The Tears Of Things

When the world feels too angry to bear, how do you keep your heart soft, truthful, and useful? In The Tears of Things, Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr argues that the biblical prophets chart a surprising way through our moment: not by more outrage or perfect religion, but by letting anger ripen into tears—tears that alchemize into compassion, solidarity, and courageous love. Rohr contends that prophecy is not fortune-telling; it’s full truth-telling. And its most reliable fruit isn’t more winners and losers, but a reordered consciousness that can love what is real, confront what is cruel, and cooperate with God’s universal mercy.

Rohr frames the prophetic journey as a pattern: we begin in order (our inherited codes), we move through holy disorder (when those codes break), and we are invited into reorder (a wiser, humbler love that includes what used to be excluded). The prophets of Israel—Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others—travel this arc in their own lives and writings. They start with deserved anger at injustice, pass through lament, and end in praise and restorative hope. It’s the movement Virgil intuited as the lacrimae rerum (“the tears of things”) and that Jesus embodied as both sentry and healer (compare Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Prophets and Walter Brueggemann’s Reality, Grief, Hope).

What the prophets actually do

The prophets are not religious scolds propping up purity codes. They are officially licensed critics of their own people’s blind spots, calling out idolatry (making non-ultimate things ultimate), the seductions of wealth and war, and the way power hides evil in respectable systems. Amos exposes a society that “tramples on the heads of the ordinary people” while singing loud worship songs (Amos 2:6–7; 5:21–24). Jeremiah deconstructs temple piety when it excuses exploitation. Ezekiel shocks a traumatized community into seeing that even their exile can become the seedbed of grace. Throughout, the aim is not humiliation but healing; not retribution but reorder. Rohr leans on René Girard’s insight that cultures maintain order by scapegoating a few (Violence and the Sacred). The prophets unmask this mechanism and redirect our gaze from “bad apples” to the rot in the barrel.

From wrath to tears to praise

Rohr shows that many prophetic books begin with blistering denunciations (Zephaniah’s dies irae), but the text itself carries the prophet beyond rage. Habakkuk rages for three chapters, then pivots to a stubborn “nevertheless” of joy (Hab. 3:17–19). Jeremiah’s anger melts into the promise of a new covenant written on the heart (Jer. 31). Ezekiel moves from bizarre, searing visions to the tender image of the Good Shepherd and the valley of dry bones being raised to life (Ezek. 34–37). Even Isaiah—actually three Isaiahs across different eras—progresses from “Holy, holy, holy” awe and judgment to the servant songs and a near-universal invitation: “I am here, I am here” to a people who weren’t even looking (Isa. 65:1). You watch prophets evolve—and you are invited to evolve with them.

Why this matters now

If you’re exhausted by culture-war religion, Rohr offers categories and companions for a different faithfulness. He distinguishes the priestly role (building and tending the container) from the prophetic role (testing the container for love, justice, and truth). Religion without prophets becomes a cult of innocence—obsessed with looking right instead of becoming real. Society without prophets defaults to revolutions of vengeance because it lacks any organic way to reform itself from within (think John Lewis’s “good trouble”). The prophetic task, Rohr argues, is to midwife holy disorder in ways that break idolatry, surface collective sin, and make space for reorder as restorative justice—what Pope Francis calls a shift from “mixing politics with religion” to seeing how God actually loves the world in public.

What you’ll learn in this summary

You’ll see the order–disorder–reorder pattern applied to your inner life and our social life. You’ll learn why the prophets target systems (Amos) more than scapegoats, and how God regularly works through a remnant—a “critical mass” of faithful minorities—to pull history forward (Isa. 37; Dorothy Day; MLK). You’ll follow Jeremiah and Ezekiel into the shock of a unilateral, grace-soaked covenant that ends the tit-for-tat economy. You’ll meet “unfinished prophets” (Elijah, Jonah, John the Baptist) whose zeal stops short of compassion—and discover why Job models the completed arc. You’ll recover tears as a form of wisdom (Lamentations, Francis of Assisi) and explore how Isaiah’s three voices became Jesus’s own mission statement in Nazareth. Finally, you’ll gather practical criteria for discerning genuine prophecy today—humility, fruits of the Spirit, and the courage to critique your own group first.

Prophetic heart

“Truth without love is not transformational truth. Truth from a cruel heart undoes its message.” Rohr’s refrain reframes the point: the prophet’s destination is not victory; it is vulnerability strong enough to love enemies and rebuild the city.

In short, The Tears of Things is an invitation to grow up spiritually with the prophets—so your anger can become lament, your lament can mature into compassion, and your compassion can become the kind of love that holds the world together while it changes.

Rohr’s core map is disarmingly simple: order, disorder, reorder. You start with a necessary structure (family, church, nation, identity)—the first half of life’s scaffolding. Then, usually through failure, loss, or truth-telling, that structure breaks. If you consent to the “holy disorder,” you grow into a wiser order that includes what the first order could not hold. The prophets are the field guides through that middle terrain.

Why disorder is holy

Disorder is where idolatry gets unmasked. Israel’s exile in Babylon terminated any illusion that temple, monarchy, or purity codes guaranteed God. Jeremiah is thrown into a cistern and still learns to sing about a new covenant written on hearts, not stone (Jer. 31:31–34; 38:6). Ezekiel acts out strange street theater—lying on his side for 390 days, shaving his head, eating a scroll—because ordinary speech can’t reach a traumatized people (Ezek. 4; 5; 3). In church history, Vatican II played a similar role. Though parishes looked strong in 1965, a deeper stagnation demanded fresh air. When reforms came, so did backlash—evidence that disorder is the price of honesty. Rohr names Representative John Lewis’s “good trouble” as the civic analog: disobedience that cracks open possibility without surrendering to cynicism.

Priests and prophets need each other

Rohr distinguishes the priestly role (Aaron) from the prophetic role (Moses and Miriam). Priests keep the container: rites, teaching, continuity. Prophets ensure the container serves love, not fear. Moses smashes the tablets and grinds the golden calf to dust, then makes the people drink their idolatry (Exod. 32) because containers become golden calves when they stop serving communion. In Rohr’s telling, every institution needs “licensed, beloved critics” on the inside—a “loyal opposition” that can name shadow, stay in relationship, and help the group move through disorder into reorder (he founded the Center for Action and Contemplation for this very formation). Without prophets, reform comes only by rupture and blood.

How you practice this shift

Practically, you can notice where your rules stop working—where your “right answers” don’t heal people. Rohr gives examples: an anti-gay stance that collapses when someone you love comes out; biblical literalism that ignores contradictions; political loyalty that excuses cruelty. Instead of doubling down, you consent to liminal space—the between time. You might take a “fearless moral inventory” (AA language) or cultivate contemplation to widen your mind beyond either/or. The goal isn’t to abolish order (that’s chaos) but to transcend and include it (Ken Wilber’s phrase). As Rohr puts it, “Those who love order need to be humbled by holy disorder. Those working through disorder need the insight of reorder.”

Checkpoint for maturity

Ask yourself: Am I arguing to win, or am I allowing reality to teach me? If you can hold paradox (law and mercy, truth and tenderness) without fleeing into rigidity or relativism, you’re moving into reorder.

Rohr’s bold claim is that God’s own pattern rides this arc: from law (order), through prophets (disorder), to Christ’s new covenant of gratuitous love (reorder). If you trust that shape, you can risk the middle—knowing that what feels like unraveling may be God’s seamstress work.

Amos, the fig-pruner from Tekoa, is Rohr’s patron saint of systemic sight. He does not sermonize private vices; he indicts the way wealth, worship, and war collude to crush the poor. “Let justice flow like waters and integrity like an unfailing stream,” he pleads, mocking festivals, music, and sacrifices that mask exploitation (Amos 5:21–24). He calls prosperous women “cows of Bashan” who demand drink while the needy starve (4:1). He names cities and regions, not anonymous sinners, because the disease lives in habits and structures.

Why scapegoats keep us sick

Rohr draws on René Girard: societies preserve order by blaming someone—immigrants, heretics, minorities—so the rest can feel innocent. The Bible is unique in exposing this mechanism from within, culminating in Jesus as the unmasking victim. We still play the game: we rail at a corrupt priest but ignore the culture that protected him; we jail a looter and celebrate corporate pillage; we say we love life while idolizing guns and war. Amos refuses the deflection. He addresses the temple priest Amaziah and King Jeroboam not as bad apples, but as symbols of a barrel gone sour (Amos 7). Jesus does the same—healing individuals while asking why they were marginalized in the first place (the demoniac chained among tombs; the hemorrhaging woman bankrupted by doctors).

Preaching that actually heals

Rohr insists that moral energy used to shame people rarely reforms a culture. Positive vision does: “wedding banquet” images, jubilee economics, and earth-based joy (Amos 9:13–15). Applied today, preaching that starts with the common good—equitable housing, dignified work, truth-telling media, ecological sanity—invites participation. Sermons that police personal purity while blessing violent systems produce brittle saints and resentful sinners. This is why Alcoholics Anonymous, with its focus on honesty, powerlessness, amends, and community, functions as “prophetic church” for many (compare William James on spiritual experience; also see Rohr’s Falling Upward).

Your next faithful step

Choose one concrete arena—workplace pay equity, neighborhood policing, school discipline—and ask Amos’s question: Where do our policies create losers so we can feel like winners? Then swap scapegoating for solidarity: partner with those affected, examine the incentives, and aim for restorative practices. As you do, expect resistance—not because you’re wrong, but because you’re naming what a culture denies to stay comfortable.

Amos’s mic drop

“I take no pleasure in your festivals … let justice flow.” If your worship doesn’t change how your city treats the poor, Amos says, God is not impressed.

Seen this way, prophecy is less about calling out personal sins and more about calling forth a people capable of common flourishing.

Again and again, Rohr notes, God works through a remnant—a humble minority whose fidelity carries hope for the whole. Isaiah names it during crisis: “The surviving remnant … shall bring forth new roots below and fruits above” (Isa. 37:31–32). This is not elitism; it’s divine realism. Majorities often choose safety and denial. Truth needs small, sturdy communities to incubate and spread.

What qualifies a remnant

Remnants are not the pure; they are the pierced. Hosea has to marry Gomer so he feels God’s spousal grief in his body. Jeremiah is starved in a cistern and rescued by an Ethiopian eunuch; he learns that salvation often comes from the margins (Jer. 38). Ezekiel sits among exiles and sees dry bones knit into a people (Ezek. 37). In Christian history, think Dorothy Day refusing nuclear drills, Óscar Romero converting from cautious bishop to martyred prophet, or Pope Francis trying to be both high priest and high prophet (Rohr calls this pairing rare but vital). What unites them is not hostility to the institution, but a non-naïve love for it—strong enough to critique, humble enough to stay.

How remnants move history

Rohr borrows a scientific image: “critical mass.” It’s the small amount that catalyzes disproportionate energy. In social change, remnants create alternative practices that expose the mainstream as unnecessary or untrue. Quakers’ nonviolence made “just war” less credible. Black churches’ theology of dignity under Jim Crow seeded the civil rights movement. Today, small communities living economies of gift (see Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics), restorative justice circles, or ecumenical common prayer may carry more reforming power than large but non-transforming institutions.

Becoming part of a remnant

Rohr offers ten traits of mature prophets (humility, team loyalty, detachment from status, fruits of the Spirit, etc.). Practically, you can start by anchoring in two communities: one that forms your interior life (a small group, contemplative practice) and one that engages a concrete work of mercy or justice. Expect little applause; a prophet’s reward is often “nothing—except the telling of the message.” To protect your freedom, minimize payoffs: avoid tying your identity to platform, salary, or party. “You received without charge; give without charge” (Matt. 10:8) becomes a spiritual strategy, not just a pious line.

Hidden leverage

You don’t need a majority to be faithful—just a critical mass who consent to be changed. God seems content with “a few who get it” each generation—and then multiplies their loaves.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your small circle matters, Isaiah’s remnant doctrine says yes. Your fidelity could be the hinge on which a neighborhood—or a church—quietly turns.

No two prophets illustrate the shift from retributive religion to restorative grace more vividly than Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Rohr tracks their path so you can recognize the same conversion in yourself—and in how you think God thinks.

Jeremiah’s heartbreak and new covenant

Jeremiah starts angry—cataloging Israel’s idolatry, warning of famine and conquest. He pays for his honesty with isolation and violence (imprisoned, thrown into a cistern). But his intimacy with God (“You misled me, and I let myself be misled,” Jer. 20:7–9) melts fear into tenderness. In exile’s ash, he announces something unimaginable in a law-based culture: God will write the law inside us; God will “never call your sins to mind” (Jer. 31:33–34). The covenant is no longer a bilateral deal (“obey and be blessed”) but a unilateral gift. Divine faithfulness carries human unfaithfulness without denial. That is reorder.

Ezekiel’s prevenient grace and dry bones

Ezekiel’s first half reads like a fever dream of judgment; then the floor drops into mercy. God says, in effect, “I will treat you not as your conduct deserves but for the sake of my name” (Ezek. 20:44; 16:62–63). Grace precedes worthiness. In chapter 36, God promises a “new heart” and “new spirit”—not because the people got religion right, but because God will not betray God’s nature. Then comes the show-stopper: the valley of dry bones. Ezekiel is told to prophesy to bones, and tendons, flesh, and breath return. This isn’t a miracle of heroic willpower; it’s a revelation that divine breath can restore what looks irretrievably lost (Ezek. 37:1–14).

Why this changes everything

If God is like this, you can stop living in a moral economy of fear and start cooperating with a gift economy of love. Rohr warns that retributive frameworks made hell the center of Christian imagination; the prophets locate “punishment” as consequences within history (war, drought), while keeping God free to heal. Practically, you move from shame-based religion to transformation by consent: “A new heart will I give you” doesn’t produce passivity; it produces participation. You stop asking, “How do I earn?” and start asking, “How do I align?”

Test for grace

When a teaching leaves you anxious, counting, or comparing, it’s likely the old economy. When it leaves you grateful and responsible—eager to repair and rejoice—you’re likely tasting the new covenant.

Jeremiah and Ezekiel dare to do what many still fear: break the link between God’s justice and payback. Rohr’s invitation is to trust their courage—and let your own theology grow up.

Not all prophets complete the arc from anger to compassion. Rohr names Elijah, Jonah, and John the Baptizer as “unfinished prophets”—each truthful, each courageous, yet each arrested by zeal. Their stories diagnose our own temptations and point toward a fuller maturity (here Rohr’s reading echoes Heschel’s insistence that prophetic pathos must end in divine pity).

Elijah: spectacle without softness

Elijah calls down fire on Mount Carmel, then slaughters Baal’s prophets (1 Kings 18). It’s dramatic, but the fruit is murder. Only later does God appear to him as “a gentle breeze,” not wind, earthquake, or fire (1 Kings 19). Elijah covers his face—symbol of partial knowledge. Rohr’s warning: passion and pyrotechnics can mimic prophecy while leaving hearts unconverted. Ask whether your “wins” are making you more tender or just more triumphant.

Jonah: correct and unwilling

Jonah hates that God forgives Nineveh. He would rather be right than rejoice. God expands the circle of compassion to include “those who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals” (Jonah 4:11). Jesus later offers only “the sign of Jonah”: the three-day journey through darkness that ends xenophobia and makes room for mercy beyond borders (Matt. 12:39). If your politics makes you resent your opponent’s conversion, you may be stuck with Jonah.

John the Baptizer: purity without Pentecost

John is humble and brave—“not worthy to untie sandals”—but his message remains largely fire and winnowing. Jesus honors him as “none greater,” then adds, “yet the least in the kingdom is greater” (Matt. 11:11). Why? Because Jesus’s baptism is “fire and Spirit,” not water alone—inner transformation, not just outer renunciation. John dies for a purity code; Jesus dies to end sacrificial religion.

Job: the completed arc

Rohr proposes Job as the mature prophet. Job refuses cheap theodicies, argues with God, and finally surrenders to Mystery: “I knew you by hearsay; now my eye sees you” (Job 42). He rejects the calculus that correlates piety and prosperity. That break from reward–punishment logic, Rohr says, is essential to prophetic completion.

Discernment cue

Two people can say the same hard thing. The mature prophet’s words create space for mercy; the unfinished prophet’s words create a stage for self.

Let these figures coach you. Keep John’s courage, Elijah’s boldness, Jonah’s honesty—and then walk with Job until your zeal learns to weep.

Rohr’s most countercultural claim might be this: tears are not weakness; they are wisdom. They are how anger metabolizes into solidarity. Lamentations—traditionally attributed to Jeremiah—reads like a universal requiem: “How lonely sits the city…” (Lam. 1:1). There are few specifics because the poem wants your grief to find itself there. When it does, lament loosens clenched judgments and makes room for compassion to move.

Why tears change the soul

Rohr notes, after decades of initiation work with men, that anger usually covers sadness. Letting sadness speak—often literally in the body—prevents the transmission of trauma. He cites modern psychology’s insight that pain is stored somatically; that’s why Jesus touches people when he heals (Luke 5:13; Mark 5:41–42). Tears are how the body consents to love again. They shift you from “Who’s to blame?” to “How do we mend?” This is the pivot that transformed church teaching on suicide (from punishment to empathy) and that powers AA’s move from moralism to mercy.

Jung’s alchemy: how transformation happens

Rohr borrows Carl Jung’s alchemical stages—conjunctio, solutio, calcinatio, mortificatio, and more—to explain inner change. You combine opposites, let old forms dissolve, pass through heat, even rot, and something new coalesces. Applied to lament, your unprocessed anger (calcinatio) meets grief (solutio); the mixture cooks (mortificatio), then condenses into a durable compassion (coagulatio). You cannot rush this. You practice wu wei—trustful allowing—so grace can do what law cannot. “You must cooperate with grace,” Sister Clara told young Rohr; tears are one form of that cooperation.

Practices of solidarity

Rohr commends three ancient practices—almsgiving, fasting, prayer—not as transactions with God but as boots-on-the-ground solidarity. Give, so another’s need becomes your own. Fast, so another’s hunger interrupts your day. Pray, so your small life plugs into the communion of saints—the “participation mystique” that turns private grief into a shared current of healing. Read Lamentations when grief is acute; wait for the center stanza’s surprising turn to hope (Lam. 3:21–23). You will not be the first to find your tears salted with mercy.

Beatitude for our times

“Blessed are those who weep, for they will be comforted.” Tears do not fix the world, but they fit you for the work.

If outrage has made you brittle, let lament make you brave. In Rohr’s vision, the prophets’ final language is not accusation but doxology—the song you can only sing after you’ve cried.

Few books carry the prophetic arc as beautifully as Isaiah—which scholars now see as three voices across different eras. Rohr uses this trio to show how holiness matures from awe to compassion to near-universal embrace—and how Jesus consciously steps into that trajectory.

I Isaiah: awe, critique, and the first turn

The first Isaiah (chapters 1–39) opens with “Holy, holy, holy!” (Isa. 6) and a searing critique of false religion: “Your hands are covered with blood … seek justice, help the oppressed” (Isa. 1:15–17). The prophet begins with purity language, but his experience of the Holy One destabilizes easy moralism and nudges toward lament—even for enemies (16:11). Awe doesn’t shrink love; it expands it.

II Isaiah: the servant’s quiet revolution

Chapters 40–55, written in exile, sing “comfort” and unveil the servant songs. Here power renounces spectacle: “He does not cry out” … “a bruised reed he will not break” (Isa. 42). God speaks like a mother: “Even if a mother forgets, I will not forget you” (49:15). This is the poetry that taught Jesus how to be Messiah—not by domination, but by suffering love (compare Philippians 2). It is, as Rabbi Heschel said, “one octave too high” for conventional politics and even for much conventional religion.

III Isaiah: wide-open eschatology

Chapters 56–66 sound almost universalist notes: eunuchs and foreigners are welcomed; God avails himself to a people not seeking him (65:1); a “new heavens and a new earth” dawn (65:17). When Jesus reads Isaiah 61 in Nazareth—“to bring good news to the poor … to proclaim the year of favor”—he stops short of “a day of vengeance” (Luke 4:16–21). He rolls up the scroll, sits down, and essentially says: that older note has been fulfilled and surpassed.

Learning to read like Jesus

Rohr urges you to read Scripture as the prophets lived it—developmentally. Don’t turn every verse into timeless law; trace the movement toward gratuitous love. Highlight red for rage, yellow for wrestling, green for grace (his suggested method). Ask, “Where does this text land?” Then imitate its landing, not just its launch. In practice, that means letting your theology outgrow retribution and your ethics outgrow insider favoritism.

Nazareth manifesto

If your mission can’t be read aloud next to “good news to the poor,” it’s not yet Isaiah–Jesus religion.

Isaiah’s choir teaches you to expect this: if you follow holiness long enough, you’ll end up loving more people than you planned—and hoping for a future larger than your tribe can control.