Richard Rohr 6

steerLaw and Grace
The Purpose of the Law

Monday, May 22, 2017
Why did Paul come to the subtle but crucial understanding of the limited and
dangerous possibilities of law/requirements? Probably because Paul himself
had been a man of the law, and he saw that it led him to “breathing threats to
slaughter the Lord’s disciples” (Acts 9:1). As he tells us in Philippians (3:4-6),
Paul was a perfect law-abiding Pharisee: “As far as the Law can make you
perfect, I was faultless,” he says. He seems to wonder, “How could such perfect
religious observance still create hateful and violent men like me?” That was
Paul’s utterly honest and humble question. (Many folks today would be wise to
ask the same question of themselves.)
What is the law really for? It’s not to make God love you. God already loves you,
and you cannot make God love you any more or any less by any technique
whatsoever. The purpose of spiritual law is to sharpen your awareness about
your own weaknesses and about who God is for you in that situation. When you
recognize your own radical inability to really obey the purpose of the law and, in
that same moment ask for God’s mercy, you have achieved its deepest purpose.
If you have ever tried to get rid of a negative thought by mere will power, instead
of by a “Higher Power,” you have surely experienced this reality. Surrender is
the goal, not personal success.
God not only allows us to make mistakes, but even uses our mistakes in our
favor! That is the brilliant Gospel economy of grace, and it is the only thing
worthy of being called “good news and a joy for all the people” (Luke 2:10).
When you come out of the boxing ring of the creative tension of law and grace,
you will know that you have finally won the match; but ironically, you will have
won by losing!
Gateway to Silence:
By grace I am saved.

An Economy of Grace
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
God’s freely given grace is a humiliation to the ego because free gifts
say nothing about being strong, superior, or moral. Thus only the
soul can understand grace, never the mind or the ego. The ego does
not know how to receive things freely or without logic. It likes to be
worthy and needs to understand in order to accept things as true.
The ego prefers a worldview of scarcity or quid pro quo, where only
the clever can win. That problem—and its overcoming—is at the very
center of the Gospel plot line. It has always been overcome from
God’s side. The only problem is getting us in on the process! God’s
inclusion of us reveals God’s humility, graciousness, and love. Only
inside an economy of grace can we see that God wants free and
willing partners. An economy of merit cannot process free love or
free anything. “Not servants, but friends” (John 15:15) is God’s plan.
Yet to this day, most Christians seem to prefer being servants. Actual
divine friendship is just too incredible to imagine.
If we’re honest, culture forms us much more than the Gospel. It

seems we have kept the basic storyline of human history in place
rather than allow the Gospel to reframe and redirect the story.
Except for those who have experienced grace at their core,
Christianity has not created a “new mind” (Romans 12:2) or a “new
self” (Ephesians 4:23-24) that is significantly different than the
cultures it inhabits. The old, tired win/lose scenario seems to be in
our cultural hard drive, whereas the experience of grace at the core
of reality, which is much more imaginative and installs new win/win
programs in our psyche, has been neglected and unrecognized by
most of Christianity. People who live their entire lives inside of a
system of competing, measuring, earning, counting, and performing
can’t understand how the win/win scenario of the Gospel would even
be interesting or attractive.
Up to now, Christianity has largely mirrored culture instead of

transforming it. Reward/punishment, good guys versus bad guys,
has been the plot line of most novels, plays, operas, movies, and
wars. This is the only way that a dualistic mind, unrenewed by
prayer and grace, can perceive reality. It is almost impossible to
switch this mind during a short sermon or service on a Sunday
morning. As long as we remain inside of a dualistic, win/lose script,
Christianity will continue to appeal to low-level and vindictive
moralisms and will not rise to the mystical banquet that Jesus
offered us. The spiritual path and life itself will be mere duty instead
of delight, “jars of purification” instead of 150 gallons of intoxicating
wine at the end of the party (John 2:6-10). We will focus on
maintaining order by sanctified violence instead of moving toward a
higher order of love and healing—which is the very purpose of the
Gospel.
Gateway to Silence:
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media:
2008), 156-157, 159, 177.
Worldview of Abundance
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
The flow of grace through us is largely blocked when we are living inside a
worldview of scarcity, a feeling that there’s just not enough: enough of God,
enough of me, enough food, enough health care to go around, enough mercy to
include and forgive all faults. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the
human mind is actually incapable of imagining anything infinite or eternal. So
it cannot imagine an infinite love or a God whose “love is everlasting,” as the
Psalms continually shout. In other words, the mind of itself cannot know God.
The many “multiplication” of food stories in the Gospels—when Jesus feeds a

crowd with very little (for example, Matthew 14:15-21)—clearly exemplify
abundance as the foundation of reality. The spiritual point is grace, not some
mere physical miracle. Notice in almost every case that the good apostles, who
represent our worldview of scarcity, advise Jesus against feeding the crowd:
“But how will two fish and five loaves be enough for so many?” Jesus is trying to
move them from their worldview of scarcity to one of abundance, but does so
with great difficulty. In the end, there is always much food left over, which
should communicate the point: Reality, with its inherent overflowing, always
has more than enough of itself to give. Just observe the seeds, spermatozoa, and
pollen of the natural world.
Our unhealthy economics and politics persist because even Christians largely
operate out of a worldview of scarcity: there is not enough land, water, money,
and housing for all of us; and in America there are never enough guns to keep us
safe. A saint always knows that there is more than enough for our need but
never enough for our greed. In the midst of the structural stinginess and over-
consumption of our present world, how do we possibly change consciousness
and teach the mind to operate from mercy and graciousness? It will always be
an uphill battle, and it will always depend upon a foundational and sustained
conversion. Even the churches tend to be stingy with grace and mercy, as Pope
Francis continues to point out.
Only our personal experiences of unconditional, unearned, and infinite love and
forgiveness can move us from the normal worldview of scarcity to the divine
world of infinite abundance. That’s when the doors of mercy blow wide open!
That’s when we begin to understand the scale-breaking nature of the Gospel.
Catholics and much of the world are now stunned to observe a pope who
exemplifies this worldview in our time. We can no longer say it is impossible
idealism.
Gateway to Silence:
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Today Is a Time for Mercy,” December 10, 2015,
https://cac.org/richard-rohr-on-mercy-mp3.
Implanted Desire
Thursday, May 25, 2017
We first see the idea of grace in the Hebrew Scriptures through the concept of
election or chosenness. This is eventually called “covenant love” because it
finally becomes a mutual giving and receiving. This love is always initiated from
YHWH’s side toward the people of Israel, and they gradually learn to trust it and
respond in kind. The Bible shows a relentless movement toward intimacy and
divine union between Creator and creatures. For this to happen, there
needs to be some degree of compatibility, likeness, or even
“sameness” between the two parties. In other words, there has to be
a little bit of God in us that wants to find itself.
We see the message of implanted grace most clearly in Jesus. He recognizes that
he is one with God. Jesus knows that it is God in him doing the knowing, loving,
and serving. Jesus fully trusts his deepest identity and never doubts it, which is
the unique character of his divine sonship. We often doubt, deny, and reject our
true identity, finding it hard to believe what we did not choose or create
ourselves. Such unaccountable gratuity is precisely the meaning of grace and
also why we are afraid to trust it. Yes, it is God in us that always seeks and
knows God; like always knows like. We are made for one another from the
beginning (Ephesians 1:4-6). Maybe the ultimate grace is to know that it is all
grace to begin with! It is already a grace to recognize that it is grace.
God doesn’t love the Israelites, anybody else, or even us today because we are
good. God loves us from a free and deliberate choice. Receiving God’s love has
never been a “worthiness contest.” This is very hard for almost everyone to
accept. It is finally a surrendering and never a full understanding. The proud
will seldom submit until they are “brought down from their thrones,” as Mary
put it (Luke 1:52). It just does not compute inside our binary, judging,
competing, and comparing brains.
God does not love you because you are good; God loves you because
God is good. And then you can be good because you draw upon such
an Infinite Source. The older I get, the more I am sure that God does
all the giving and we do all of the receiving. God is always and
forever the initiator in my life, and I am, on occasion, the half-
hearted respondent. My mustard seed of a response seems to be
more than enough for a humble God, even though the mustard seed
is “the tiniest of all the seeds” (Matthew 13:32).
God makes use of everything that we offer and thus expands our
freedom. Otherwise it would not be a covenant love, but a mere coercion. God
even implants the desire within us to desire even more intimacy with God.
Gateway to Silence:
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media:
2008), 163-164.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Law and Grace
Summary: Sunday, May 21-Friday, May 26, 2017
We must recover grace-oriented spirituality if we are to rebuild Christianity

from the bottom up. (Sunday)
When you recognize your own radical inability to really obey the purpose of the
law and, in that same moment ask for God’s mercy, you have achieved the law’s
deepest purpose. (Monday)
Up to now, Christianity has largely mirrored culture instead of transforming it.

(Tuesday)
Only our personal experiences of unconditional, unearned, and infinite love and
forgiveness can move us from the normal worldview of scarcity to the divine
world of infinite abundance. (Wednesday)
God does not love you because you are good; God loves you because God is
good. And then you can be good because you draw upon such an Infinite Source.
(Thursday)
God’s faithfulness has never been dependent on our worthiness or readiness.

This is restorative justice, the divine form of justice. (Friday)

Practice: Trust the River
Grace and mercy teach us that we are all much more than the good or bad
stories we tell about ourselves. These self-made identities are based on hurts
and unconscious agendas that allow us to see and judge things in a very selective
way. Strangely, your real life is not about “you.” It is part of a much larger
stream.
The Spirit is described as “flowing water” and as “a spring inside you” (John
4:10-14), a “river of life” (Revelation 22:1-2). Faith is trusting the Big River of
God’s providential love, which is to trust the visible embodiment (the Son), the
flow (the Holy Spirit), and the source itself (the Father). This is a divine process
that we don’t have to change, coerce, or improve. We just need to allow and
enjoy it. That takes immense confidence, especially when we’re hurting.
Usually, I can feel myself get panicky. Then I want to quickly make
things right. I lose my ability to be present, ignoring my body and
heart while my mind is obsessing. I’m oriented toward goals and
making things happen, trying to push or even create my own river.
Yet the Big River already flows through me and I am only one small
part of it.
Faith does not need to push the river precisely because it is able to
trust that there is a river. The river is flowing; we are already in it.
So do not be afraid. We have been given the Spirit by a very proactive
God. Jesus understands this gift as a foregone conclusion: “If you,
who are evil, know how to give your children what is good, how
much more will the heavenly Father give you the Holy Spirit?” (Luke
11:13).
Simone Weil said, “Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is
a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.” [1] Grace leads
us to the state of emptiness, to that momentary sense of meaninglessness in
which we ask, “What is it all for? What does it all mean?” All we can do is try to
keep our hands cupped and open. And it is even grace to do that. But we must
want grace and know we need it.
Ask yourself regularly, “What am I afraid of? Does it matter? Will it matter at
the end or in the great scheme of things? Is it worth holding on to?” Grace will
lead us into such fears and emptiness, and grace alone can fill them up, if we
are willing to stay in the void. We mustn’t engineer an answer too
quickly. People of deep faith develop a high tolerance for ambiguity
and come to recognize that it is only the small self that needs
constant certitude or order. The Godself is perfectly at home in the
River of Mystery.
Gateway to Silence:
References:
[1] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, introductions by Gustave Thibon & Thomas R. Nevin
(Bison Books: 1997), 55.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The
Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 46, 53, 142-144.
A Tuning Fork
Friday, June 30, 2017
Contemplative prayer is like striking a tuning fork. All you can really do in the
spiritual life is resonate to the true pitch, to receive the always-present message.
Once you are tuned, you will receive, and it has nothing to do with worthiness or
the group you belong to, but only inner resonance, a capacity for mutuality (see
Matthew 7:7-11), which implies a basic humility. We must begin with the
knowledge that the Sender is absolutely and always present and broadcasting;
the only change is with the receiver station, you and me.
Prayer is connecting with God/Ultimate Reality. It is not an attempt to change

God’s mind about us or about events. Such arrogance is what unbelievers make
fun of—and often rightly so. Prayer is primarily about changing our own mind
so that things like infinity, mystery, and forgiveness can resound within us. The
small mind cannot see great things because the two are on different frequencies
or channels. We must match our resonance to Love’s. Like knows like.
Without contemplation, the best you can do is to know by comparison,

calculation, and from the limited viewpoint of “you.” Prayer knows reality in a
totally different way. Instead of presenting a guarded self to the moment, prayer
stops defending or promoting its ideas and feelings, and waits for, expects, and
receives guidance from Another. It offers itself naked to the now, so that our
inner and aroused lover can meet the Lover. Such prayer takes major surgery of
heart, mind, and inner sight. Prayer is about changing you, not about
changing God.
Most simply put, prayer is something that happens to you (Romans 8:26-27),
much more than anything you privately do. It is an allowing of the Big Self
more than an assertion of the small self. Eventually you will find yourself
preferring to say, “Prayer happened, and I was there” more than “I prayed
today.” All you know is that you are being led, guided, loved, used, and prayed
through. You are no longer in the driver’s seat. Following this guidance you will
know what is yours to do.
God stops being an object of attention like any other object in the world, and
becomes at some level your own “I Am.” You start knowing through, with, and
in Somebody Else. And then your little “I Am” becomes “We Are.” Afterward
you know instinctively that your life is not about you, but you are about Life. “I
live now not I, but Another Life lives in me,” to paraphrase Paul’s poetic words
(Galatians 2:20).
This does not mean you are morally or psychologically perfect. Not at all. But
you will now have the freedom to recognize your failings and to grow and love
better because of them. That is the major and important difference!
Gateway to Silence:
Be still and still moving.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The
Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 101-104.
A Hidden Wholeness
Tuesday, July 4, 2017

Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist, wrote with great insight
that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” [1] Everything new
and creative in this world puts together things that don’t look like they go
together at all but always have been connected at a deeper level. Spirituality’s
goal is to get people to that deeper level, to the unified field or nondual thinking,
where God alone can hold contradictions and paradox.
When people ask me which is the more important, action or contemplation, I
know it is an impossible question to answer because they are eternally united in
one embrace, two sides of one coin. So I say that action is not the important
word, nor is contemplation; and is the important word! How do you put the two
together? I am seventy-four now and I’m still working on it! The dance of action
and contemplation is an art form that will take your entire life to master. Like
Moses at the burning bush, many of us begin with a mystical moment and end
with social action or what looks like politics. But it also works in the other
direction. Some start by diving into the pain of the world and that drives them
toward their need for God.
Unfortunately, too often Christianity has focused on one or the other. But there
are some masterful teachers who emphasize the integration of action and
contemplation. One of these was John Main (1926–1982), a Benedictine monk.
He taught the necessary fixed point, the place to stand, which for him was the
stability of the mantra and the disciplined practice of twice-daily formal
meditation. And from that daily practice flowed action. [2]
Though he didn’t talk directly about social or political issues, Main drew
attention to our basic distractibility and superficiality. In this he was a prophet,
seeing to the depth of things. He spoke from a place of critical distance from the
illusions of this world, and in that way his words have weight and substance.
People like John Main and Thomas Merton continue to have a tremendous
impact—even though each was just a single human being—because their vision
was both radically critical of consumer culture and also in love with God and the
world. They overcame the seeming tension and found underneath it a unified
field. Merton called this the “hidden wholeness” [3] and it is what Lady Julian of
Norwich saw when she looked at a single hazelnut and understood, “It is all that
is made.” [4] She is either delusional or seeing what most of us do not see.
Mystics always see in wholes.
Gateway to Silence:
Give me a lever and a place to stand.
References:
[1] Charles Péguy, Notre Jeunesse (Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 1910), 27.
Original text: “Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.”
[2] John Main, John Main: Essential Writings, ed. Laurence Freeman
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002).
[3] Thomas Merton, “Hagia Sophia: Dawn.” See Thomas Merton, In the Dark
Before Dawn: New Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, ed. Lynn R. Szabo (New
York: New Directions, 2005), 65.
[4] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 5.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a
Place of Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 6, 11.
Electric Circuits
Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Moses’ experience of the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-6) links action and
contemplation as the very starting place of the Judeo-Christian tradition. His
encounter is surely an inner one, but it immediately drives him outwardly, as
deep inner experience tends to do. It is a transcendent experience, yet note that
it is based in nature rather than a synagogue or temple. Often it is in the open
spaces of the natural world that the inner world is most obviously recognized, as
the Desert Fathers and Mothers and Celtic Christianity remind us.
Immediately after Moses had his heart-stopping experience, YHWH said to him:
“I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt. Now, go! Tell
Pharaoh to let my people go” (Exodus 3:7, 10). God gives Moses an experience of
an unnamable Presence, and it has immediate practical—and in this case socio-
political—implications and direction. Rather than invite Moses to worship or
attend a church service, God says, “Go make a difference, Moses!”
The fire burned for him, then in him, and finally through him.
The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous is another example of inner
conversion leading to outer service of others. In Bill Wilson’s twelfth step,
alcoholics learn that they will never really come to appropriate the power and
importance of the first eleven steps until they personally take it upon themselves
to give it away to at least one other person. This necessary reciprocity is an
essential hook from which too many Christians have released themselves and we
all have suffered because of it. In avoiding their need to pay back, many
Christians have lost whatever they might have gained in their private devotions.
Love is like an electric circuit; it can never flow in just one direction.
If I have grown at all in my decades as a priest, it’s in part through this role of
being a preacher and teacher. I have had to stand before crowds for years and
describe what I thought I believed, and then I often had to ask myself, “Do I
really believe that myself?” And in my attempt to communicate it, I usually
found that I’d only scratched the surface of my own understanding. In sharing
what you have experienced and learned, you really own the Gospel message
beyond what you ever imagined.
In giving away you are recharged.
Regardless of our different political opinions and values, we must admit that the
tenor of public and even private discourse in America is often infantile and
usually dualistic. Yet many people know of no other way of thinking. No one told
them about the wonderful alternative, a third way beyond fight or flight. This
tells me that Christianity has not been presenting the Gospel in a way that really
changes people. Meditation makes it almost inevitable that your politics will
change, the way you spend your time is going to be called into question, and any
snug socioeconomic perspective will be slowly taken away from you.

Gateway to Silence:
From Being Driven to Being Drawn

Thursday, July 6, 2017
When I was a young man, I liked ideas and books quite a lot, and I still read a
great deal. But each time I come back from a long hermitage retreat, I have no
desire to read a book for the next few weeks or even months. For a while I know
there is nothing in any book that is going to be better, more truthful, or more
solid than what I have just experienced on the cellular, heart, and soul level.
If you asked me what it is I know, I would be hard pressed to tell you. All I know
is that there is a deep “okayness” to life—despite all the contradictions—which
has become even more evident in the silence. Even when much is terrible,
seemingly contradictory, unjust, and inconsistent, somehow sadness and joy are
able to coexist at the same time. The negative value of things no longer cancels
out the positive, nor does the positive deny the negative.
Whatever your personal calling or your delivery system for the world, it must
proceed from a foundational “yes” to life. Your necessary “no” to injustice and
all forms of un-love will actually become even clearer and more urgent in the
silence, but now your work has a chance of being God’s pure healing instead of
impure anger and agenda. You can feel the difference in people who are working
for causes; so many works of social justice have been undone by people who do
all the fighting from their small or angry selves
If your prayer goes deep, your whole view of the world will change from fear and
reaction to deep and positive connection—because you don’t live inside a fragile
and encapsulated self anymore. In meditation, you are moving from ego
consciousness to soul awareness, from being driven by negative motivations to
being drawn from a positive source within.
Through a consistent practice of contemplative prayer you will find yourself

thinking much more in terms of both/and rather than either/or. This is what
enables mystics and saints to forgive, to let go of hurts, to be compassionate,
and even to love their enemies.
Gateway to Silence:
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of
Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 17-18, 22.
The Great Turning

Friday, July 7, 2017
Contemplation is no fantasy, make-believe, or daydream, but the flowering of

patience and steady perseverance. When we look at the world today, we may
well ask whether it can be transformed on the global or even personal level. Our
hope lies in the fact that an authentic inner life is going to change the society
that we live in, just as we allow it to change us. God seems to patiently
participate with us and kindly invite us into a long-term process of growth. Love
and life are infinite.
I know the situation in the world can seem dark today. We are seeing theological
regression into fundamentalist religions which believe all issues can be resolved
by an appeal to authority (hierarchy or Scripture) and so there is no need for an
inner life of prayer. In the United States we have seen the rolling back of a
compassionate economic system and the abandonment of our biblical
responsibility for the poor, the sick, and refugees. Fear and anger seem to rule
our politics and our churches. We see these same things in many parts of the
world.
The negative forces are very strong, and the development of consciousness and
love sometimes feels very weak. But a “Great Turning” is also happening, as
believed and described in many ways by such people as Teilhard de Chardin,
Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, and David Korten. There is a deep relationship
between the inner revolution of prayer and the transformation of social
structures and social consciousness.
The Apostle Paul has a marvelous line: “where sin increased, grace abounded all
the more” (Romans 5:20). In so many places, there are signs of the Holy Spirit
working at all levels of society. The church might well have done its work as
leaven because much of this reform, enlightenment, compassion, and healing is
now happening outside the bounds of organized religion. Only God gets the
credit.
The toothpaste is out of the tube. There are enough people who know the big
picture of Jesus’ thrilling and alluring vision of the reign of God that this Great
Turning cannot be stopped. There are enough people going on solid inner
journeys that it is not merely ideological or theoretical anymore. This is a
positive, nonviolent reformation from the inside, from the bottom up. The big
questions are being answered at a peaceful and foundational level, with no need
to oppose, deny, or reject. I sense the urgency of the Holy Spirit, with over seven
billion humans on the planet. There is so much to love and so much suffering to
share in and heal.
Gateway to Silence:
Connecting with Universal Meaning

Sunday, July 9, 2017
Let nothing disturb you,

Let nothing frighten you,
All things are passing:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things
Whoever has God lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.
—St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) [1]
Contemplation is a most radical form of self-surrender and kenosis (letting go).

Yet surrender is only possible if there is a profound trust that there is Someone
trustworthy to whom we can surrender. Paradoxically, self-forgetfulness leads
to a firm and fearless sense of self-responsibility. There is a co-creation going
on, a synergism between surrender and personal responsibility, God “co-
operating with those who love God” (Romans 8:28). We are on a cosmic trust
walk.
Contemplation is challenging and even unnatural in an overstimulated culture.

It is next to impossible as long as we identify with our passing feelings and
opinions. No new perception, no new engagement, no honest name for God will
emerge in our cluttered existence apart from a contemplative stance which
relativizes the shallow and egoic chatter in our minds.
I am convinced that many, if not most, modern neuroses are a direct result of
the lack of a common, shared story under which our individual stories are
written. As a result, our tiny lives lack a transcendent referent, a larger
significance, a universal meaning. Our common life is a “dis-aster,” literally
disconnected from the cosmic “stars.” We are lost in insignificance.
The Universal Christ, described by the Apostle Paul, is not a problem-solving

Christ, not a denominational or cultural Christ, not a Christ domesticated by the
churches, but the One who names in his life and person what matters, what
lasts, and finally what is. He holds it all together in significance, reveals the
redemptive pattern that we call the life and death of things, and holds the
meaning and value of our lives outside of ourselves (see Colossians 1, Ephesians
1, John 1).
Because Christians no longer “worship” such a Christ, we are condemned to

worship smaller gods and to build our lives around smaller stories, none of
which are big enough or real enough to give universal order and meaning. We
look to the private psyche, but it is just not connected enough to encompass
human spiritual longing. Christianity’s efforts at evangelization will remain
trapped in culture and fundamentalism until we ourselves are large enough to
proclaim a cosmic notion of Christ.

Gateway to Silence:
Build on the positive; build on love.
References:
[1] Teresa of Avila, “Nada te turbe.” Soon after Teresa’s death, these lines were found
written in her prayer book. See note in The Complete Works of St. Teresa of Avila, trans.
and ed. E. Allison Peers, vol. 3 (New York: Burns and Oates, 2002), 288.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace (Orbis Books: 1993), 19-20.
Silently Gazing upon God

Monday, July 10, 2017
In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI invited Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of

Canterbury and leader of the Anglican Church in England, to address the
Synod of Bishops on the topic of evangelization. Williams is a brilliant
theologian and man of prayer. His address to the synod shares the
foundational importance of contemplation in rebuilding Christianity. Let his
words speak to you:
To be fully human is to be recreated in the image of Christ’s humanity; and that

humanity is the perfect human “translation” of the relationship of the eternal
Son to the eternal Father, a relationship of loving and adoring self-giving, a
pouring out of life towards the Other. Thus the humanity we are growing into in
the spirit, the humanity that we seek to share with the world as the fruit of
Christ’s redeeming work, is a contemplative humanity. . . . We could say that we
begin to understand contemplation when we see God as the first contemplative,
the eternal paradigm of that selfless attention to the Other that brings not death
but life to the self. All contemplating of God presupposes God’s own absorbed
and joyful knowing of . . . and gazing upon [God’s self] in the Trinitarian life. [1]
To be contemplative as Christ is contemplative is to be open to all the fullness

that the Father wishes to pour into our hearts. With our minds made still and
ready to receive, we are at last at the point where we may begin to grow. And the
face we need to show to our world is the face of a humanity in endless growth
towards love, a humanity so delighted and engaged by the glory of what we look
towards that we are prepared to embark on a journey without end to find our
way more deeply into it, into the heart of the Trinitarian life. St. Paul speaks (in
2 Corinthians 3:18) of how “with our unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the
Lord,” we are transfigured with a greater and greater radiance. That is the face
we seek to show to our fellow human beings. [2]
And we seek this not because we are in search of some private “religious
experience” that will make us feel secure or holy. We seek it because in this self-
forgetting gazing towards the light of God in Christ we learn how to look at one
another and at the whole of God’s creation. In the early Church, there was a
clear understanding that we needed to advance from the self-understanding or
self-contemplation that taught us to discipline our greedy instincts and cravings
to the “natural contemplation” that perceived and venerated the wisdom of God
in the order of the world and allowed us to see created reality for what it truly
was in the sight of God—rather than what it was in terms of how we might use it
or dominate it. And from there grace would lead us forward into true “theology,”
the silent gazing upon God that is the goal of all our discipleship. [3]
I do not need to speak when Rowan Williams has spoken so well.
Gateway to Silence:
References:
[1] Rowan Williams, “The Archbishop of Canterbury's Address to the Thirteenth Ordinary
General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on The New Evangelization for the Transmission
of the Christian Faith,” 5,
http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2645/archbishops-
address-to-the-synod-of-bishops-in-rome.
[2] Ibid., 6.
[3] Ibid., 7.
Are you ready to go deeper? If Father Richard's teaching has impacted you,
consider applying for the immersive two-year Living School experience. Help us
rebuild spirituality from the bottom up on a foundation of contemplative
consciousness, bringing healing and hope to the world! Learn more at
cac.org/living-school.
Rebuilding on a
Contemplative Foundation
Revolutionary Contemplation
Tuesday, July 11, 2017
Today, we continue Archbishop Rowan Williams’ address to the Synod of

Bishops in Rome in 2012.
[Contemplation] is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do:
it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed
humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world
with freedom—freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted
understanding that come from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only
ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and
our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us
to inhabit. To learn contemplative prayer is to learn what we need so as to live
truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter. [1]
. . . [We] have to be very careful in our evangelization not simply to persuade

people to apply to God and the life of the spirit all the longings for drama,
excitement and self-congratulation that we so often indulge in our daily
lives. . . . [Responding] in a life-giving way to what the Gospel requires of us
means a transforming of our whole self, our feelings and thoughts and
imaginings. To be converted to the faith does not mean simply acquiring a new
set of beliefs, but becoming a new person, a person in communion with God and
others through Jesus Christ. [2]
Contemplation is an intrinsic element in this transforming process. To learn to

look to God without regard to my own instant satisfaction, to learn to scrutinize
and to relativise the cravings and fantasies that arise in me—this is to allow God
to be God, and thus to allow the prayer of Christ, God’s own relation to God, to
come alive in me. Invoking the Holy Spirit is a matter of asking the third person
of the Trinity to enter my spirit and bring the clarity I need to see where I am in
slavery to cravings and fantasies and to give me patience and stillness as God’s
light and love penetrate my inner life. Only as this begins to happen will I be
delivered from treating the gifts of God as yet another set of things I may
acquire to make me happy, or to dominate other people. And as this process
unfolds, I become more free—to borrow a phrase of St. Augustine—to “love
human beings in a human way,” [3] to love them not for what they may promise
me, to love them not as if they were there to provide me with lasting safety and
comfort, but as fragile fellow-creatures held in the love of God. I discover (as we
noted earlier) how to see other persons and things for what they are in relation
to God, not to me. And it is here that true justice as well as true love has its
roots. [4]
Paradoxically, personal fulfillment means abandoning ourselves and putting

others first. It means moving beyond wanting to be loved and moving into
becoming lovers. It means growing past our need for things and discovering
happiness in giving things away—even giving ourselves away, as Jesus did.
[5]
Gateway to Silence:
References:
[1] Rowan Williams, “The Archbishop of Canterbury's Address
to the Thirteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops
on The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith,” 8, emphasis mine,
http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2645/archbishops-
address-to-the-synod-of-bishops-in-rome.
[2] Ibid., 9.
[3] Augustine, Confessions IV.7.
[4] Williams, 10.
[5] Richard Rohr, Why Be Catholic? Understanding Our Experience and Tradition
(Franciscan Media: 1989), 16.
The Healing Power of Meditation

Wednesday, July 12, 2017
When religion is not about healing, it really does not have much to offer people
in this life. Many have called such disembodied theology “carrot on the stick”
theology or, as my friend Brian McLaren says, we made the Gospel largely into
“an evacuation plan for heaven.” [1] If we don’t understand the need and desire
for healing now, then salvation (salus = healing) becomes a matter of hoping for
some form of delayed gratification. We desperately need healing for groups,
institutions, marriage, the wounds of war, abuse, race relations, and the endless
social problems in which we are drowning today. But we won’t know how to heal
if we never learn the skills at ground zero: the individual human heart.
For much of its history following 313 AD, the Christian church’s job or concern
was not healing, but rather maintaining social and church order: doling out
graces and indulgences (as if that were possible); granting dispensations,
annulments, absolutions, and penalties; keeping people in first marriages at all
costs, instead of seeing marriage as an arena for growth, forgiveness, and
transformation. In general, we tried to resolve issues of the soul and the Spirit
by juridical and "transactional" means, which in my opinion seldom work.
As priests, we felt our job was to absolve sin rather than actually transform
people. “Get rid of the contaminating element,” as it were, rather than “Learn
what you can about yourself and God because of this conflict.” Those are two
very different paths. In the four Gospels, Jesus did two things over and over
again: he preached and he healed. We have done a lot of preaching, but not too
much healing. We did not know how.
If there isn’t much of a relationship between our religion and our politics, I
think it’s because we are not involved in healing ourselves. How can we
understand the healing of the world? Only whole people can imagine or call
forth a more whole world. Healing depends upon relating with love and
compassion. Religion usually focuses on imputing and then forgiving guilt. This
is much more about “sin management” than it is about proclaiming a larger-
than-life vision for humanity. Remember that the ego contracts around
problems. The soul gathers and is drawn by meaning. We too often settle for
problem solving. It really is the best way to keep the laity coming back, strangely
enough. Carrot on the stick theology keeps us clergy in business. I wish it did
not work so well.
Christianity must first teach people how to really pray so they can relate to God
as adults. This creates spiritual inter-dependence instead of infantile
codependency which people eventually react against. I say this coming from a
church that put most of its resources into training children in rote prayers. We
can do so much better.
Gateway to Silence:
References:
[1] Brian McLaren, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?:
Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World (New York: Jericho Books), 211.
Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 53-55.
Rebuilding on a
Contemplative Foundation
Contemplation Gives Power to the People

Thursday, July 13, 2017
If religious teachers told their parishioners about contemplation, where

individuals can experience the mercy of God for themselves, they would not be
so dependent upon the clergy. Although this codependency is not engineered
maliciously, it does create job security. We all have a hard time doing things that
essentially work ourselves out of a job or make ourselves unnecessary. Sin
management does hold the flock together, but soon we realize that there is little
maturity, or even love, in a flock that is glued together in this way. The passive,
passive-dependent, and passive-aggressive nature of the church is rather
obvious to many of us who have worked on the inside.
The very emergence of the monks, the early Desert Fathers and Mothers, is an
unexpected and surprising third-century movement because there is nothing in
Jesus’ teaching to suggest there should be different levels of discipleship in his
vision. We are all equally called to follow Jesus, but we created our own caste
system; some people were supposed to “get it” and take it seriously, and some
were just along for the ride. The very term layperson implies someone who
doesn’t know anything. We were left with the professionals and the amateurs.
But we were all meant to be professional disciples.
Could meditation or contemplative prayer be the very thing that has the power
to both democratize and mature Christianity? Meditation does not require
education; it does not need a hierarchy of decision makers; it does not argue
about gender issues in leadership or liturgy; nor does it demand licensed
officials for sacraments. Meditation does not need preachers and bishops; it
does not have moralistic membership requirements. Meditation lives and
thrives with dedicated pray-ers who have every chance of becoming healers in
their world, each according to his or her gift. And let’s be very honest, Jesus
talked a lot more about praying and healing than anything else.
Christians who meditate are self-initiating. Since we no longer have formal rites
of passage in our cultures, we need contemplation to change us. Faithfulness to
contemplative practice can achieve the same radical inner renewal as
sacraments and formal initiation rites. Contemplation addresses the root, the
underlying place, where illusion and ego are generated. It touches the
unconscious, where most of our wounds and need for healing lie. With
meditation or contemplation, I think we have every likelihood of producing
actual elders for the next generation, and not just elderly people.
Gateway to Silence:
Reference:
Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 55-57, 98.
Order, Disorder, Reorder

First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of
God. —Julian of Norwich [1]
Whenever we’re led out of normalcy into sacred, open space, it’s going to feel
like suffering, because it is letting go of what we’re used to. This is always
painful at some level. But part of us has to die if we are ever to grow larger (John
12:24). If we’re not willing to let go and die to our small, false self, we won’t
enter into any new or sacred space.
The role of the prophet is to lead us into sacred space by deconstructing the old
space; the role of the priest is to teach us how to live fruitfully inside of sacred
space. The prophet disconnects us from the false, and the priest reconnects us to
The Real at ever larger and deeper levels. Unfortunately, most ministers might
talk of new realms but rarely lead us out of the old realm where we are still
largely trapped and addicted. So not much genuinely new happens.
I see transformation and change occurring in three stages: order > disorder >
reorder.
A sense of order is the easiest and most natural way to begin; it is a needed first
“container.” But this structure is dangerous if we stay in its safe confines too
long. It is small and self-serving. It doesn’t know the full picture, but it thinks it
does. “Order” must be deconstructed by the trials and vagaries of life. We must
go through a period of “disorder” to grow up.
Only in the final “reorder” stage can darkness and light coexist, can paradox be
okay. We are finally at home in the only world that ever existed. This is true and
contemplative knowing. Here death is a part of life, failure is a part of victory,
and imperfection is included in perfection. Opposites collide and unite;
everything belongs.
We dare not get rid of our pain before we have learned what it has to teach us.
Most of religion gives answers too quickly, dismisses pain too easily, and seeks
to be distracted—to maintain some ideal order. So we must resist the instant fix
and acknowledge ourselves as beginners to be open to true transformation. In
the great spiritual traditions, the wounds to our ego are our teachers and are to
be welcomed. They should be paid attention to, not denied or even perfectly
resolved. How can a Christian look at the Crucified One and not understand this
essential point?
The Resurrected Christ is the icon of reorder. Once we can learn to live in this
third spacious place, neither fighting nor fleeing reality but holding the creative
tension, we are in the spacious place of grace out of which all newness comes.
God is now in charge, not us.
There is no direct flight from order to reorder. You must go through disorder,
which is surely why Jesus dramatically and shockingly endured it on the
cross. He knew we would all want to deny necessary suffering unless he made it
overwhelmingly clear.
Gateway to Silence:
References:
[1] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, 61, ed. Grace Warrack, (London:
Methuen & Company, 1901), 153; R. Rohr paraphrase.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, How Do We Get Everything to Belong? disc 2 (CAC:

2004), CD, MP3 download; and
Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company:
2003), 43-44, 101, 158-159, 171.
There Is Nothing to Regret

(God Uses Everything in Our Favor)
Monday, June 12, 2017

Toward the end of his life, Saint Francis told the friars, “Let us begin, brothers,
to serve the Lord God, for up until now we have done little or nothing.” [1] That
enigmatic sense of beginning again at the end of life, at the end of an era, in the
middle of so much failure, when we just want to rest and put the past behind us,
that is the gift for reconstruction that we want to discover in these meditations.
It makes Francis a man for all seasons, particularly for seasons of winter and
death, when we do not know how, much less want, to begin again.
Francis also said as he lay dying, “I have done what is mine; may Christ teach
you what is yours!” [2] We cannot change the world except insofar as we have
changed ourselves. We can only give away who we are. We can only offer to
others what God has done in us. We have no real mental or logical answers. We
must be an answer. We only know the other side of the journeys that we have
made ourselves. Francis walked to the edge and thus he could lead others to
what he found there.
All the conflicts and contradictions of life must find a resolution in us before we
can resolve anything outside ourselves. Only the forgiven can forgive, only the
healed can heal, only those who stand daily in need of mercy can offer mercy to
others. At first it sounds simplistic and even individualistic, but it is precisely
such transformed people who can finally effect profound and long-lasting social
change.
It has something to do with what we call quantum theology. [3] The cosmos is
mirrored in the microcosm. If we let the mystery happen in one small and true
place, it moves from there! It is contagious, it is shareable, it reshapes the world.
Thus, both Jesus and Francis had no pragmatic social agenda for reform. They
just moved outside the system of illusion, more by ignoring it than fighting it
and quite simply doing it better. They knew that “the best criticism of the bad is
the practice of the better” (one of the Center for Action and Contemplation’s
core principles). [4] Jesus and Francis moved to a much larger place that we call
holiness/wholeness in God, and from there they could deal kindly with all
smaller and confined places. Nothing threatened them; everything elated them,
reflecting their own infinite abundance.
Don’t waste any time dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys.
Hold them both together in your own soul—where they are anyway—and you
will have held together the whole world. You will have overcome the great divide
in one place of spacious compassion. You, little you, will have paid the price of
redemption. God takes it from there, replicating the same pattern in another
conscious human life.
Gateway to Silence:
Help me do what is mine to do.
The Third Eye

Thursday, June 29, 2017
In the early medieval period, two Christian philosophers offered names for three
different ways of seeing, and these names had a great influence on scholars and
seekers in the Western tradition. Hugh of St. Victor (1078-1141) and Richard of
St. Victor (1123-1173) wrote that humanity was given three different sets of eyes,
each building on the previous one. The first eye was the eye of the flesh (thought
or sight), the second was the eye of reason (meditation or reflection), and the
third was the intuitive eye of true understanding (contemplation). [1]
I describe this third eye as knowing something simply by being calmly present
to it (no processing needed!). This image of “third eye” thinking, beyond our
dualistic vision, is also found in most Eastern religions. We are onto something
archetypal here, I think!
The loss of the “third eye” is at the basis of much of the shortsightedness and
religious crises of the Western world, about which even secular scholars like
Albert Einstein and Iain McGilchrist have written. Lacking such wisdom, it is
hard for churches, governments, and leaders to move beyond ego, the desire for
control, and public posturing. Everything divides into dualistic oppositions like
liberal vs. conservative, with vested interests pulling against one another. Truth
is no longer possible at this level of conversation. Even theology becomes more a
quest for power than a search for God and Mystery.
One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us
without some degree of contemplative seeing and action. It is hardly an
exaggeration to say that “us-and-them” seeing, and the dualistic thinking that
results, is the foundation of almost all discontent and violence in the world. [2]
It allows heads of religion and state to avoid their own founders, their own
national ideals, and their own better instincts. Lacking the contemplative gaze,
such leaders will remain mere functionaries and technicians, or even dangers to
society.
We need all three sets of eyes in both a healthy culture and a healthy religion.
Without them, we only deepen and perpetuate our problems.
Gateway to Silence:
Be still and still moving.
References:
[1] Hugh of St. Victor, De Sacramentis christianae fidei, 1.10.2;
Richard of St. Victor, The Mystical Ark, 1:3-4. See Richard of St. Victor, trans. Grover A.
Zinn (Paulist Press: 1979), 30, 155-158.
[2] See David Berreby, Us and Them: The Science of Identity (University of Chicago Press:
2008).
Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 28-29.

Divinization
Yesterday we explored the metaphor of a wedding to describe what God is doing

—preparing and drawing us toward deeper intimacy, belonging, and union. The
Eastern Fathers of the Church were not afraid of this belief, and called it the
process of “divinization” (theosis). In fact, they saw it as the whole point of the
Incarnation and the very meaning of salvation. The much more practical and
rational church in the West seldom used the word divinization. It was just too
daring for us, despite the rather direct teachings from Peter (1 Peter 1:4-5 and 2
Peter 1:4) and Jesus in John’s Gospel: “I pray not only for them, but also for
those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as
you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world
may believe that you sent me” (John 17:20-21).
Jesus came to give us the courage to trust and allow our inherent union with
God, and he modeled it for us in this world. Union is not merely a place we go to
later—if we are good. It is a place of deep goodness that we naturally exist inside
of—now.
For persons and for creation, transformation must be real and in this world.
Paul’s most used phrase, “en Christo,” suggests a shared embodiment. The Body
of Christ (1 Corinthians 12) then takes the form of a meal so we can be reminded
frequently of our core identity (1 Corinthians 11:23-26). As Augustine said, “We
are what we eat! We are what we drink!” [1]
This development of love consciousness is the true Second Coming of Christ. I

am convinced of it. Our union with God will finally be allowed and enjoyed,
despite our relentless resistance and denial. When God wins, God wins! God
does not lose. Apokatastasis (universal restoration) has been promised to us
(Revelation 3:20-21) as the real message of the Universal Christ, the Alpha and
the Omega of all history (Revelation 1:4, 21:6, 22:13). It will be a win-win for
God—and surely for humanity! [2] What else would a divine victory look like?
The clear goal and direction of the biblical revelation is toward a full mutual
indwelling. We see the movement toward union as God walks in the garden with
naked Adam and Eve and “all the array” of creation (Genesis 2:1). The theme
finds its shocking climax in the realization that “the mystery is Christ within
you, your hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27). As John excitedly puts it, “You know
him because he is with you and he is in you!” (John 14:17). The eternal mystery
of incarnation will have finally met its mark, and “the marriage feast of the
Lamb will begin” (Revelation 19:7-9). History is not heading toward Apocalypse,
Armageddon, or “The Late Great Planet Earth” kind of conclusion. Jesus says, in
any number of places and parables, it will be a great wedding banquet.
Gateway to Silence:
I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine.
References:
[1] Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 272, “On the day of Pentecost, to the infantes, concerning
the sacrament” in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, pt. 3,
vol. 7, Sermons, trans. Edmund Hill (New City Press: 1993), 300-301.
[2] For more on universal restoration, see David Burnfield, Patristic Universalism: An
Alternative to the Traditional View of Divine Judgment (Universal Publishers: 2013).
Christians deserve to know how many Fathers of the early Church, particularly in the East,
understood cosmic salvation to be the whole point. This is just one more recent and well-
sourced example of a rediscovered theme in the Christian world.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, New Great Themes of Scripture, disc 1 (Franciscan Media:
1999), CD;
and Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 212.
A note on the term "substitionary atonement":

The phrase “substitutionary atonement” is generally used in this week's meditations to indicate the most
current iteration of the theory. Throughout Christian history, there have been multiple theories of
substitutionary atonement. One of the earliest, the ransom theory, originated with Origen and the early
church. Closely related to this was the Christus Victor theory. The ransom view of atonement was the
dominant theory until the publication of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo? (Why Did God Become Human?) at
the end of the 11th century. Anselm’s satisfaction theory of atonement then became dominant until the
Reformed position introduced penal substitution in the 16th century. This new view of substitutionary
atonement emphasized punishment over satisfaction and paralleled criminal law. Today, the phrase
“substitutionary atonement” is often (correctly or incorrectly) used to refer to the penal theory of
atonement. This series touches the surface of 2,000 years of complex theological process.

Meister Eckhart, Part II
Friday, September 29, 2017

What is life? God’s being is my life. —Meister Eckhart [1]
Meister Eckhart illustrates the height of western non-dualism. This is why he is

largely impossible to understand with our usual dualistic mind. When Eckhart
says, “Let us pray to God that we may be free of God,” [2] our logical mind
would see this as nonsense! It takes unitive consciousness to discover what
Eckhart means. There is no concept of God that can contain God. Your present
notion of God is never God. As Augustine said, “If you comprehend it, it is not
God.” [3] We can only come to know God as we let go of our ideas about God,
and what is not God, is slowly stripped away.
Before transformation, you pray to God. After transformation you pray through
God, as official Christian prayers say: “Through Christ our Lord. Amen!” Before
radical conversion, you pray to God as if God were over there, an object like all
other objects. After conversion (con-vertere, to turn around or to turn with),
you look out from God with eyes other than your own. As Meister Eckhart stated
it in one of his sermons, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with
which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing
and one love.” [4] All we humans are doing is allowing God to “complete the
circuit” within us—until we see from the same perspective. This is the “mind of
Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), which will be experienced as a “spiritual
revolution” in thinking (Ephesians 4:22).
Michael Demkovich, a Dominican priest and scholar, explains: “It is through

our coming to know the truest self that we are transformed into something
divine. Eckhart’s notion of deiformity, a person’s conformity to this underlying
reality of Godliness, is critical in his understanding . . . of the soul.” [5] Eckhart
did not see the soul as dualistically opposed to the body, but as a guide to the
body’s experience. Because God took on a human body in Christ and is present
within humanity, the body is sacred. In his preaching, Eckhart uses a verbal
illustration, exemplum, of eating to illustrate the body-soul relationship: “The
food that I eat is united with my body just as my body is with my soul. My body
and my soul are united in one being . . . and this typifies that great union we are
destined to have with God, in one being.” [6]
You can see why much of the dualistic church was just not ready for dear
Meister Eckhart, and thus he was never canonized a saint. But he is still a
“Meister”! When copying one of Eckhart’s most famous sermons, an anonymous
scribe praised him as “one from whom God hid nothing.” [7]

Gateway to Silence:
Practice being present.
Julian of Norwich, Part I

Sunday, October 1, 2017
We who seek to grow spiritually are like children ushered off to school for their
education and personal growth. God is the principal or headmaster, and the
saints and mystics are the various teachers and coaches who will interact with
us on a day-to-day basis. Our goal, therefore, is to learn: to learn the
curriculum of a truly spiritual life . . . grounded in love, mercy, tenderness,
compassion, forgiveness, hope, trust, simplicity, silence, peace, and joy. To
embody union with God is to discover these beautiful characteristics emerging
from within and slowly transfiguring us to remake us in the very image and
likeness of God. —Carl McColman [1]
Lady Julian of Norwich (1342-1416) is one of my favorite mystics and teachers. I

return to her writings again and again, every few months, and always discover
something new. Julian experienced her “showings,” as she called them, all on
one night (May 8 or 13, 1373) when she was very sick and near death. As a priest
held a crucifix in front of her, Julian saw Jesus suffering and heard him
speaking to her for some hours. Like all mystics, she realized that what Jesus
was saying about himself he was simultaneously saying about all of reality. That
is what unitive consciousness allows us to see.
This was such a profound experience that Julian eventually asked the bishop to
enclose her in an anchor-hold, built against the side of St. Julian’s Church in
Norwich, England. Julian was later named after that church. We do not know
her real name, since she never signed her writing. The anchor-hold had a
window looking into the church sanctuary that allowed Julian to attend Mass
and another window so she could counsel and pray over people who came to her
on the street.
Julian felt the need to go apart and reflect on her profound experiences. It took
her twenty years to find a language that the larger Church could understand,
and then it took us over 600 years to finally take her seriously. People like
Julian don’t want to engage in oppositional thinking, and they don’t need to
prove they’re right, so they often become hermits. They go apart to find a way to
experience their truth in a healing, transformative way for others. They look like
they are alone, but exactly the opposite is the case.
Julian first wrote a short text about the showings, but feeling it did not do
justice to her experience, she rewrote it as a longer text some years later. Her
writings are usually called Revelations of Divine Love or sometimes Showings.
Julian is thought to be the first known woman to write a book in English. Her
spirituality is unlike the religious views common in her time. It is not based in
sin, shame, guilt, or fear of God or hell. Instead, it is full of delight, freedom,
intimacy, and cosmic hope.
Gateway to Silence:
We are all one with You.
References:
[1] Carl McColman, Christian Mystics: 108 Seers, Saints, and Sages (Hampton Roads:
2016), xix.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Following the Mystics Through the Narrow Gate: Seeing God
in All Things, disc 7 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2010), CD, DVD, MP3
download; and
Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, disc 7 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2013), CD,
MP3 download.
Julian of Norwich, Part II

Monday, October 2, 2017
The place which Jesus takes in our soul he will nevermore vacate, for in us is
his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there. . . . And
the soul who thus contemplates is made like [the one] who is contemplated. —
Julian of Norwich [1]
On that day, you will know that you are in me and I am in you. —John 14:20
“That day” John refers to has been a long time in coming, yet it has been the
enduring message of every great religion in history. It is the Perennial
Tradition. Divine and thus universal union is still the core message and promise
—the whole goal and the entire point of all religion.
Lady Julian of Norwich uses the idea of “oneing” to describe divine union. She
writes:
The soul is preciously knitted to him in its making, by a knot so subtle and so
mighty that it is oned into God. In this oneing, it is made endlessly holy.
Furthermore, he wants us to know that all the souls which are one day to be
saved in heaven without end are knit in this same knot and oned in this oneing,
and made holy in this one identical holiness. [2]
Julian says, “By myself I am nothing at all, but in general, I am in the oneing of
love. For it is in this oneing that the life of all people exists.” [3] She continues:
“The love of God creates in us such a oneing that when it is truly seen, no person
can separate themselves from another person” [4], and “In the sight of God all
humans are oned, and one person is all people.” [5]
This is not some 21st century leap forward in theology. This is not pantheism or
mere “New Age” optimism. This is the whole point and always has been. It was,
indeed, supposed to usher in a new age—and it still can and will. Radical union
is the recurring experience of the saints and mystics of all religions. Our job is
not to first discover it, but only to retrieve what has been re-discovered—and
enjoyed, again and again—by those who desire and seek God and love. When
you think you have “discovered” it, you will be just like Jacob “when he awoke
from his sleep” and shouted, “You were here all the time, and I never knew it!”
(Genesis 28:16).
Gateway to Silence:
We are all one with You.
References:
[1] Julian of Norwich, Showings, Chapter 22 (Short text), trans. Edmund Colledge and
James Walsh (Paulist Press: 1978), 164.
[2] Julian of Norwich, Showings, Chapter 53. See The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A
Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, eds. Nicholas Watson and
Jacqueline Jenkins (Pennsylvania State University Press: 2006), 295. (Sentences presented
here are adapted from Julian’s Middle English.)
[3] Showings, Chapter 9. See Watson and Jenkins, 155.
[4] Showings, Chapter 65. Ibid., 329.
[5] Showings, Chapter 51. Ibid., 279.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-
Bass: 2013), 95;
Following the Mystics Through the Narrow Gate: Seeing God in All Things, disc 7 (Center
for Action and Contemplation: 2010), CD, DVD, MP3 download; and
“Introduction,” “The Perennial Tradition,” Oneing, vol. 1, no. 1 (Center for Action and
Contemplation: 2013), 14. Issue no longer available.

Love Is Our Origin and Destiny

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Today James Finley will introduce us to another great mystic, John of the Cross.
As with all of the mystics, a different kind of reading and perception is required.
Remember that mysticism is simply experiential knowing, rather than
intellectual knowing. Read today’s reflection with your heart wide open.
John of the Cross (1542-1591) met Teresa of Ávila—then fifty-two years old—
when he was a newly ordained Carmelite priest at twenty-five. John was
planning to join the Carthusians and become a hermit, but Teresa asked him to
join her instead in reforming the Carmelites. Teresa and John shared a rich
friendship and correspondence.
When I first read John at age eighteen, there was a certain resonance in
realizing he was talking about something that I didn’t understand but I knew
mattered very, very much. I’m seventy-four years old now, and I’m still reading
him.
Like Teresa, John believed that Infinite Love is the architect of our hearts, and
we are made in such a way that nothing less than an infinite union with Infinite
Love will do. Love is our origin and our destiny. Creative love sustains us breath
by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat. John writes:
God sustains every soul and dwells in it substantially, even though it may be
that of the greatest sinner in the world. This union between God and creatures
always exists. By it He conserves their being so that if the union should end they
would immediately be annihilated and cease to exist. Consequently, in
discussing union with God, we are not discussing the substantial union that is
always existing but the soul’s union with and transformation in God. This union
is not always existing, but we find it only where there is likeness of love. We will
call it “the union of likeness”; and the former, “the essential or substantial
union.” The union of likeness is supernatural [meaning graced or given]; the
other, natural. The supernatural union exists when God's will and the soul’s are
in conformity, so that nothing in the one is repugnant to the other. When the
soul rids itself completely of what is repugnant and unconformed to the divine
will, it rests transformed in God through love. [1]
God's will for you is Godself. When you, in the freedom of your will, want
nothing but what God wills—that is, you live by and for the ever-deepening
consummation of this union in love—then these two wills are united in love.
Our spiritual task is to discern the ways in which our heart is at variance with
God's heart. We see how our own subjective perceptions and intentions are
compromised or violate our ultimate destiny in love. By this graced recognition,
we are released and liberated.
Gateway to Silence:
Fall deeper into love.
References:
[1] John of the Cross, John of the Cross: Selected Writings, trans. Kieran
Kavanaugh (Paulist Press: 1987), 89.
Adapted from James Finley, Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, discs 1 and 3
(Center for Action and Contemplation: 2013), CD, MP3 download.
Experiencing God's Love

Thursday, October 12, 2017
Guest writer and CAC faculty member James Finley continues sharing
insights from John of the Cross. Before you read, take a few deep, slow
breaths. Feel yourself in your body, in this place. Attune to your heart’s
wisdom and let your mind rest in the quiet.
John believed that substantial union is our God-given godly nature. It's the
inherent sacredness of life itself. This dance of infinite love is rhythmically
playing itself out in the rhythms of our life standing up and sitting down, waking
up and falling asleep. The concrete immediacy of life is the infinite love of God
manifesting itself in the present moment.
All of life, distilled to its simplest essence, has to do with the intimate, utterly
personal way that each of us serendipitously stumbles upon this great truth.
When everything is said and done, only love is real; only love endures. Outside
of love, there is nothing, nothing at all. We subsist in varying degrees of
awareness from which flow gratitude and peace.
John of the Cross calls this growing awareness of affective union “the way of
beginners.” At this stage, our belief is a finite idea about God which reveals
something of the nature of the Infinite. Within the Scriptures, there are
eloquent, beautiful, finite ideas of the Infinite. And we experience finite feelings
of the Infinite. These consolations and solace are the felt sense of God's abiding
presence in our life. This is the ego illumined by faith.
This is just the beginning of our journey. We rightly learn at this stage how to
live by this love that we are experiencing. What's the most loving thing I can do
right now for myself, for my body, for my mind, for the gift of my life? What's
the most loving thing I can do for this person, for this community of people, for
this animal, for the earth?
The wonderful thing about being a beginner is that we can begin with a
confidence that eventually we will arrive at union. When death comes, an
extraordinary thing happens: through all eternity, we will no longer be knowing
God through finite ideas of the Infinite. Rather, you will know God through
God's own knowledge of God which is Christ; and for all eternity, you will love
God with God's own love which is the Holy Spirit. Through all eternity, you and
God will disappear as other than each other.

Gateway to Silence:
Practice: Breathing Love in All Things
I have the intuition that in his Spiritual Canticle, John of the Cross was trying to
move us poetically into a spacious state or a way of being in the world which
really is Christ consciousness, the way Christ lived his life.
Let’s say you are sitting in prayer and using your breath as the prayer. As you
inhale you listen to God saying I love you. When you breathe out you exhale I
love you: you give yourself to the love that gives itself to you. In the I love you
received and the I love you response, the reciprocity of love and of the
communion deepens.
Now while you are sitting there saying this prayer, let's say there is bodily pain.
Now when you inhale, you inhale Infinite Love, loving you pain and all, through
and through and through and through and through. And when you exhale
yourself into God, you give yourself, pain and all, into the Love that loves you,
pain and all.
Let’s say you are sitting there and you are confused; something has happened
and you are bewildered. You sit there and as you breathe in God, you breathe in
God loving you, confusion and all, through and through and through and
through and through. And when you exhale yourself in the I love you, you give
yourself, confusion and all, to the Love that loves you, confusion and all.
And let’s say you are sad, and you breathe in God loving you through
and through and through, sadness and all; and you exhale yourself
in your sadness. Then your sadness is an act of love. And so, in every
reciprocity of love, the ultimate irrelevance of conditioned states
yields and gives way to Love that unexplainably sustains you in the
conditions in which you exist.
This is the message of John’s Spiritual Canticle. It is not saying that

you are not in pain, that you are not sad or confused; nor is it saying
that you don’t need to deal with these things.
Let’s turn it around. You are sitting in prayer and bubbling over with
joy because you just won the lottery. And God is loving you through
and through, joy and all; and you breathe yourself back to Love, joy
and all. It’s the infinite irrelevance of attainment and
nonattainment, the infinite irrelevance of laughter and tears with
respect to the oceanic Love that loves you through and through and
through and through in your tears, in your laughter, in all things.
So, stabilized in love, we are grounded in the courage that empowers

us to touch the hurting places. Prior to being grounded in love, we
think we are nothing but the self that things happen to. We are afraid
to go near the hurting place because we absolutize the relative. But if
we are absolutely grounded in the absolute love of God that protects
us from nothing, even as it sustains us in all things, it grounds us to
face all things with courage and tenderness.
Gateway to Silence:
Deep Hope Flows Over Deep Time

Monday, October 16, 2017
Guest writer and CAC faculty member Cynthia Bourgeault continues reflecting
on the Christian mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
The first of the Teilhardian “road signs” helps us reframe our sense of scale:
Teilhard reminds us that deep hope flows over deep time. From his perspective
as a geologist and paleontologist, Teilhard reassures us that evolution has not
changed direction; it has always been and always will be “a rise toward
consciousness.” [1] But rather than the very small snapshots represented in our
short lifetimes, evolution’s span is measured in eons, not decades. When we lose
sight of the cosmic scale, the result is anguish and impatience. If we measure
human progress only by our usual historical benchmarks—the span of a
presidential administration, the not-yet 250 years of the American democratic
experiment, or the “mere” 2,500 years of Western civilization—we are still only
catching the smallest snippet of the inevitable process of what Teilhard
calls tatonnement, or “trial and error,” part of the necessary play of freedom on
its way to new combinations and creativity.
Teilhard affirmed that even the emergence of human consciousness itself, as it

reached its present configuration 125,000 years ago with the stunning debut of
homo sapiens [current estimate is 200,000 years], followed a 10,000-year ice
age, in which it appeared that all that had been gained prior to that point was
irreversibly lost. It wasn't. Paleontological discoveries reveal that humans kept
and refined their skills of using fire and making tools—providing unmistakable
evidence that even when hidden by ice and apparent desolation, the
evolutionary journey was still unperturbedly marching forward.
“Deep hope” is not, however, an excuse to relax our vigilance in stewardship for
the planet Earth. Teilhard does not permit himself to be used that way; his sense
of the oneness of the world pervades everything he sees and writes. But he
realizes as well that Creation has an intelligence and a resilience that meets us
far more than halfway. Over the millennia our planet has endured meteor
strikes, the rise and fall of sea levels, ice ages, the continual shifting of tectonic
plates, the appearance and disappearance of species.
For sure, we need to fall on our knees every morning and beseech God to help us
through this latest dark time of human greed and destructiveness. But our real
task at this evolutionary cusp is not to lose sight of what is coming to us from
the future, the vision of our common humanity that is indeed “groaning and
travailing” to be born (Romans 8:22).
Gateway to Silence:
Fall fearless into love.

God's Heartbeat
Friday, November 3, 2017

CAC’s core faculty member, Cynthia Bourgeault, shares insights from other
mystics—current and past—to reveal mercy at the heart of the universe. She
shares the theological implications of quantum physics from contemporary
Episcopal preacher, Barbara Brown Taylor:
Where is God in this picture? God is all over the place. God is up there, down
here, inside my skin and out. God is the web, the energy, the space, the light—
not captured in them, as if any of those concepts were more real than what
unites them—but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationship that
animates everything that is. . . . At this point in my thinking, it is not enough for
me to proclaim that God is responsible for all this unity. Instead, I want to
proclaim that God is the unity—the very energy, the very intelligence, the very
elegance and passion that make it all go. [1]
Cynthia reflects:
Barbara’s point may seem like a nuance, but it is a crucially important one. Our
visible, created universe is not simply an object created by a wholly other God in
order to manifest God’s love, but the created universe is that love itself—the very
heart of God, fully expressive in the dimension of time and form.
When we speak in these terms, of course, we begin to use the classic language of
the mystics, the language of visionary utterance. For Jacob Boehme (1575-1624)
the name in German for mercy was Barmherzigkeit—“warmheartedness.”
Boehme saw mercy as “the holy element”: the root energy out of which all else in
the visible universe is made. The Mercy is “holy substantiality”—the innermost
essence of being itself. It is that “river of God,” running like the sap through the
tree of life. [2]
Lest we be inclined to discount this insight as merely the rambling of a God-

intoxicated mystic, it is astonishing to discover virtually an identical insight
revealed by the eminently sane psychotherapist Gerald May (1940-2005). May
affirms that from a clinical standpoint, once the various differentiations and
feeling-tones have been stripped away from our subjective emotional life, what
remains is a raw, root energy that is, finally, none other than divine love. “It is as
if agape [divine love] were the base metal, irreducible and unadulterated,” he
writes. “The universe runs on an energy that is, at its core, unconditionally
loving.” [3]
May’s vision of agape—divine love—is very close to Boehme’s (and my own)

notion of the Mercy. Far from pity or condescension, it is the very heartbeat of
God resonant in creation; the warmth that pulses through all things as the
divine Mystery flows out into created form.
Gateway to Silence:
We live, move, and have our being in love.
References:
[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion
(Cowley Publications: 2000), 74.
[2] See Jacob Boehme, The Way to Christ (Paulist Press: 1978).
[3] Gerald May, Will and Spirit (Harper and Row: 1982), 172. May was the
cofounder of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Direction in Bethesda, Maryland,
shalem.org.
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God
(Cowley Publications: 2001), 28-31.

Living in the Now
Time-Tested Wisdom
Sunday, November 19, 2017
Embrace the present moment as an ever-flowing source of holiness. —Jean

Pierre de Caussade [1]
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your
consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this
is the experience you are having at the moment. —Eckhart Tolle [2]
Of all the things I have learned and taught over the years, I can think of nothing
that could be of more help to you than living in the now. It is truly time-tested
wisdom.
So many leaders in so many traditions have taught the same thing: Hindu
masters, Zen and Tibetan Buddhists, Sufi poets, Jewish rabbis, and Christian
mystics to name a few. In the Christian tradition, we have heard it from
Augustine, the Franciscan Francisco de Osuna, the Carmelite Brother Lawrence,
and more recently, Paul Tillich and Alan Watts. Contemporary teachers Thich
Nhat Hanh and Ekhart Tolle have done much to help us understand the
importance of living in the now.
Jesuit priest Jean Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751) called it the “sacrament of the
present moment.” His book, Abandonment to Divine Providence, was the book
most recommended by spiritual directors for many decades. His key theme is:
“If we have abandoned ourselves to God, there is only one rule for us: the duty
of the present moment.” To live in the present is finally what we mean
by presence itself!
God is hidden in plain sight, yet religion seems determined to make it more
complicated. Much of low-level religion suggests that to find God you need this
morality and that behavior and this ritual and that performance and this belief
system. Western Christianity has largely refused to allow God to be as simple,
obvious, democratic, and available as God has made (and makes!) God’s self—
right here and right now.
This is what Eckhart Tolle popularized in his bestselling book, The Power of
Now. While it’s often found in the New Age section of most bookstores, Tolle’s
message falls squarely in line with orthodox Christianity. And, as I said, it’s also
in numerous other traditions. If it’s true, it’s true everywhere!
Gateway to Silence:
God is right here right now.
References:
[1] Jean Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, trans. John Beevers
(Image Books: 1975), 36.
[2] Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Penguin Books: 2005,
2016), 41.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Living the Eternal Now (Center for Action and
Contemplation: 2005), CD, MP3 download.
Incarnation and Indwelling
Monday, November 20, 2017
Most religious people I’ve met—from sincere laypeople to priests and

nuns—still imagine God to be elsewhere. Before you can take the
“now” seriously, you must shift from thinking of God as “out there”
to also knowing God “in here.” In fact, that is the best access point!
Only inner experience can bring about a healing of the human-divine
split.
Transformation comes by realizing your union with God right here,

right now—regardless of any performance or achievement on your
part. That is the core meaning of grace. But you have to know this for
yourself. No one can do this knowing for you. I could tell you that
God is not elsewhere and heaven is not later, but until you come to
personally and regularly experience that, you will not believe it.
Authentic Christianity overcame the “God-is-elsewhere” idea in at least two

major and foundational ways. Through the Incarnation, God in Jesus became
flesh; God visibly moved in with the material world to help us overcome the
illusion of separation (John 1:14). Secondly, God as Holy Spirit, is
precisely known as an indwelling and vitalizing presence. By itself,
intellectual assent to these two truths does little. The Incarnation
and Indwelling Spirit are known only through participation and
practice, when you actively draw upon such Infinite Sources. “Use it
or lose it!”
Good theology helps us know that we can fully trust the “now”
because of the Incarnation and the Spirit within us. It’s like making
love. We can’t be fully intimate with someone who is physically
absent or through vague, amorphous energy; we need close,
concrete, particular connections. That’s how our human brains are
wired.
Jesus teaches and is himself a message of now-ness, here-ness, concreteness,

and this-ness. The only time Jesus talks about future time is when he tells us not
to worry about it (see Matthew 6:25-34). Don’t worry about times and seasons,
don’t worry about when God will return, don’t worry about tomorrow. Thinking
about the future keeps us in our heads, far from presence. Jesus talks about the
past in terms of forgiving it. Some say forgiveness is central to his whole
message. Jesus tells us to hand the past over to the mercy and action of God. We
do not need to keep replaying the past, atoning for it, or agonizing about it.
Yet, as practitioners of meditation have discovered, the mind can

only do two things: replay the past and plan or worry about the
future. The mind is always bored in the present. So it must be
trained to stop running backward and forward. This is the role of
contemplation.
Gateway to Silence:
Reference:
Wisdom is not the gathering of more facts and information, as if that would
eventually coalesce into truth. Wisdom is a way of seeing and knowing the same
old ten thousand things but in a new way. As my colleague Cynthia Bourgeault
often says, it’s not about knowing more, but knowing with more of you. I
suggest that wise people are those who are free to be truly present to what is
right in front of them. It has little to do with formal education. Presence is pretty
much the same as wisdom!
Presence is the one thing necessary to attain wisdom, and in many ways, it is the
hardest thing of all. Just try to keep your heart open and soft, your mind
receptive without division or resistance, and your body aware of where it is and
its deepest level of feeling. Presence is when all three centers are awake at the
same time! Most religions decided it was easier to believe doctrines—and obey
often arbitrary laws—than undertake the truly converting work of being present.
The Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh teaches this wisdom through the ceremony
and meditation of tea (a Buddhist parallel to the Christian Eucharist):
You must be completely awake in the present to enjoy the tea.
Only in the awareness of the present, can your hands feel the pleasant warmth
of the cup.
Only in the present, can you savor the aroma, taste the sweetness, appreciate the
delicacy.
If you are ruminating about the past, or worrying about the future, you will
completely miss the experience of enjoying the cup of tea.
You will look down at the cup, and the tea will be gone.
Life is like that.
If you are not fully present, you will look around and it will be gone.
You will have missed the feel, the aroma, the delicacy and beauty of life.
It will seem to be speeding past you. The past is finished.
Learn from it and let it go.
The future is not even here yet. Plan for it, but do not waste your time worrying
about it.
Worrying is worthless.
When you stop ruminating about what has already happened, when you stop
worrying about what might never happen, then you will be in the present
moment.
Then you will begin to experience joy in life. [1]
As you eat your next meal—perhaps with family gathered for Thanksgiving—
enter into the experience mindfully. Savor the aroma. Taste the sweetness.
Appreciate the delicacy. Experience the joy—right now—without needing
anyone to notice. But they will!
Gateway to Silence:
References:
[1] Thich Nhat Hanh, meditation shared at Plum Village in southern France. See Evan
Sutter, Solitude: How Doing Nothing Can Change the World (Tenth Street Press: 2015),
147-148. Thich Nhat Hanh offers more practices in Present Moment Wonderful Moment:
Mindfulness Verses for Daily Living (Parallax Press: 2002).
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Yes, And . . . Daily Meditations (Franciscan Media: 2013),
368.
The Sacrament of the Present Moment
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
—Rumi [1]
Unitive, non-dual consciousness opens our hearts, minds, and bodies to actually
experience God in the now. Ultimate Reality cannot be seen with any dualistic
operation of the mind, where we divide the field of the moment and eliminate
anything mysterious, confusing, unfamiliar, or outside our comfort zone.
Dualistic thinking is highly controlled and permits only limited seeing. It
protects the status quo and allows the ego to feel like it’s in control. This way of
filtering reality is the opposite of pure presence.
We learn the dualistic pattern of thinking at an early age, and it helps us survive
and succeed in practical ways. But it can get us only so far. That’s why all
religions at the more mature levels have discovered another “software” for
processing the really big questions like death, love, infinity, suffering, the
mysterious nature of sexuality, and whoever God or the Divine is. Many of us
call this access “contemplation” or simply “prayer.” It is a non-dualistic way of
living in the moment. Don’t think, just look (contemplata).
Non-dual knowing is learning how to live satisfied in the naked now, “the
sacrament of the present moment” as Jean Pierre de Caussade called it. This
consciousness will teach us how to actually experience our experiences, whether
good, bad, or ugly, and how to let them transform us. Words by themselves
divide and judge the moment; pure presence lets it be what it is, as it is. Words
and thoughts are invariably dualistic; pure experience is always non-dualistic.
As long as you can deal with life as a set of universal abstractions, you can
pretend that the binary system is true. But once you deal with concrete reality—
with yourself, with someone you love, with actual moments—you find that
reality is a mixture of good and bad, dark and light, life and death. Reality
requires more a both/and approach than either/or differentiation. The non-dual
mind is open to everything. It is capable of listening to the other, to the body, to
the heart, to all the senses. It begins with a radical yes to each moment.
When you can be present in this way, you will know the Real Presence. I
promise you this is true. You will still need and use your dualistic mind, but now
it is in service to the greater whole rather than just the small self.
Gateway to Silence:
References:
[1] The Essential Rumi, trans. Coleman Barks (HarperOne: 2004), 36. Used with
permission.
Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 12, 50, 56, 74; and
A New Way of Seeing . . . A New Way of Being: Jesus and Paul, disc 1 (Center for Action
and Contemplation: 2007), CD, MP3 download.
Practicing Presence
Friday, November 24, 2017
The presence of God is infinite, everywhere, always, and forever.

You cannot not be in the presence of God. There’s no other place to
be. It is we who are not present to Presence. We’ll make any excuse
to be somewhere else than right here. Right here, right now never
seems enough. It actually is, but it is we who are not aware enough
yet.
All spiritual teaching—this is not an oversimplification—is about
how to be present to the moment. When you’re present, you will
experience the Presence. But the problem is, we’re almost always
somewhere else: reliving the past or worrying about the future.
As a Franciscan, I have many opportunities to go away for long periods in

solitude. When I’m in a hermitage, there’s no television, smart phone,
computer, or radio. There’s pretty much nothing but the natural. You’d think it
would be easier to be present to Presence in this setting, and in some ways it is—
watching the snow fall, listening to a hawk’s cry, walking slowly without any
particular destination or deadline. But I can’t escape my monkey mind even on
retreat. Daily contemplative prayer is crucial to helping me live in the now. It
takes constant intention and practice to remain open, receptive, and awake to
the moment.
We live in a time with more easily available obstacles to presence than any other
period in history. We carry our obstacles in our pockets now, vibrating and
notifying and emoji-ing us about everything and nothing. And let’s be honest:
most of our digital and personal conversation is about nothing. Nothing that
matters, nothing that lasts, nothing that’s real. We think and talk about the
same things again and again, like a broken record. Pretty soon we realize we’ve
frittered away years of our life, and it is the only life we have.
We have to find a way to more deeply experience our experiences. Otherwise

we’re just on cruise control, and we go through our whole life not knowing
what’s happening. Whether we realize it or not, the divine energy of God is
flowing through each one of us. When we draw upon this Source consciously,
our life starts filling with what some call coincidences or synchronicities which
we can never explain. This has nothing to do with being perfect, highly moral, or
formally religious. I wish someone had told me that when I was young. I would
still have been religious, but now in a whole different way—and all the time.
Gateway to Silence:
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “First Sunday of Advent: To Be Awake Is to Be Now, Here,”
November 30, 2014 (Center for Action and Contemplation), https://cac.org/first-sunday-
of-adventto-be-awake-is-to-be-now-here/.
Living in the Now
Summary: Sunday, November 19-Friday, November 24, 2017
that could be of more help to you than living in the now. (Sunday)
I could tell you that God is not elsewhere and heaven is not later, but until you
come to personally and regularly experience that, you will not believe it.
(Monday)
Unitive, non-dual consciousness opens our hearts, minds, and bodies to actually
experience God in the now. (Tuesday)
“Only one thing is necessary,” Jesus says. If you are present, you will be able to
know what you need to know. Truly seeing is both that simple and that hard.
(Wednesday)
Wisdom is the freedom to be truly present to what is right in front of you.

Presence is pretty much the same as wisdom! (Thursday)
The presence of God is infinite, everywhere, always, and forever. You cannot not
be in the presence of God. There’s no other place to be. It is we who are not
present to Presence. (Friday)
Practice: A Clear Mirror
Both Jesus and Buddha say the same thing: “Stay awake!” Contemplative
practice gradually transforms our minds so that we can live in the naked now,
the sacrament of the present moment. Without some form of meditation, we
read life through a preferred and habitual style of attention. Unless we come to
recognize the lens through which we filter all of our experiences, we will not see
things as they are but as we are.
Zen Buddhist masters tell us we need to “wipe the mirror” of our minds and
hearts in order to see what’s there without distortions or even explanations—not
what we’re afraid is there, nor what we wish were there, but what is actually
there. Contemplation is a lifelong task of mirror-wiping. “I” am always my first
problem, and if I deal with “me,” then I can deal with other problems much
more effectively. A clean mirror offers “perfect freedom” (see James 1:23-25).
Mirror-wiping is the inner discipline of calmly observing our own patterns—

what we see and what we don’t—in order to get our demanding and over-
defended egos away from the full control they always want. It requires us to
stand at a distance from ourselves and listen and look with calm,
nonjudgmental objectivity. Otherwise, we do not have thoughts and feelings:
they have us! A clear mirror allows us to simply see the reality of what is.
The real gift is to be happy and content, even when we are doing the
“nothingness” of a chore, a repetitive task, or silent prayer. When we can see
and accept that every single act of creation is “just this” and thus allow it to work
its wonder on us, we have found true freedom and peace.
Many years ago I asked CAC’s bookstore to create a simple double-sided mirror
medallion as a tool to remind us how to be present to what is, to just this. One
side is a plain mirror, taking in and reflecting exactly what it sees, without
distortion, judgment, or analysis. The other mirrored side has an image of the
eye of God, forever gazing at us with love, respect, and desire. [1]
I invite you to imagine wearing such a mirror at the level of your heart. With
both your external and internal eyes, see reality as it is through a clear mirror.
As you receive this unfiltered reality, reflect back its shining beauty and dignity.
Imagine God’s eye gazing into your heart, revealing to you the reality of your
own being. Reflect back the love that is your True Self.
Gateway to Silence:
References:
[1] The mirror medallion described here is available at store.cac.org.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2017), 24,
34.
For Further Study:

Richard Rohr, Just This (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2017)
Richard Rohr, Living the Eternal Now (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2005), CD,
MP3 download
Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad
Publishing Company: 2009)
Where Is God?
Friday, January 5, 2018
When I was on retreat at Thomas Merton’s hermitage at Gethsemani Abbey in

1985, I had a chance encounter that has stayed with me all these years. I was
walking down a little trail when I recognized a recluse, what you might call a
hermit’s hermit, coming toward me. Not wanting to intrude on his deep silence,
I bowed my head and moved to the side of the path, intending to walk past him.
But as we neared each other, he said, “Richard!” That surprised me. He was
supposed to be silent. How did he know who I was? “Richard, you get chances to
preach and I don’t. Tell the people one thing.” Pointing to the sky, he said, “God
is not ‘out there’!” Then he said, “God bless you,” and abruptly continued down
the path.
The belief that God is “out there” is the basic dualism that is tearing us all apart.
Our view of God as separate and distant has harmed our relationships with
sexuality, food, possessions, money, animals, nature, politics, and our own
incarnate selves. This loss explains why we live such distraught and divided
lives. Jesus came to put it all together for us and in us. He was saying, in effect,
“To be human is good! The material and the physical can be trusted and
enjoyed. This physical world is the hiding place of God and the revelation place
of God!”
Far too much of religion has been about defining where God is and where God
isn’t, picking and choosing who and what has God’s image and who and what
doesn’t. In reality, it’s not up to us. We have no choice in the matter. All are
beloved. Everyone—Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Muslim, black and
white, gay and straight, able-bodied and disabled, male and female, Republican
and Democrat—all are children of God. We are all members of the Body of
Christ, made in God’s image, indwelled by the Holy Spirit, whether or not we are
aware of this gift.
Can you see the image of Christ in the least of your brothers and sisters? This is
Jesus’ only description of the final judgment (Matthew 25). But some say, “They
smell. They’re a nuisance. They’re on welfare. They are a drain on our tax
money.” Can we see Christ in all people, even the so-called “nobodies” who can’t
or won’t play our game of success? When we can see the image of God where we
don’t want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own.
Jesus says we have to love and recognize the divine image even in our enemies.
Either we see the divine image in all created things, or we don’t see it at all.
Once we see God’s image in one place, the circle keeps widening. It doesn’t stop
with human beings and enemies and the least of our brothers and sisters. It
moves to frogs and pansies and weeds. Everything becomes enchanting with
true sight. We cannot not live in the presence of God. We are totally surrounded
and infused by God. All we can do is allow, trust, and finally rest in it, which is
indeed why we are “saved” by faith—faith that this could be true.
Living in the Now
Time-Tested Wisdom
Sunday, November 19, 2017
Embrace the present moment as an ever-flowing source of holiness. —Jean

Pierre de Caussade [1]
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your
consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this
is the experience you are having at the moment. —Eckhart Tolle [2]
that could be of more help to you than living in the now. It is truly time-tested
wisdom.
So many leaders in so many traditions have taught the same thing: Hindu
masters, Zen and Tibetan Buddhists, Sufi poets, Jewish rabbis, and Christian
mystics to name a few. In the Christian tradition, we have heard it from
Augustine, the Franciscan Francisco de Osuna, the Carmelite Brother Lawrence,
and more recently, Paul Tillich and Alan Watts. Contemporary teachers Thich
Nhat Hanh and Ekhart Tolle have done much to help us understand the
importance of living in the now.
Jesuit priest Jean Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751) called it the “sacrament of the
present moment.” His book, Abandonment to Divine Providence, was the book
most recommended by spiritual directors for many decades. His key theme is:
“If we have abandoned ourselves to God, there is only one rule for us: the duty
of the present moment.” To live in the present is finally what we mean
by presence itself!
God is hidden in plain sight, yet religion seems determined to make it more
complicated. Much of low-level religion suggests that to find God you need this
morality and that behavior and this ritual and that performance and this belief
system. Western Christianity has largely refused to allow God to be as simple,
obvious, democratic, and available as God has made (and makes!) God’s self—
right here and right now.
This is what Eckhart Tolle popularized in his bestselling book, The Power of
Now. While it’s often found in the New Age section of most bookstores, Tolle’s
message falls squarely in line with orthodox Christianity. And, as I said, it’s also
in numerous other traditions. If it’s true, it’s true everywhere!
Gateway to Silence:
References:
[1] Jean Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, trans. John Beevers
(Image Books: 1975), 36.
[2] Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Penguin Books: 2005,
2016), 41.


From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Week Twenty-one

Art

Poetry
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
Before 500 BCE, religion and poetry were largely the same thing. People did not
presume to be able to define the Mystery. They looked for words that
could describe the Mystery. Poetry doesn’t claim to be a perfect description as
dogma foolishly does. It’s a “hint half guessed,” to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase. [1]
That’s why poetry seduces and entices you into being a searcher for the Mystery
yourself. It creates the heart leap, the gasp of breath, inspiring you to go further
and deeper; you want to fill in the blanks for yourself.
Poetry does this by speaking in metaphors. All religious language is metaphor

by necessity, yet I must insist on this to every new group of students, especially
Protestants who tend to understand the Bible in a more literal way. Religion
points toward a Mystery that you don’t know—can’t know—until you have
experienced it. Poetry gives you resonance more than logical proof, and
resonance is much more healing and integrating. It resounds inside of you. It
evokes and calls forth a deeper self. When religion becomes mere philosophy,
definitions, moralisms, and rituals, it no longer has the power to transform.
For poetry to be most effective, I believe it should be spoken aloud, embodied.

After all, God didn’t think, “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). God spoke, and
creation vibrated into existence. Isn’t it just like our Creator to imprint the
subtlety and mystery of creativity in the thisness of each voice?
Cynthia Bourgeault says that she gradually learned the value of speaking the
scripture aloud before beginning to prepare a sermon on it:
Nine times out of ten, when I finally read the passage out loud during the
proclamation of the Gospel on Sunday morning, I hear exactly the phrase or
innuendo that I should have preached on, but that escaped my reading eye.
Virtually all spiritual paths begin their training with breath and tone—conscious
breathing, following the breath, vibrating the mantra—and for good reason:
these are the actual tools and technologies for engaging and energizing our more
subtle inner being. [2]
Poetry, like chant, is meant to vibrate through the uniqueness of our own voice
for it to come alive. Don’t take my word for it! Find your favorite poem and see if
it becomes real in a new way when you say the words out loud.
One of my favorite poets is Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Here is one of his
poems translated from German by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. If you can,
read it aloud slowly, musically.
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand. [3]
Gateway to Presence:
If you want to go deeper with today’s meditation, take note of what word or
phrase stands out to you. Come back to that word or phrase throughout the
day, being present to its impact and invitation.
[1] T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages,” The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-
1950 (Harcourt Brace: 1980), 136.
[2] Cynthia Bourgeault, Chanting the Psalms: A Practical Guide with Instructional CD
(New Seeds: 2006), 76.
[3] Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, Rilke’s Book of Hours:
Love Poems to God (The Berkley Publishing Group: 1996), 119. Used with permission.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Poetry and Prayer,” unpublished talks (Center for Action and
Contemplation: 2005) and Franciscan Mysticism: I Am That Which I AM Seeking, disc
1 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2012), CD, MP3 download.
Image credit: Portrait of Dizzy Gillespie, John Lewis, Cecil Payne, Miles Davis, and Ray
Brown (detail), by William P. Gottlieb, 1946-1948, Downbeat, New York City, New York.
No Images? Click here


Week Twenty

Art

Unselfconscious Awareness
Friday, May 18, 2018
The power of imagination and art is at the level of soul, where we do not
consciously know what is happening. Therefore, we cannot engineer it, do not
need to understand it, nor can we fully stop its effects! If we “perfectly
understand” how God is changing us, if we try to be too rational about it, we will
only fight grace, try to personally steer the soul (dangerous!), and, of course,
take argumentative sides.
God works best underground and in our unconscious, by
rearranging our assumptions and presuppositions—frankly, when
we are not in control. The work of grace and healing mostly happens
“in secret” as Jesus himself seems to say (Matthew 6:1-13).
An artist friend, Barbara Coleman, writes of an insight she learned while

painting with her young daughter:
Great art . . . needs technical expertise as well as unchecked creativity, passion,
and expression. Great art seems to be created through a person. Somehow one’s
ego, self-consciousness, and expectations must be released before the piece is
completed. . . .
When my oldest daughter was three, she would sit and paint for long periods of
time in my studio as I painted. I was thrilled with her work . . . and I told her so.
I praised her extravagantly, hoping to encourage her. I would say, “Oh, you
really are a great artist!” and things of that sort. As soon as I would begin this
personal praise, . . . her work would become sloppy or careless or she’d just get
up and leave. Clearly my praise was having an unintended and very undesirable
effect on her. I was making her self-conscious and distracting her from her
discoveries. She began to turn to me for praise and approval, and the possibility
of self-doubt was introduced. . . . It didn’t take long to redirect her focus back to
her work, once I stopped praising her and addressed my comments to what was
on the page. Understanding and discovery are their own rewards.
Being unself-conscious and being willing to lose oneself in the work is vital for a
child and an artist. . . . How can we free [ourselves] to learn and have the
experience of creating art? As a parent and art teacher, I find that the more [we]
can focus on the immediate artwork at hand, the more satisfying the experience
becomes. By not emphasizing a product, and by focusing on process instead, the
work becomes more successful as well. The more [we are] able to reach a state of
awareness in which [our] self-consciousness disappears into the desire to
participate and see what [we] are trying to express, the more the art [and, I
would add, God] can reach [us]. [1]
[1] Barbara Coleman as quoted by Richard Rohr, Contemplation in Action (The Crossroad
Publishing Company: 2006), 145-148.
Image credit: Composition VIII (detail), Wassily Kandinsky, 1923, Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York City, New York.


Week Twenty

Art

God Breaks In
Today Barbara Holmes continues exploring the contemplative in surprising

places:
We are told that Jesus hung out with publicans, tax collectors, and sinners.
Perhaps during these sessions of music, laughter, and food fellowship, there
were also . . . moments when the love of God and mutual care and concern
became the focus of their time together. Contemplation is not confined to
designated and institutional sacred spaces. God breaks into nightclubs and Billie
Holiday’s sultry torch songs; God tap dances with Bill Robinson and Savion
Glover. And when Coltrane blew his horn, the angels paused to consider.
Some sacred spaces bear none of the expected characteristics. The fact that we
prefer stained glass windows, pomp and circumstance . . . has nothing to do
with the sacred. It may seem as if the mysteries of divine-human reunion erupt
in our lives when, in fact, the otherness of spiritual abiding is integral to human
interiority. On occasion, we turn our attention to this abiding presence and are
startled. But it was always there.
. . . Art can amplify the sacred and challenge the status quo. The arts help us to
hear above the cacophony and pause in the midst of our multitasking. The arts
engage a sacred frequency that is perforated with pauses. Artists learned . . . that
there were things too full for human tongues, too alive for articulation. You can
dance and rhyme and sing it, you almost reach it in the high notes, but joy
unspeakable is experience and sojourn, it is the ineffable within our reach.
When you least expect it, during the most mundane daily tasks, a shift of focus
occurs. This shift bends us toward the universe, a cosmos of soul and spirit,
bone and flesh, which constantly reaches toward divinity. Ecclesial
organizations want to control access to this milieu but cannot. The only
divisions between the sacred and the secular are in the minds of those who
believe in and reinforce the split. . . .
All things draw from the same wellspring of spiritual energy. This means that
the sermonic and religious can be mediated through a saxophone just as
effectively as through a pastor. . . . How can this be? . . . [Can] tapping feet and
blues guitar strokes . . . evoke the contemplative moment and call the listener to
a deeper understanding of inner and outer realities? . . . The need to create
impermeable boundaries between the sacred and the secular is . . . a much more
recent appropriation of western values. . . .
Historically, most efforts to wall off the doctrinal rightness and wrongness of
particular practices failed. Instead, hearers of the gospel inculturated and
improvised on the main themes so as to tune the message for their own hearing.
Given Christianity’s preferential option for the poor, the cross-pollination of
jazz, blues, and tap with church music and practices could be considered the
epitome of missional outreach and spiritual creativity.
Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church,

second edition (Fortress Press: 2017), 183-185.
Image credit: Composition VIII (detail), Wassily Kandinsky, 1923, Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum, New York City, New York.



Week Twenty-two

Vocation

Discernment versus Decision Making

The holiness of Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), like all holiness, was unique and
never merely a copy or imitation. In his Testament, he tells his brothers, “No
one showed me what I had to do,” [1] and then, at the very end of his life, he
says, “I have done what is mine; may Christ teach you what is yours!” [2] What
permission, freedom, and space he thus gave to his followers!
We are each unique incarnations of God, bringing to visible and tangible

expression God’s presence in the world. Sr. Ilia Delio paraphrases Francis’
message from his Later Admonition and Exhortation:
When love transforms our actions in a way that Christ is “represented”— then
we become mothers, sisters and brothers of Christ. This birthing of Christ in the
life of the believer . . . is a way of conceiving, birthing, and bringing Christ to the
world in such a way that the Incarnation is renewed. It is making the gospel
alive. [3]
So, how do we discover what is ours to do? How do we connect with our sacred
vocation in service to the needs of the world? How do we give birth to Christ in
the world? How do we renew the Incarnation and give flesh to the Word? First,
we must go through a process of discernment. Henri Nouwen explains:
Christian discernment is not the same as decision making. Reaching a decision
can be straightforward: we consider our goals and options; maybe we list the
pros and cons of each possible choice; and then we choose the action that meets
our goal most effectively. Discernment, on the other hand, is about listening and
responding to that place within us where our deepest desires align with God’s
desire. As discerning people, we sift through our impulses, motives, and options
to discover which ones lead us closer to divine love and compassion for
ourselves and other people and which ones lead us further away.
Discernment reveals new priorities, directions, and gifts from God. We come to
realize that what previously seemed so important for our lives loses its power
over us. Our desire to be successful, well liked and influential becomes
increasingly less important as we move closer to God’s heart. To our surprise,
we even may experience a strange inner freedom to follow a new call or
direction as previous concerns move into the background of our consciousness.
We begin to see the beauty of the small and hidden life that Jesus lived in
Nazareth. Most rewarding of all is the discovery that as we pray more each day,
God’s will—that is, God’s concrete ways of loving us and our world—gradually is
made known to us. [4]
When I moved to New Mexico in 1986, Henri Nouwen personally told me to

forget the many things I try to teach and just teach one thing—contemplation!
This is why I am still doing it.
[1] Francis of Assisi, The Testament, line 14. See Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 1
(New City Press: 1999), 125.
[2] Francis of Assisi, quoted by Thomas of Celano, The Remembrance of the Desire of a
Soul, chapter 162. See Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 2 (New City Press: 2000),
386.
[3] Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer (Franciscan Media: 2004), 150-151.
[4] Henri Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life (HarperOne: 2013), 17.
Image credit: Automat (detail), 1927, Edward Hopper, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines,
Iowa.



Week Twenty-two

Vocation

Who Am I?
Monday, May 28, 2018
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. —Dr. Howard
Thurman (1899-1981), theologian and civil rights leader [1]
As conscious human beings, our life purpose is to be a visible expression of

both the image and the likeness of God. Each of us reveals a unique facet of the
divine, what Franciscan John Duns Scotus called haecceity or thisness. [2]
Parker Palmer says it well in his book Let Your Life Speak:
[My newborn granddaughter] did not show up as raw material to be shaped into
whatever image the world might want her to take. She arrived with her own
gifted form, with the shape of her own sacred soul. . . . Thomas Merton calls it
true self. Quakers call it the inner light, or “that of God” in every person. The
humanist tradition calls it identity and integrity. No matter what you call it, it is
a pearl of great price. . . .
The deepest vocational question is not “What ought I to do with my life?” It is

the more elemental and demanding “Who am I? What is my nature?” . . . [I
believe we’ve got to get our own who right before we can begin to address the
question of what am I to do.]
Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it
conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only
find the joy that every human being seeks—we will also find our path of
authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick
Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as “the place where your deep
gladness meets the world’s deep need.” [3] . . .
Contrary to the conventions of our thinly moralistic culture, this emphasis on

gladness and selfhood is not selfish. The Quaker teacher Douglas Steere was
fond of saying that the ancient human question “Who am I?” leads inevitably to
the equally important question “Whose am I”—for there is no selfhood outside
of relationship. . . .
As I learn more about the seed of true self that was planted when I was born, I
also learn more about the ecosystem in which I was planted—the network of
communal relations in which I am called to live responsively, accountably, and
joyfully with beings of every sort. Only when I know both seed and system, self
and community, can I embody the great commandment to love both my
neighbor and myself. . . .
The world still waits for the truth that will set us free—my truth, your truth, our
truth—the truth that was seeded in the earth when each of us arrived here
formed in the image of God. Cultivating that truth, I believe, is the authentic
vocation of every human being. [4]
If you want to go deeper with today’s meditation, take note of what word
or phrase stands out to you. Come back to that word or phrase throughout
the day, being present to its impact and invitation.
[1] Howard Thurman, occasion unidentified. This often-used quotation is attributed to

Reverend Thurman on the history page of the Howard Thurman Center for Common
Ground at Boston University, https://www.bu.edu/thurman/about/history/.
[2] See Richard Rohr’s previous meditations on “Thisness,” https://cac.org/thisness-

weekly-summary-2018-03-24/.
[3] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC (HarperSanFrancisco:

1993), 119.
[4] Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Jossey-
Bass: 2000), 11, 15,16-17, 36.
Image credit: Automata (detail), 1927, Edward Hopper, Des Moines Art Center, Des
Moines, Iowa.


Week Twenty-two

Vocation

Let Your Life Speak

Sunday, May 27, 2018

God’s image within each of us is inherent and irrevocable. God’s likeness is our
unique expression of that image, inviting our full and conscious participation.
Vocation is one way in which we discover and grow into our “True Self.” I’m not
speaking so much about education, career, or livelihood, though in some cases
they might overlap. In general, it is a Larger Life that somehow calls us forward
(vocatio means “a call or summons” in Latin), more than we call it to us. We do
not know its name yet, so how can we call it? If we engineer the process too
much, we often mistake a security-based occupation for our soul’s vocation.
Parker Palmer, a Quaker teacher and activist whom I deeply trust, reflects on his
own “further journey”:
[There are] moments when it is clear—if I have the eyes to see—that the life I am
living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me. In those moments I
sometimes catch a glimpse of my true life, a life hidden like the river beneath
the ice. And . . . I wonder: What am I meant to do? Who am I meant to be?
I was in my early thirties when I began, literally, to wake up to questions about

my vocation. By all appearances, things were going well, but the soul does not
put much stock in appearances. Seeking a path more purposeful than
accumulating wealth, holding power, winning at competition, or securing a
career, I had started to understand that it is indeed possible to live a life other
than one’s own. . . .
Then I ran across the old Quaker saying, “Let your life speak.” I found those
words encouraging, and I thought I understood what they meant: “Let the
highest truths and values guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in
everything you do.” . . .
So I lined up the loftiest ideals I could find and set out to achieve them. The
results were rarely admirable, often laughable, and sometimes grotesque. But
always they were unreal, a distortion of my true self—as must be the case when
one lives from the outside in, not the inside out. I had simply found a “noble”
way to live a life that was not my own, a life spent imitating heroes instead of
listening to my heart.
Today, some thirty years later, “Let your life speak” means something else to me
. . . : “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen to what it
intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have
decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values
you represent.” [1]
In other words, your life is not about you. You are about a larger thing called
Life. You are not your own. You are an instance of a universal and eternal
pattern. Life is living itself in you. The myriad forms of life in the universe are
merely parts of the One Life—that many of us call “God.” You and I don’t have to
figure it all out, fix everything, or do life perfectly by ourselves. All we have to do
is participate in this One Life. To find our unique niche in that Always Larger
Life is what we mean by “vocation.”
[1] Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Jossey-Bass:
2000), 2-3.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation (The
Crossroad Publishing Company: 2004), 60, 61.
Image credit: Automata (detail), 1927, Edward Hopper, Des Moines Art Center, Des
Moines, Iowa.
Unselfconscious Awareness
Friday, May 18, 2018
The power of imagination and art is at the level of soul, where we do not
consciously know what is happening. Therefore, we cannot engineer it, do not
need to understand it, nor can we fully stop its effects! If we “perfectly
understand” how God is changing us, if we try to be too rational about it, we will
only fight grace, try to personally steer the soul (dangerous!), and, of course,
take argumentative sides.
God works best underground and in our unconscious, by

rearranging our assumptions and presuppositions—frankly, when
we are not in control. The work of grace and healing mostly happens
“in secret” as Jesus himself seems to say (Matthew 6:1-13).
An artist friend, Barbara Coleman, writes of an insight she learned while

painting with her young daughter:
Great art . . . needs technical expertise as well as unchecked creativity, passion,
and expression. Great art seems to be created through a person. Somehow one’s
ego, self-consciousness, and expectations must be released before the piece is
completed. . . .
When my oldest daughter was three, she would sit and paint for long periods of
time in my studio as I painted. I was thrilled with her work . . . and I told her so.
I praised her extravagantly, hoping to encourage her. I would say, “Oh, you
really are a great artist!” and things of that sort. As soon as I would begin this
personal praise, . . . her work would become sloppy or careless or she’d just get
up and leave. Clearly my praise was having an unintended and very undesirable
effect on her. I was making her self-conscious and distracting her from her
discoveries. She began to turn to me for praise and approval, and the possibility
of self-doubt was introduced. . . . It didn’t take long to redirect her focus back to
her work, once I stopped praising her and addressed my comments to what was
on the page. Understanding and discovery are their own rewards.
Being unself-conscious and being willing to lose oneself in the work is vital for a
child and an artist. . . . How can we free [ourselves] to learn and have the
experience of creating art? As a parent and art teacher, I find that the more [we]
can focus on the immediate artwork at hand, the more satisfying the experience
becomes. By not emphasizing a product, and by focusing on process instead, the
work becomes more successful as well. The more [we are] able to reach a state of
awareness in which [our] self-consciousness disappears into the desire to
participate and see what [we] are trying to express, the more the art [and, I
would add, God] can reach [us]. [1]

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What is the purpose of spiritual law according to the passage?

What is the purpose of spiritual law according to the passage?

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