Prophetic Voice
We need the prophets, the far-seeing ones, the dreamers in broad daylight, the long-distance high beams that show us glimpses of where we are going and what the outcome of our choices and lifestyles will be. Megan McKenna
Gregg’s Reflection
Throughout the Old Testament, the prophetic word comes from unusual sources. The prophets were not rabbis, they were outsiders who always lived at the edge of the inside, closer to the poor than the powerful, able to critique a system they were a part of. People rarely listened, and the powers that be always attacked and dismissed them. The prophetic voice never comes from where we expect to hear it.
In the Sounds of Silence, Simon and Garfunkel tell us:
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence"
Saint Francis was a prophet whose life touched many in his time, and continues to resonate deeply with people today. He grew up son of a merchant, went off to war, was captured and imprisoned for a year. Reflecting on his life, he had seen the beauty of nature all around, and was awakened to a deeper journey. A dream called him to serve the Lord.
He walked away from his family wealth, kissed a leper he encountered in the countryside and found love entering his heart. Praying before a crucifix in a church ruin, he heard Christ tell him to ‘go and repair the church.’ He sold everything he had to fulfill that call. It became his home. In his own words, he ’left the world’ and married Lady Poverty. Clare of Assisi joined his band of followers. Francis started the Franciscan order, and Clare followed, founding the Poor Clares.
During the Crusades, he traveled to meet the Sultan, crossed no man’s land with only one companion and met with the leader of the Muslim Armies to talk peace. It was a model of Muslim/Christian dialog that is a beacon to us today. Francis was a prophet, and his Franciscan order drew Richard Rohr early in life.
I didn’t grow up in church, and what I saw of the church was summarized by saying, “People dress up and go to church on Sunday. Then from Monday to Saturday you can’t see much evidence lived out in so many.” As an Enneagram 8, the Challenger, I could see the brokenness of the church in my teenage years.
Genie and I saw the movie Brother Sun, Sister Moon about St Francis and Clare. It made a huge impact on me. I was struck by how closely they imitated the life of Jesus in their lives and ministry. That was the really real. We have drifted so far from this example. Yet, some fifty years later, no one wants to hear about the brokenness of the American church.
In the Living School, I got to ask Richard Rohr this question one day: I find that the prophetic voice often evokes defensiveness. I find very little learning happens when people become defensive. So, how do we communicate prophetic messages without causing defensiveness and shutting down learning? He responded:
You have to move to soft prophecy, encouraging movement to the better, not condemning the present. Avoid all accusatory language. The accusatory voice is Satan. The voice of God never works through guilt and shame. We all get tired of being judged, railed at. They are zealots. The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
My pastor in Atlanta, Scott Armstrong says, “You never invite the prophet to dinner twice.” Ponder that for a minute. Let us wade into the Prophetic Voice of the Saints and Mystics across history and try to see the world as God sees it.
Blessings, Gregg
Journaling Prompts
Have you found voice to critique the brokenness of the system around us? In what ways has God given you ’eyes to see’ more deeply that the superficial view our cultural religion gives us? Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats religion for lunch.” Contemplate what that means in our world today.
Scripture
When there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, will reveal myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams.
Numbers 12:6
I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their fellow Israelites, and I will put my words in his mouth. He will them everything I command him.
Deutoronomy 18:18
The the Lord reached out his hand and touched my mouth and said to me, “ I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.
Jeremiah 1:9
Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet.
Matthew 11:9
And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.
Luke 1:76-79
After the people saw the signs Jesus performed, they began to say,“Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.”
John 6:14
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
1 Corinthians 13:2
For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
2 Peter 1:21
At this I fell at his feet to worship him. But he said to me, “Don’t do that! I am a fellow servant with you and with your brothers and sisters who hold to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God! For it is the Spirit of prophecy who bears testimony to Jesus.
Revelations 19:10
Ancient Writings
It is necessary for the perfection of human society that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation.
Thomas Aquinas
There is not in the world a kind of life more sweet and delightful, than that of a continual conversation with God; those only can comprehend it who practice and experience it.
Brother Lawrence
May we look upon our treasure, our furniture and our garments. And try to discover whether the seeds of war are nourished by these, our possessions.
John Woolman, A Plea for the Poor (1763)
Modern Writings
Acts of worship must be tested by the degree to which they remain living channels for the direct release of God into the life of the worshipper. When they become institutionalized they are apt to become dead so the mystic seems always to be the foe of institutional religion. He is very sensitive to the crystallizing of acts of worship into dead forms. It is profoundly true that he does not stand in need of the institution or the institutional forms as such. Even in Catholicism any careful reading of the testimony of the mystics convinces one that the church has no real friend in the mystic.
Howard Thurman, p. 114-5 A Strange Freedom: The Best of Howard Thurman on Religious Experience and Public Life.
A prophet is not just a mouthpiece, but a hollow reed through which God blows out a beautiful song of love. They pass fire through a bamboo flute to remove any resistance to the flow coming through.
Mirabai Starr, Living School Teaching
Culture eats religion for lunch.
Peter Drucker
When I feed poor people, they call me a saint. When I ask why there are poor people, they call me a communist.
Dom Helder, Archbishop of Recife, Brazil
Save me from the curse that lies dark across the modern clergy: the curse of compromise, of imitation, of professionalism. Save me from the error of judging a church by its size, its popularity or the amount of its yearly offering. Help me to remember that I am a prophet—not a promoter, not a religious manager, but a prophet. Let me never become a slave to crowds. Heal my soul of carnal ambitions and deliver me from the itch for publicity.
A.W. Tozer, Voice of a Prophet: Who Speaks for God?
God made us for Himself, and our hearts are dissatisfied until we find our satisfaction in God. It is God that we need. It is God that we lost when we sinned; it is God that we get back when we are saved.
A.W. Tozer, Voice of a Prophet: Who Speaks for God?
We consume and waste and throw away and everyone else in the world starves, and starves miserably.
Thomas Merton, Search for Solitude, p. 391
Jesus seems to have taken every possible opportunity of getting away to a quiet and lonely place for prayer and reflection. “In the morning, while it was still very dark,” Mark 1:35 tells us, “[Jesus] got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed” (see also Mark 6:46 and Luke 4:42). Luke 5:16 says he did this regularly. Before choosing his twelve apostles, he spent the whole night in prayer, we are told (Luke 6:12).
What interests us here is the powerfully simple way in which prophecy and mysticism form an inseparable whole in the life and spirituality of Jesus. Traditionally prophets were mystics and mystics were prophets. Any idea that one could be a prophet calling for justice and social change without some experience of union with God was unthinkable. Equally unthinkable was any idea that one could be a perfectly good mystic without becoming critically outspoken about the injustices of one’s time.
Albert Nolan, Jesus Today: A Spirituality of Radical Freedom, p. 72
Prophets are never mainstream. They hold a completely different vision of life than do most. In fact, they hold the rest of the vision of holiness, the part that seldom is taught in the same breath as charity or morality or good citizenship. They are the other half of Christianity, the forgotten half of the spirituality of the Christian world. They see what’s missing in the world around them and set out to see that the world supplies it for those who need it most. They value other ends in life than the ones toward which most of the world strains for too much wealth, too much power, and too much distance from the dailiness of the daily.
The prophet in this day facing a world where rugged individualism reigns and those who can’t make it on their own are easily forgotten now must do more than simply serve. They must lead this world beyond its present divisions of race and gender, of national identity and economic class.
Yes, the prophet is always out of step with the average response to pain or want or loss or oppression. They are always disturbingly different, always stirring up the consciousness of those left behind, always confronting a world that obstructs them, always on a path toward the Kingdom rather than the palace.
Joan Chittister, The Time is Now: A call to Uncommon Courage
American philosopher William Hocking declared that the prophet is the mystic in action. The mystic says Yes to life and the prophet says No to injustice and whatever interferes with life. The mystic encounters the Divine, ascending the mountaintop, but the prophet descends and returns to the dirty work of implementing the revelation of divine compassion. Does the prophet in you take over from the mystic in you?
Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 199
The mystics and nondual seers of the OT are the prophets. Jesus comes out of that stream. Jesus is a layman. He is much more akin to a prophet than to a priest or rabbi.
Richard Rohr, Living School Teaching
Most of the prophets seem to be ordinary people who find themselves with a gift. Prophecy in the Bible is not a matter of foretelling, but to play with the English language a bit it’s forth-telling. Prophecy is speaking with such a forwardness of truth, direction, and passion that, after the fact, we say the prophet foretold it. It’s not that they’re really predicting something, it’s just that they have immense spiritual insight.
The original Hebrew word for a prophet meant simply that: one who sees. A prophet is a seer who sees all the way through. The reason prophets can speak so clearly and strongly in the now is because they judge the now from, of all places, the future. Prophets have seen the future. In other words, they have seen where God is leading humanity. They have seen and drawn close to the heart of God and they know God is leading us somewhere good.
Since they know the conclusion and where it is that we’re heading, they become impatient and angry at the present state of things. If we know where history is going and what God is leading us toward; if we know what our lives could and should be, why are we wasting time with all this violence and all this stupidity?
The prophets judge the present by the perspective of the future. Perhaps that’s how we began to think that prophets foretold the future because they forth-told the future. They were the original futurists. The fancy, theological word for this is eschatology. The prophets live out of this futuristic vision of God’s dream for the world, where God is leading history, and where it’s all headed.
Prophets become so infatuated with that final ideal goal and vision that they become passionately sad and angry about what we’re doing now. Once we experience the universal being of God, the present becomes so dissatisfying and disappointing. We wonder how people can be satisfied with so little and content with such tawdry lives.
Richard Rohr, Way of the Prophet (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 1994)
A prophet must hold on to the truth of their anger, especially as it is directed toward injustice but the danger of the anger is that when we let it control us, we’re not a help anymore. That’s why we have so many false prophets in America and in the world today. They are so angry.
I want to sit there and say, “I agree with you. That situation deserves anger, but you’re not a good messenger because you’re only making me more angry. You’re feeding your anger by letting it become your ego.” Of course, in my early life that was me. I think what we see in the Hebrew prophets is autobiographical.
My early social justice sermons at New Jerusalem just edged people out of the room. I’m sure many of them thought, “I don’t think we want to hear Richard today. He’s on one of his tirades.” They saw me at my angriest when I had just come back from Latin America and Africa. Anger is usually a necessary starting place, but it is never the full message.
That’s why I always go back to prayer. It’s the only way for me. I rest in God, let God massage my heart for a while, cool me down and say, “I love you. You don’t have to save the world, Richard. You don’t have to ‘play’ the prophet and you don’t have to do anything except what I tell you to do.” The more I rest there with God, the next time the words come out so differently.
We’ve got to learn how to discern the Spirit. We have to listen to our own hearts and discern where the voices are coming from. Are they harsh, angry, hurtful, resentful, cynical voices telling us we’ve got to go out and do some righteous thing? Or are they coming from a place of freedom and a place of peace?
The prophet is the one who can be a faithful lover, who is truly seeking the whole and seeking the good, and not just seeking the self. We can tell after a while the difference between someone who is operating out of their own anger and compulsions, and someone who is operating out of the heart of God.
Richard Rohr, CAC Morning Devotion 12/29/23
The prophet gives us a direction and vision of the whole. For most people, history was circular; it wasn’t going any place in particular. But the prophet gives history a goal, aim, and direction and calls history forward.
This is essential because if we don’t have a sense that history is going somewhere, we will go in circles and our lives will become meaningless. We enter a kind of existential absurdity with no direction in which many people become caught. Without an eschatological sense of time, we become trapped in the now. Without the word of the prophet, religion becomes no more than a legitimation of the status quo.
Richard Rohr, The Prophets
The shadow is that part of the self that we don’t want to see, we don’t want others to see, and of which we’re always afraid. Our tendency is to try to hide it or deny it, even and most especially from ourselves. Jesus, quoting the prophet Isaiah, describes it as “listening but not understanding, seeing but not perceiving” (Matthew 13:14-15).
Jesus and the prophets deal with the cause, which is the ego. Our problem is not our shadow self as much as our over-defended ego, which always sees and hates its own faults in other people, and thus avoids its own conversion. Jesus’ phrase for the denied shadow is “the plank in your own eye,” which you invariably see as the “splinter in your neighbor’s eye” (Matthew 7:3-5). Jesus’ advice is absolutely perfect: “Take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly enough to take the splinter out of your neighbor’s eye.”
He does not deny that we should deal with evil, but we had better do our own inner housecleaning first. If we do not see our own “plank,” it is inevitable that we will hate it elsewhere. Once we expose the shadow for what it is, its game is over. Its effectiveness entirely depends on disguise (see 2 Corinthians 11:14) and not seeing the plank in our own eye. Once we see our own plank, the “speck” in our neighbor’s eye becomes inconsequential.
Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p. 78, 79-80.
The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Just go ahead and live positively, “In God, thought God, with God.” In time, the fruits will be apparent. In the short run you will hold the unresolved tension of the cross. In the long run, you will usher in something entirely new and healing.
Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern, p. 20
The unique and rare position of a biblical prophet is always on the edge of the inside. The prophet is not an outsider throwing rocks or an insider comfortably defending the status quo. Instead, the prophet lives precariously with two perspectives held tightly together. In this position, one is not ensconced safely inside, nor situated so far outside as to lose compassion or understanding.
Prophets must hold these perspectives in a loving and necessary creative tension. It is a unique kind of seeing and living, which will largely leave the prophet with “nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58) and easily attracting the “hatred of all” who have invariably taken sides in opposing groups (Luke 21:16-17). The prophet speaks for God, and almost no one else, it seems. When we are both inside and outside, we are an ultimate challenge, possible reformers, and lasting invitations to a much larger world.
Richard Rohr, On the Edge of the Inside: The Prophetic Position, Radical Grace 25, no. 4, The Eight Core Principles (Fall 2012): 23-26.
The theological term for the rejection of dominating supremacy is Kenosis, which means self emptying. Rather than seizing, hoarding, and exercising power in the dominating ways of typical kings, Jesus was consistently empowering others. He descended the ladders and pyramids of influence instead of climbing them, released power instead of grasping at it, and served instead of dominating. He ultimately overturned all conventional understandings of supremacy, Lordship, sovereignty, and power by purging them of violence-to the point where he himself chose to be killed rather than kill.
Brian McLaren, Great Spiritual Migration, p. 91
I see myself as an “edge walker,” wandering along the hemlines of the Christ tradition. I stand at the inside edge of a tradition that has brought many people, including me, deep pain and has also brought many people, including me, deep joy and meaning. The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature describes her edge walking as traveling “the narrow space between the religious tradition she credits for having ‘forged her soul,’ and her direct and very personal experiences in nature that have revealed a truth of their own.”
Edge walkers occupy a thin space and are by definition a bit lonely. Most people inhabit the vast spaces on both sides of edges. But those of us called to the threshold the edges between life in this thin space and recognize one another when we meet. The edges between biosystems are called ecotones. These thresholds usually contain the most biodiversity and therefore are the most resilient. The time is coming soon when the edges we inhabit will start to redefine the center. And we will need to lean on and learn from one another as we, together, engage in the work of that redefining.
Each of us is characterized by our own unique gifts, communities of influence, and a particular bio-region. But we cannot behave as silos. The more diverse our relationships are, the more resiliently we can hold our own individual edges. Every religion has an edge where the mystics live. There have always been edge walkers: those who didn’t follow along with the status quo, who didn’t swallow the version of religion offered by those on top of the hierarchy as The Only Way. And at that edge, spirituality and nature are in an unbroken relationship.
Victoria Loorz, Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred, p. 14-16.
We need the prophets, the far-seeing ones, the dreamers in broad daylight, the long-distance high beams that show us glimpses of where we are going and what the outcome of our choices and lifestyles will be. One way to define a prophet is a person who sees so clearly what is happening in the present moment that he or she can tell us what is going to happen if we don’t change immediately and radically. God is not indifferent to or far from anyone’s life, but rather draws near to those who know pain because of the sin and indifference of others. The prophet loudly insists that God is not impartial and that God will not allow anyone who professes belief in the Holy to harm another.
Megan McKenna, Prophets: Words of Fire, p. 19, 22.