Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
St. Francis receiving the Stigmata (detail), by Giotto de Bondone from the Legend of St. Francis, 1297-1300. San Francesco, Upper Church, Assisi, Italy.
"Alternative Orthodoxy: Week 1"
"Incarnation Is Already Redemption" for Wednesday, February 10, 2016 (Ash Wednesday)
The alternative orthodoxy of Francis and the mainline orthodoxy of most Christian denominations largely have different starting points. Francis' alternative orthodoxy emphasizes incarnation instead of redemption. For Franciscans, Christmas is already Easter because in becoming a human being, God already shows that it's good to be human, to be flesh. The problem is already somehow solved. Flesh does not need to be redeemed by any sacrificial atonement theory. This opens up an entirely different field in which to move freely.
Our sense of shame and guilt seems to localize in the body. The body ages and dies and so it looks inferior, but actually the soul can age and die too, and that is probably what we meant by the word "hell." Both body and soul are on a journey. Of all people, Christians should have known that "flesh" is not a bad word. In fact, "The Word became flesh" (John 1:14) according to the inspired words of John's Gospel. Unfortunately Paul used the same word "flesh" (sarx) in a most judgmental and dualistic way--and that is the one most people remember. It got us off to a bad start.
I think my wonderful Church history and liturgy professor, Fr. Larry Landini, in Centerville, Ohio, may have given the best explanation for why so many Christians seem to be ashamed and afraid of the body. In 1970, on the last day of class, as he was backing out of the classroom, Fr. Landini offered these final words to us: "Just remember, on the practical level the Christian Church has been much more influenced by Plato than it has been by Jesus." He then left the room, leaving us laughing and stunned, but fully prepared to understand the sad truth of what he had just said, since he had led us through the history of spirituality and liturgy for four full years.
For Plato, body and soul were incompatible enemies; matter and spirit were at deep odds with one another, utter opposites. But for Jesus, there is no animosity between body, soul, and spirit whatsoever. In fact, this is the heart of Jesus' healing message, and this is why incarnation is at the heart of Franciscan theology. Jesus healed both body and soul in most Gospel stories.
Francis understood the deep implications of the Incarnation and took Incarnation to its logical conclusions: Real Presence is everywhere--in the neighbor, in the other, in nature, in animals, in Brother Sun and Sister Moon, in sinner and enemies, in the collective Body of Christ, and yes, in distilled form in the bread and in the wine, just as it was distilled and focused in the person of Jesus. The principle is this: we must struggle with the truth in one concrete place--and then universalize from there. This has sometimes been called the first philosophical problem of "the one and the many."
The Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed, which many Christians recite at church, go back to the second and third centuries. In them we say, "We believe in the resurrection of the body." I want to point out what that is not saying: We believe in the resurrection of the spirit or the soul--yet that is exactly what most Christians have almost exclusively concentrated on. The Christian religion makes the most daring affirmation: God is redeeming matter and spirit, or the whole of creation. The very end of the Bible speaks of the "new heavens and the new earth" and the descent of the "new Jerusalem from the heavens" to "live among us" (Revelation 21:1-3). This physical universe and our own physicality are somehow going to share in the Eternal Mystery, whatever it is in its fullness. Embodiment is not insignificant; your body is not bad. In fact, it is the new and lasting temple (1 Corinthians 6:19-20 and throughout Paul). It is the very hiding place of God--so only the humble and the humbled will find such a Treasure.
For much of Christian history we've severely limited people's in-depth experience of God by making religious faith largely into a set of mental abstractions. We split the mind from the body and both of them from the spirit. Many of us are now victims of not knowing how to receive, access, enjoy, suffer, and appreciate what can only be known in its wholeness. No wonder so many have left the church, doubt the truth of Christianity, become practical materialists inside the church (including many clergy) or agnostics and atheists outside the church (including many who are actual "believers"). I am not sure which is sadder. What they seem to affirm or seem to reject is too often not the real thing anyway. As wise Augustine said in the 4th century, "God has many that the church does not have; and the church has many that God does not have." Any who put body and spirit together are already "had" by God! They are privileged to "carry in their bodies the very brand marks of Jesus" (Galatians 6:17).
Gateway to Silence: Love with your whole heart, soul, mind, and body.
Reference:
Adapted from Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That which I Am Seeking(Center for Action and Contemplation: 2012), discs 3 and 4 (CD, MP3 download);
"Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. It is the inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change."[Richard Rohr]
Join Fr. Richard for a live webcast:
Authentic Transformation
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
4:30-6:00 p.m. US MST*
Register for as little as $1 at cac.org.
*Registration includes access to the replay, which will be available shortly after the live event through Sunday, March 27, 2016.
Center for Action and Contemplation
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Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Learning How to Love" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Tuesday, 9 February 2016
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
St. Francis receiving the Stigmata (detail), by Giotto de Bondone from the Legend of St. Francis, 1297-1300. San Francesco, Upper Church, Assisi, Italy.
"Alternative Orthodoxy: Week 1"
"Learning How to Love" for Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Francis' emphasis on action, practice, and lifestyle was revolutionary for its time, just as it is now. It is the foundation of Franciscan alternative orthodoxy. For Francis and Clare, Jesus became someone to actually imitate and not just to collectively worship. Believe it or not, this has hardly ever been the norm or practice of most Christians. We preferredSunday morning worship services and arguing about how to conduct them or prohibiting each other from attending "heretical" church services. God must just cry.
The Franciscan School found a way to be both very traditional and very revolutionary at the same time by emphasizing practice over theory, or orthopraxy over orthodoxy. In general, the Franciscan tradition taught that love and action are more important than intellect or speculative truth. Love is the highest category for the Franciscan School (the goal), and we believe that authentic love is not possible without true inner freedom (contemplative practice helps with this), nor will love be real or tested unless we somehow live close to the disadvantaged (the method), who frankly teach us that we know very little about love.
Orthodoxy teaches us the theoretical importance of love; orthopraxy helps us learn how to love. To be honest, even my Franciscan seminary training did not teach me how to love. It taught me how to obey and conform, but not how to love. I'm still trying to learn how to love every day of my life. As we endeavor to put love into action, we come to realize that on our own, we are unable to obey Jesus' command to "Love one another as I have loved you." To love as Jesus loves, we must be connected to the Source of love. Franciscanism found that connection in solitude, silence, and some form of contemplative prayer. Contemplation quiets the monkey mind and teaches us emotional sobriety and psychological freedom from our addictions and attachments. Otherwise, most talk of "change of life" is largely an illusion and a pretense.
Early on, Francis found himself so attracted to contemplation, to living out in the caves and in nature, that he was not sure if he should dedicate his life to prayer or to action. So he asked Sister Clare and Brother Sylvester to spend some time in prayer about it and then come back and tell him what they thought he should do. After a few weeks, they both came back. Francis knelt down and put his arms out, prepared to do whatever they told him. They both, in perfect agreement, without having talked to one another, said Francis should not be solely a contemplative; nor should he only be active in ministry. Francis was to go back and forth between the two (much as Jesus did). Francis jumped up with great excitement and immediately went on the road with this new permission and freedom.
Before Francis, the "secular" priests worked with the people in the parishes and were considered "active." Those who belonged to religious orders went off to monasteries and prayed. Francis found a way to do both. Thus Franciscans were called friars instead of monks. Francis took prayer on the road; in fact, prayer is what enabled him to sustain his life of love and service to others over the long haul, without becoming cynical or angry. Francis didn't want a stable form of monastic life [1]; he wanted us to mix with the world and to find God amidst its pain, confusion, and disorder. For me, that is still the greatest art form--to "dance while standing still"! So you see that 30 years ago, when I founded the Center for Action and Contemplation, I was just being a good Franciscan.
Gateway to Silence: Love with your whole heart, soul, mind, and body.
References:
[1] I wrote my Bachelor's thesis on this theme in 1966.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 81, 87, 98;
Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That which I Am Seeking (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2012), disc 1 (CD, MP3 download);
In the Footsteps of Francis: Awakening to Creation (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2010), CD, MP3 download;
and Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer(Paulist Press, 2014).
"Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. It is the inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change."[Richard Rohr]
Join Fr. Richard for a live webcast:
Authentic Transformation
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
4:30-6:00 p.m. US MST*
Register for as little as $1 at cac.org.
*Registration includes access to the replay, which will be available shortly after the live event through Sunday, March 27, 2016.
Center for Action and Contemplation----------------------
Richard Rohr's Meditation: "A Different Worldview" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Monday, 8 February 2016
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
St. Francis receiving the Stigmata (detail), by Giotto de Bondone from the Legend of St. Francis, 1297-1300. San Francesco, Upper Church, Assisi, Italy.
"Alternative Orthodoxy: Week 1"
"A Different Worldview" for Monday, February 8, 2016
Before we begin to outline Franciscan alternative orthodoxy, it is helpful to look at the Franciscan worldview, which grew out of the historical and cultural context in which St. Francis lived. Today's meditation will be a little longer to give a full background.
Francis was born in Assisi, Italy, in the year 1181. He died in 1226. It was a time of great social and economic change and much violence between Italian city-states. Before and during his life, Europe and the Muslim world were involved in four Crusades, and there were more to come. Christians were fighting Muslims; Muslims had overtaken what Christians considered their holy places in Jerusalem; and the Christians of the West were fighting the Eastern Orthodox Christians. Added to that, Assisi itself was in an ongoing war with Perugia, a little city to the west. In the year 1202, Francis was taken prisoner in a battle against Perugia. In 1204, he escaped from prison. He emerged dazed, disillusioned, and deeply hoping for something more, something different than all the terrible violence that had destroyed his youth. His world was obsessed with war, with security, with self-protection, and with fear of the outsider. (Does this sound familiar?) Everyone in Assisi was armed; revenge, scapegoating, cruelty, torture, and aggression against enemies were rampant and even socially sanctioned and idealized, much as they are today.
Francis seemed to realize that there was an intrinsic connection between violence and possessions, power, and prestige. So he rejected all of them. His father was among the first generation of the new propertied business class. Francis recognized that his father's obsession with money and property had destroyed his father's soul, and so he set out on a very different path. Francis concluded that the only way out of such a world was to live a life of voluntary poverty or "non-possession." He refused to be part of the moneyed class because he knew that once you owned something you'd have to protect it, and for some reason, you would inevitably try to get more of it. Francis said, "Look, Brothers, if we have any possessions, we will need arms to protect them. . . . Therefore, we do not want to possess anything in this world."
Francis felt that in order to find a way out, he had to live in close proximity and even solidarity with the excluded ones in his society. He literally changed sides. He had been born among the upper class in Upper Assisi. In the lower part of town lived the lower class. Francis not only moved to the other side of town, but he actually moved to the plain below Assisi where there was a leper colony. The word "leper" did not always refer to the contagious disease. Rather, the lepers in both Jesus' and Francis' times represented the excluded ones, the ones whom society had decided were unacceptable, unworthy, or unclean for a number of reasons. Francis told us to identify not with the upper class and the climb toward success, power, and money, but to go to where Jesus went--to where there was pain, to the excluded ones. We were to find our place not in climbing but in descending, not at the top but at the bottom, not among the insiders but with the outsider. What an upside down world!
Francis, seeing the beginnings of the propertied leisure class, told us to work for our pay; and if work was not available, we were to humbly beg, just as the Buddha advised his monks. Francis recognized that his society was becoming a structured system of protected and unequal social relationships. He knew the violence, mistrust, ambition, and pride which that worldview would engender. So he insisted on what he called equal power relationships in religious communities. He rejected all titles like Superior or Abbot. Francis did not want anyone to act as if he was higher than anyone else. Even those who led the community were to be called friars or brothers, and they only held the office for a short term and then returned to the equality of brotherhood. No one should stay at the top for very long; and when they were there, they were to be servant leaders or "guardians" of the mission and message of the friars.
In Francis we see the emergence of a very different worldview, a worldview that is not based on climbing, achieving, possessing, performing, or any idealization of order, but a life that enjoys and finds deep satisfaction on the level of nakedbeing itself--much more than doing or having. He learned this from Jesus. It seems to me the Franciscan worldview is now desperately important if the 7.4 billion of us are going to exist happily together on this one limited planet. Voluntary simplicity is now essential for social survival. Francis warned us where we were headed eight hundred years ago.
Gateway to Silence: Love with your whole heart, soul, mind, and body.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis (Sounds True: 2010), disc 1 (CD).
"Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. It is the inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change."[Richard Rohr]
Join Fr. Richard for a live webcast:
Authentic Transformation
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
4:30-6:00 p.m. US MST*
Register for as little as $1 at cac.org.
*Registration includes access to the replay, which will be available shortly after the live event through Sunday, March 27, 2016.
Center for Action and Contemplation
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Richard Rohr's Meditation: "New Ways" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Sunday, 7 February 2016
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
St. Francis receiving the Stigmata (detail), by Giotto de Bondone from the Legend of St. Francis, 1297-1300. San Francesco, Upper Church, Assisi, Italy.
"Alternative Orthodoxy: Week 1"
"New Ways" for Sunday, February 7, 2016
The "alternative orthodoxy" of Francis of Assisi is of crucial importance in our age, just as it was in his own time. Above all, Francis loved God and wanted to imitate Jesus in very practical ways. In other words, it was action and lifestyle itself that mattered much more than mentally believing dogmatic or moral positions to be true or false. Francis directly said to the first friars, "You only know as much as you do!" [1]
Jesus' first recorded word in at least two Gospels is unfortunately translated with the moralistic, churchy wordrepent. The word quite literally means change or even more precisely "Change your minds!" (Mark 1:15, Matthew 4:17). Given that, it is quite strange that the religion founded in Jesus' name has been very resistant to change and has tended to love and protect the past and the status quo much more than the positive and hopeful futures that could be brought about by people agreeing to change. Maybe that is why our earth is so depleted and our politics are so pathetic. We have not taught a spirituality of actual change or growth, which is what an alternative orthodoxy always asks of you.
Francis didn't bother questioning any of the mainline Christian doctrines. He was not personally oppositional, nor was he an intellectual. He just took the imitation of Christ absolutely seriously and tried to live the way that Jesus lived! This is such a simple and obvious agenda that I think we had to find a way to avoid it. The civil religion we have today doesn't demand changes to our lifestyle or familiar habits. The best way to avoid actually changing is to go into your head and endlessly argue about what "changing" means. Human minds love to argue, oppose, critique, judge, evaluate, and adjust--it gives our little minds a job. Academics, politicians, and seminary professors love to stay right there and rarely hit the streets of the incarnate or suffering world as Jesus clearly did. What else are the healing stories about?
Franciscan alternative orthodoxy doesn't bother fighting popes, bishops, Scriptures, or dogmas. It just quietly but firmly pays attention to different things--like simplicity, humility, non-violence, contemplation, solitude and silence, earth care, nature and other creatures, and the "least of the brothers and sisters." These are our true teachers. The Rule of Saint Francis--which Rome demanded Francis develop--was often thought of as "Tips for the Road" and hardly a rule at all. Like Jesus, Francis taught his disciples while walking from place to place and finding ways to serve, to observe, and to love in the world that was right in front of them.
Frankly, this is exactly what Pope Francis is doing for the whole church right now, and this is not making some cardinals, priests, and lay people very happy, especially those who live in their heads, always clarifying doctrinal and moral positions, as if God needed them to do that. Pope Francis is formally a Jesuit; but he is really a Franciscan--in his entire style, message, and emphasis. (Apologies to my many wonderful Jesuit friends!)
In Laudato Si', Pope Francis writes, "In the heart of this world, the Lord of life, who loves us so much, is always present. He does not abandon us, he does not leave us alone, for he has united himself definitively to our earth, and his love constantly impels us to find new ways forward. Praise be to him!" [2, emphasis mine] I believe the Franciscan worldview with its alternative orthodoxy can help us "find new ways forward" and stop being so afraid of change.
To be afraid of change is to be afraid of growing up. Change and growth are finally the same thing. Unfortunately, the church has trained many people in not growing up.
Gateway to Silence: Love with your whole heart, soul, mind, and body.
References:
[1] "The Legend of Perugia," Saint Francis of Assisi: Omnibus of Sources(Franciscan Press: 1991), 74.[2] Pope Francis, Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home,
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Returning to Essentials: Teaching an Alternative Orthodoxy (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2015), CD,MP3 download; and The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis (Sounds True: 2010), CD.
"Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. It is the inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change."[Richard Rohr]
Join Fr. Richard for a live webcast:
Authentic Transformation
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
4:30-6:00 p.m. US MST*
Register for as little as $1 at cac.org.
*Registration includes access to the replay, which will be available shortly after the live event through Sunday, March 27, 2016.
Center for Action and Contemplation---------------------
Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Grace: Week 2 Summary" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Saturday, 6 February 2016
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Photograph by BryanHanson, 2015.
"Grace: Week 2"
"Summary"
Sunday, January 31-Friday, February 6, 2016
The passion of Pope Francis is to again make merciful love the foundation, the center, and the goal. (Sunday)
Grace is not something God gives; grace is who God is. (Monday)
God does not love you because you are good; God loves you because God is good. (Tuesday)
"Yahweh, Yahweh, a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger, rich in kindness, and abounding in faithfulness."[Exodus 34:6] (Wednesday)
I believe that faith might be precisely that ability to trust 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). (Thursday)
Mercy has to be your deepest way of seeing, a generosity of spirit that draws from your identity, your deepest dignity, which is love. (Friday)
"Practice: Saying Grace"
Many cultures have a beautiful tradition of saying a prayer before or after a meal, expressing gratitude and asking for blessing. If we are accustomed to praying over our food, it may become a rote, almost thoughtless gesture. Yet it is another opportunity to intentionally open ourselves to receive and participate in grace. The food is already blessed simply by its existence. God doesn't require our words of thanks. But it does us good to "say grace," to verbally acknowledge the grace that is everywhere, even and especially in the giving of lives--plant and animal--for our sustenance.
If you have a practice of saying grace, bring greater awareness and presence to it. Find or create a prayer that names your experience of grace. This Hindu blessing, from the Bhagavad Gita, is said before meals:
This ritual is One. The food is One. We who offer the food are One. The fire of hunger is also One. All action is One. We who understand this are One.
Indeed, it is all One in the immense and undiscriminating Grace that is God.
Gateway to Silence: Everything is Grace.
For Further Study:
Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer
Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self
CONSPIRE 2016: Everything Belongs
Friday, July 15--Sunday, July 17, 2016
In person, Albuquerque, New Mexico OR Live webcast worldwide
Richard Rohr, Christena Cleveland, James Alison, Mirabai Starr
When we realize that everything belongs, when we discover who we truly are as God's beloveds, there is no longer any reason to scapegoat or exclude anyone. Rather than directly fight evil and untruth, we must bring it into the Light of Love.
Learn more at cac.org.
Register for the in-person conference soon (limited seating)! Webcast registration includes access to the video replay through August 21, 2016. Financial assistance is available.
Center for Action and Contemplation---------------------
Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Everything Is Grace" Of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Friday, 5 February 2016
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Photograph by BryanHanson, 2015.
"Grace: Week 2"
"Everything Is Grace" for Friday, February 5, 2016
Mercy is not a virtue that you choose to put on one day. Mercy has to be your deepest way of seeing, a generosity of spirit that draws from your identity, your deepest dignity, which is love. It is basically a worldview of abundance, wherein I do not have to withhold, protect, or hoard myself.
I liken this deepest dignity, this True Self who we are at our core, to a diamond buried deep within us and constantly forming under the intense pressure of our lives. We must search for and uncover this diamond, freeing it from the surrounding debris of guilt and shame. In a sense, our True Self must, like Jesus, be resurrected. That process is not resuscitation of something old and tired, but a wonderful discovery of something always new--and already perfectly formed.
For the True Self, there is nothing to hate, reject, deny, or judge as unworthy or unnecessary. It has "been forgiven much and so [it] loves much" (Luke 7:47). Once you live inside the Big Body of love, compassion and mercy come easily. The detours of the false self were all just delays, bumps in the road, pressure points that created something new in the long run, as pressure does to carbon deep beneath the earth. God uses everything to construct this hard and immortal diamond, our core of love. Diamonds are said to be the hardest substance on this earth. It is this strong diamond of love that will always be stronger than death (Song of Songs 8:6).
All, absolutely everything, is now made use of in this great economy of grace. "Grace is everywhere," Georges Bernanos said both at the end of his great novel and at the very end of his life. [1] Likewise, nearing her death, Thérèse of Lisieux said, "Everything is a grace!" [2] Living from your core of love, you can now enjoy unearned love in yourself and allow it in everyone else too. This patient mining process will make you compassionate and forgiving with the unfinished diamonds of others who are on the same journey as you are. This True Self cannot find or know God without bringing everybody else along for the same ride. It is one great big finding and one great big being found, all at the same time. Surely this is the meaning of the Day of Yahweh, Dame Julian's "Great Deed," and God's Final Judgement.
You do not find the Great Love except by finding your True Self along with it, and you cannot find your True Self without falling into the Great Love. As you fall, you will discover that the meaning of the universe, at its deepest and final level, is only "mercy within mercy within mercy." [3]
Gateway to Silence: Everything is grace.
References:
[1] Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest (Carroll & Graf: 2002), 298.
[2] John Clarke, trans., Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux (ICS Publications: 1996), 266.
[3] Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas (Harcourt: 1953), 362.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, "Today Is a Time for Mercy," December 10, 2015, https://cac.org/richard-rohr-on-mercy-mp3; and Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-Bass: 2013), 184-185.
CONSPIRE 2016: Everything Belongs
Friday, July 15--Sunday, July 17, 2016
In person, Albuquerque, New Mexico OR Live webcast worldwide
Richard Rohr, Christena Cleveland, James Alison, Mirabai Starr
When we realize that everything belongs, when we discover who we truly are as God's beloveds, there is no longer any reason to scapegoat or exclude anyone. Rather than directly fight evil and untruth, we must bring it into the Light of Love.
Learn more at cac.org.
Register for the in-person conference soon (limited seating)! Webcast registration includes access to the video replay through August 21, 2016. Financial assistance is available.
Center for Action and Contemplation
----------------------
Richard Rohr's Meditation: "Trust the River" Center for Action and Contemplation of Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Thursday, 4 February 2016
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
Photograph by BryanHanson, 2015.
"Grace: Week 2"
"Trust the River" for Thursday, February 4, 2016
Grace and mercy teach us that we are all much larger than the good or bad stories we tell about ourselves or about one another. Please don't get caught in your small stories; they are usually less than half true, and therefore not really "true" at all. They're usually based on hurts and unconscious agendas that allow us to see and judge things in a very selective way. They're not the whole You, not the Great You, not the Great River. Therefore it is not where your big life can really happen. No wonder the Spirit is described as "flowing water" and as "a spring inside you" (John 4:10-14) or, at the end of the Bible, as a "river of life" (Revelation 22:1-2). Strangely, your real life is not about "you." It is a part of a much larger stream called God.
I believe that faith might be precisely that ability to trust 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 it 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 and I go up into my head and start obsessing. Soon I tend to be overly focused in my head to such a point that I don't really feel or experience things in my heart and body. I'm oriented toward goals and making things happen, trying to push or even create my own river. Yet the Big River is already flowing 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. This is probably the deepest meaning of "divine providence." So do not be afraid. We have been proactively 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, "It is grace that forms a void inside of us and it is also grace that fills that void." 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?" Without grace we will not enter into such a necessary void, and without grace the void will not be filled. 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 you into such fears and emptiness, and grace alone can fill them up, if we are willing to stay in the void. It is a kind of "negative capability" that God seems to make constant use of. We mustn't engineer an answer too quickly. We mustn't get settled too fast. We all want to manufacture an answer to take away our anxiety and settle the dust. To stay in God's hands, to trust, means that we usually have to let go of our attachments to feelings--which are going to pass away anyway (which is the irony of it all). People of deep faith develop a high tolerance for ambiguity, and come to recognize that it is only the small self that needs certitude or perfect order all the time. The Godself is perfectly at home in the River of Mystery.
Gateway to Silence: Everything is grace.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 46, 53, 142-144.
CONSPIRE 2016: Everything Belongs
Friday, July 15--Sunday, July 17, 2016
In person, Albuquerque, New Mexico OR Live webcast worldwide
Richard Rohr, Christena Cleveland, James Alison, Mirabai Starr
When we realize that everything belongs, when we discover who we truly are as God's beloveds, there is no longer any reason to scapegoat or exclude anyone. Rather than directly fight evil and untruth, we must bring it into the Light of Love.
Learn more at cac.org.
Register for the in-person conference soon (limited seating)! Webcast registration includes access to the video replay through August 21, 2016. Financial assistance is available.
Center for Action and Contemplation
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Center for Action and Contemplation
1823 Five Points Road SW (physical)
PO Box 12464 (mailing)
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87195, United States
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