Resilience Requires Some Disorder

“Resilience is really a secular word for what religion was trying to say with the word faith and why even Jesus emphasized faith even more than love. Without a certain ability to let go, to trust, to allow, you don’t get to any new place. If you stay with order too long and you’re not resilient [enough] to allow a certain degree of disorder, you don’t get very smart, you just get rigid. Unfortunately, this is what characterizes so many religious people. They’re not resilient at all. Then there’s another set of people, maybe represented by the millennial generation, who have settled down in disorder—that there’s no pattern, there’s nothing always true. It’s a deep cynicism about reality, and that’s equally problematic. I think such faith in both good order and acceptable disorder—creating a new kind of creative reorder—is actually somewhat rare.”

So said Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar, author and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation.