CHAPTER 3: POWER, PRESTIGE AND POSSESSION: TWO APPROACHES TO HOPE
4.4 Rohr on hope
Just as Buchan has no clear theology of hope, neither does Rohr try to describe what hope is. Rather he deals with humanity’s postmodern anxiety and how the cross calls us to confront that anxiety through the transforming power of love and acceptance. He speaks of the difficulties that people face, not just in everyday life, but also in the
perception of the absence of a good God. “[Postmodernism] is a major crisis of meaning for the West, and at the deepest level it is a loss of hope,” he says (Farrell 1994:1).
“Were we honest, maybe many of us would admit we do not have a lot of evidence of God’s goodness. For many people, faith is just whistling in the dark, hoping against hope that God is indeed good” (:3). He describes the spirit of the age as one of hopelessness: “There is no hope in most countries I visit. It’s almost as if there is no future for this planet” (Rohr & Feister 2001:27).
Blogger MikeF quotes Rohr’s understanding that “biblical hope is the certainty that things finally have a victorious meaning no matter how they turn out. We learned that from Jesus, which gives us now the courage to live our lives forward from here” (2010).
Hope then is about having courage in the midst of the difficulties and challenges that life presents rather than some vague belief that “all will work out well” (MikeF 2011).
So hope for Rohr is not the about the quick fix of an altar call, but about transformation through accepting a different reality – the reality that God is there and is good even when so many things may seem to indicate the opposite. He speaks about his brother and family choosing to live outside the mainstream and mentions his brother’s children and their friends coming to see him and bringing animals to be blessed while he was visiting there. “To these folks it’s still an enchanted universe, filled with communion and mystery. If religion does not give us that sense of belonging to a sacred world of meaning, it is pretty useless (Rohr and Feister 2001:49). He claims that in the midst of a daily struggle, people need “the mythology of a bigger, better world to ‘recover’ to.”
(Farrell 1994:2).
His criticism of much religion is that “somehow Jesus becomes the great problem- solver and answer-giver for the next world and not primarily the one who teaches us how to live with peace and freedom in this world. It’s fire-insurance religion instead of a banquet-right-now.” (2001:22)
Hope is not to be found in a tribal world defined by the black and white of both conservatives and liberals, in a denial of one’s struggles through the papering over of what is wrong with platitudes, but in being able being able to say yes to one’s
brokenness and in so doing to own it. He says, “Hope is about people who know the dark side but build anyway,” (:79) but also notes “I’m not encouraging mindless enthusiasm, but the enthusiasm that is based on intelligence and wisdom and that great gift of hope. Hope is a participation in the very life of God” (:52). Grappling with reality rather than trying to escape it is a way to let go of postmodern anxiety and trust that God is good, the world is good and we are good (:43). He expresses the same sentiment elsewhere when he says that people need to know that “God is, God is good, God can be trusted and God is on your side” (:19) (Italics his).
Hope, for both Buchan and Rohr, is to be found in the reinstatement of what has been damaged through the religious establishment of the modern era and deconstructed in postmodernism. They present, for their followers, a vision of hope in a confusing postmodern era.
Just as Buchan is concerned about young people who feel they have no hope for the future (1998:68), Rohr is also concerned about the next generation. “They seem to have nothing… our people are dying for lack of vision, for lack of transcendent meaning to name their souls and their struggles” (Farrell 1994:6). Farrell notes that Rohr believes that the only worthwhile contribution is in “searching out and pointing at what’s right, worthwhile for the next generation to place its hope in” (:6).
Blogger CanadaSue, who writes on issues of spirituality, quotes from Rohr’s devotional CD:
What word of hope does the Church have to offer the world? The world is tired of our ideas and theologies. Its tired of our lazy church services. Its no longer going to believe ideas, but it will believe love. It will believe life that is given and received… Yet we’ve lived in our heads so long, the world no longer listens to us. I don’t need your words, the world says to us. I don’t need your sermons. I want life. And I want life more abundantly. What word of hope do we have to offer to the millions of workers in the world who see no meaning in their life? What word of hope have we for all the women who bear children and, day after day, say, what is the meaning of this life? For most people in the world the question is not, Is there a life on the other side of death? It is, rather, Is there life on this side of death? Until we Christians give evidence that there is life on this side of death, the world does not need to believe our dogmas and giant
churches. It doesn’t need our words of hell. It needs our promise of heaven (Canadasue).
Farrell sums up Rohr’s teaching on hope for the broken with these words:
We come to God through our imperfection… When we can live with that, can accept that humble, broken state, and even rejoice in it, then we’re free. Then we have nothing to protect, no illusions to maintain before ourselves and other people. We know who we are, and that’s whom God loves. That’s freedom.
There’s no other freedom to match it (1994:5).
This, says Farrel, is hope.
5 Conclusion to chapter
Speaking as an member of the audiences at one of Buchan’s meetings, Johan Bisschoff of Vereeniging said that the Afrikaans people and the whole of the country are looking for something positive (Jackson 2008), the “capacity to inspire courage, to give vision against the odds, to create dreams out of the raw materials of fear and uncertainty”
mentioned at the end of the last chapter (Ward 170-171). It would seem that both Buchan and Rohr regard hope as an economic product to be marketed, albeit in a way that uses different methodology and is meaningful to different people. I turn now to a closer look at the audience and why the respective messages are meaningful for them.