Standing in Solidarity  🔗 **Source:** [Standing in Solidarity](https://cac.org/daily-meditations/standing-in-solidarity/) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [contemplative-spirituality, theology-of-suffering, richard-rohr, liberation-theology, deconstruction] > author: Richard Rohr, OFM > source: Center for Action and Contemplation — Daily Meditations > reference: https://cac.org/daily-meditations/standing-in-solidarity/ > date created: 2026-08-31 16:40 > > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > > # 🏷️ Title: Standing in Solidarity > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References - Source: https://cac.org/daily-meditations/standing-in-solidarity/ (Monday, 2026-08-31, 577 words) - Weekly theme: Becoming Disciples · Annual theme: Good News for a Fractured World - Companion video referenced in the email: Randy Woodley, "How Western Christianity Got It Wrong" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC5gwnDGBGk ## 📝 Summary **What this is.** A 577-word Daily Meditation from Richard Rohr, OFM, assembled by CAC editors from two of his books. Its argument: the cross is not a transaction that satisfies an angry God, but a voluntary act of solidarity — God entering human suffering rather than observing it from outside. Discipleship, on this reading, is accepting an invitation into that same solidarity. **The central distinction.** Rohr separates *pain* from *suffering*. Pain is the given — "the rent we pay for being human." Suffering is what resistance, denial, and the sense of wrongness add on top. He calls suffering "usually optional." **Why it matters.** This is a compact statement of the contemplative, post-punitive strand of Christian theology that has become the main off-ramp for people leaving high-demand or triumphalist traditions. It relocates the meaning of the cross from penal substitution to divine solidarity, and it relocates the meaning of "Christian" from belonging to transformation. For anyone whose formation was in a victory-and-dominion framework, this is close to the exact inversion of that theology. **Stakeholders.** Readers in deconstruction or reconstruction; UCC and mainline congregations working with contemplative material; anyone doing pastoral care around suffering; and — read critically — anyone who has been harmed by a "we're all sinners equally" flattening of accountability. **Risks, named plainly.** Two lines in this meditation can wound if applied without care. "Suffering is usually optional" can land as blame on people whose suffering is chronic illness, disability, poverty, or abuse — conditions where the suffering is structural, not attitudinal. And God being "on the side of suffering wherever it is found, including... both the victims and the oppressors" sits in real tension with liberation theology's preferential option for the poor. Rohr knows this is contested — he says so — but he does not engage the counterargument, and in a devotional register the assertion passes unexamined. **Bottom line.** Genuinely nourishing on the cross as solidarity rather than transaction, and honest enough to admit its hardest claim "pleases very few people." Read the pain/suffering distinction as an invitation, never as a diagnosis handed to someone else. The both-sides line needs a companion text, not a rebuttal. ## 📖 Main Content The meditation moves through four claims. **First, a definition.** Rohr distinguishes pain from suffering. Pain is physical discomfort and, more broadly, the unavoidable cost of embodied existence. Suffering is the additional layer produced by resistance, denial, and the judgment that this should not be happening. He grounds this autobiographically — "I know that is very true for me" — which matters, because it frames the distinction as testimony rather than as a rule for others. **Second, a redefinition of discipleship.** Accepting the invitation into solidarity with the world's pain is "what it means to be 'a Christian.'" Rohr is careful to make this non-coercive: it is "an option, a choice, a call, a vocation," and "we are totally free to say yes or no or maybe." He explicitly removes the transactional motive — "We do not have to do this to make God love us. That is already taken care of." The reason offered is reciprocal love, not credit. **Third, the theological core.** The "crucified God" reveals a God who is always on the side of suffering wherever it appears. Rohr extends this deliberately past the comfortable boundary: to wounded troops on both sides of every war, and to both victims and oppressors. He immediately concedes the reception — "frankly, this pleases very few people." He then names what he sees as organized resistance to suffering: the gun lobby, the permanent war economy, resistance to profit-sharing with the poor, and the demand for constant entertainment. He closes the section on courage, offering "cor-agere, an action of the heart" as its derivation. **Fourth, the consequence.** If God participates in suffering rather than merely tolerating it, "that changes everything" — though Rohr limits the claim to "those who are willing to 'gaze' contemplatively." The transformation is not self-generated: "Jesus then does it in us, through us, with us, and for us," producing a "new creation." The piece is structurally a devotional, not an argument. It asserts, testifies, and invites. That is the genre working as intended, and it is also why the contestable claims travel without their objections attached. ### 🗒️ Notes Not a transcript; no timestamps apply. Segmented by paragraph movement. #### ¶1 — The pain/suffering distinction Solidarity with the world's pain produces "various 'crucifixions.'" Suffering is located in resistance and denial rather than in the pain itself. "Pain is the rent we pay for being human, it seems, but suffering is usually optional." The cross is framed as voluntary acceptance of undeserved suffering — an act of total solidarity. #### ¶2 — Discipleship as free vocation Accepting the invitation is what constitutes being a Christian. Emphasis on inner freedom and on the absence of any earning transaction. Baptism "into his death" and resurrection (Romans 6:3; Philippians 3:10–12) is contrasted against Christianity as "a mere belonging system" versus "a transformational system that will change the world." #### ¶3 — The crucified God, and its cost God sides with suffering universally — including combatants on both sides, and both victims and oppressors. Rohr concedes this "pleases very few people." Resistance to suffering is named as "an entire industry," instanced by the gun lobby, the permanent war economy, resistance to profit-sharing with the poor, and constant entertainment. Courage is offered as the foundational virtue, with the derivation "cor-agere, an action of the heart." #### ¶4 — Divine participation, not observation God "participating in human suffering, instead of just passively tolerating it and observing it" changes everything — qualified to those willing to gaze contemplatively. All humble suffering souls learn this; the Christian Scriptures named it publicly. #### ¶5 — Not alone Transformation comes through identification with "the Crucified One and crucified humanity," accomplished by Jesus "in us, through us, with us, and for us," yielding a "new creation" (Galatians 6:15). #### Apparatus — sources, image, community Two book citations, both hyperlinked to the CAC store. Image credit to Jenna Keiper, CAC campus, Albuquerque. A community story from Ilka F. about Zacchaeus' tree arising during Centering Prayer. ## 📚 References Primary sources preferred. **Both book citations in this piece are present and hyperlinked** — verified by extracting every `<a href>` from the stored document HTML, which returned three links: two to the cited books and one to the image credit. This is a properly sourced devotional, and no "uncited" finding applies to its book claims. **Cited by the author:** - Richard Rohr, *Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi* (Franciscan Media, 2024), 21, 22–23, 24 — https://store.cac.org/products/eager-to-love-the-alternative-way-of-francis-of-assisi - Richard Rohr, *Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality* (Franciscan Media, 2022), 202, 203, 223 — https://store.cac.org/products/things-hidden-scripture-as-spirituality-1 - Image: Jenna Keiper, *CAC Environment*, 2019-10-09, photograph, CAC campus, Albuquerque NM. **Scripture referenced but not linked or quoted in full:** Romans 6:3; Philippians 3:10–12; Galatians 6:15. All three are cited accurately — Romans 6:3 does concern baptism into Christ's death, Philippians 3:10–12 does pair the power of the resurrection with the fellowship of his sufferings, and Galatians 6:15 does contain "new creation." The more commonly quoted "new creation" verse is 2 Corinthians 5:17; Rohr's choice of Galatians 6:15 is defensible and arguably more pointed, since that verse subordinates ritual belonging markers to transformation — which is precisely his argument. **Referenced in the email but outside the meditation proper:** - Randy Woodley (Indigenous theologian), "How Western Christianity Got It Wrong" — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC5gwnDGBGk **Unattributed intellectual debts — a real gap.** The phrase "crucified God" appears in scare quotes without attribution. It is the title and central thesis of Jürgen Moltmann's *The Crucified God* (German 1972; English 1974), the twentieth century's major argument against divine impassibility. The adjacent idea also has a prior in Kazoh Kitamori's *Theology of the Pain of God* (1946). Likewise, the pain-versus-resistance distinction closely parallels the Buddhist second-arrow teaching on *dukkha*. Rohr elsewhere credits these influences; this particular meditation does not, and a reader encountering the ideas here would not know where to go next. ## 🗣️ Paraphrase **Opening frame (editorial).** CAC editors introduce the piece: Father Richard considers how Jesus' choice to go to the cross reveals God's solidarity with suffering. **¶1.** If we actually live in solidarity with the world's pain instead of organizing our lives to avoid necessary suffering, we will meet our own crucifixions. Rohr then separates two things people usually merge. Pain is discomfort — the unavoidable toll of being a body in the world. Suffering is what we add through resistance, denial, and the conviction that this is wrong and should not be. He grounds the claim in his own experience rather than asserting it over anyone else's. Pain is the price of admission to being human; the suffering layered on top is, he says, usually optional. Jesus' cross was the voluntary acceptance of suffering he did not deserve, chosen as complete solidarity with the world's pain — and sitting with that, Rohr says, can change a life. **¶2.** Saying yes to that invitation is, in Rohr's view, what being a Christian actually means. It requires real interior freedom, because it is genuinely optional — a call one may accept, decline, or hold open. Crucially, it is not how anyone secures God's love; that is already settled and requires nothing. The motive is returning love, and loving what and how God loves. Either we are genuinely baptized into Christ's death and resurrection, or Christianity reduces to a system for belonging rather than one that transforms anything. **¶3.** The crucified God, revealed in Jesus, is always on the side of suffering wherever it occurs — and Rohr presses this past where most readers will follow, to the wounded and dying on both sides of any war, and to both the victims and the oppressors of the world. He knows how this lands: it pleases almost no one. Resistance to suffering, he argues, has become an industry, visible in the power of the gun lobby, a permanent war economy, refusal to share profits with the poor, and an appetite for constant distraction. Perhaps this is why courage has been called the foundational virtue beneath all others — Rohr glossing it as an action of the heart. Walking in solidarity with others' suffering, and with one's own, takes enormous courage. **¶4.** If God is actually participating in human suffering rather than tolerating and observing it from a distance, everything changes — at least for those willing to look contemplatively. Humble, suffering people learn this from God across traditions; the Christian Scriptures named and dramatized it publicly in Jesus. **¶5.** None of this is achievable alone. It comes only through deep identification with the Crucified One and with crucified humanity, and then Jesus does the work in, through, with, and for us. What emerges is a new creation — a true disciple, and a genuinely different kind of person. ## 📰 Newsletter *Routing note: this belongs at Robertson's Home (faith writing), not courtneyr.dev.* **The line in this week's Rohr that I keep turning over** Monday's CAC meditation makes the case that the cross was solidarity, not a transaction — God stepping into human pain rather than watching it from a safe distance. If you came up in a tradition where the cross was primarily an accounting entry, that reframe alone is worth sitting with. [Read it here](https://cac.org/daily-meditations/standing-in-solidarity/). But there's a sentence I want to flag before anyone forwards this to a friend in a hard season: *"Pain is the rent we pay for being human, it seems, but suffering is usually optional."* Rohr grounds it in his own experience — "I know that is very true for me" — and as testimony it's sturdy. As a diagnosis handed to somebody else, it's a weapon. Tell a person with chronic illness, or someone whose suffering is a landlord and a wage rather than an attitude, that their suffering was optional, and you have just made yourself one more thing they have to survive. First person, this is contemplative wisdom. Second person, it's spiritual bypassing wearing its vestments. The harder line is the one Rohr himself admits "pleases very few people": God is on the side of suffering everywhere, including "both the victims and the oppressors of this world." I don't think he's wrong that divine love refuses to stop at a boundary. I do think a theology of solidarity that never distinguishes the person on the cross from the people who put them there will get used, eventually, to tell someone their abuser deserves equal pastoral airtime. Gustavo Gutiérrez's [preferential option for the poor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_option_for_the_poor) exists precisely because "God loves everyone" kept arriving as "so stop making a fuss." Hold both. Don't let the second one do the first one's job. Worth pairing with the [Randy Woodley video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC5gwnDGBGk) CAC linked alongside it — an Indigenous theologian on replacing a god of fear with a spirituality of healing. Different door into the same room. ## ✅ Action Items #### DevRel - **#action/h3** — Not applicable to this source; nothing here touches developer relations work. #### OSPO - **#action/h3** — Not applicable to this source. #### Community - **#action/h2** — The "belonging system vs. transformational system" distinction is a genuinely useful lens for any community, secular ones included. Worth holding for governance conversations about whether a community actually changes its participants or only credentials them. #### WordPress - **Core** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Core Performance** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Core AI** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Core Program Team** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Mobile** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Playground** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Community** — **#action/h3** See Community above; the belonging-vs-transformation frame transfers to contributor culture, nothing more specific. - **Training** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Marketing** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Support** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Design** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Documentation** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Photos** — **#action/h3** Not applicable, though the image-credit practice here (photographer, date, location, and an interpretive prompt) is a small model worth noticing. - **TV** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Polyglots** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Accessibility** — **#action/h3** Not applicable to WordPress; see the Accessibility Assessment for findings on the source itself. - **Meta** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **CLI** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Hosting** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Tide** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Openverse** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Themes** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. - **Plugins** — **#action/h3** Not applicable. #### The WPOCC - **#action/h3** — Not applicable to this source. ### FAIR - **#action/h3** — Not applicable to this source. #### Personal / faith practice - **#action/h1** — Sit with the pain/suffering distinction in first person only, and notice where it stops being true. The places it fails are the more useful data. - **#action/h2** — Draft the Robertson's Home piece on testimony vs. diagnosis: why "suffering is optional" is contemplative wisdom in the first person and spiritual bypassing in the second. - **#action/h2** — Pair this with the Randy Woodley video and with a liberation-theology text before using any of it in worship planning; the both-sides line needs a companion, not a rebuttal. - **#action/h3** — Consider whether "solidarity, not transaction" is usable for the SJUCC worship planning already on the calendar; it is a gentler on-ramp than atonement language for a mixed-background congregation. ## 🧪 Hypotheses 1. **The pain/suffering distinction predicts wellbeing only where the pain source is not structural.** For chronic illness, poverty, or ongoing abuse, "suffering is optional" should show no benefit and may increase self-blame. Testable by segmenting acceptance-based intervention outcomes by whether the stressor is controllable. 2. **Solidarity framings of the cross retain deconstructing believers better than penal-substitution framings.** Testable by surveying people who left high-demand traditions on which atonement model, if any, they now hold. 3. **Rohr's "both victims and oppressors" claim is the single highest-friction line in the piece for readers with abuse histories.** Testable by reader response, and partially self-confirmed — Rohr predicts the friction himself. 4. **The "belonging system vs. transformational system" dichotomy is empirically false as stated** — most durable religious communities are measurably both, and belonging is a precondition for transformation rather than its rival. Testable against congregational-retention research. 5. **Unattributed borrowing is systematic in the devotional genre, not particular to this piece.** Testable by sampling daily-devotional output across publishers and counting attributed versus unattributed theological and cross-tradition borrowings. 6. **Readers encounter this meditation primarily by email rather than on the web.** Suggested by the capture path itself — this arrived as a tracked email link — and testable against CAC's own open-versus-pageview reporting, if published. ### 📊 Methodology **Genre first: this is devotional literature, not scholarship, and evaluating it as scholarship would be a category error.** It makes no empirical claims, reports no data, and proposes no study. Its warrant is testimony, scriptural appeal, and the authority of a tradition. The right question is not "is this evidenced" but "is it honest about what kind of claim it is making." **On that question it does reasonably well.** Rohr marks the autobiographical basis of his central distinction ("I know that is very true for me"), hedges the sweeping claim ("it seems," "usually," "somehow"), qualifies the transformation claim to "those who are willing to 'gaze' contemplatively," and explicitly concedes that his hardest assertion "pleases very few people." Those are all epistemic-humility markers, and they are doing real work. **Where the method is weaker.** The compilation itself is an editorial act: the text is stitched from pages 21, 22–23, and 24 of one book and pages 202, 203, and 223 of another, marked "Adapted from." Ideas separated by twenty pages in the source arrive adjacent here, and the adaptation is unspecified. A reader cannot tell which sentences are Rohr's original wording and which are editorial bridging — which matters, because this analysis is quoting the compiled text as his. **The one checkable factual claim in the piece is wrong.** The etymology "cor-agere, an action of the heart" is folk etymology; see Logical Validity. That it is the only verifiable assertion, and that it fails, is worth noting about the genre generally: devotional writing rarely offers claims that can be checked, so the few it does offer deserve checking. ### ❓ Questions - Which sentences here are Rohr's and which are editorial adaptation? The "Adapted from" label makes every direct quotation of this text slightly uncertain in attribution. - Does Rohr distinguish anywhere between suffering that resistance produces and suffering that injustice produces? The meditation collapses them, and the distinction is the whole pastoral question. - If God stands with victims and oppressors alike, what remains of judgment, and what does repair look like? The piece gestures at "changes everything" without saying what changes for the oppressor. - Why is "crucified God" in scare quotes but unattributed to Moltmann? Editorial economy, assumed familiarity, or a house style that omits living-theologian citation? - Is "suffering is usually optional" a claim about all people, or a report about Rohr? The autobiographical marker suggests the latter; the aphoristic phrasing invites the former. - What is the pastoral protocol at CAC for readers who receive this in the middle of acute grief or active abuse? A daily meditation has no way to know its reader's state. - Would the argument survive translation out of a Christian frame, given Rohr's own concession that "all humble, suffering souls learn this from God"? ### 🔮 Future Research - **Trace the compilation.** Read *Eager to Love* 21–24 and *Things Hidden* 202–223 directly, and mark what the adaptation changed. This is the single highest-value follow-up, because it settles what can honestly be quoted as Rohr. - **Read Moltmann's *The Crucified God* directly** rather than through the devotional secondhand, along with Kitamori's *Theology of the Pain of God*, to get the impassibility argument in its own terms. - **Set this against Gutiérrez's *A Theology of Liberation*** on the preferential option, and against womanist critiques of redemptive-suffering theology — Delores Williams' *Sisters in the Wilderness* is the sharpest of these and argues directly that surrogate-suffering atonement harms Black women. - **Survey the deconstruction pipeline empirically.** Rohr functions as a major landing site for people exiting evangelical and charismatic traditions; whether that landing holds, and for how long, appears under-studied. - **Cross-tradition comparison** of the pain/suffering distinction: the second arrow in Buddhist teaching, Stoic *dispreferred indifferents*, and this Christian framing all make similar moves from different premises. - **Watch the Woodley video** and read his written work; an Indigenous critique of Western Christianity is a genuinely different angle on the same fracture and CAC placed it here deliberately. ### 💡 Implications **Practice.** The most usable takeaway is the reframe of the cross from transaction to solidarity, which changes what prayer, lament, and presence with the dying are *for*. The pain/suffering distinction is usable as a personal practice and should carry a warning label before being used pastorally on anyone else. **Policy.** Rohr names the gun lobby, a permanent war economy, and resistance to profit-sharing with the poor as an "industry" of avoiding suffering. That is a political claim delivered in a devotional register, where it arrives as spiritual insight rather than as an argument requiring support. Readers who agree with the politics should still notice the move; readers who disagree will experience the genre as smuggling. **Security — read as safeguarding.** A theology asserting God's equal solidarity with victims and oppressors is straightforwardly dangerous if applied inside a situation of ongoing harm. Congregations using contemplative material like this need an explicit safeguarding frame: solidarity is not neutrality, and pastoral care for a perpetrator is not owed the same room as protection of the person they harmed. This is the implication most worth carrying forward. **Education.** The unattributed "crucified God" and the false *cor-agere* etymology together make this a compact teaching case on how ideas travel through devotional literature — accurately in substance, lossily in provenance. **Funding.** The email is also a funnel: both citations link to the CAC store, and the footer solicits support. That is unremarkable and disclosed, but it does mean the citation practice and the commerce share a URL, and a reader clicking "source" lands on a product page rather than a text. ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment **Estimated reading level:** roughly grade 11–12 by sentence structure, but the vocabulary demand is higher than that suggests — *solidarity*, *vocation*, *crucifixions* used figuratively, *new creation*, "crucified God," and the assumption that Romans, Philippians, and Galatians are locatable without help. Fluent for a formed reader; genuinely opaque to a newcomer. #### 👀 Visual learners **Weakly served by the text, partially rescued by the image.** The prose is abstract with almost no concrete imagery — the exception being "pain is the rent we pay," which is the piece's one vivid figure. The accompanying photograph carries an interpretive prompt ("What does it look like to lay down burdens and die to ourselves while still on the path to becoming?"), which is a thoughtful bridge for visual processors. #### 🔊 Aural learners **Well served.** The cadence is homiletical — built for reading aloud, with rhythmic triads ("in us, through us, with us, and for us") and a preacher's escalation. This is prose written by someone who has spoken it. #### 🗣️ Verbal learners **Well served, and this is the piece's strongest channel.** It turns on precise verbal distinctions — pain versus suffering, belonging system versus transformational system, participating versus tolerating. A reader who thinks in definitions gets a lot here. #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners **Poorly served.** Despite being published by a Center for Action *and* Contemplation, the meditation names no practice. There is no instruction to try, no posture, no exercise. The reader is told what to believe about suffering and not what to do on Tuesday. The community story about Centering Prayer gestures at practice but is not the meditation. #### 🧠 Logical learners **Mixed, and likely frustrating.** The definitions are crisp, but the central move is asserted rather than argued, the one explicit dichotomy is a false one, and the hardest claim is defended by predicting its own unpopularity rather than by reasoning. A logically-inclined reader will find the framework attractive and the support absent. #### 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social learners **Moderately served.** "Crucified humanity," solidarity as the organizing concept, and a reader-submitted community story all point outward. But the piece is delivered as one voice to a silent list, with no dialogue and no disagreement represented. #### 🧘‍♀️ Solitary learners **Very well served.** This is the target reader — short, self-contained, designed for solitary morning reading and rumination. The contemplative "gaze" it asks for is explicitly a solitary act. #### 🌿 Naturalistic learners **Lightly served, mostly by the apparatus rather than the text.** The photograph is from the CAC campus environment in Albuquerque and the credit line invites reflection on it. The meditation itself is anthropocentric — the suffering in view is exclusively human, with no reference to creation, land, or non-human suffering. Notably, the companion Woodley video would supply exactly that; the meditation does not. ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment Assessed against WCAG 2.2 Level AA, applied to the email and its web version. #### Screen reader semantics **Mixed, with one confirmed defect.** Extracting the rendered text surfaced duplicated link labels — "READ ON CAC.ORG" and "SHARE THIS MEDITATION" each appear twice in immediate succession, the standard signature of an image-link plus text-link pair where the image's alternative text repeats the adjacent visible text. Screen reader users hear each control announced twice. **SC 1.1.1 Non-text Content** is technically met (the alt text exists and is meaningful) but **SC 2.4.4 Link Purpose** is degraded by the redundancy; the image should carry a null alt when its text twin is adjacent. The email also opens with "No images? Click here," a link whose purpose is opaque out of context. #### Keyboard navigation **Not assessable from captured content, and largely inherited.** Email rendering is client-dependent; the web version is a WordPress page whose keyboard behavior would need live testing. No custom interactive widgets appear in the content, so the risk is low. **SC 2.1.1** unverified. #### Contrast and readability **Not assessable from the extracted text.** Requires inspecting the email's inline CSS and the rendered page against **SC 1.4.3**. Flagged as unassessed rather than passed — HTML-email templates commonly use grey-on-white for footer, credit, and reference text, and this email has substantial matter in exactly those regions. #### Text resizing and reflow **Likely acceptable, unverified.** The content is genuine HTML text rather than text baked into images — the full meditation extracted cleanly as text, which is itself evidence that **SC 1.4.4** and **SC 1.4.10** are structurally satisfiable here. Table-based email layouts can still break reflow at 320 CSS pixels; untested. #### Media and captions **A real gap.** The email links a companion video — Randy Woodley on Western Christianity — with the link text "Watch the video." Nothing in the captured content indicates whether that video is captioned or transcribed, and no transcript link is offered alongside it. **SC 1.2.2 Captions** cannot be confirmed for the linked media, and offering a text alternative beside the link would be the cheap fix. The meditation text itself is non-media and unaffected. #### Forms and interactions **Minimal surface, one concern.** The only interactive elements are links — subscribe, share, preferences, and store. The "forwardtomyfriend" share link and the preferences link are third-party endpoints whose own accessibility is outside CAC's markup but inside the reader's experience. No forms appear inline. **SC 3.3.2** not applicable to the captured content. #### Standards reference WCAG 2.2 Level AA. Met: 1.1.1 (alt text present and meaningful). Degraded: 2.4.4 (duplicated adjacent link labels). Gap: 1.2.2 for linked video, unverifiable and unmitigated. Unassessed without live rendering: 1.4.3, 1.4.10, 2.1.1. Overall this is a better-than-average newsletter build whose main defect is redundant announcement of repeated controls. ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment #### Cultural breadth **Genuinely mixed, and the tension is instructive.** Within the frame, Rohr reaches past Christian exclusivity — "All humble, suffering souls learn this from God" grants that the insight is not the property of one tradition, and the Christian Scriptures are credited with naming it publicly rather than owning it. That is a real universalist move. But the vocabulary, canon, and authority structure are entirely Western Latin Christian, and the pain/suffering distinction is borrowed from Buddhist teaching without acknowledgment. The email's own placement of Randy Woodley's Indigenous critique of Western Christianity directly beside this meditation is the most interesting editorial choice in the whole send — CAC is putting the corrective next to the text that needs it. #### Inclusive language **Careful, with one structural exception.** Rohr uses "we" and "us" throughout rather than instructing a "you," which distributes the demand rather than imposing it. There is no gendered language for humans. God-language is mostly avoided in gendered form, though "Father Richard" in the editorial frame and the male figure of Jesus keep the register masculine by default. No slurs, no othering, no in-group/out-group construction — notable given how easily "what it means to be a Christian" could have become a boundary policing move, and Rohr explicitly declines to make it one by insisting on freedom to say "no or maybe." #### Neurodiversity support **Good length, poor scaffolding.** At 577 words with short paragraphs, the piece respects limited attention and working memory. Against that: it is heavily abstract, uses figurative language without signaling it ("various 'crucifixions'" is not literal), and relies on scriptural allusions given only as chapter-and-verse. Readers who process literally, or who lack the canonical background, get little help. The absence of any concrete practice also removes the handhold that many neurodivergent readers use to metabolize abstraction. #### Representation **Narrow in the meditation, deliberately widened in the frame.** The meditation is one voice: an elderly white male American Franciscan, drawing on a male Italian saint, citing a male apostle. The surrounding email does the corrective work — a community story from a reader ("Ilka F."), a photograph credited to a named woman photographer (Jenna Keiper), and a linked Indigenous theologian. The editorial apparatus is measurably more diverse than the text it surrounds, which is worth naming as a real, if partial, practice. #### Psychological safety **The weakest dimension, and the one that matters most for this reader.** Two elements carry genuine risk. First, "suffering is usually optional" — mitigated by first-person framing and the hedge "usually," but aphoristic enough to travel without either, and capable of landing as blame on someone whose suffering is chronic, structural, or inflicted. Second, and more seriously, God's equal solidarity with "both the victims and the oppressors." Rohr's intent is the scandalous breadth of divine love, and he is transparent that it will not please people. But for a reader processing spiritual abuse or ongoing harm, a theology that declines to distinguish the crucified from the crucifiers can function as one more instruction to stop making a fuss. **The safeguarding principle worth attaching: solidarity is not neutrality, and refusing moral asymmetry in a situation of active harm is itself a harm.** To Rohr's credit, the surrounding invitation is explicitly non-coercive — freedom to say yes, no, or maybe, and no transaction required for God's love — which does substantial protective work. ### ✅ Logical Validity #### Strong reasoning - **The transactional motive is explicitly severed.** "We do not have to do this to make God love us. That is already taken care of." This removes the coercive engine from the entire argument and is the single most pastorally sound sentence in the piece. - **Freedom is preserved rather than asserted and withdrawn.** "We are totally free to say yes or no or maybe" — including "maybe," which is unusually generous and leaves room for a reader mid-deconstruction. - **Epistemic hedging is consistent and honest.** "It seems," "usually," "somehow," "at least for those who are willing" — Rohr repeatedly marks the limits of what he is claiming rather than overstating. - **He predicts and names his own unpopularity** rather than pre-emptively attacking objectors. "Frankly, this pleases very few people" is a concession, not a defense. - **The autobiographical grounding is properly marked.** "I know that is very true for me" locates the pain/suffering claim as testimony, which is the correct warrant for it. #### Fallacies - **False dilemma — #fallacy/false-dilemma.** "We either are baptized 'into his death' and 'resurrection'... or Christianity is largely a mere belonging system, not a transformational system that will change the world." The disjunction excludes the ordinary middle in which belonging is the *precondition* for transformation rather than its rival — which describes most functioning congregations, and arguably describes discipleship itself. **Fix:** "Without this, Christianity risks collapsing into a belonging system" preserves the warning without the false exclusivity. - **Etymological fallacy, resting on an incorrect etymology — #fallacy/etymological.** "the foundational virtue underlying all others is courage (cor-agere, an action of the heart)." Two problems. First, the derivation is wrong: *courage* descends from Old French *corage*, from Vulgar Latin *coraticum*, from Latin *cor* ("heart") plus the French nominal suffix *-age*. The verb *agere* ("to act") is not a component; "cor-agere" is homiletical folk etymology. Second, even a correct etymology would not establish what a word means now or which virtue is foundational. **Fix:** drop the parenthetical, or say "courage, whose root is the Latin *cor*, heart" — which is true, and loses nothing rhetorically. - **Persuasive definition — #fallacy/persuasive-definition.** "the acceptance of that invitation to solidarity with the larger pain of the world is what it means to be 'a Christian.'" This redefines a contested category term so that the author's preferred content becomes definitionally required, making disagreement into non-membership. Rohr softens it with "I think," which matters — but the sentence still does definitional work that an argument should be doing. **Fix:** the hedge could be strengthened to "is what I have come to think Christianity is for," which claims the same ground without annexing the word. - **Suppressed counterargument on the central claim — #fallacy/suppressed-evidence.** God being on the side of "both the victims and the oppressors of this world" is presented against a well-developed opposing tradition — liberation theology's preferential option for the poor, and womanist critiques of redemptive suffering — that goes entirely unmentioned. Predicting that a claim will be unpopular is not the same as engaging the reasoned objection to it. **Fix:** one clause acknowledging that this stands in tension with the preferential option would let readers hold both rather than receive only one. #### Tone of voice Warm, unhurried, and pastoral, with the cadence of spoken homily. The register is invitational rather than directive — "we" throughout, permission to decline, no threat attached to refusal. Its characteristic move is the gentle overreach: a sweeping claim delivered so softly, and hedged so courteously, that the reader is disinclined to check it. That is precisely why the *cor-agere* error and the false dilemma pass without friction. The warmth is genuine and the gentleness is not a manipulation — but it does function as an anesthetic on the reader's critical attention, which is worth knowing while reading devotional material generally. ### 🛡️ DARVO Analysis **Not applicable to this source.** DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) describes a defensive pattern deployed by someone facing accusation. This is a devotional meditation with no accusation in view, no self-defense, and no named adversary. - **Deny** — Nothing is denied. Rohr concedes rather than denies: he grants that his hardest claim "pleases very few people." - **Attack** — No person or group is attacked. The nearest thing is naming the gun lobby and the war economy as an "industry" of avoiding suffering, which criticizes structures rather than defending the author against a charge. - **Reverse victim and offender** — Absent as a rhetorical maneuver. **One clarification is worth recording, because the surface resemblance is real:** the line placing God in solidarity with "both the victims and the oppressors" refuses to *distinguish* victim from oppressor, but it does not *invert* them, and it is not deployed to deflect an accusation from the author. That is a different problem — a moral-asymmetry problem, addressed under Logical Validity and Psychological Safety — not DARVO. Naming the distinction precisely matters here, because for a reader alert to abuse dynamics the two can feel identical, and conflating them would misdiagnose a real concern. ## 🎯 Conclusion **Bottom line.** A well-made, honestly-sourced devotional whose core reframe — the cross as solidarity rather than transaction, a God who participates in suffering rather than observing it — is the most nourishing thing in it, and genuinely useful for anyone unlearning a punitive atonement. Its two contestable claims are both hedged by the author and both still capable of causing harm when repeated without the hedges. **What holds up.** Severing the transactional motive ("we do not have to do this to make God love us"). Preserving real freedom, including "maybe." Marking testimony as testimony. Conceding unpopularity instead of attacking objectors. Citing and linking both book sources properly — verified, not assumed. **What does not.** The either/or between belonging and transformation excludes the ordinary middle where most religious life actually happens. The *cor-agere* etymology is simply incorrect — *courage* is *cor* plus a French suffix, with no *agere* in it. "What it means to be 'a Christian'" annexes a contested word to one position. And the both-sides solidarity claim is argued against a serious opposing tradition that never gets named. **The line to handle carefully.** "Suffering is usually optional" is contemplative wisdom in the first person and spiritual bypassing in the second. Rohr keeps it in the first person. Anyone quoting it should too. **Next steps.** 1. Read the two source passages directly — *Eager to Love* 21–24, *Things Hidden* 202–223 — to see what the "Adapted from" compilation changed before quoting any of this as Rohr's own words. 2. Pair this with the Randy Woodley video CAC linked beside it, and with a liberation-theology or womanist text, so the both-sides claim is held alongside the preferential option rather than instead of it. 3. Carry one safeguarding sentence forward into any pastoral or worship use: solidarity is not neutrality. 4. If this feeds worship planning, "solidarity, not transaction" is the usable through-line, and it is a gentler entry into atonement language for a mixed-background congregation than substitution is. ## 🔄 Refactor Appendix — Standing in Solidarity ### 📚 Literature Atoms (H3) #### [H1] The cross reframed as solidarity, not transaction > [!quote] ID:rw_01m1cv6hndh2rgd5wtkwzmm3md > "The cross was Jesus's voluntary acceptance of undeserved suffering as an act of total solidarity with the pain of the world." The load-bearing claim. It relocates atonement from a debt paid to an angry God toward a God who refuses to stay outside human pain. For readers formed in penal substitution, this is the reframe that makes the symbol survivable — and it is why Rohr functions as a landing site for people leaving punitive traditions. Tags: `#atom/literature/h1` #### [H2] The love is not contingent, so the invitation can be declined > [!quote] ID:rw_01m1cv6hndh2rgd5wtkwzmm3md > "We do not have to do this to make God love us. That is already taken care of." The most pastorally sound sentence in the piece, and the one that disarms the rest. Once the transaction is severed, the call cannot be used as leverage. Paired with "totally free to say yes or no or maybe," it makes room for a reader who is not currently able to say yes. Tags: `#atom/literature/h2` #### [H2] Divine participation against divine impassibility > [!quote] ID:rw_01m1cv6hndh2rgd5wtkwzmm3md > "If God is somehow participating in human suffering, instead of just passively tolerating it and observing it, that changes everything" A live rejection of classical impassibility, delivered as devotion. This is Moltmann's argument in *The Crucified God* arriving without Moltmann's name attached — worth tracing to the source rather than receiving secondhand. Tags: `#atom/literature/h2` #### [H3] Solidarity extended past the comfortable boundary > [!quote] ID:rw_01m1cv6hndh2rgd5wtkwzmm3md > "God is always on the side of suffering wherever it is found, including the wounded and dying troops on both sides in every kind of war, and both the victims and the oppressors of this world; frankly, this pleases very few people." The piece's highest-friction claim, and Rohr knows it. Supporting context for the tension between universal solidarity and the preferential option for the poor — a tension the meditation raises and does not resolve. Tags: `#atom/literature/h3` `#fallacy/suppressed-evidence` ### 🧠 Permanent Candidates (H4) #### [P1] Testimony in the first person is wisdom; in the second person it is a verdict "Suffering is usually optional" is defensible as a report on one's own interior life and indefensible as a diagnosis handed to someone else. The grammatical person a claim is spoken in determines whether it consoles or accuses. This generalizes well past religion — it is the same mechanism that makes resilience advice, productivity advice, and recovery language land as either solidarity or blame depending entirely on who is speaking about whom. Links: [[Spiritual bypassing]] · [[Structural vs attitudinal suffering]] · [[Faith deconstruction]] Tags: `#atom/zettel/z1` #### [P2] Solidarity is not neutrality A love that reaches both the harmed and the harmer is not the same as a stance that declines to distinguish them. Collapsing the two converts compassion into a safeguarding failure: in situations of active harm, refusing moral asymmetry functions as instruction to the injured party to stop objecting. The distinction has to be stated explicitly, because the two positions use nearly identical language and the second one hides comfortably inside the first. Links: [[Preferential option for the poor]] · [[Safeguarding in congregations]] · [[Spiritual abuse]] Tags: `#atom/zettel/z1` #### [P3] Belonging is the precondition for transformation, not its rival The dichotomy between a "belonging system" and a "transformational system" is false as posed. Communities that transform people do so largely *through* belonging — the trust that makes change bearable is manufactured by membership. The real failure mode is not belonging but belonging that terminates in itself. This applies to open-source communities and workplaces as directly as to congregations: a community that only credentials its members has not stopped short of transformation by having belonging, but by having nothing past it. Links: [[Community governance]] · [[High-demand groups]] · [[Contributor culture]] Tags: `#atom/zettel/z1` ### ✏️ Fleeting Queue - The editorial apparatus around this meditation is more diverse than the meditation — reader story, woman photographer, Indigenous theologian, all framing one elderly white Franciscan. Is that deliberate CAC practice or accident? Worth watching across a few sends. `#atom/fleeting/f1` - "Pain is the rent we pay for being human" — the metaphor makes pain a landlord's claim, which is bleaker than Rohr seems to intend and is quietly a class metaphor. Sit with that. `#atom/fleeting/f1` - Collect folk etymologies used homiletically (cor-agere, "sincere" from *sine cera*, "atonement" as at-one-ment). All false, all rhetorically effective. There is a post in why the fake ones persist. `#atom/fleeting/f1` - CAC published this on the same Monday as the SJUCC worship-planning window. "Solidarity, not transaction" may be the gentler on-ramp for a mixed-background congregation. `#atom/fleeting/f1` - Randy Woodley video is the unread companion — an Indigenous critique sitting right next to a Western contemplative text. That juxtaposition is the actual assignment. `#atom/fleeting/f1` ### → Things 3 (max 2 actions) 1. **Read *Eager to Love* 21–24 and *Things Hidden* 202–223 directly** — the meditation is marked "Adapted from," so verify what is Rohr's wording before quoting any of it as his. `#action/h2` 2. **Draft "Testimony vs. Diagnosis" for Robertson's Home** — 700 words on why "suffering is optional" is wisdom in the first person and bypassing in the second, with the solidarity-is-not-neutrality principle as the close. `#action/h2` <!-- deep-read:sections end --> 📄 **Full text:** [[Full Document Contents/Articles/Standing in Solidarity.md|Standing in Solidarity by Richard Rohr, OFM]] ## Highlights - When we try to live in solidarity with the pain of the world—and don’t spend our lives running from necessary suffering—we will encounter various “crucifixions.” Many say pain is physical discomfort, but suffering comes from our resistance, denial, and sense of injustice or wrongness about that pain. I know that is very true for me. This is the core meaning of suffering on one level or another, and we all learn it the hard way. Pain is the rent we pay for being human, it seems, but suffering is usually optional. *The cross was Jesus’s voluntary acceptance of undeserved suffering as an act of total solidarity with the pain of the world.* Reflecting on this mystery of love can change our lives. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m1cvh8bx1b6nkmgmg783g0dn)) - Note: The load-bearing reframe: cross as solidarity, not transaction. But handle "suffering is usually optional" with care — Rohr grounds it in FIRST person ("I know that is very true for me"), and it only works there. Said to someone whose suffering is chronic illness, poverty, or abuse, it becomes a verdict. Testimony in the first person is wisdom; in the second person it's a diagnosis. - Tags: atom/literature/h1 - I think the acceptance of that invitation to solidarity with the larger pain of the world is what it means to be “a Christian.” It takes great inner freedom to be a follower of Jesus. *His life is an option, a choice, a call, a vocation* for us, and we are totally free to say yes or no or maybe. *We do not have to do this to make God love us*. That is already taken care of. We do it to love God back and to love what God loves and how God loves! We either are baptized “into his death” and “resurrection” (Romans 6:3; Philippians 3:10–12), or Christianity is largely a mere belonging system, not a transformational system that will change the world. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m1cvhcs2yf4wwxxkjcvy4t4z)) - Note: "We do not have to do this to make God love us. That is already taken care of." — the most pastorally sound line here; it severs the transaction so the call can't be used as leverage. "Yes or no or MAYBE" leaves room for someone mid-deconstruction. BUT the closing either/or is a false dilemma: belonging is usually the precondition for transformation, not its rival. The real failure mode isn't belonging — it's belonging that terminates in itself. - Tags: atom/literature/h2, fallacy/false-dilemma - The “crucified God” as personified in Jesus revealed that *God is always on the side of* *suffering wherever it is found*, including the wounded and dying troops on both sides in every kind of war, and both the victims and the oppressors of this world; frankly, this pleases very few people. Our resistance to suffering is an entire industry now, perhaps symbolized by the total power of the gun lobby and the permanent war economy in the United States, the fear of any profit sharing with the poor, or the need to be constantly entertained. Maybe that is why some have said that the foundational virtue underlying all others is courage (*cor-agere*, an action of the heart). It takes immense courage to walk in solidarity with the suffering of others, and even our own. [1] ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m1cvhkesq8p9drvdc7crq3hp)) - Note: The highest-friction paragraph, and Rohr knows it ("pleases very few people"). Two flags. (1) "Both the victims and the oppressors" is argued against a serious opposing tradition — Gutiérrez's preferential option for the poor, and womanist critiques of redemptive suffering — that never gets named. Solidarity is not neutrality. (2) "cor-agere" is folk etymology: courage is Old French corage < Vulgar Latin *coraticum < Latin cor (heart) + the French suffix -age. No "agere" in it. Also: "crucified God" is Moltmann's, unattributed. - Tags: fallacy/etymological, fallacy/suppressed-evidence, atom/literature/h3 - We can’t do it alone at all, but only by a deep identification with the Crucified One and crucified humanity. Jesus then does it in us, through us, with us, and for us. Then we have become a “new creation” (Galatians 6:15), a true disciple of Jesus, and a very different kind of human being. [2] ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01m1cvhp410ery1p1jvt0xqye3)) - Note: The homiletical cadence ("in us, through us, with us, and for us") is prose written to be spoken. Note the citation choice: "new creation" is more famously 2 Cor 5:17, but Gal 6:15 is the sharper pick — it subordinates ritual belonging markers to transformation, which is exactly the argument. Verified accurate. - Tags: atom/literature/h2