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Image credit: Springtime II (detail). Photograph by Domenico Salvagnin taken near Padua, Italy.
"Everything Belongs: Week 2"
Summary: Sunday, December 4-Friday, December 9, 2016
God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting our always too small boxes. (Sunday)
Learning how to love—which is our life’s project—is quite simply learning to accept our messy reality. If you love anyone, then you have learned to accept them despite their faults. (Monday)
“First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God.”[Julian of Norwich] (Tuesday)
God is not threatened by differences, as we see in the three persons of the Trinity. It’s we who are. (Wednesday)
As long as your ego is in charge, you will demand a retributive God; you’ll insist that hell is necessary. But if you have been transformed by love, hell will no longer make sense to you because you know that God has always loved you in your sinfulness. (Thursday)
God is to be found in all things, even and most especially in the painful, tragic, and sinful things, exactly where we do not want to look for God. (Friday)
"Practice: Praying Unceasingly"For Jesus, prayer seems to be a matter of waiting in love, returning to love, and trusting that love is the bottom stream of reality. Prayer isn’t primarily words; it’s a place, an attitude, a stance. That’s why Paul could say, “Pray always” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). We can pray unceasingly if we find the stream and know how to wade in the waters. The stream will flow through us, and all we have to do is consciously stay there. Paul says, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:26-27).
Of course the ego resists such surrender and emptiness. So we need a little practice. In contemplative prayer we consciously open ourselves to being prayed through. Again and again we are humbled, observing our incessant and scattered stream of consciousness. Simply watching our thoughts helps us detach from them rather than be identified with them. Again and again we have the opportunity to let go, to sink into the deeper stream of Presence. For a moment or two we are “praying unceasingly.” It takes a lifetime of practice to remain in this flow more and more.
Gateway to Silence: All things work together for good.[Romans 8:28]
References:Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 177-182; and
How Do We Get Everything to Belong? disc 1 (CAC: 2004), CD, MP3 download.
For Further Study:Richard Rohr, CONSPIRE 2016: Everything Belongs (CAC: 2016), MP4 download
Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003)
Richard Rohr, How Do We Get Everything to Belong? (CAC: 2004), CD, MP3 download
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Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation "The Cross" for Friday, 9 December 2016 The demand for the perfect is the enemy of the possible good.
"Everything Belongs: Week 2"
"The Cross"
Friday, December 9, 2016
The cross is a perfect metaphor for what we mean by “Everything Belongs.” The rational, calculating mind can never fully understand the mystery of the cross. These insights can only be discovered through contemplative seeing:
God is to be found in all things, even and most especially in the painful, tragic, and sinful things, exactly where we do not want to look for God. The crucifixion of the God-Man is at the same moment the worst thing in human history and the best thing in human history.
Human existence is neither perfectly consistent (as rational and control-needy people usually demand it be), nor is it incoherent chaos (what cynics, agnostics, and unaware people expect it to be). Instead, life has a cruciform pattern. All of life is a “coincidence of opposites” (St. Bonaventure), a collision of cross-purposes; we are all filled with contradictions needing to be reconciled. This is the precise burden and tug of all human existence.
The price that we pay for holding together these opposites is invariably some form of “crucifixion.” Jesus himself was archetypally hung between a good thief and a bad thief, between heaven and earth, holding together both his humanity and his divinity, a male body with a feminine soul. He was a Jewish believer who forgave and loved everyone else. He “reconciled all things in himself” (Ephesians 2:14-18). Jesus really is an icon of what Carl Jung called the whole-making instinct.The demand for the perfect is the enemy of the possible good. Be peace and do justice, but don’t expect perfection in yourself or the world. Perfectionism contributes to intolerance and judgmentalism and makes ordinary love largely impossible. Jesus was an absolute realist, patient with the ordinary, the broken, the weak, and those who failed. Following him is not a “salvation scheme” or a means of creating some ideal social order as much as it is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the World, and to love the way that God loves—which we cannot do by ourselves.
The doctrine, folly, and image of the cross is the great clarifier and truth-speaker for all of human history. We can rightly speak of being “saved” by it. Jesus crucified and resurrected is the whole pattern revealed, named, effected, and promised for human history. Jesus did not come to found a separate or new religion as much as he came to present a universal message of vulnerability and foundational unity that is necessary for all religions, the human soul, and history itself to survive. Thus Christians can rightly call Jesus “the Savior of the World” (John 4:42), but no longer in the competitive and imperialistic way that they have usually presented him. By very definition, vulnerability and unity do not compete or dominate. The cosmic Christ is no threat to anything but separateness, illusion, domination, and the imperial ego. In that sense, Jesus, the Christ, is the ultimate threat, but first of all to Christians themselves.
Gateway to Silence: All things work together for good.[Romans 8:28]
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 177-182; and
How Do We Get Everything to Belong? disc 1 (CAC: 2004), CD, MP3 download.
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Richard Rohr Meditation: "Universal Love" for Thursday, 8 December 2016 God restores rather than punishes.
"Everything Belongs: Week 2"
"Universal Love"
Thursday, December 8, 2016Love [people] even in [their] sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.[Fyodor Dostoyevsky [1]]
God restores rather than punishes, which is a much higher notion of how things are “justified” before God. The full and final Biblical message is restorative justice, but most of history has only been able to understand retributive justice. Now, I know you’re probably thinking of many passages in the Old Testament that sure sound like serious retribution. And I can’t deny there are numerous black and white, vengeful scriptures, which is precisely why we must recognize that all scriptures are not equally inspired or from the same level of consciousness. (This is why models of human development like Spiral Dynamics can be so helpful.) Literal interpretation of Scripture is the Achilles’ heel of fundamentalist Christians. [2]
Yes, you have to begin with dualistic thinking, just as you must first develop a healthy frame before you can move beyond it. Jesus often made strong binary statements, for example, “You cannot serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24); “The Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats” (Matthew 25:32-33). We must first be capable of some basic distinctions between good and evil before we then move higher. Without basic honesty and clarity, non-dual thinking becomes very naïve. We must first succeed at good dualistic thinking before we also discover its final inadequacy in terms of wisdom and compassion. Not surprisingly, Jesus exemplifies and teaches both dualistic clarity and then non-dual wisdom and compassion: “My Father’s sun shines on both the good and the bad; his rain falls on both the just and the unjust” (Matthew 5:45).
The ego prefers a dualistic worldview where bad people are eternally punished and good people (like ourselves) are totally rewarded. The soul does not need to see others punished to be happy. Why would anyone like the notion of somebody being tortured for all eternity? What kind of psyche or soul can condemn others to hellfire? Certainly not Divine Love.
As long as your ego is in charge, you will demand a retributive God; you’ll insist that hell is necessary. But if you have been transformed by love, hell will no longer make sense to you because you know that God has always loved you in your sinfulness. Why would God change policies after death?
We are all saved by mercy and grace without exception—before, during, and after our life in this world. Could God’s love really be that great and universal? Love is the lesson, and God’s love is so great that God will finally teach it to all of us. Who would be able to resist it once they see it? We’ll finally surrender, and God—Love—will finally win. God never loses. That is what it means to be God. That will be God’s “justice,” which will swallow up our lesser versions of retributive justice.
Gateway to Silence: All things work together for good.[Romans 8:28]
References:
[1] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (Encyclopedia Britannica: 1952), 167.
[2] For more on interpreting and understanding Scripture see Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2007), and Hierarchy of Truths: Jesus’ Use of Scripture (CAC: 2014), CD and MP3 download.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, CONSPIRE 2016: Everything Belongs, session 3 (CAC: 2016), MP4 download; and Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 133.
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Richard Rohr Meditation: "Transcend and Include" for Wednesday, 7 December 2016 God is not threatened by differences.
"Everything Belongs: Week 2"
"Transcend and Include"
Wednesday, December 7, 2016David Benner, a friend and wise teacher, has been a part of several Christian traditions over the years, including fundamentalism, evangelicalism, and now contemplative Anglicanism. Of the spiritual journey he writes:
Identifying and embracing your lineage is an important part of any pathway to greater wholeness because it involves remembering your own story. All the parts of your journey must be woven together if you are to transcend your present organization and level of consciousness. For myself, the great challenge was re-embracing traditions that I have grown beyond and that offered—even at the time—an oppressively small worldview. I did not want to be an ex-evangelical or an ex-fundamentalist. Too many people live that life of dis-identification, and I did not want to share their anger and “stuckness.” It was essential, therefore, for me to identify and embrace the gifts that had come to me from these traditions. This was the way in which I came to know that everything in my life belongs, that every part of my story has made important contributions to who I am. And the same is true for you. [1]
When I speak about the failings and limitations of the church or of low level religion, I hope you know that I am not throwing out the important beginning stages of structure and obedience. They have a relative importance as scaffolding, but they are not the building itself. We don’t need to continue protecting the scaffolding once it’s served its purpose. But we still honor and respect it.In the first half of life, our task is to build a container. Eventually we realize that life isn’t primarily about the container, but the contents. As Jesus said, wineskins are for the sake of holding the wine (Luke 5:37-39), not for the sake of themselves. It doesn’t serve us to argue about whose wineskins are best. If they hold the precious contents, they are good!
There is room for immense diversity inside healthy Catholicism, usually exemplified by the satellite communities—Religious Orders—of women and men. The seeming monolith of Catholicism recognized, after the great Constantinian compromise of 313 AD, that there were many historical, temperamental, theological, and cultural differences in the world and that we had to make room for much diversity to survive. God is not threatened by differences, as we see in the three persons of the Trinity. It’s who we are.
On his deathbed, St. Francis freed his brothers by saying, “I have done what was mine to do, may Christ now teach you what you are to do.” [2] He knew the Franciscans would try to copy him—as indeed we have done in a few externals. But he gave us radical permission to do what was ours to do, and not to slavishly idealize him. If we cannot include the raw materials of each of our lives (and indeed they are often raw!), I do not believe we have truly transcended to higher levels of consciousness and holiness. False transcendence tries to fly high without realizing it was the lower tail winds that got it there.
Gateway to Silence: All things work together for good.[Romans 8:28]
References:[1] David G. Benner, Human Being and Becoming: Living the Adventure of Life and Love(Brazos Press: 2016), 118-119.
[2] Bonaventure, The Life of Saint Francis, trans. E. Gurney Salter (London: J. M. Dent, 1904), 150.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, How Do We Get Everything to Belong? disc 1 (CAC: 2004), CD, MP3 download; and
Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 112, 128.
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Richard Rohr Meditation: "The Three Boxes" for Tuesday, 6 December 2016 First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God.[Julian of Norwich]
"Everything Belongs: Week 2"
"The Three Boxes"
Tuesday, December 6, 2016First 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 in sacred space. The prophet disconnects us from the false, and the priest reconnects us to the real at ever larger levels. If “priests” have been largely unsuccessful, it is because there are so few prophets. And to be honest, most ministers confuse the maintaining of order with re-order! This is a huge issue. Such “priests” might talk of new realms but never lead us out of the old realm where we are still largely trapped and addicted; they have little personal knowledge of the further journey. Thus our Western spirituality is so lopsided.
Let’s think in terms of what I call “the three boxes”: order > disorder > reorder.
The first order, where we all begin, is a necessary first “containment.” But this structure is dangerous if we stay there too long. It is too small and self-serving, and it must be deconstructed by the trials and vagaries of life (“the cross” or disorder). Initial “order” doesn’t really know the full picture, but it thinks it does.
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 to be welcomed. They should be paid attention to, not litigated or even perfectly resolved. How can a Christian look at the Crucified One and not get this essential point? The Resurrected Christ is the icon of the third box or reorder
Once we can learn to live in this third spacious place, neither fighting nor fleeing reality but holding the creative tension itself, we are in the spacious place of grace out of which all newness comes.
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 disorder unless he made it clear. But we denied it anyway.
Gateway to Silence: All things work together for good.[Romans 8:28]
References:[1] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, 61, ed. Grace Warrack, R. Rohr paraphrase (London: Methuen & Company, 1901), 153.
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.
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Richard Rohr's Center for Action and Contemplation "The Gift of Contemplation" for Tuesday, 6 December 2016 Receive 25% off your purchase! Explore opportunities for deepening your spiritual journey.
Truth Is One (The Perennial Tradition)
Nature Reflects God's Goodness (Nature)
Find additional reflections in CAC’s online archive at cac.org/richard-rohr/daily-meditations/daily-meditations-archive/.
The Living School faculty recently reflected on the United States’ presidential election.
They invite us to find our ground in God—the eternally loving foundation of a unity that transcends our differences.Copyright © 2016
Center for Action and Contemplation
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Richard Rohr Meditation: "The Weeds and the Wheat" for Monday, 5 December 2016 We are all a mixture of weeds and wheat.
"Everything Belongs: Week 2"
"The Weeds and the Wheat"
Monday, December 5, 2016Can true humility and compassion exist in our words and in our eyes unless we know we too are capable of any act?[St. Francis of Assisi [1]]
Jesus uses a number of images that illustrate the tension between good and evil. They seem to say this world is a mixture of different things, and unless you learn how to see deeply, you don’t know which is which, and you don’t notice that God allows both good and bad to grow in the same field (Matthew 13:24-30). When a student asks Jesus if he should pull out the weeds, Jesus says to “let them both grow together until the harvest” (13:30). Then, at the end of time, God will decide what is wheat and what is a weed. In a certain way, he is saying it is none of our business to fully figure it out. This is really quite risky of God—and it takes tremendous courage on our part to trust God and ourselves here.
We are all a mixture of weeds and wheat and we always will be. As Martin Luther put it, we are simul justus et peccator. We are simultaneously saint and sinner. That’s the mystery of holding weeds and wheat together in our one field of life. It takes a lot more patience, compassion, forgiveness, and love than aiming for some illusory perfection that is usually blind to its own faults. Acknowledging both the wheat and weeds in us keeps us from thinking too highly of ourselves and also from dismissing ourselves as terrible.
To avoid cynicism and negativity, you have to learn to accept and forgive this mixed bag of reality that you are—and everyone else is, too. If you don’t, you’ll likely become a very angry person. To accept the weeds doesn’t mean that you say, “It’s okay to be ignorant and evil.” It means you have some real wisdom about yourself. You can see your weeds and acknowledge when you are not compassionate or caring. You have to name the weed as a weed. I’m not perfect; you’re not perfect; the church is not perfect; America is not perfect.
If we must have perfection to be happy with ourselves, we have only two choices: We can blind ourselves to our own evil (and deny the weeds), or we can give up in discouragement (and deny the wheat). It takes uncommon humility to carry both the dark and the light side of things. The only true perfection available to humans is the honest acceptance of our imperfection. This is precisely what Divine Perfection can help us do; only God in us can love imperfect and broken things. By ourselves, we largely fail.
Learning how to love—which is our life’s project—is quite simply learning to accept our messy reality. If you love anyone, then you have learned to accept them despite their faults. You see a few things you’d like to change in your partner, your children, yourself. By the Largeness of God within you, you are able to trust that the good is deeper than the bad, and usually well hidden. This is probably why so many of Jesus’ parables are about hiddenness, seeking, and finding.
Gateway to Silence: All things work together for good.[Romans 8:28]
References:[1] Francis of Assisi paraphrased by Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God: Twelve Voices from the East and West (Penguin Compass: 2002), 37.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 41; and
Homily “The Weeds and the Wheat,” July 20, 2014.
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1823 Five Points Road South West (physical)
PO Box 12464 (mailing)
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