Interviewed by David Hardin

David Hardin: Richard, to many people I know, the Center for Contemplation and Action is almost an oxymoron. They view contemplation as a kind of avoidance of life or action.Richard Rohr: Yes, I think that is why we chose the title. Even though it is a cumbersome title, we knew these classic polarities had to be put together because they are too often separated. I think it produces schizophrenic Christianity if they are not put together. We put it in our title to hold ourselves to it.

Hardin: You are talking about the schizophrenia being contemplation on the one hand and social action on the other.

Rohr: That’s right.

Hardin: Why are they each necessary?

Rohr: I think they are un-whole without the other. I have often used the metaphor of the spring and the stream — contemplation perhaps being the spring and action being the stream. If you just stay with the spring and it doesn’t flow out, it becomes dead water after while. There is, of course, nothing to flow if there isn’t some action. They really necessitate one another. It is like breathing in and out. You can’t do one without the other.

Hardin: A wise friend of mine said that you can’t give what you don’t have. You get the skills and the strength from meditation that perhaps you can then use in the world. What kinds of problems does the Center address?

Rohr: We are probably somewhat unusual, at least in the American church, in terms of training lay people who are working with the disadvantaged, working with refugees, working with a battered women’s shelter. They come to us from all over the country and really the English-speaking world. They live with us for six weeks. In the morning, they work maybe at the homeless shelter, at the jail where I am the chaplain.

In the afternoons, we give them classes on contemplative prayer, Liberation Theology, scripture, spirituality. They have a spiritual director and they live in community while they are there. The community experience itself is sort of the matrix where all of this can happen.

Hardin: Who are these people?

Rohr: They are usually people in the middle of life. Most who apply to come are people who have already gotten in the fray and realize how hard it is. You can romantically idealize the poor, but when you are actually running the soup kitchen, you see the dark side of the ministry.

Often they are people who are losing heart or losing the vision, or who maybe haven’t learned how to pray yet. They come to us wanting to put those together.

Hardin: You mentioned that you work with the people in the jail. There was a horrendous riot in the New Mexico Prison not many years ago. What can we do about people in prisons? What is your prescription for a really healthy prison system?

Rohr: Our assumption is, of course, whatever this means in our minds, that they are bad people. I have been chaplain there for five years. To be brutally honest, the only completely communal thing I have seen is that most of them are poor.

Secondly, most of them did not have good parenting, were not believed in, were not loved. What I would primarily advise is some kind of prison system that really seeks to give these men and women back their humanity. Give them back their dignity, back themselves, back their soul as we were saying in this talk. Merely incarcerating them doesn’t do that.

Hardin: We almost take their humanity away in prison.

Rohr: I’m afraid we brutalize them and we really are not resolving the problem at all.

Hardin: I think we are afraid of being soft, or something like that.

Rohr: There is a bit of a punitive attitude in a lot of us who think that punishment is going to achieve holiness or goodness or reform.

Hardin: Thank you very much for being with us.

Rohr: You are welcome. My delight.