Sacred Criticism by Maryanne Hannan

The Tears of Things:
Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage
By Richard Rohr
Convergent, 2025
$27   208 pp.

Cherished by many for his expansive scriptural interpretations, Richard Rohr, Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has also been criticized by many for not strictly adhering to tradition. He has authored over 30 books and also writes a daily newsletter sent out from the CAC, so his influence cannot be underestimated. 

As a long-time student of his teachings, I was especially looking forward to his new book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage. Would he go off in a new direction altogether, or consolidate, summarize, and tweak previous teachings? In either event, I was sure he would offer pastoral guidance for these troubled times. At 81 years of age, Rohr has endured recent health difficulties, so his words carry weight. 

Rohr begins in a familiar landscape: universally experienced human grief, frustration at the evil we see around us, public and private hardships and loss. Expanding on Virgil’s famous phrase from the Aeneid, lacrimae rerum (“the tears of things”), he suggests we take a deeper look at the example of the biblical prophets who understood “the soul must weep to be a soul at all.”

Prophets are not fortunetellers, as a secular understanding of the word might suggest. They are truthtellers for their societies, calling out systemic injustice, collective evil, and, for the Hebrew prophets, any movement away from their covenantal relationship with God. But the prophets do not reach this level of mature understanding and compassion easily. The Bible records their unique individual and gradual evolution from anger, through sadness, to ultimate reconciliation and praise of God. The immaturity of many of the prophetic rants along the way can make reading them difficult, so this book provides wise guidance.

Emphasizing the need for a historical-critical approach that insists on considering the whole narrative of any biblical book rather than individual passages, Rohr suggests a specific method for readers to use. He describes how to discern the pattern in the historical narrative by highlighting the responses of “threat, rage, and retribution,” through the prophets’ “inner conflict and early awareness,” culminating in a “reordering” of understanding the word of God.

Rohr begins with the prophet Amos, a humble herdsman from the eighth century B.C.E. who became the first to model the role of a Hebrew prophet. In addition to speaking on behalf of the lowly, he directed his critiques against the collective rather than focusing on individual sin and responsibility. Likewise, Jesus attacked the system, just as Pope Francis calls out “structural sin” today. In this chapter, Rohr poses a challenging question: Why do we Christians know so little about Amos? Is it because “his message is culturally incompatible with our modern individualistic values?” This is strong stuff, not a pastoral pat on the head.

Rohr next considers “remnant theology” in the prophets, which sees that “a humble minority is always the critical stand-in for God’s big truth.” Prophets do not get discouraged when their message is rejected by the group, thereby leaving the consequences to God. There was a kind of “social agreement within Israel to tolerate and expect the prophet’s provocations, no matter how much they hated them,” Rohr explains. According to Rohr, we no longer have institutional protections for these true prophets, ones who “critique their own group first.” Nor do we frequently preach the Hebrew prophets’ messages.

Another interesting chapter concerns Jeremiah. Rohr underscores how Jesus considered himself a prophet in the lineage of Jeremiah, “emphasizing a lifestyle of justice and compassion instead of temple worship.” Like Amos, Jeremiah calls the people as a collective, not as individuals, to repent. He joins his people through the “disorder” phase, leading them to a new order, a new covenant. While the previous covenant was bilateral, in this new covenant, Rohr states, “only God can fill in all the gaps. Henceforth, there is no such thing as deserving or earning anything. All is grace.” Rohr also follows the tradition of accepting Jeremiah as the author of the book of Lamentations, expressing the pain of the Babylonian exile from Jerusalem.

One of the surprises of The Tears of Things is that Rohr identifies John the Baptist as one of the “unfinished prophets,” along with Elijah and Jonah. In his reading, they do not complete the cycle to full love and maturity, but “persist in anger, blaming, and accusations. They remain moralistic and judgmental.” John “does not yet know the language of healing, forgiveness, and grace that we find in Jesus and the mature prophets.”

The historical-critical method of interpretation is especially important for reading Isaiah. According to Rohr, the three Isaiah texts express the “expansion from self-love, to neighbor love, to love of otherness, which is the very nature of God’s love,” as well as the power of redemptive suffering and the idea of universal salvation in a “new heaven and a new earth.” He offers a close textual analysis, using the method suggested in the earlier chapter.

Rohr applauds the Jewish people for including Ezekiel’s text in their Scriptures, despite Ezekiel’s anger toward them, his “lurid descriptions of the people’s depravity,” and his strange and difficult visions. Among the behaviors Ezekiel criticized was the practice of usury, something the church used to condemn but now fully accommodates. Rohr sees in Ezekiel a repudiation of a God who demands retributive justice. He discovers instead a God of restorative justice, God’s “divine freedom to do good at all costs.”

If we do not understand this journey of spiritual growth which the prophets embody, Rohr cautions, we are left with “a dangerous God.” With them, we can see “the radical decentering of their own selves . . . in favor of another center that has shown itself as love.” In this book, Rohr calls for more contemporary prophets (and prophetesses) to give voice to sacred criticism. He ends the book with a summary of the qualities of a prophet, a list of the prophets of Israel along with sources and timelines, and, finally, his “seven themes of alternative orthodoxy,” a summary of his own prophetic teaching.

This book can be used as a guide for greater understanding of the prophets’ journey through the necessary “tears of things” and their historically based biblical tradition. It is inspiration and information at once. Rohr speculates that our refusal to accept that God loves us unconditionally will “probably forever be the anguish of every prophet and the burden of every mystic or saint.” If this book is indeed his swan song, he has sung that message loud and clearly. ♦

A poet and frequent book reviewer, Maryanne Hannan is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. A resident of upstate New York, she is the author of Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st-Century Psalm Responsorials (Wipf and Stock, 2019). More information at www.mhannan.com.

Image: 18th-century Russian icon depicting the prophets Amos and Obadiah / Wikimedia Commons