The Truly Human

Living In Deep Time, Krista Tippett with Richard Rohr [Excerpt]

FR. ROHR: The ‘truly human’ is always experienced in vulnerability, in mutuality, in reciprocity. Vulnerability transforms you. You can’t be in the presence of a truly vulnerable honestly vulnerable person and not be affected. I think that’s the way we were meant to be in the presence of one another.

Joseph Campbell is someone who, at another era in American life, kind of gave voice to this. And you quote from him, and there is this beautiful quote from him, about that mythological trajectory.

“We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a God; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

But Jesus would be a little beyond that when he says, “Take up your cross,” which is not so attractive. But he’s much more leading us into the second half of life.

I gave a retreat two weekends ago in Santa Fe for 40 millennials, and what some of them have done already, for the poor in Africa, starting not-for-profits that care about this cause or that cause. And they conversed with me for a full weekend with some of the most mature, grounded, humble, responsive understanding to what I was saying, just proving the proof of what you just said. Some of the young people today feel like old souls. And some of my generation feel like old fools.

But a phrase was used in medieval Catholic spirituality was “the eternal now.” “When time comes to its fullness,” is the biblical phrase. I’m sure you’ve been told that in the Greek, in the New Testament, there’s two words for time. Chronos is chronological time, time as duration, one moment after another, and that’s what most of us think of as time.

But there was another word in Greek, kairos. And kairos was deep time. It was when you have those moments where you say, “Oh my god, this is it. I get it,” or, “This is as perfect as it can be,” or, “It doesn’t get any better than this,” or, “This moment is summing up the last five years of my life,” things like that where time comes to a fullness, and the dots connect, when we can learn how to more easily go back to those kind of moments or to live in that kind of space.

Now, I think that’s what the tradition means by the word “contemplation,” that to be a contemplative is to learn to trust deep time and to learn how to rest there and not be wrapped up in chronological time…. So already, the desert fathers and mothers discovered this word “contemplation” because I believe they found the word that most believers use, the word “prayer,” to be so trivialized, so cheapened by misuse. Prayer was sort of a functional thing you did to make announcements to God or tell God things, which God already knew, of course. And they created another word to give us access to this deep time, and that word that kept recurring throughout the 2,000-year history of Christianity was the contemplative mind. It’s a different form of consciousness. It’s a different form of time.

Let me add one thing. We used to, in Latin, use this phrase sub specie aeternitatis, and the old professors used to say, “Sub specie aeternitatis.” And what it means—“in the light of eternity.” In the light of eternity, this thing that you’re so worried about right now—is it really going to mean anything on your deathbed? [laughs] And for some reason, that had the power to relativize the things that a young man would get so impassioned about, positively or negatively. And those were various ways of directing us toward deep time.

MS. TIPPETT: There’s a question—I think this may be on your website—so let me start this way. I often come to this point in a conversation as we’re ending and will ask this huge, unanswerable question about just where somebody would start, about how your sense of what it means to be human has changed, has evolved, or is evolving. It seems to me that—you said right at the beginning of our conversation that a sense of God is all wrapped up with what it means to be human. There’s this question on your website, and I kind of feel like it’s connected to this, but I’d like for you to think, to reflect on it, what it means, in any case. “What if changing our perception of God has the potential to change everything?”

FR. ROHR: The Latin poet Terence is supposed to have said, “Nothing truly human is abhorrent to me.” I think the truly human is always experienced in vulnerability, in mutuality, in reciprocity. When human beings try to deny their own vulnerability, even from themselves, when they cannot admit weakness, neediness, hurt, pain, suffering, sadness, they become very unhuman and not very attractive. They don’t change you; they don’t invite you. I think that’s why Brené Brown, perhaps you’ve interviewed her…

MS. TIPPETT: Yes, I have.

FR. ROHR: …why her work is having such influence. Because like few other people, she has brought this central, for me, as a Christian, central, divine, gospel notion of vulnerability to really begin to make sense to a lot of people. So that’s why I’m anxious to present the vulnerable God, which, for a Christian, was supposed to have been imaged on the cross. But again, we made it into a transaction. Transaction isn’t vulnerability anymore, really. Vulnerability transforms you. You can’t be in the presence of a truly vulnerable, honestly vulnerable person and not be affected. I think that’s the way we are meant to be in the presence of one another.

[music: “Stars Pt. 2” by Lowercase Noises]

MS. TIPPETT: Richard Rohr is a Franciscan writer and teacher, and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, NM. His books include Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, and most recently, Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation.