Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Forty-Four: Rediscovering the Common Good

A Foundation for the Common Good

Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners ministry and a longtime friend of Fr. Richard’s, connects the idea of the common good with Jesus’ proclamation of the Kingdom of God.

I believe the moral prerequisite for solving the deepest problems this country and the world now face is a commitment to an ancient idea whose time has urgently come: the common good. . . .

Our life together can be better. Ours is a shallow and selfish age, and we are in need of conversion—from looking out just for ourselves to also looking out for one another. It’s time to hear and heed a call to a different way of life, to reclaim a very old idea called the common good. Jesus issued that call and announced the kingdom of God—a new order of living in sharp contrast to all the political and religious kingdoms of the world. That better way of life was meant to benefit not only his followers but everybody else too.

Christianity is not a religion that gives some people a ticket to heaven and makes them judgmental of all others. Rather, it’s a call to a relationship that changes all our other relationships. Jesus told us a new relationship with God also brings us into a new relationship with our neighbor, especially with the most vulnerable of this world, and even with our enemies. But we don’t always hear that from the churches. This call to love our neighbor is the foundation for reestablishing and reclaiming the common good, which has fallen into cultural and political—and even religious—neglect.

Judaism, of course, agrees that our relationship with God is supposed to change all our other relationships, and Jesus’s recitation of the law’s great commandments to love God and your neighbor flows right out of the books of Deuteronomy [see 6:5] and Leviticus [see 19:18]. . . . In fact, virtually all the world’s major religions say that you cannot separate your love for God from your love for your neighbor, your brothers and sisters. Even the nonreligious will affirm the idea of “the Golden Rule”: “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:31). . . .

While some form of the Golden Rule has been around for thousands of years, we seem to have lost a sense of its importance and its transformative power. Wallis urges:

It is time to reclaim the neglected common good and to learn how faith might help, instead of hurt, in that important task. Our public life could be made better, even transformed or healed, if our religious traditions practiced what they preached in our personal lives; in our families’ decisions; in our work and vocations; in the ministry of our churches, synagogues, and mosques; and in our collective witness. In all these ways we can put the faith community’s influence at the service of this radical neighbor-love ethic that is both faithful to God and the common good.

Jim Wallis, The (Un)Common Good: How the Gospel Brings Hope to a World Divided (Brazos Press: 2014), xi, 3‒4, 5.

Image credit: Rose B. Simpson, River Girls in situ (detail), 2019, sculpture. Photo by Kate Russell. Used with permission. 

We featured the artist of these sculptures, Rose B. Simpson, at our recent CONSPIRE conference—so many of us were impacted by her creations that we decided to share her work with our Daily Meditations community for the month of November.

Image inspiration: This is a piece that was specifically about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. It was about empowerment and companionship and the moment of heartbreak and how do we find strength to create a new reality. I called them River Girls because there was a young girl from my tribe that was found in the river real close to my studio as I was making these. I made these pieces and every bead on their arms was a prayer, every day that I worked in the clay was a prayer for strength and for protection and for clarity… —Rose B. Simpson, from CONSPIRE Interview, 2021

Learn more about the Daily Meditations Editorial Team. 

Prayer For Our Community

Loving God, you fill all things with a fullness and hope that we can never comprehend. Thank you for leading us into a time where more of reality is being unveiled for us all to see. We pray that you will take away our natural temptation for cynicism, denial, fear and despair. Help us have the courage to awaken to greater truth, greater humility, and greater care for one another. May we place our hope in what matters and what lasts, trusting in your eternal presence and love. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our suffering world. Please add your own intentions . . . Knowing, good God, you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God. Amen.
Listen to Father Richard pray this prayer aloud.

Story From Our Community

A United Methodist all my life, who would have thought that a Franciscan would become so influential in my spiritual journey! Fr. Richard's meditations, books, and conferences have helped me see that being a Christian is not about having correct beliefs, but about and trying to create a peaceful world.
—Margaret C.
Share your own story with us.

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Explore Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations archive at cac.org. 

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