Unfinished Prophets: Elijah, Jonah, and John the Baptizer

Everything Belongs: Living the Teachings of Richard Rohr Forward

Center for Action and Contemplation

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 723 Ratings

🗓️ 8 August 2025

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How do we learn from imperfect spiritual teachers and embrace our own incompleteness? In this episode, we're exploring Chapter 6 of Richard Rohr's final book, The Tears of Things, titled "Unfinished Prophets: Elijah, Jonah, and John the Baptizer." In an extended conversation at Richard's hermitage, hosts Mike Petrow and Paul Swanson dive deep into three biblical figures who never quite completed their prophetic journey from anger to sadness to love. Later, Carmen Acevedo Butcher joins to discuss what it means to love our own imperfection and learn from flawed teachers without idealizing them. Mike and Carmen explore how perfectionism serves oppressive systems, why self-compassion is essential for spiritual growth, and address the significant absence of women's voices in prophetic literature.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit
0:05.4	cac.org.
0:07.7	Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Everything Belongs, the podcast where we live the
0:13.0	teachings of Father Richard Roar Forward. This season, we've been looking at Father
0:18.1	Richard's book, The Tears of Things, his most recent,
0:21.1	and he claims last book.
0:24.4	It's been a beautiful exploration the last few months, and we've now come to Chapter 6,
0:30.3	Unfinished Prophets, Elijah, Jonah, and John the Baptizer.
0:34.8	We're about halfway through this season, and it's right here in this chapter
0:38.6	where Father Richard takes a look at prophets who he think went on the path of the prophet that he's
0:44.3	been describing with us and didn't quite get there. They didn't quite make the full journey
0:50.0	from anger to sadness to love. And hey, this is a great opportunity for us to look at all the
0:56.8	ways that we're on the journey and to check in with where we are in our own development,
1:02.3	and in our own prophetic path. And also to ask ourselves, can we learn from prophets and scriptures
1:09.5	and spiritual teachers who themselves are maybe a little
1:13.6	bit unfinished and incomplete?
1:15.3	And in doing that, can we let ourselves be incomplete and imperfect?
1:20.6	I can't help but think of my favorite saying of Richards, which is that the only perfection
1:26.0	available to us is to completely love our imperfection.
1:31.3	This time, we're going to do something a little bit different. You know, normally what we do is we go to
1:36.7	Richards Hermitage and we talk to him for just about 20 to 30 minutes and then we bring in an
1:41.6	external guest and we unpack the themes of the chapter and the wisdom
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Center for Action and Contemplation, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Center for Action and Contemplation and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.