Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation "Two Halves of Life" for Sunday, March 25, 2018 from the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque New Mexico United States
Week Thirteen "Growing in Love's Likeness"
"Two Halves of Life"Sunday, March 25, 2018
All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image that we reflect. This is the work of the Lord who is Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:18)
We are created in the image and likeness of God from the moment of our conception. The Creator gives us our core identity as sons and daughters of God, “from the beginning” (Ephesians 1:4-5). Throughout our lives we co-create our unique likeness as we grow and mature. Yes, we have a say in the process! God creates things with the freedom and permission to continue the act of creation. (See Romans 8:28-30.) Many people struggle to think this way without an evolutionary worldview. Religious folks often attribute transformation entirely to God, and secular folks think it’s all up to them. But of course, you who read these meditations are nondual thinkers and can say both/and!
Life gives us opportunities to discover our image and develop our likeness, often in the form of necessary stumbling and falling. Throughout it all we are always held inside of Love. Challenges and disruptions invite us to move from what I call the first half of life to the second half, from forming and serving the ego to the ego, in fact, serving the soul. With the guidance of the Spirit and the help of wise mentors and elders, all of life, including our “false” or small and separate self, can lead us to our True Self or “who we are hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).
Most of us tend to think about the second half of life in terms of getting old, dealing with health issues, and letting go of our physical life. But the transition can happen at any age. Moving to the second half of life is an experience of falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world, where the soul has found its fullness and we are consciously connected to the whole.
It is not a loss but somehow a gain. I have met enough radiant people to know that this paradox is possible! Many have come to their human fullness, often against all odds, and usually through suffering. They offer models and goals for humanity, much more than the celebrities and politicos who get so much of our attention today.
Helen Keller (1880-1968)—an author, pacifist, suffragist, member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and a woman who was deaf and blind—was such a model. Once she discovered her own depths, she seems to have leapt into the second half of life very early, despite considerable limitations. She became convinced that life was about service to others rather than protecting or lamenting her supposedly disabled body. Keller’s Swedenborgian mysticism surely helped her grow and “fall upward” despite—or maybe because of—her very constricted early experience. Helen had to grow; she had to go deep and broad. She clearly continued to create herself, even though she could have so easily complained about how little she had to work with. Where did God end and where did she begin? It is an impossible question to answer. Helen and God somehow worked together.
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.
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Adapted from Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass: 2011), 153-154.***Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation - Summary: Week Twelve "Thisness" March 18 - March 23, 2018 for Saturday, 24 March 2018 from the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
March 18 - March 23, 2018
Each creature is not merely one member of a genus and species, but a unique aspect of the infinite Mystery of God. God is continuously choosing each created thing specifically to exist, moment by moment. (Sunday)
Without truly seeing and valuing individual lives, war and violence become almost inevitable. Unless we can see and honor “thisness,” religion and politics are up in the head, and the heart and body can remain untouched. (Monday)
Father Richard reflects on the past 75 years of his “particular” life, finding God in the “thisness” of his own experience: “I just stumbled into Love again and again. And was held by it. This is entirely true for you, too.”(Tuesday)
Duns Scotus offered us a meaningful and practical way to live compassionately by focusing on the now, the particular, the concrete, the individual. (Wednesday)
We are each one of an eternity. Each of us has come with a gift. And if we do not give our gift, the world misses out. (Mary Beth Ingham) (Thursday)
Each being possesses an immanent dignity; it is already gifted by the loving Creator with a sanctity beyond our ability to understand. (Mary Beth Ingham) (Friday)
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"Practice: Awe and Surrender"I once spoke to my friend, an old squirrel, about the Sacraments—he got so excited
and ran into a hollow in his tree and came
back holding some acorns, an owl feather,
and a ribbon he had found.
And I just smiled and said, “Yes, dear,
you understand:
everything imparts His grace.” (Francis of Assisi [1])
When Lady Julian of Norwich looked at a little hazelnut and said, “This is everything that is,” [2] I think she meant that one authentic relationship serves as the only real doorway to a relationship with everything else. How you do anything is how you do everything. To encounter one thing in its gratuity and uniqueness is to encounter all of creation—and its Creator—along with it. An authentic I-Thou relationship with one thing opens a universal doorway. How you relate is how you relate.
Contemplation is really the art of full relationship. It is learning how to relate to reality in an immediately appreciative and non-manipulative way. The contemplative mind does not demand, is not needy, and is not easily offended. It allows other things and people to have their own voices without trying to impose its own agenda on them. It takes a lifetime to learn this, it seems.
A daily practice of contemplative prayer will help you to both allow and trust an overwhelming gratuity from outside yourself. It then offers you the safety, the validation, and the courage to relate to everything else as gratuitous gift too. When we see contemplatively, we know that we live in a fully sacramental universe, where everything is a finger pointing at the moon of Divine Reality. Every ordinary moment can be an epiphany.
To let the moment teach us, we must allow ourselves to be at least slightly stunned by it until it draws us inward and upward, toward a subtle experience of wonder. We normally need a single moment of gratuitous awe to get us started.
The spiritual journey is a constant interplay between moments of awefollowed by surrender to that moment. We must first allow ourselves to be captured by the goodness, truth, or beauty of something beyond and outside ourselves. Then we universalize from that moment to the goodness, truth, and beauty of the rest of reality, until our realization eventually ricochets back to include ourselves. This is the great inner dialogue we call prayer.
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[1] Francis of Assisi, fancifully rendered by Daniel Ladinsky, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West (Penguin Compass: 2002), 53. Used with permission.[2] Julian of Norwich, Showings, chapter 5.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This(Center for Action and Contemplation: 2017), 9-11, 70.
For Further Study:
Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi(Franciscan Media: 2014)
Mary Beth Ingham and Richard Rohr, Holding the Tension: The Power of Paradox(Center for Action and Contemplation: 2007), CD, MP3 download
Mary Beth Ingham, Scotus for Dunces: An Introduction to the Subtle Doctor (The Franciscan Institute: 2003)
Richard Rohr and James Finley, Intimacy: The Divine Ambush (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2013), CD, MP3 download
Richard Rohr, Just This (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2017)
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Thank you for being part of CAC’s contemplative community. You are one of 311,258 readers worldwide (as of March 2018).
News from the CAC
Essential Teachings on Love
We are delighted to commemorate Father Richard’s 75th birthday with a new book in collaboration with Orbis Books. Drawing largely from his 2016 Daily Meditations, this collection shares many of Richard’s core teachings on Love. Interwoven with a personal interview, the writings illuminate a lifelong journey of growing in love—a journey open to all who are willing. Experiences from Richard’s life, both joyful and sorrowful, illustrate how the path has unfolded for him and how we each might come to know Love more intimately. Richard Rohr: Essential Teachings on Love is now available at store.cac.org.
Sharing Transformative Teachings
In lieu of gifts or greetings, we invite contributions to the Center for Action and Contemplation’s scholarship fund. (Might we suggest a gift of $75?) Thanks to your support, we are able to offer scholarships for the Living School, online courses, and conferences. You may donate securely online at cac.org/75-year-scholarship-gift or write a check (USD only), payable to CAC, and mail to PO Box 12464, Albuquerque, NM 87195.
"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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You can only know anything by meeting it in its precise and irreplaceable thisness and honoring it there. Each individual act of creation is a once-in-eternity choice on God’s part. (Richard Rohr)
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