Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
"Week Six: Sermon on the Mount"
Summary: Week Six
Sermon on the Mount
February 4 - February 9, 2018
The experience of forgiveness or mercy is the experience of a magnanimous God who loves out of total gratuitousness. (Sunday)If the heart is awake and clear, it can directly receive, radiate, and reflect the unmanifest divine Reality. (Cynthia Bourgeault) (Monday)
If you want peace, work for justice. (Pope Paul VI) (Tuesday)
Pax Romana creates a false peace by sacrificing others; but the peace Jesus speaks of—Pax Christi, the peace of Christ—waits and works for true peace by sacrificing the false self of power, prestige, and possessions. (Wednesday)
Wisdom people like Jesus have passed through a major death to their ego. This is the core meaning of transformation. (Thursday)
We think of Jesus’ teaching as prescriptions for getting to heaven (even though we haven’t followed them). Instead, the Sermon on the Mount is a set of descriptions of a free life. (Friday)
"Practice: Affirmations"
All of creation and each of us have received original blessing. Yet we have been conditioned to focus on the negative in ourselves and others. Think of a negative phrase you have said aloud or thought to yourself that stems from a sense of shame rather than your inherent dignity.
Turn it upside down and say, in first person, present tense, an affirmation of your God-given value. For example:
I am unlovable. . . . I am infinitely loved.
I don’t have enough. . . . I have everything I need.
I am stupid. . . . I have the mind of Christ.
I am worthless. . . . I am precious in God’s eyes, I am honored, and God loves me.
Repeat the positive statement aloud, slowly, with intention and trust, several times. Then rest silently in the awareness that you are already and forever, without any effort or achievement on your part, a beloved and blessed child of God.
***
Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2016), 110-111.For Further Study:
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart (Jossey-Bass: 2003)
John Dear, The Beatitudes of Peace: Meditations on the Beatitudes (Twenty-Third Publications: 2016)
Eknath Easwaran, Original Goodness: On the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount (Nilgiri Press: 1996)
Richard Rohr with John Bookser Feister, Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media: 1996)
Richard Rohr, Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media: 1991), CD
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"Who Will Preserve the Essentials?"
Friday, February 9, 2018
Jesus says that the people who live these happinesses, these Beatitudes, will be “the salt of the earth” (see Matthew 5:13). For ancient people, salt was an important preservative, seasoning, and symbol of healing. What does Jesus mean by such an image?First, he’s not saying that those who live this way are going to heaven. He is saying that they will be gift for the earth. We think of Jesus’ teaching as prescriptions for getting to heaven (even though we haven’t followed them). Instead, the Sermon on the Mount is a set of descriptions of a free life.
Jesus’ moral teaching is very often a description of the final product rather than a detailed process for getting there. When you can weep, when you can identify with the little ones, when you can make peace, when you can be persecuted and still be joyful . . . then you’re doing it right. He is saying, as it were, this is what holiness looks like. When you act this way, “The Kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21). Jesus doesn’t seem to be concerned about control, enforcement, or uniformity. His priority is proclamation, naming, and revealing. Then he trusts that good-willed people and a reliable God will take it from there.
“If salt becomes tasteless, how can we salt the world with it?” asks Jesus (see Matthew 5:13). That message seems especially true today. If Christians—Jesus’ self-proclaimed followers—no longer believe the Gospel, if we no longer believe in nonviolence and powerlessness, then who’s going to convert us? We’re supposed to be the leaven of the world, yet if we no longer believe in the Gospel, what hope do we have of offering anything new to anyone?
Finally, Jesus says, “You are light for the world; a city built on a hill-top cannot be hidden” (Matthew 5:14-15). Our job is to be a shining truth, to live the truth as best we can, and let it fall where it may. “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better” is one of the Center for Action and Contemplation’s core principles.
Jesus is telling his disciples, “I’ve given you a great truth. I want you to hold the light and the leaven in the middle of the world. As light or leaven it will do its work, and God’s purposes will be achieved.” What a relaxed and patient trust Jesus has in God!
Jesus is quite content, it seems, with such a humble position. He enters the imperial city from a place of powerlessness. His Sermon on the Mount has to do with an alternative understanding and strategy of power. Jesus is leading us to participate in God’s power, which to us feels like powerlessness.
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.
***
Adapted from Richard Rohr with John Bookser Feister, Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media: 1996), 142-145.***
"Blessed Are the Persecuted"
Thursday, February 8, 2018
Blessed are those who are persecuted in the cause of justice: the kingdom of Heaven is theirs. (Matthew 5:10)I guess we should not be surprised that this Beatitude follows the previous ones. The first and last Beatitudes are present tense: Theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. Until this statement, Jesus has said “happy are the . . .,” speaking generally. Now he says happy are “those of you. . . .” Very likely Matthew is conveying that this scene is happening directly in front of Jesus. His small community is being persecuted, and Jesus tells them to “rejoice and be glad”! Persecution for the cause of justice is inevitable. Instead of seeking to blame someone for their well-earned scars, he is telling them two clear things: You can be happy—and you can be happy now!
Matthew 5:11-12 could really be called the ninth Beatitude, although it more likely is an explanation of the eighth:
Blessed are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of things against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven; this is how they persecuted the prophets before you.
The disciples’ response is a prophetic action itself. To live joyfully amid misunderstanding and slander points beyond “my kingdom” to the Kingdom of God. Goodness can never be attacked directly; the messengers or the motivation must be discredited.
Luke’s Gospel presents the same message in the opposite form: “Alas for you when the world speaks well of you! This was the way their ancestors treated the false prophets” (Luke 6:26). Too much praise is probably an indication that it is not the full Gospel. In either case, Jesus himself clearly knew that his teaching would turn conventional values on their head.
“Bad” people didn’t kill Jesus; conventional wisdom crucified him. Jesus taught an alternative wisdom instead of the maintenance of social order. Prophets and wisdom teachers like Jesus have passed through a major death to their ego. This is the core meaning of transformation. Yet most of Christian history tried to understand Jesus inside the earlier stage of law and order. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is anything but maintaining the status quo!
Theologian Marcus Borg (1942-2015) wrote:
The gospel of Jesus—the good news of Jesus’ own message—is that there is a way of being that moves beyond both secular and religious conventional wisdom. The path of transformation of which Jesus spoke leads from a life of requirements and measuring up (whether to culture or to God) to a life of relationship with God. It leads from a life of anxiety to a life of peace and trust. It leads from the bondage of self-preoccupation to the freedom of self-forgetfulness. It leads from life centered in culture to life centered in God. [1]
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] Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith (HarperSanFrancisco: 1994), 88.Adapted from Richard Rohr with John Bookser Feister, Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media: 1996), 141, 142;
Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media: 1991), CD; and
Prophets Then, Prophets Now (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2006), CD, MP3 download.
***
"Children of God"
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. . . . Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. (General Omar Bradley [1])Today we continue discussing the implications of Matthew 5:9: Blessed are the peacemakers: they shall be recognized as children of God.
As I mentioned yesterday, the Pax Romana creates a false peace by sacrificing others. But the peace Jesus speaks of—Pax Christi, the peace of Christ—waits and works for true peace by sacrificing the false self of power, prestige, and possessions. Such peacemaking will never be popular. The follower of Jesus is doomed to minority status.
Jesus next warns us that we will be hated from all sides (see also John 15:18-16:2 and Matthew 10:22). When you’re working outside the system, when you work for peace, you will not be admired inside the system. In fact, you will look dangerous, subversive, and unpatriotic. One thing you cannot call Jesus was a patriot. He was serving a far bigger realm.
If you are truly a peacemaker, your very means have to be nonviolent and you have to be consistently pro-life—from womb to tomb. One of the most distressing qualities of many Christians today is that they retain the right to decide when, where, and with whom they will be pro-life peacemakers. If the other can be determined to be wrong, guilty, unworthy, or sinful, the death penalty is somehow supposed to serve justice. That entirely misses the ethical point Jesus makes: We are never the sole arbiters of life or death, because life is created by God and carries the divine image. It is a spiritual seeing, far beyond any ideology of left or right.
John Dear writes:
With this Beatitude, Jesus announces that God is a peacemaker. Everyone who becomes a peacemaker is therefore a son or daughter of the God of peace. With this teaching, Jesus describes the nature of God as nonviolent and peaceful. This one verse throws out thousands of years of belief in a violent god and every reference to a warmaking god in the Hebrew Scriptures. It does away with any spiritual justification for warfare . . . . Instead, it opens vast new vistas in our imaginations about what the living God is actually like, and what God’s reign might be like. With this Beatitude, we glimpse the nonviolence of heaven and join the global struggle to abolish war and pursue a new world of nonviolence here on earth. . . .
As peacemakers, we are nonviolent to ourselves, nonviolent to all others, all creatures, and all creation, and we work publicly for a new world of nonviolence. . . .
[We are called to] speak out against every aspect of violence—poverty, war, racism, police brutality, gun violence, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction—and at the same time call for a new culture of peace. . . . [2]
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] Omar Bradley, Armistice Day Address in Boston on November 10, 1948. From The Collected Writings of General Omar N. Bradley, vol. 1 (U.S. Government Printing: 1967), 588-589.[2] John Dear, The Beatitudes of Peace: Meditations on the Beatitudes, Peacemaking and the Spiritual Life (Twenty-Third Publications: 2016), 89-90, 91, 98.
Adapted from Richard Rohr with John Bookser Feister, Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media: 1996), 140-141.
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"News from Richard Rohr and CAC" Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
News from New Mexico
A monthly newsletter from the Center for Action and Contemplation
In Search of the True Self
Reconnect with your soul’s deep desires and wisdom in a 10-week online course. Read and reflect on Richard Rohr’s book, Immortal Diamond, with other seekers from around the world.
The course begins February 28 and ends May 8, 2018. Register soon! (Registration closes February 14 or when the course fills.) Learn more at cac.org.
Teachings for Lent
There are two moments that matter. One is when you know that your one and only life is absolutely valuable and alive. The other is when you know your life, as presently lived, is entirely pointless and empty. Lent is about both. The first such moment gives you energy and joy by connecting you with your ultimate Source and Ground. The second gives you limits and boundaries, and a proper humility, so you keep seeking the Source and Ground and not just your small self. (Richard Rohr, Wondrous Encounters)
Father Richard also shares insights from his book Wondrous Encounters in an 80-minute talk, available as a CD and MP3 download.
Purchase these and other titles at store.cac.org.
The Mendicant
In God, our self is no longer its own center. There is a death of the self-centered and self-sufficient ego. In its place is awakened a new and liberated self which loves and acts in the Spirit. (Richard Rohr, "Mirror and Mask")
Enjoy the Center for Action and Contemplation’s quarterly print newsletter online! The February issue features articles by Richard Rohr, Living School student Darlene Ortega, donor Kate Hampton, and staff member Paul Swanson. Read The Mendicant at cac.org.
Reader Favorites:
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations
I am always inspired by Fr. Rohr’s posts because he takes me beyond religion! He opens my eyes to what I have always known in my heart. God is Love! Period. (Doe G.)
Who Was Jesus?: We must understand Jesus in his social, cultural, political, and economic context.
At-One-Ment, Not Atonement: Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing). Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.
The Lost Tradition of Contemplation: The Spirit planted inside us yearns for and responds to God. Contemplation helps us become attuned and surrendered to this process.
Find additional meditations by Richard Rohr in the online archive.
***
"News from Richard Rohr and CAC" Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
A monthly newsletter from the Center for Action and Contemplation
Reconnect with your soul’s deep desires and wisdom in a 10-week online course. Read and reflect on Richard Rohr’s book, Immortal Diamond, with other seekers from around the world.
Teachings for Lent
There are two moments that matter. One is when you know that your one and only life is absolutely valuable and alive. The other is when you know your life, as presently lived, is entirely pointless and empty. Lent is about both. The first such moment gives you energy and joy by connecting you with your ultimate Source and Ground. The second gives you limits and boundaries, and a proper humility, so you keep seeking the Source and Ground and not just your small self. (Richard Rohr, Wondrous Encounters)
Purchase these and other titles at store.cac.org.
The Mendicant
In God, our self is no longer its own center. There is a death of the self-centered and self-sufficient ego. In its place is awakened a new and liberated self which loves and acts in the Spirit. (Richard Rohr, "Mirror and Mask")
Enjoy the Center for Action and Contemplation’s quarterly print newsletter online! The February issue features articles by Richard Rohr, Living School student Darlene Ortega, donor Kate Hampton, and staff member Paul Swanson. Read The Mendicant at cac.org.
Reader Favorites:
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations
I am always inspired by Fr. Rohr’s posts because he takes me beyond religion! He opens my eyes to what I have always known in my heart. God is Love! Period. (Doe G.)
Who Was Jesus?: We must understand Jesus in his social, cultural, political, and economic context.
At-One-Ment, Not Atonement: Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing). Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.
The Lost Tradition of Contemplation: The Spirit planted inside us yearns for and responds to God. Contemplation helps us become attuned and surrendered to this process.
Find additional meditations by Richard Rohr in the online archive.
***
"Blessed Are the Peacemakers"
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Blessed are the peacemakers: they shall be recognized as children of God. (Matthew 5:9)In Jesus’ teaching and in his life, we see modeled nonviolent, peaceful action. He encourages us to likewise “turn the other cheek” and not return vengeance with vengeance. There is no way to peace other than through peacemaking itself. But many think we can achieve peace through violence. We say, “We will stop killing by killing.” Sadly, that is the way we think, and it is in opposition to all great religious teachers. Our need for immediate control leads us to disconnect the clear unity between means and ends.
American Christians supported the killing of two hundred thousand people in Iraq during the Persian Gulf War and still dare to call themselves pro-life. Many Christians support the violent, unjust Israeli occupation of Palestine. We name a missile that is clearly meant for destruction of human lives a “peacekeeper.” I could list many other examples. The peace we are keeping is a false peace. Jeremiah the prophet would say to our “peacekeeping” wars what he said to the leaders of Israel:
. . . Peace! Peace!
Whereas there is no peace.
They should be ashamed of their loathsome deeds.
Not they! They feel no shame,
They do not even know how to blush. (Jeremiah 8:11-12)
Do we have any idea of all the slavery and oppression, all the killing, the torture, all the millions of people who have existed around the edges of every empire so those at the center of the empire could say they had peace? Every time we build a pyramid, certain people at the top will have their peace. Yet there will be bloody bodies upon which their security is built. Those at the top are usually blind to the price of their false peace.War is a means of seeking control, not a means of seeking peace. Pax Romana is the world’s way of seeking control and calling it peace. In ancient times, the citizens who lived in the city of Rome thought they had peace. Violence, you see, will always create more violence. It is not real peace. As Pope Paul VI reflected, “If you want peace, work for justice.” [1]
John Dear, an internationally known voice for peace and nonviolence, says that as Christians, “We cannot support war, participate in war, pay for war, promote war, or wage war.” It is our responsibility to work to “end war and create peace . . . to be a peacemaker.” [2]
How can we be peacemakers? It begins by being peace ourselves, by connecting with the source of peace within. It means standing up in nonviolent resistance to systems of injustice. It involves learning the skills of nonviolent communication and conflict resolution.
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] Pope Paul VI, Message for the World Day of Peace, January 1, 1972, http://w2.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/messages/peace/documents/hf_p-vi_mes_19711208_v-world-day-for-peace.html.[2] John Dear, The Beatitudes of Peace: Meditations on the Beatitudes (Twenty-Third Publications: 2016), 89-90.
Adapted from Richard Rohr with John Bookser Feister, Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media: 1996), 139-140.
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"Blessed Are the Pure in Heart"
Monday, February 5, 2018
Blessed are the pure in heart: they shall see God. (Matthew 5:8)When the heart is right, Jesus says, seeing will be right. He ties together heart and sight. Consider the saying, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.” So is God. All we need to do is keep the lens clean, the heart pure.
Cynthia Bourgeault describes the connection between the “heart” and the ability to see God as taught in the Wisdom tradition:
The heart in the ancient sacred traditions has a very specific and perhaps surprising meaning. It is not the seat of our personal affective life—or even, ultimately, of our personal identity—but an organ for the perception of divine purpose and beauty. It is our antenna, so to speak, given to us to orient us toward the divine radiance and to synchronize our being with its more subtle movements. The heart is not for personal expression but for divine perception. . . .
The ancient Wisdom traditions all saw (I do not mean they theorized; theydirectly perceived) that the physical world we take for our empirical, time-and-space-bound reality is encompassed in another: a coherent and powerful world of divine purpose always surrounding and interpenetrating it. This other, more subtle world is invisible to the senses, and to the mind it appears to be pure speculation. But if the heart is awake and clear, it can directly receive, radiate, and reflect this unmanifest divine Reality.
In the language of sacred tradition, the emotional center [where the heart lies] carries the “reconciling” force. It serves as a bridge between the mind and the body and also between our usual physical world and this invisible other realm. When properly attuned, the emotional center’s most striking capacity, lacking in the mind alone, is the ability to comprehend the language of paradox. Logical inconsistencies that the mind must reduce into a simple “either-or” can be held by the heart in “both-and”—and even more important, felt that way—without needing to resolve, close down, or protect oneself from the pain that ambiguity always brings. [1]
Eknath Easwaran (1910-1999) writes:
When the distorting instrument of the mind is made clear, we see life not as a collection of fragments, but as a seamless whole. We see the divine spark at the center of our very being; and we see simultaneously that in the heart of every other human being—in every country, in every race—though hidden perhaps by clouds of ignorance and conditioning, that same spark is present, one and the same in all. [2]
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] Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart (Jossey-Bass: 2003), 33-35.[2] Eknath Easwaran, Original Goodness: On the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount (Nilgiri Press: 1996), 41.
Adapted from Richard Rohr with John Bookser Feister, Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media: 1996), 138.
***
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Teachings for Lent
There are two moments that matter. One is when you know that your one and only life is absolutely valuable and alive. The other is when you know your life, as presently lived, is entirely pointless and empty. Lent is about both. The first such moment gives you energy and joy by connecting you with your ultimate Source and Ground. The second gives you limits and boundaries, and a proper humility, so you keep seeking the Source and Ground and not just your small self. (Richard Rohr, Wondrous Encounters)
Father Richard shares insights from his book, Wondrous Encounters, in an 80-minute talk, available as a CD and MP3 download from store.cac.org.
"Image and Likeness"
2018 Daily Meditations Theme
God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness.” (Genesis 1:26)
Richard Rohr explores places in which God’s presence has often been ignored or assumed absent. God’s “image” is our inherent identity in and union with God, an eternal essence that cannot be destroyed. “Likeness” is our personal embodiment of that inner divine image that we have the freedom to develop—or not—throughout our lives. Though we differ in likeness, the imago Dei persists and shines through all created things.
Over the course of this year’s Daily Meditations, discover opportunities to incarnate love in your unique context by unveiling the Image and Likeness of God in all that you see and do.
Each week builds on previous topics, but you can join at any time! Click the video to learn more about the theme and to find meditations you may have missed.
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Les victimes de la mer. Douleur (The Victims of the Sea. Grief[detail]), by Charles Cottet. 1909, Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France
Blessed are the merciful: they shall have mercy shown them. (Matthew 5:7)
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Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
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