October 26, 2025
Dear Friends,
We have been conversing in a manner of speaking about Andrew Root’s book, A Pilgrimage Into Letting Go Helping Parents and Pastors Embrace the Uncontrollable, in anticipation of his visit to our parish on November 30, but it is important to remember that a one-time visit with a 45 minute talk is no substitute for the hard work of reading and digesting his ideas and insights in any meaningful manner that might have a bit of influence on our understanding of our faith and our practice of that faith.
In Advent I have scheduled some opportunities for interested folks to continue the conversations. December 2, 9, 16 1:30-3:00.
One major factor that will neutralize his visit and our study of his books and ideas is that the vast majority of us who still affiliate with the practice of our Catholic faith don’t want anything to change. If we are still “going” to Church in 2025 we have become accustomed to our faith, accustomed to the Liturgy of our parish, accustomed to the contours and concepts and customs that many of us believe gives us a “timeless,” firm and stable platform from which to observe the passing of a time that we understand asoutside of us.
Reportedly there are younger folks who are seeking affiliation with the Catholic Church and other Christian churches who seem to be looking for that “timeless,” firm, and stable platform but my own suspicion is that that is not a healthy choice and that the illusion of stability that many try to offer as the Catholic religion will prove damaging and reinforce underlying instability issues better addressed by mental health professionals.
Andrew Root with well researched and studied analysis proposes not the maintenance of supposedly timeless, firm, and stable institutional religious structures but a spiritual/religious search, like a real pilgrimage that is not a vacation, with unknown and uncharted territories trusting that God speaks and loves precisely in the uncontrollable dimensions offaith and life and that religious faith that promises predictability and control is not really healthy nor does it promote spiritual maturity.
Andrew Root and his wife and to some degree his children have constructed their lives in this book that we are discussing, around and within the ancient pilgrimage route in the Scottish/English Highlands of the 7th century saint, Cuthbert.
Most of us are perfectly content where we are because we have a great deal control over where we are and how we are until we don’t and then we can be thrown for a loop by the many, many aspects of being a human creature that are totally unable to be predicted and totally beyond our control.
Andrew Root wants us as parents, pastors, all of us people, to learn to intentionally embrace the uncontrollable in our lives, our faith, our creation but we are quite satisfied, most of us, with the controllable lives that we have and most of us can take or leave just about anything that appears in our lives…until we cannot. Many of us have no idea how to be still,
to not be busy, to sit still. In our efforts to control, we schedule, schedule, schedule, to consume with wanton appetites anything we can get our minds into that keeps us from really knowing who we are and what we are all about.
Our modern world has given us many wonderful advances in many realities that were uncontrollable for our ancestors, but our modern world has also given us hyper-aggressivity, boredom, apathy, and ever new ways of being immature, underdeveloped, uninteresting, uncreative persons, parents, pastors, and citizens of this country and this world.
Since I retired and discovered Facebook and Redditt, I am embarrassed at how much time I give to my various screens. I have a hard time spending quality time in reading. I am not a weather addict, but Iknow many of you are.
What are we gaining and what could we gain by just being still and being alone on a regular basis,
I know loneliness is an issue but could the loneliness we think we are experiencing be a symptom of livingwith the unquestioned and false need to produce and consume that our modern Western world has convinced us that we must do?
Deacons Dan and Phil and I will be spending this weekend in Albuquerque attending a conversation inspired by another creative pastor and priest, Richard Rohr. The weekend is titled, ReVision: What Do We Do with Christianity?
Andrew Root and Richard Rohr both teach that we are created in the image of God which is in essence is a Mystery of relationships. Our doctrine of the Holy Trinity is an attempt to help us understand that and that our primary way of being in the world is to be in relationship with others, all others. Both Root and Rohr use the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber’s teachings that call us into I-Thou relational conversations and not I-It relational functions.
The “praying folks” in our Gospel story this weekend are one and the same person not two individuals and one is not a better “prayer” than the other one. The difference is that they/we can choose how we want to be in our world that has a time limit on our presence on this earth.
Do we want to be control freaks with all the answers and few questions like the Pharisee character or do we want to be more aware of the mysteries of mercy and belonging that we are capable of enjoying like the tax collector?
Peace,
Father Niblick