Richard Rohr Reorders the Universe
New Yorker
Not
long ago, on his way to the post office in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
Richard Rohr, a seventy-six-year-old Franciscan friar, had a spiritual
experience. “This light is interminably long,” he told me one morning,
in late August, as we stopped at a red light while retracing his route.
Rohr hates wasting time, and he had been sitting at the light fuming
when a divine message arrived. “I heard as close as I know to the voice
of God,” he said. The voice suggested that he find happiness where he
was, rather than searching for it elsewhere. “For two and a half
minutes, I’m not in control at this stoplight,” he said. Being made to
sit still required a surrender to a force greater than his ego; it was
an opportunity to practice contemplation, a form of meditative prayer
that has equivalents in almost every religion. In Christianity, the
practice dates back to the first several centuries after Christ, though
it was revitalized in the twentieth century by the Trappist monk Thomas
Merton. Rohr told me, “Merton pulled back the veil.”
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