Over the past four decades, he has gained a devoted following for his provocative vision of Christianity. Rohr is slight, with a white beard and the starry eyes of a person who spends long periods in silence. Rohr told me, “Merton pulled back the veil.” In Christianity, the practice dates back to the first several centuries after Christ, though it was revitalized in the twentieth century by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Being made to sit still required a surrender to a force greater than his ego it was an opportunity to practice contemplation, a form of meditative prayer that has equivalents in almost every religion. “For two and a half minutes, I’m not in control at this stoplight,” he said. The voice suggested that he find happiness where he was, rather than searching for it elsewhere. “I heard as close as I know to the voice of God,” he said.
Rohr hates wasting time, and he had been sitting at the light fuming when a divine message arrived. “This light is interminably long,” he told me one morning, in late August, as we stopped at a red light while retracing his route. Not long ago, on his way to the post office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Richard Rohr, a seventy-six-year-old Franciscan friar, had a spiritual experience. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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