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JOHN MAIN SEMINAR - 2005
FROM THE HEART

    “A Lever and a Place to Stand”
    Richard Rohr, OFM
    California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, California

    Fr. Richard, it is the custom of the John Main Seminar that a member of
    our community offers thanks on behalf of all—and attempts to capture
    the key points of the Seminar leader’s teaching.

    So here I stand at Niagra Falls with a thimble. I think it’s safe to say that
    the 250 people before you today feel much like you say you feel each
    year coming away from your hermitage:  “There’s nothing in any book
    that’s better than what we’ve just experienced.”

    And indeed we haven’t just been to a lecture series. We’ve been soaked
    in the living waters of the Gospel. The Gospel of the one who didn’t hate
    back, who told and showed us the one thing necessary: Fear Not.

    You showed us what’s possible if we’re not afraid—the new view from
    the new point. Of course, you didn’t say that the new view was an
    elevator ride to the top of the Basilica. It was more like “Welcome back
    to the catacombs,” to the “edge of the inside.” The place where we have
    an honest encounter with the “inner river of fear” that runs in all of us,
    but that, in wisdom, we are not fated to disguise or project or moralize;
    that, in love, we have the courage to bear.  

    It’s the inward, downward journey that sets us free

    Free from explaining or defending or justifying;
    Free from criticizing or denying or destroying; and
    Free from the equally toxic tyrannies of me and we, that turn the other
    into an object of hate, where fear moves like a bullet toward violence.

    The price of this freedom, you taught us, is not cheap. The path of
    dispossession is so narrow that we have to die to belonging; die to
    rebelling; die to self. We can’t hold on to anything except our poverty---
    and our lever, our contemplation and our action.

    So we ask, what’s the upside of being one of the mystics and sinners?
    Of being, as Merton describes, at the far end of solitude? You answered:
    only love---and a world to move. And that is a good Gospel.

    So we thank you, Fr. Richard, for the bountiful truth of your teaching—
    and for the radiant example of your life. We hope you hear and feel our
    love and gratitude.

    Carla M. Cooper
    August 14, 2005