Oprah & Richard Rohr on Finding Hope in Uncertain Times

Well, it is so nice to be with you all here on the Oprah podcast.

I thank you for joining me.

I know many people

are feeling

a sense of unease right now.

Maybe you are struggling with navigating so much disruption.

I mean, it's hard to watch the news.

I mean, I pulled way back from the news.

So, so much disruption going on in the world at work or within your own family.

And one of my intentions for this platform is that it is a place for conversation that can uplift, bring some insight, perhaps even enhance your life and give you a fresher perspective or a new way to think about our collective human experience.

That's why I'm still talking after all of these years.

So for a time...

A time such as this, I was thinking to myself, who would be a great person to talk to about the unease so many of us are feeling right now, uncertainty, and for good reason.

And then I see that one of the great spiritual teachers alive today has written a new book about exactly what was on my mind, and I know on a lot of yours.

It is my pleasure to welcome once again back to my home for the third time,

Father Richard Rohr.

And his current New York Times best-selling book is called The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom Wisdom for an Age of Outrage.

Beautiful, the Tears of Things.

I know many people feel that we are living in an age of outrage.

It's everywhere.

Father Richard Rohr was ordained into the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church in 1970.

He is a Franciscan friar, a world-renowned author, spiritual teacher, theologian, and mystic.

I don't care what your religion is, great love and great suffering change the the soul.

Awaken the soul.

Father Richard Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico and has written 42 books, including the bestsellers, Falling Upward and The Universal Christ.

42 books you've written.

And I'm not really that smart.

I'm just,

they just come.

There are so many big ideas in The Tears of Things that we certainly are not going to have time to cover it all here.

But what does the title, The Tears of Things, mean to you?

You know, I was the last generation of priests that had to learn Latin.

I was never very good at it.

But the great Latin

myth that we studied was...

Virgil's Aeneid.

And in the Aeneid, he's a Roman.

He goes to Carthage, which was their enemy.

He's observing a huge fresco on the wall.

And it's a whole field of dead soldiers.

And he uses a phrase that I'm told is by far the most quoted phrase in Latin literature.

And it seems at first hearing so innocent.

I'll quote the Latin, don't be impressed, la crime rerum.

The Spanish speakers will recognize la crima as their word also for tears.

But

he's observing this, that everything seems to be crying.

Everything has tears and everything

deserves tears.

It was his way of saying what you and I would now call the tragic sense of life,

the tragic sense of life, that it can't be ignored.

Everybody's life sooner or later rushes into tragedy.

Yeah.

So I knew for most people, they won't have all the connotation, but thank you for liking it.

I liked it.

And I was asking you before we started this,

did the title come first, or does the title come as you're processing?

If I'd be honest,

it was in my mind for years.

I've got to write a book called The Tears.

And it came in the end of my life.

I do think it's my last book.

You do?

I do.

And why do you think it's your last book?

Well, first, my age.

But in some ways, it sums up my thinking,

my spiritual teaching.

I want to be honest about how most people have to suffer.

The animals now are suffering.

The planet is suffering.

So it's spreading to every level.

And this generic term, the tears of things, not just the tears of humans,

although they say we're the only ones who formally cry.

As a Christian, of course, I knew Jesus' words: How happy are those who weep?

We think, is he crazy?

What's happy about that?

But I think,

yes,

but I think it's a transformative movement inside the soul.

You write this about tears.

You say, felt reality is invariably wept reality.

That's a beautiful line.

And wept reality is soon compassion and kindness.

Decisive and harsh judgments slip away in the tracks of tears.

And when we cry, we are revealing our truest, most loving self.

So how do tears connect us to our truer self, do you think?

Because they come

unbidden out of the unconscious.

Most people just suddenly have to wipe away their tears.

They're a little embarrassed by it

because it is an object of the will or the intellect.

It comes from somewhere else than intellect and will.

Both positive tears of joy

and tears of sadness.

Yeah, when they're spontaneous, it comes from a place you don't even know.

Yes, that's right.

You can't even explain that.

Yeah, you got it.

And it's and people wipe them away because it feels unnatural.

Yeah.

Yes.

Particularly, you know, my men's work led me to this, particularly men.

Yeah.

You women are better at it.

Oh, yeah, we are.

Much better.

Except I remember many years on the Oprah show,

I had gotten to the point where I could feel people's stories, not just hear people's stories, but I was feeling

I was feeling people's stories.

And my friend Gail called me up one day and she said, you're crying too much.

You have to stop this crying.

I go, I'm just, I'm just feeling, I'm feeling, she goes, well, you need to shut down some of those feelings

because you're feeling too much.

And here's the thing.

I was so moved by this line, moved in that I thought, aha, this is so true.

If we stay with our rage and resentment too long, and you all listening to me right now, take this in.

If we stay with our rage and resentment too long, we we will righteously and unthinkingly pass on the hurt in ever new directions.

And we injure our own souls in ways we don't even recognize.

This is killing our post-modern world.

When I read that, I had a big aha because I went, wow, this is why we are where we are.

Because there's so much rage and resentment that people have now taken on as their righteous judgment and have just passed on those hurt feelings.

Yeah.

You know, we say that phrase all the time, hurt people, hurt people.

But this sums it up, I think, more accurately.

Well, it does.

You know, I know it's an ugly and not common word, but biologists, medical teachers speak of the amygdala.

And that's the part of your nervous system that gets hooked whenever someone is speaking to you angrily or fearfully.

And I know it's an ugly phrase, but I think we have a whole country of hooked amygdalas.

And why do you think there is so much rage and resentment?

One of the most unfortunate results of what we call postmodernism.

Postmodernism is basically saying, okay, we tried all of these philosophies and theologies and religions, but basically none of them work.

And that's called nihilism.

Nihil is a Latin word.

I'm not trying to impress you with my Latin, but it was forced on me.

Nihil means nothing.

And we live in a very nihilistic country.

When heads of state can get away with telling demonstrable lies,

obvious lies, and people don't just accept it, but applaud.

Applaud.

You're in a nihilistic culture.

And once you've destroyed any appreciation for truth, once that's gone, it's all downhill.

I mean, I don't mean to be pessimistic, but you can't walk around telling total lies and build a culture or build a civilization.

or build a healthy psyche or build a healthy family.

When truth is whatever, I want to be the truth.

What takes over is not just the amygdala, but the ego.

Well, that's what I think has happened, is that the ego has landed and is in full force right now.

Full force.

In every area that we can see.

The ego is in full force.

And we're not being political except by effect.

We're being just realistic and honest.

Yes, yes, yes.

You feel that people today need to win too much, you say.

And I think you're so right.

I love this line that you have.

You say, there is no one-way prophecy, no speaking without listening, you say.

And he also says...

You're reminding me of things I forgot I wrote.

Go ahead, go ahead.

And you say, the flow must go both ways or it is not a divine flow.

Is this what's creating so much of the turmoil that we're seeing, you think?

I like your honing in on both ways.

Yes.

Once you're in the flow, it both flows in with some ease and out with some ease.

If you're always putting out and never listening to other people or letting them influence you, that's not true prophecy.

Yeah, it's not true prophecy.

No, uh-uh.

We've largely neglected the prophets.

And that was what led me to write the book that for 37 years out at our center in New Mexico, I taught the Jewish prophets.

And each time I'd go through it, I'd say, why aren't more people teaching this?

The prophets have had very little effect on Judaism, and they're honest about that.

As Jesus said, you're going to kill all the prophets and you're going to kill me.

And his most quoted line about the prophets is this, no prophet is honored in his own country.

You're familiar with that.

Yes, yes.

Why?

A prophet knows no honor in his own homeland is

how I learned it.

Very good.

Okay.

Why?

Because a prophet is always, first of all, critical of his own self, his own agenda, his own tribe, his own country.

And we have a politic that seems to be incapable of self-criticism.

So what do you think is going to happen?

If you have a...

You spoke earlier about the truth and about where the truth is annihilated,

the culture and the country becomes destroyed.

And you spoke about where we are right now.

What do you think is actually going to happen to us?

I can't play the prophet myself, but you can't go on a course this long without self-destructing.

It's not going to be an enemy from without.

It's going to be massive disillusionment from within.

Exactly how that's going to happen, I don't know.

But we Americans who thought we were so great, and I don't need to tell you, but we were able to do that by denying how we treated the indigenous people, how we treated the black people, while cheering about our democracy.

You know, I mean, democracy didn't even seriously begin till the 1960s.

That's what happens when you have no healthy self-criticism.

You had no democracy before the Civil Rights Act.

You had none.

When you can't see your own.

You had none for all of its citizens of color.

You certainly had none.

And see, people of color know that.

We white guys are the last ones to know it.

We really naively presumed everybody was free and everybody was in charge of their own destiny.

We can't do that anymore.

And for a lot of people, it doesn't matter if everybody isn't free, if they are.

That's the problem.

Don't have it.

It hurts too much.

Yeah.

It's too true.

But you know it's true.

Yeah, it's too true.

It doesn't matter if everybody isn't free as long as you feel that you are.

That's what we're seeing.

That's the triumph of the ego.

I thank you so much for spending your very valuable time with us here on the Oprah podcast.

When we come back, Father Roar shares his wisdom on how to show up for others with compassion.

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Welcome back to the Oprah Podcast.

I am so glad you're here.

I am talking with Father Richard Rohr.

He explains why embracing our tears is essential in order to feel more deeply and to see more clearly.

You titled the introduction of this book, Good Trouble, a turret.

Good trouble.

Do you know who I got that from?

Yes, from Congressman John Lewis.

And you warn about group narcissism.

Do you think that's where we are right now?

In this country, definitely.

That we are in a group narcissistic, collective narcissistic.

And when you you got to a later chapter like Amos,

one of the great things I try to make clear in the book, and it isn't hard to prove at all, I'm just amazed more people haven't preceded me,

is the prophets localize evil not in individual bad apples, but in the collective culture.

structural sin, institutional injustice, that you're blind to it.

Why?

Because everybody's doing it.

And they've all agreed it's wonderful.

And this is key to understanding the prophets.

Okay.

So this group narcissism,

how do we break free of it?

Usually through grief.

Yes.

I mean, eventually grief hits every life, but you have to taste it.

You have to, we used to say, drink your tears.

Yes.

You have have to learn its lesson.

How can life be so sad?

A lot of us experience that the death of our parents or the death of a child,

it always has to be uncalled for, unworthy, unnamed, and then it haunts you for years to come.

That undoes the ego.

I always say there's two universal paths of transformation.

Bigger than Christianity, bigger than any single religion.

Great love

and great suffering.

They have the capacity to change every human being.

I don't care what your religion is.

Great love and great suffering change the soul.

Awaken the soul.

Awakens the soul.

Yeah.

And if you never love anybody or anything, if you never care for anybody enough to weep for them,

you'll pretty much stay how you were at 17.

Yeah.

And also, if you never have any suffering, know any suffering, or empathize with anyone else's suffering.

Yes.

You named it.

Yes.

You named it.

You've been critical of your own faith, Catholicism.

How do you turn over in your mind and in your heart all the atrocities along with all the good works done by the Catholic Church?

Well, thank God,

I was educated, first of all, in the lives of the saints and the good works of the church.

It was admittedly one side of the story.

It was later in my life when things like the Inquisition and the pedophile scandal were revealed to us Catholics.

So I got a good dose of the positive.

Our philosophical tradition, our theological tradition.

They held me fast.

I think I use in the book, Oprah, correct me if it didn't stick with you, that my big three-level change is you have to begin with order, then you have to have the courage to admit into your ordered universe that you were given in Mississippi, I was given in Kansas.

Yeah.

Both of us raised nice little conservative Christians.

But that stabilizes the psyche.

There is meaning in the universe.

There is order.

But then what came along for me exactly at the right time in the 60s was a huge dose of disorder.

For us, it was a civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam movement, which began to expose the shadow side, as Carl Jung calls it.

the shadow side of everything.

That's another way of saying the tears.

The tides of things, yes.

Everything,

and I'm going to say everything has a shadow side.

You have the courage to admit that if you've had a good dose of the first good side, order.

Now, if you can put order together with disorder,

guess what you end up with?

Reorder.

That's enlightenment.

Where you don't try to eliminate disorder anymore.

You don't try to even, it's going to be shocking to a Christian.

You don't even try to eliminate sin.

You're not surprised at it.

It's a universal phenomenon.

We hope we'd sin a little less, but when you see how poorly we've localized sin,

always in someone else,

another group, they're sinful.

Accusatory and judgmental about other people.

One of the things I appreciated, you said that now that you have reached 83, you've learned that you have to forgive almost everything.

Almost everything.

It's one big

sweep,

but not thinking of it as forgiving.

It's just a patience with things.

I don't call it forgiving.

I call it for me.

Well, I'm 71.

Yeah.

And for me, it's not forgiving as much as it is a letting go and allowing.

Just allowing.

Perfect.

to letting go and allowing giving up our control needs.

Yes.

Giving up.

I don't think I have any control over any of it.

And just letting people be whoever they are and accepting them exactly where they are.

Thinking, I can't love it till it meets my definition

of order and control.

That's right.

You'll never love anybody.

That's right.

Unless you allow them to be.

You got it.

You got it.

I love forgiving everything.

Not consciously.

It comes naturally now.

I talked to you in one of my earlier talks about the two halves of life.

I'm now, this isn't good mathematics, but I'm calling it the third half of life, which there can't be, but the third half of life is just, it's all okay.

It's all okay.

I can live with it.

Yeah.

Somebody was talking to me about yesterday the way somebody was dressing or looking at that.

It's all fine.

It's all good.

You're there at 71.

Made it into 10.

70 to 83.

Well, we have Richard Rohr here.

I knew we'd have listeners who have questions for you around your new book, The Tears of Things.

Nick is zooming in with us from Utah.

Hi.

Nick, I hear

you started a TikTok channel in hopes of helping bridge the divide between the left and the right.

Tell us about that.

Yeah, no, thank you.

And thank you both so much for having me on.

I really appreciate it.

As Oprah said, I started this TikTok channel called The Radical Centrist, hoping to bridge the divide, right?

I feel like it's gotten to a point where

it's really scary.

And as I've done this, I've had some success.

The left and the right need each other, but without them, we lose the moral friction that makes democracy work.

America doesn't need a red team or a blue team.

It needs both.

But the more success I have, the more hate I receive, right?

The extremes really don't like it.

Right.

The more hate, did you say more hate?

The more hate, right?

So the extremes really feel that I'm just enabling evil on the other side.

Both sides feel that way.

Both sides, yeah.

I do think it's a vocal minority, but it's very, very vocal.

And so sometimes it's really hard to know because these are, in my opinion,

a lot of them are just really good people.

And so it's hard to know whether or not I'm doing the right thing in doing this, saying we should bridge the divide and see the humanity and the other side.

So my question for you, Father Rohr, is what advice would you give those of us that are trying to bridge this divide, whether that's at home, whether it's on a TikTok channel, whether it's at work?

And then how do we know if we are doing it in the right way?

Because we don't want to be doing it the wrong way, you know?

Let me start with this.

I mean, you just set me up for an hour lecture, which I promise not to give you.

But

the opposite of faith is not doubt.

The opposite of faith is certitude.

And after the Enlightenment, 17th, 18th century, we, even we Christians, felt that our job was to be certain.

No, our job is to be loving.

That's different.

Now, once you've localized evil

and you've they are the evil country, they are the evil religion.

It's so bad now, they are the evil gender.

You know, we do this to one another.

You don't want to be disallowed that localization.

I like the way the world is situated.

Good people are here.

Bad people are there.

Don't make me change my mind.

Do you see the love affair with certitude?

It's not loving God.

I'm sorry.

It's not loving certainly not loving your neighbor.

It's not even loving yourself.

It's loving your ideas about things.

And we Catholics made that mistake too long.

So we're very impatient with it.

When we see other people repeating our heresy, it doesn't make for happy people or content people or alive people,

I don't think.

Yeah.

Am I answering your question at all?

I think so, yeah.

No, I...

So then

if I'm applying that to myself, I have a pretty strong belief that there are good people on both sides.

I know Republicans that I love and I know Democrats that I love, you know, for speaking specifically to America.

How do I avoid that sin of certainty, if you want to call it that?

And yet, how do I know if I'm doing the right thing?

Those seem to be at odds with each other.

What's at odds?

I'm trying to understand what's at odds, Nick.

Good.

So

the idea, so I need certainty that I'm doing the right thing, right?

So if I'm going to keep on reaching out to the other side side or both sides and saying, hey, we need to be kind to each other, it takes a certain level of conviction and certainty to do that.

So is

it okay for me to have that certainty?

Yes.

Yeah.

Is it okay for him to have that certitude that the right thing to do is to try to get both sides to,

you know, I think the key is in humanizing both sides.

That's good.

Is in humanizing both sides.

When I can see your humanity, when I can see that you feel the same sadness and the same sorrow for

the same things that I feel sadness for, you want the same accomplishments to experience the same joys with your children.

There's a commonality that we all have in the human experience.

So

my way through these podcasts and through everything else I've done,

that also gets lots of criticism, is to actually humanize and to see the other person person and the other side

as myself, as my equal,

as a human.

And I think you know you're doing the right thing

if the right thing is coming from a genuine, pure space

that is an extension of the love you have for humanity.

So you're not doing it because you're trying to get TikTok followers.

You're not doing it if you're doing it in any way, because this has been my experience.

I check my ego for all things.

Right.

I don't do one damn thing, if I can help it, that I'm acting out of my ego, because I know that's going to come back to me in an egotistic or a way that is going to be harmful to me.

So I think the part of the answer that you're looking for is to search within yourself for the pure intention and reason why you're doing it.

I admire your courage and your bravery because, I mean, I just have, you know, left a lot of social stuff alone and come off social media because the

backlash of the hatred and the vitriol is more than I can stand.

I can't bear it.

It's why we don't have comments on this YouTube channel because you just be fighting all of the negative stuff all the time, the crazy stuff, the conspiracy theories, the, you know,

all that stuff.

So I admire you for doing it, but if you're doing it for the right reasons, then it is the right thing thing to do because the world needs people like you,

especially right now.

So what is your purest, purest intention in doing it?

I mean, it's got to, I think it has to be love.

It does.

Okay.

Expand more on that for us.

Why does it have to be love?

Why?

Why?

Because anything else is,

I can't find a purer

force, right?

I mean, anger makes me make a lot of mistakes.

Correct.

Love is a lot more humble.

I could admit when I moved.

And then, I don't know.

I mean, I always go back to that quote from Martin Luther King that was, love,

hate cannot throw out hate.

Only love can do that.

Yeah.

Right.

So I want to be that, but it is hard to stay in that space.

It's really, really difficult.

Martin Luther King didn't have TikTok.

Right?

He didn't have TikTok.

He had all the other haters trying to bomb his house and kill him and his family,

but

he he didn't have the ongoing visceral reaction every day from people coming at you with their meanness and their you know intention to take you down yeah let me throw this into the mix it doesn't cover every base but you first have to succeed at dualistic clarity like it was this same president who said it was a Charlottesville.

Well, there are good people on both sides.

That sounds like fuzzy, soft thinking, so I don't have to take a stand.

First you have to say, no, this is objectively good and this is objectively bad.

Then you get to what the Eastern religions would call non-duality.

First dualistic, Jesus himself,

God and mammon and so forth, he's very dualistic.

about the big issues.

But then, when it comes to practical everyday living, you said it a minute ago

the response to both of them

the one you like and the one you don't like is love

that's the dance

that I think an authentic believer has to do has to not be naive

about evil and evil's capacity to hurt people Because otherwise we're going to get in real trouble saying, oh, there's good people on both sides.

Well, yes,

but

a lot of them are doing some bad stuff that must be named.

Evil must be named.

And that was the genius of the prophets.

They critiqued Israel first.

They critiqued themselves first.

And then they said,

but,

and they learned this through tears.

That's my thesis in the whole book,

through sadness.

They moved from anger to sadness.

That movement from anger to sadness to compassion is the transformative movement of the prophets.

I'm going to send you an autograph signed copy of Tears of Things from Father Rohr.

And I think if you read it and you actually look at many of the lessons from the prophets, because what you're establishing yourself to be, what you are

journeying in this lifetime to be, is someone who can moderate both sides.

And I think taking lessons from people who've done it over the ages will be really beneficial to you.

And I have to say,

I admire your willingness to take it on.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you, Nick.

Thank you, Nick.

All right.

We're going to autograph a book to Nick and get it.

All right.

Okay.

Easy.

Easy.

easy, peasy.

Thank you, Nick.

Thank you.

Dear listener, I just thank you for spending your time with us here on the Oprah podcast.

When we return, we're going to hear from Jason Wilson.

He's the author of the book Cry Like a Man.

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I am so glad you've joined me here on the Oprah podcast.

I'm here with Father Richard Rohr, a New York Times best-selling author and Franciscan friar.

He shares decades of wisdom in his latest book, The Tears of Things.

Best-selling author Jason Wilson is joining us.

Hi, Jason.

How are you doing, Oprah?

How are you doing, Father Roy?

Better now.

Okay,

he once went viral with his empowering message to a young boy when he assured him it's okay to cry.

That thing went all over the world.

Why are you crying?

That's what this is about, son.

It's okay to cry.

We cry with me.

Why are you crying, my son?

Tell me, why are you are you crying?

It's part of the test for a reason, but why are you crying?

Go ahead, sir.

Because what?

Okay, good.

But you did it, though.

And Jason, you've also written a book called Cry Like a Man.

So I know you're going to love the tears of things.

What was your question for Father Roar?

My question was.

Well, before you ask that question, I want to ask, how did finally learning how to cry change your life?

Well, my tears taught me that I'm human.

You know, so often growing up in my community, especially as me and as Father Rohr had shared earlier, we're trained by misconstrued mantras like big boys don't cry.

What doesn't kill you can only make you stronger and no pain, no gain.

And as a result of that, we repress our emotions.

And then, Oprah, when I discovered that tears not only contain 98% water, but also stress hormones that get excreted from our bodies when we cry.

So my work with boys Oprah, here it is with telling boys not to cry.

And then we wonder why when they get to a certain age that they don't know how to express themselves.

So for me, when I was able to, you know, share the misleading mantras and really understand that tears made me human, it finally allowed me to stop my trauma from time traveling.

and then to grieve without embarrassment, without shame.

I was able to finally love myself, my family, and my friends without limits, and most importantly, escape emotional incarceration.

I love that escape emotional incarceration.

And didn't it open up so many avenues?

I mean,

I was just having a conversation recently with the gentleman who runs the Hoffman Institute, who was saying that he was raised

as a young boy.

not to cry and that many years later, when his mother was dying and he was crying in the car about that, his father, who had taught him not to cry, said, can you teach me how to cry?

Can you teach me how to cry?

And he said he did.

He was able to help his father, told his father, that when he started to feel the emotion instead of shutting down, just open up and go into that feeling and allow it to take over and to know that it's only going to last for 10 or 15 minutes, that it's not, you're not going to be crying the rest of your life.

And that his father learning how to cry during the death of his wife that he'd been married to all those years really changed the grieving process, but also opened up an aperture for joy.

So I've shared that story with you to just ask that question.

Did your learning to cry also open up the aperture for experiencing

other emotions in your relationships?

Oh, absolutely, Oprah.

I often teach my boys and men that I work with with that we tend to gravitate toward the eight box of crayons versus the 64 box.

And I compare those two emotions that we're both given as men and women.

But with Timothy as men, as Father Roy tells you, we go towards anger, frustration, and fear.

But what about the other emotions?

And so being married 26 years now, I had to learn that when my wife is requesting violet, all I could give her was purple.

When she wanted lime, I had to figure out a way to make green and yellow match the color.

And I said, wait a minute, this is a major issue with communication.

And I learned how to not only process my emotions, but become a verbal processor, expressing the true feeling behind the emotion instead of always going to the surface emotion, which I call anger.

And so I was repressing all of this pain.

And working with boys, I realized later on why.

the word thug was really popular.

And I made an acronym because what I saw wasn't a gangster.

I saw a traumatized human unable to grieve.

And so when I helped them process their pain and emotions and gave them the freedom to feel and show them the power of tears, they were finally able to release and grieve and live better and fuller lives.

Boy, that made my eyes water.

Thug

is a traumatized human unable to grieve.

Wow, that reorders.

Reorder.

That reorders the meaning and definition of that word.

Thank you for sharing that, Jason.

What was your question?

Did you have a question for Father Rory?

Yeah, absolutely.

I wanted to ask you, as someone who also works closely with men, helping them process their emotions and release trauma, you know, I'm curious because I read some of your work with men in retreats and helping them open up.

What practices and approaches have you found to be the most effective in helping men be transparent and emotionally open?

The most universal one discovered by all of the world religions is some form

of mindfulness that you see the games your mind plays.

You have to observe.

It sounds so passive, but once you see it, you can't not see it, that you prefer the negative or you prefer problem solving or you prefer being antagonistic, scapegoating others.

Once you recognize your patterns,

you see they're everywhere.

For years up at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, where I live, I gave these five-day events called men's rites of passage.

And the turning point I'm not exaggerating for many men was on the third day, which we call the day of grief.

And I had learned this, but I'm not making this up.

It sounds like a dramatic story, but I visited the Maasai in Africa, and the chief, who had read some of my stuff, he gave two warriors permission to walk me around

the path that a young warrior had to walk to be initiated.

And the most moving part was the caves of grief, and these two tough-looking guys with spears and shields and

They got even soft-spoken as we approached these caves.

And they said, here, Father, we had to learn how to cry.

And I would explain to the group and say the turning phrase was when I would say, many of you thought your father was an angry man, and maybe he was.

Many of you think you are an angry man, and maybe you are.

But now listen closely, they'd lead forward.

This is by the third day they were teachable.

And I said, many of you are not angry.

You're sad.

And it just, you could see the jolt of recognition.

Sadness

hides as anger.

But once you give permission, a man at least, women have permission already.

But we have to give men permission.

You're not really an angry man.

You're just deeply sad.

The whole five-day event turned in some ways on that one remark because they wanted to discover the source of their tears.

And that led to this book.

Tears of Things.

Tears of Things.

I can see that resonated with you, Jason.

Yeah,

I have so many questions.

My male program, I teach boys emotional stability training.

It's called the Cave of Adullum.

And so when I read about the Caves of Grief and your work with the Maasai warriors, it really hit me hard.

And I got the name from David when he ran from King Saul to hide from him because he was trying to kill him.

And the history tells us that 400 men came unto David who was distressed, discontented, and in debt.

And he became a captain.

What's interesting, when you tie this caves of grief in, I always ponder, like, well, what happened in this cave?

Because those same men came out as mighty men of valor.

So they didn't need to train to fight because, Father Moore, am I right?

They already were warriors.

And so you're telling me that these men,

they would have to, as a part of the rite of passage, they would have to learn how to cry in these caves.

It felt like that's what they were saying.

Now, I would have then had to ask, how do they do that?

Because I I know you can't program tears.

We in the church tried to do it, but

they didn't come from

a deep place too often.

Jason, I can see you all could have a conversation all day long.

I need his number.

I can see that that could go on.

Thank you for joining us, and thank you for writing your book on the book.

What a delight.

Cry like a man.

Cry like a man.

Well, you say in the book human beings are really made of love and for love and we still don't know it we are made of love for love and we still don't know it why do you think people still can't get it i mean i think we humans are missing the point especially now and when everybody is just you know attacking everybody else i thought wow

Most Christians hear self-criticism, but I hope you don't hear it coming from a negative place.

We substituted a reward-punishment scenario,

apocalyptic dualism,

forgive the two big words, at the end of our lives.

And it largely created fear of God, not love of God.

I don't know if you got to the end of the book, the story of the angel.

walking through the streets of the world.

Yes.

Now, I'll just finish it since I started it.

I used used to use this in a lot of major talks, and people said they never forgot it.

The angel walking through the streets of the world has a pail of water and a torch of fire.

And people, of course, ask, what are you going to do with that torch and that pail?

And the angel is supposed to say, I'm here to burn down the mansions of heaven.

and to put out the fires of hell.

Only then

will we know who really loves God.

We've got to get beyond this reward-punishment scenario, because it makes us think that our job is to decide who deserves the reward and who deserves the punishment.

It makes Christians inherently judgmental.

The first 2,000 years, society itself was too violent, as we see from our own history of enslavement, enslavement.

To hear that, we just couldn't hear it.

And feudalism couldn't hear it, and the war centuries couldn't hear it.

But there's more and more people who can hear that.

That, as

you both have been saying, only love wins, only love changes people.

That's obvious.

Yeah.

I don't know what it's going to take.

What's we think?

I don't know what it is.

Our reward-punishment system will not change people.

It makes them afraid of God and hate their neighbor with impunity.

God wants me to hate those people,

whatever those

when we return.

We're going to hear from guests who were personally transformed by Father Richard Rohr's teachings, and he shares advice on how to increase joy in our everyday lives.

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Welcome back to the Oprah Podcast.

I'm glad to be here with you all and glad you're here.

This is my third time talking with spiritual teacher and mystic, Father Richard Rohr.

This time, I want to ask him at 82, how does he define a well-lived life?

Well, Susie now joins us from Dallas, Texas, and you say that Father Rohr's teachings are what actually made you feel loved by God.

That is big.

Oh, I hope so.

That's big.

What's your question?

First of all, tell us how his teachings help you feel loved by God.

I've been following Father Richard for, I think, over 10 years.

I really sort of found myself brought to my knees by some things in my life, both personally and professionally, that

kind of happened at that time.

And I think intuitively, I knew that I needed God and I just, I needed something greater than myself.

And I just didn't know where to turn.

I think I learned of you through Rob Bell.

And,

you know, I read several of your books and I have been getting your daily newsletter.

And

It just always resonates so deeply with me.

I mean, often your readings bring me to tears because it just touches touches me at a place that nothing else has.

It says more about you than me, but thank you.

Do you have a question, Susie?

I do.

In the book you've quoted

in the introduction, you said, my hope is that this small book might accelerate the pace of human and spiritual vulnerability by encouraging each of us to take a first daring step.

And so I guess my question for you is, you know, what might that step be for those of us outside of organized religion who

don't always feel like I have the the words necessarily to speak about faith outside of religion and how can we help you know sort of push this forward?

You have to meet a God of limitless love.

It has to be limitless.

It has to be infinite.

But I'm told the human mind, just like it's hooked by the amygdala, it is positively hooked by unconditional love.

And you have to have at least had a taste of that.

But I'm told the human mind can't imagine infinite things.

Can't.

So we portion love out.

Who's worthy of it?

Who's ready for it?

Who deserves it?

Who deserves it?

When you stop counting, you're living not in the kingdoms of this world.

The kingdoms of this world are all about counting, measuring, weighing.

The kingdom of God, as Jesus would call it, the whole game of mathematics falls apart.

You can't compute anymore.

Now, if you're not willing to let that be done to your mind, to live in an infinite sea of mercy where all counting is meaningless, meaningless, you'll never be a mystic.

You'll never be a non-dual enjoyer.

And I believe we have to resituate Christianity in joy, not threat.

And that's why I told the story of the angel traveling the streets of the world.

A lot of us grew up with threat.

Threat does not get you there, but it's the way most of us.

Certainly I in the 40s and 50s in Kansas, where I grew up, I had very loving parents, but they did threaten us a lot.

A lot.

Susie, thank you for that.

Thank you for your question, and thank you for being

a follower and a reader and being inspired by Father Roar.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you both.

Thanks for joining us today.

Thank you.

Next, we have Lauren, founder of We Grow LA, a nonprofit in Los Angeles that builds spaces of access, of hope, and belonging.

Lauren, what's your question for Father Roar today?

You look so gorgeous today.

Oh, thank you.

I'm so happy to be I'm learning so much, soaking it all in.

My question is, as a faith-based community leader in today's society, how do I make sure that I'm a listening ear for prophetic voices in a way that really creates a culture that surrounds truth-seeking, honesty, prophetic messages, even if it is not consistent with what my original plans are for the organization?

What you have to develop in yourself and in your group is a capacity for positive self-criticism.

And once you learn how to positively critique your own games, your own shadow, remember, the shadow is not evil.

We learn this from, well, Jesus talked about the splinter in other people's eyes and the log in your own.

He was teaching us the same thing.

But if you don't do shadow work, you end up unself-critical.

And

why would you listen to an unself-critical person?

Because they'll never see their filters, their agendas, their obsessions.

That's certainly much of the first,

I'm going to say, 45, 50 years of life, learning just how to do that without shaming the self, without hating the self, just recognizing, well, Richard, you've got your own faults too.

You've got your own blind spots.

And this is what you need to work on for yourself.

That's right.

Yes.

Or your lens is not clear enough.

You've got your Achilles heel.

Looking at the moat in your own eye.

There you go.

Yeah.

This hasn't been taught.

You know, I assume maybe you're familiar with Saint Paul in the scriptures.

He talks about the second most important of the charismatic gifts, of the gifts of the Spirit, is the gift of prophecy.

prophecy.

And we haven't even allowed it, taught it.

He speaks of schools of prophets where you have to be trained in how to positively self-critique.

And if you're a politician, you're preacher-priest, if they aren't capable of healthy self-criticism, I wouldn't follow them too far down the plank

because they're going to lead you to a not very enlightened place.

They'll always have localized evil in another race, another religion, another gender,

another neighborhood, another

we don't have time for that anymore.

We really, we just don't.

Yeah.

Did you get your question answered?

I did.

I did.

It sounds, well, how I'm interpreting it is is the first thing for me to do is, you know, remain in a self-evaluation state.

That's a good word.

Yeah.

And then also before accepting,

you know, messaging from others to make sure that it's identifiable, that they are also in that state as well.

Yep.

You got it.

You received it.

Thank you, Lauren.

Thank you for the question.

Thank you so much.

I love how your green matches the plants in the background.

That's great.

Perfect outfit.

Thank you for your nice smile.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So I often end our conversations here with this question.

I know for sure I need to ask you of all people, how do you define a well-lived life,

Father Roar?

You know, who used the word generative?

Was that Eric Erickson?

I'm not sure.

It doesn't matter.

But you're delighted when you're around generative

people

who

generate other

people,

other movements, other

things than their own.

I was just at a conference in Boston for champions of love, a rather pretentious title.

But God, was I energized after being with them for five days.

They're all doing.

They deserve the title.

Yeah, they deserve the title.

And they were just so positive, so loving, even though every one of them was addressing

major social ills.

Brian Stevenson,

the

lynching museum, and

you've probably read it.

I've been there.

I

did the first story about it for 60 minutes.

It was great.

Yeah.

Yes.

Father Greg Boyle with the

homeboy working with the Hispanic Hispanic street boys of Los Angeles.

God, do we think like, but he's so generative with it.

It's the biggest street boy,

if I can use that phrase, organization in the world.

And

that's what he's generated.

So you came away from this conference with all of these people who are generating, who are champions of love and love.

Champions of love.

And you felt championed yourself.

You felt inspired, opened up,

elevated.

Yes.

Loving people liberate you.

You don't feel judged around them.

You feel affirmed.

So a well-lived life is a life of someone who can generate the kind of love that inspires other people to be more loving.

That's what it sounds like you're saying.

And it sounds like a cliché, doesn't it?

But it's true.

But it's true.

It's so true.

It's so true.

Always a joy to talk to you.

Thank you, Father Richard Wuhr.

This book is called The Tears of Things.

Thank you to my guests, Nick and Jason, who could have still been talking to you.

Susie and Lauren for sharing your stories and your thoughtful questions.

The Tears of Things is available wherever books are sold.

It's a call of action for all of us to love more.

To love more.

Go well, everybody.

Thank you.

You're a delight.

Thank you.

Always.

Thank you.

You can subscribe to the Oprah podcast on YouTube and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

I'll see you next week.

Thanks, everybody.