjoy that kind of trust.

We lost the ability to think and dialog in this way. By the Protestant Reformation, our style of conversation inside the Catholic Church was to prove the “enemy” wrong; this was the form of discourse that has held sway for the last five hundred years. We really went backwards with this idea that we had the right to certitude, that we needed to prove we were absolutely right and therefore did not have to listen to any minority positions. It was the triumph of dualistic thought and has lasted till our time.

Abélard points out that in Luke’s Gospel (2:46), the little boy Jesus, symbol of all wisdom and truth, is sitting among the teachers and listening to them and asking them questions. If Jesus can listen and ask questions, Abélard says, who are we to think we are better than him?(Adapted from Sic et Non; Yes, And webcast recording (MP3 download))

Gateway to Silence:

Yes . . . and . . .

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