On Diversionary Temptation

St. Julian Ukrainian Catholic Church

Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest and teacher. I can’t claim to understand in depth his view of the world or all the essentials of his faith; our understanding is bound somewhat—always—by our growing-up experiences and education. 

I have, however, been reading his daily meditations for some time and gaining access to some insights that experience so far failed to provide. I’m not alone—I’d venture to say—in having struggled always with the quarreling in my own mind and in my Christian home, the church; an unease over a myriad of doctrines and “right ways of doing things,” and wondered how that could ever have grown out of the Sermon on the Mount, the prospect of personal, familial joy and peace that is—according to Christ’s witness—the nature of the Kingdom.

I posted this excerpt from the January 26^th meditation on Facebook, so some of you have seen it there. The meditations can be emailed to you daily by going to the Centre for Action and Contemplation website and enrolling.

You might come to consider what is meant by “diversionary temptations,” and if that’s a legitimate sensibility, might further consider into which category you and I have been tempted to divert from “essentials” to preoccupy ourselves with “non-essentials,” and further to debate with Rohr whether certain doctrinal issues that he would consider “non-essential” are really pretty . . . well, essential. But then we’d probably be allowing that debate to be yet another distraction. 

 

Is government’s liberalization of the definition of marriage, for instance, a “diversionary temptation” for our churches? Or is it an essential?

 

More importantly, might it be something that displaces true fellowship, true worship, true action toward the building of the Kingdom?

 

I find that Rohr’s meditations help me gain a clearer understanding of myself, although the emphasis on contemplation in arriving at the peace of Christ is something that eludes me mostly . . . doggone it! I think my “diversionary temptation” of note is freneticism, the inability to stop moving, to fill every hour with “stuff,” lest I be bored to death.

 

Here is the quote repeated:

St. Francis cut to the essentials and avoided what had been, and continues to be, a preoccupation with non-essentials. Even Thomas Aquinas said that the actual precepts Jesus taught were “very few.” But the diversionary temptations have been many. In the Franciscan worldview, separation from the world is the monastic temptation, asceticism is the temptation of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, moralism or celibacy is the Catholic temptation, intellectualizing is the seminary temptation, privatized Gospel and inerrant “belief” is the Protestant temptation, and the most common temptation for all of us is to use belonging to the right group and practicing its proper rituals as a substitute for any personal or life-changing encounter with the Divine.

Enjoy a restful, contemplative Sunday Sabbath.