News from New Mexico
A Monthly Newsletter from the Center for Action and Contemplation
A New Issue of Oneing Is Here!
This issue of CAC’s journal, Oneing, features articles by Richard Rohr, Barbara Brown Taylor, Walter Brueggemann, Joan Halifax, Barbara Holmes, Brian McLaren, Mirabai Starr, and others.
Purchase a limited-edition copy at store.cac.org.
Anger is good and very necessary to protect the appropriate boundaries of self and others. . . . I would much sooner live with a person who is free to get fully angry, and also free to move beyond that same anger, than with a negative person who is hard-wired with resentments and preexisting judgements. Their anger is so well hidden and denied—even from themselves—that it never comes up for the fresh air of love, conversation, and needed forgiveness. (Richard Rohr)
Orbis Books Features Richard Rohr in their Modern Spiritual Masters Series
This book is a wonderful testimony to the life and teachings of Richard Rohr, prophet, teacher, and mystic. By distilling the Gospel into the law of love, Richard has provided a healing balm for a wounded church, for those who have felt left out or shut out, or simply for those who are seeking a depth of spiritual meaning. Time and again his message is summed up in the simple truth: God is unconditional love. (Ilia Delio)
Order the book at store.cac.org.
A Gift for You to Share
Do you know someone you’d like to introduce to Richard Rohr or who is seeking freedom from negative thoughts and unhealthy attachments? Invite a friend to listen to one of Fr. Richard’s classic, introductory talks, “Emotional Sobriety,” by sharing this link: cac.org/free-emotional-sobriety-gift. If you haven’t heard this teaching yet, you can enjoy it, too—our gift to you!
Contemplation IN Action
Guest writers reflect on the new Poor People’s Campaign—continuing the work of Martin Luther King, Jr.—as an example of contemplation in action. The campaign challenges the evils of systemic racism, poverty, the war economy, and ecological devastation. Beginning May 13, people across the country are participating in nonviolent, direct action, culminating on June 23 with a mass rally in Washington, DC. Learn about the movement in the Mendicant online and visit poorpeoplescampaign.org or find them on Facebook.
Reader Favorites:
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations
Feminine and Masculine Principles: It is important that all people are able to recognize themselves in the picture we paint of God.
Black Bodies: If we are all made in God’s image, if we are all the Body of Christ, then treating black and brown bodies with love and respect is the only way for our country, our communities, and our Christianity to be whole.
Growing into Our Incarnation: God seems to desire a perfect but free unification between body and soul and is willing to wait for us to choose this unity.
Find additional meditations by Father Richard in the online archive.
The Richard Rohr Meditation: "The Mirroring Gaze" The Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Tuesday, 1 May 2018
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Week Eighteen: "Relationships"
"The Mirroring Gaze"Tuesday, May 1, 2018
As I shared early last month, infants see themselves mirrored in their caregiver’s eyes. [1] This gaze begins to form mirror neurons that are thought to be the physiological basis for empathy. Babies and children who receive loving mirroring and modeling can grow into adults capable of I-Thou relationships, tenderness, and closeness—with other beings and with God.
James Finley, one of CAC’s core faculty members, sees the brain activity shown by parts of the brain “lighting up” during moments when a baby and parent are mirroring each other as similar to what happens in the exchange of divine and human gazes:
When God gazes at us and we gaze at God we light up. . . . And God lights up with joy of being recognized by the one that God created in God’s own image and likeness for the very sake of this recognition. It’s a state of visceral, emotional, intimate communion; a tender recognition of oneness that we might rest in it, resting in us . . . resting in this communion in each other, as each other, through each other, beyond each other in this endless interconnectedness of life itself, of love. [2]
Healthy relationships and spirituality lead us beyond the human level of feeling special and loved to allow this same divine mirroring with every living thing. It’s not just people who love you that you can return the gaze to, but it is the way you see everything: the grasshopper in the grass, the flower on the bush, the blue sky, even the would-be enemy.
The mirror, according to Zen masters, is without ego and without mind. Everything is revealed as it really is. There is no discriminating mind or self-consciousness on the part of the mirror. If something comes, the mirror reflects it; if the object moves on, the mirror lets it move on. The mirror is always empty of itself and therefore able to receive the other. The mirror has no preconditions for entry or acceptance. It receives and reflects back what is there, nothing more and nothing less. The mirror is the perfect lover and the perfect contemplative.
If we are to be a continuation of God’s way of seeing, we must, first of all, be mirrors. We must be no-thing so that we can receive some-thing. To love demands a transformation of consciousness, a transformation that has been the goal of all saints, mystics, and gurus. And the transformation of consciousness is this: we must be liberated from ourselves, which is done by somehow becoming the other. Think of Paul’s famous “I live no longer, not I, but with the life of Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). This is not fantastic religious poetry, it is the heart of the experience of human and divine love. What we allow ourselves to see is what we eventually become.
The Jewish scholar, Martin Buber (1878-1965), said that the modern world has mostly entered into an I-it relationship with reality, when we were in fact created for a constant I-Thou relationship. The I-Thou relationship is an attitude of reverence and mutuality in which we encounter people, things, and events as subject to subject, knowing and being known, giving and receiving, taking insofar as we can also surrender. In this fully mature state, those in I-Thou relationships refuse to objectify anything or anyone, but always allow things and people to be a fellow subject—even those they might dislike.
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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[1] See Richard Rohr’s meditation, “Bodily Knowing,” April 4, 2018, https://cac.org/bodily-knowing-2018-04-04/.[2] James Finley, Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, disc 7 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2013), CD, MP3 download.
Richard Rohr, Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, disc 2 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2013), CD, MP3 download;
Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love (Orbis Books: 2018), 134-135.
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The Richard Rohr Meditation: "Made for Love" The Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States for Monday, 30 April 2018
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Week Eighteen: "Relationships"
"Made for Love"Monday, April 30, 2018
It is an entirely relational universe. If, at any time, we try to stop this life flow moving through us, with us, and in us, we fall into the true state of sin (and it is much more a state than a momentary behavior). What we call “sins” cannot really separate us from God, because Divine Love is unilateral and unconditional and is not dependent on our receiving it. Rather it is our lonely and fearful illusion of separateness that makes us do sinful and selfish things. Try to make that switch in your understanding, and it will send you on a much more authentic spiritual path.
Love must flow both toward us and out from us, or we do not experience or enjoy its full effects. The Law of Flow is simple, and Jesus states it in many different formulations, such as “Happy are the merciful; they shall have mercy shown to them” (Matthew 5:7).
Sin is a refusal of mutuality and a closing down into separateness. In his classic book, The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis has a ghostly soul in hell shouting out, “I don’t want help. I want to be left alone.” [1] Whenever we refuse mutuality toward anything, whenever we won’t allow our deep inner-connectedness to guide us, whenever we’re not attuned to both receiving and giving, you could say that the Holy Spirit is existentially (but not essentially) absent from our lives.
Toxic, psychopathic, or sociopathic people cannot maintain or sustain relationships. They run from connection and commitment. Usually they are loners in a foundational way or they at least make interactions with them very difficult.
I once met a psychiatrist who said something to me that initially I thought was an overstatement: “Richard, at the end of your life, you’ll realize that every mentally ill person you’ve ever worked with is basically lonely.”
“Oh, come on, that’s a little glib, isn’t it?” I replied.
“Oh, I admit, there are surely physiological reasons for much mental illness, but loneliness might just be what activates it. Every case of nonphysiologically-based mental illness stems from a person who has been separated, cut off, living alone, and has forgotten how to relate in one way or another.” I still wonder if that might be true.
That’s probably why God created the sexual drive—the instinct for personal intimacy and mutual giving of delight—to be so strong in most humans. (Sexuality is a much broader experience than genital intercourse for the purpose of reproduction.) When you allow yourself to be separated from self and others you become sick, toxic, and can do some very evil things—and not even think of them as evil.
If God is absolute relatedness, then any notion of salvation is simply the readiness, the capacity, and the willingness to stay in relationship (which almost always involves forgiveness). When the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote, “Hell is other people,” he was, at least momentarily, in hell himself.
We—not you alone, nor me alone, but we—are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in an absolute relatedness of self-emptying and infilling.
This is love. Outside of this flow and communion, we all die very quickly.
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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[1] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce: A Dream (HarperCollins: 2001, ©1946), 59.[2] See Richard Rohr’s meditations on Gender and Sexuality, week 1 and week 2, and Gate of the Temple: Spirituality and Sexuality, disc 1 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 1991, 2006, 2009), CD, MP3 download.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, with Mike Morrell, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation (Whitaker House: 2016), 45-47, 56-57
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Thank you for being part of CAC’s contemplative community. You are one of 285,245 readers worldwide (as of April 2018).
News from the CAC
The "Anger" Issue of CAC's Journal Oneing
Much of the work of emotional maturity is learning to distinguish between emotions that give us a helpful message about ourselves or the moment and emotions that are merely narcissistic reactions to the moment. (Richard Rohr)
Learn anger's lessons in a collection of thoughtful articles by Richard Rohr, Barbara Brown Taylor, Brian McLaren, Barbara Holmes, Mirabai Starr, Joan Halifax, Walter Brueggemann, and others. As Father Richard writes, allow your own anger to come up "for the fresh air of love, conversation, and needed forgiveness."
Purchase a limited-edition copy at store.cac.org.
Join us today for contemplative prayer!
Tuesday, May 1
8:30 a.m. U.S. Mountain Time
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The first Tuesday of each month, join the Center for Action and Contemplation for 20 minutes of silent meditation, sharing our intentions, and being in each other’s and Love’s presence. Watch for the live video on our Facebook page!
"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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Inspiration for this week's banner image: Love is the most powerful force or energy in the universe. That power is multiplied in relationships. Love’s potency is released most powerfully among people who have formed a relationship. (Louis Savary and Patricia Berne)
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© 2018 | Center for Action and Contemplation
Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
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