Richard Rohr 7

Hinduism
Widening Circles
Sunday, August 12, 2018
What is required is a meeting of the different religious traditions at the

deepest level of their experience of God. Hinduism is based on a deep,
mystical experience, and everywhere seeks not simply to know “about”
God but to “know God,” that is, to experience the reality of God in the
depths of the soul. —Dom Bede Griffiths [1]
Like so many Westerners, I grew up knowing almost nothing about

Hinduism, even though it is by far the oldest of the “Great Religions.”
Because Hindu dress, various gods, and temples seemed so foreign to our
faith practices, we did not take Hinduism seriously. That’s what happens
when everything is seen in relation to one’s self—whenever one’s
nationality, era, and religion are the only reference points.
In 1965, the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church issued its
historic conclusions that still stand as inspired and authoritative. In the
Council’s document Nostra Aetate (In Our Time), it specifically addressed
other world religions, naming what was good and eternal in each of them.
Followers of Hinduism are recognized as they “contemplate the divine
mystery and express it through an inexhaustible abundance of myths and
through searching philosophical inquiry.” [2]
I was only slowly introduced to Hinduism’s profound mystical depths

through two very special authors. I admit that I first trusted them because
they were both Catholic priests, scholars, and even mystics themselves.
One was Dom Bede Griffiths (1906-1993), an English Benedictine, who in
the pivotal year of 1968 was asked to take charge of an ashram in India to
combine Western and Eastern spirituality. Griffith’s writings are still
monumental and important. From the time of his arrival in India in 1955,
Dom Bede built a huge and holy bridge, which many have now walked
over with great effect.
The other author who led me deeper in Hinduism was a son of a Spanish
mother and a Hindu father, Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010). Panikkar’s
intellect and spirit astounded all who heard him or read his words.
Somehow Panikkar’s ancient roots, stellar mind, and his Christian love all
came through. He saw the Christ as the fully adequate Christian symbol for
the whole of Reality. I never felt Panikkar compromised his Christian
belief even though he was quite able and willing to use metaphors for the
same experience from Hinduism and Buddhism. In fact, it was his
Hinduism that often led Panikkar to the depths and the full believability of
his Christian experience. I would say the same for Bede Griffiths.
The great mystics tend to recognize that Whoever God Is, he or she does
not need our protection or perfect understanding. All our words, dogmas,
and rituals are like children playing in a sandbox before Infinite Mystery
and Wonderment. If anything is true, then it has always been true; and
people who sincerely search will touch upon the same truth in every age
and culture, while using different language, symbols, and rituals to point us
in the same direction. The direction is always toward more love and union
—in ever widening circles.
References:
[1] Bede Griffiths, Christ in India: Essays towards a Hindu-Christian
Dialogue (1965). See Bede Griffiths: Essential Writings, ed. Thomas Matus
(Orbis Books: 2004), 65.
[2] Second Vatican Council, “Nostra Aetate: Declaration on the Relation of

the Church to Non-Christian Religions (October 28, 1965), 2. Full text at
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/
vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html
Hinduism
Infinite Forms
Monday, August 13, 2018
If you have ever traveled to India, you realize that Hinduism is less a
religion and more a 5,000-year-old culture, formed by such ancient sources
as the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita, and communicated
in thousands of other ways. Hinduism is the product of millennia of deep
self-observation, human history, a confluence of cultures, and innumerable
people seeking the Divine and seeking themselves.
Hinduism has been described as the most tolerant of the world religions.
Hinduism is much more comfortable with mystery and multiplicity than are
the three Abrahamic religions. This is symbolized by thousands of gods
and dozens of primary deities in Hindu literature and tradition.
Inter-spiritual teacher Mirabai Starr says that “Hinduism is actually quite

monotheistic or better said monistic. The Upanishads assert that there is
only one supreme, divine reality.” [1] The ancient, diverse tradition led to
the overwhelming consensus and conclusion that the Atman (True
Self/Individual Consciousness) is the same as Brahman (God). This is
summarized in the well-known Sanskrit phrase Tat Tvam Asi, loosely
translated as “Thou art That.” This is the final extent and triumph of
nondual thinking (advaita): God and the soul are united as one.
Reflect on how the Perennial Tradition’s emphasis on the oneness of God

with everything is presented in these sacred texts from both Hinduism and
Christianity:
My true being is unborn and changeless. I am the Lord who dwells in every
creature. Through the power of my own appearance, I manifest myself in
finite forms. —Bhagavad Gita 4:5-6
In the beginning was only Being; One without a second. Out of himself he
brought forth the cosmos and entered into everything in it. There is nothing
that does not come from him. Of everything he is the inmost Self. —
Chandogya Upanishad, Chapter 6, 2:2-3
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. Through him all things came to be, and not one thing had its
being but through him. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwells among
us. —John 1:1, 3, 14
From his tradition of Judaism, rabbi Rami Shapiro offers this rather simple
explanation of these profound texts: “Just as the same lump of clay can take
on infinite form and remain itself unchanged, so God takes on infinite form
while never being other than God.” [2]
References:
[1] Mirabai Starr, “Unitive Consciousness: An Eastern Perspective” (an
unpublished webcast from the Center for Action and Contemplation: 2015).
[2] Rami Shapiro, Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent:

Sacred Teachings—Annotated & Explained (Skylight Paths Publishing:
2013), 66.
Hinduism
Ways of Praying and Knowing

Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Hinduism emphasizes concrete practices (yogas) which allow practitioners
to know things for themselves. I often wonder if conservative Christians
are afraid of the word yoga because they are in fact afraid of concrete
orthopraxy! They prefer to strongly believe things but have very few daily
practices or yogas that would allow them to know things in an experiential
or “real” way.
The summary belief in Hinduism is that there are four disciplines, yogas,

toward which different temperaments tend to gravitate. The
word yoga comes from the Sanskrit for the yoke which unites the seeker
with the Sought. Hindus believe that all four yogas can lead one to
enlightenment; in other words, there are at least four foundationally
different ways of praying and living in this world.
The four basic Hindu disciplines are:
 Bhakti yoga—the way of feeling, love, and the heart, preferred by

Christianity and most mystics
 Jnana yoga—the way of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, or
head-based enlightenment, preferred by some forms of Buddhism
and intellectual Christians.
 Karma yoga—the way of action, engagement, and work, which can
be done in either a knowledge way or a service/heart way, preferred
by both Judaism and Islam
 Raja yoga—this roughly corresponds to experimentation or trial and
error with mind and body through practices and empirical honesty
about the inner life and the world, preferred by Hinduism itself (We
see this clearly in Gandhi and his “experiments with truth” and
frankly in Mother Teresa who was formed by India more than most
Catholics probably care to admit.)
Each of these paths can and will lead each of us to union with Supreme
Reality, if we are fully faithful to them over time. For
example, Raja yoga focuses on the mind’s ability to discover the spiritual
world through eight sequential steps, ending in enlightenment:
1. Yamas—five moral “thou shalt nots,” calling for non-violence,

truthfulness, moderation in all things, no stealing, and not being
covetous
2. Niyamas—five “thou shalts,” requiring purity, contentment,
austerity, study of the sacred texts, and constant awareness of and
surrender to divine presence
3. Asanas—physical postures (Westerners typically use the
word yoga to simply mean asanas.)
4. Pranayama—breathing exercises
5. Pratyahara—withdrawal of the senses
6. Dharana—concentration of the mind
7. Dhyana—meditation
8. Samadhi—enlightenment, union with the Divine
Hinduism
Stages of Life
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
Beginning with Jesus’ four kinds of soil and receptivity (Matthew 13:4-9),
to John of the Cross’ “dark nights” and Teresa of Ávila’s “interior
mansions,” through the modern schemas of Jean Piaget, James Fowler,
Lawrence Kohlberg, Eric Erikson, Abraham Maslow, Carol Gilligan, and
others, each clarify that there is a clear direction and staging to maturity
and therefore to human life.
Unless we can somehow chart this trajectory, we have no way to discern

growth and what might be a full, fuller, or fullest human response. Neither
do we have any criteria for discerning an immature, regressive, or even sick
response. When pluralism itself becomes the goal, a postmodern dilemma
is created. There must be a direction to ripening, but we must also
recognize that any steps toward maturity are by necessity immature. An
understanding of ripening teaches us the wisdom of timing, love, and
patience, and allows us to be wise instead of judgmental.
Hinduism teaches that there are four major stages of life: (1) the student,
(2) the householder, (3) the forest dweller or hermit (the “retiree” from
business as usual), and (4) the beggar or wanderer (the wise or fully
enlightened person who is not overly attached to anything and is detached
from everything and thus ready for death). I once saw these four stages
represented in four stained glass windows in a Catholic church in
Bangalore, showing how central this cultural paradigm is to the wider
Indian culture, not just practicing Hindus.
Western cultures tend to recognize and honor only the first two stages at
best. We are an adolescent culture. Seeing these missing pieces in our
societies, I helped develop men’s initiation rites and have explored later
stages of life. [1] My experience tells me that when we do not intentionally
cultivate the third and fourth stages, we lose their skills and fail to create
the elders needed to understand the first and second stages and guide us
through and beyond them.
This is foundational to the spiritual problems we are experiencing in

Western religion and culture today, and probably why we now seem to
have an epidemic of mental and emotional illness. It seems so many people
are angry and afraid, especially at religion itself. I hope they do not waste
too many years there because reactivism is an early-stage response. They
are angry because we do not honor variety, staging, interiority, or depth in
most of organized Christianity; but their attachment to that very anger
becomes a hindrance.
Becoming a “forest dweller” and “beggar” is a slow, patient learning and

letting go. This ripening is a seeming emptying out to create readiness for a
new kind of fullness, about which we are never sure. If we do not allow our
own ripening, resistance and denial set in. Yet when we surrender to our
own natural journey, we find authentic hope, hope that is not identified
with outcomes or goals.
References:
[1] See Richard Rohr, Adam’s Return: The Five Promises of Male
Initiation (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2004) and Falling
Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass: 2011).
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Introduction,” “Ripening,” Oneing, vol. 1 no.

2 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2013), 11-12.
Hinduism
Parts of a Whole
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Several central ideas affirmed by Jesus were already formed in the ancient
Hindu Vedas, then unfolded by the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.
Three of these ideas are advaita, karma, and maya.
The word advaita is loosely translated as “having no duality,” implying
that the proper or spiritual way of understanding things is outside the realm
of comparison or judgment. The contemplative mind sees things in their
unity and connection before it separates them as not completely one, but
not two either. If you first emphasize dissimilarity and distinction, it is
almost impossible to ever get back to unitive consciousness or similarity,
from which most compassion, or at least tolerance, proceeds. If you start
with advaita, you can still go back to making needed and helpful
distinctions, but now love and union is prior to knowledge and information.
That is the unique and brilliant starting place of so many Eastern religions,
as I believe it was for Jesus! Read Jesus’ words: “My Father’s sun shines
on the good and the bad; his rain falls on the just and the unjust” (Matthew
5:45); “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me” (Matthew
25:40). With a dualistic mind, such statements are just idealistic poetry,
which is largely how many Christians have read them.
For the Hindu, karma is the nature of the universe and moves us toward
purification of motive and honesty about why we are doing what we are
doing. Karma is an absolute law of cause and effect. What goes around
comes around—eventually! We are responsible for our own thoughts and
motives—which create the Real—and we cannot avoid the consequences.
Negative thoughts will destroy us. We are punished by our sins more than
for our sins. Goodness is its own reward now; we do not need to wait for
heaven later.
I am convinced that Jesus taught the karmic world view, but many

Christians understood him inside a reward and punishment framework.
Here are just a couple illustrations: “If you show mercy, mercy will be
shown to you” (Matthew 5:7, Luke 6:37); “The standard you use will be
used for you” (Mark 4:24).
The third supreme idea of Hinduism is maya. This is often translated as

“illusion,” but a better translation might be “tricky.” When Hinduism (or
Buddhism, which is a child of Hinduism) states that all the world of forms
is maya (or emptiness), it is trying to help you look deeper and broader so
as not to be tricked by the short term pay-offs of the ego.
The Upanishads illustrate maya as “tricky” using the familiar experience

of finding a rope on a path. We jump back, thinking it’s a snake, but it
isn’t. Mirabai Starr says, “Wisdom comes with being able to engage in
inquiry with curiosity (with childlike wonderment as Jesus calls it) [in
order] to see what really is, and to discover it’s not something we have to
defend ourselves against.” [1] Reality is hard, maya says, but also
benevolent.
All phenomena pass themselves off as total and final in their independent
and free existence. But just wait a while, look deeper, and you will see that
all things are parts of much larger ecosystems of connection and life. In
their separateness, they will pass. Everything is qualified and provisional
and contingent on something else. The illusion of our separateness makes it
hard for us to see and seek the common good or to rest in Divine Union.
Reference:
[1] Mirabai Starr, “Unitive Consciousness: An Eastern Perspective” (an
unpublished webcast from the Center for Action and Contemplation: 2015).
Image Credit: A Hindu Woman in Yoga Asana Meditation (detail),

Lucia Puertas, 2010, river Ganges, Varanasi, India.
Hinduism
Action and Contemplation

Friday, August 17, 2018
There are three major texts in Hinduism and Indian philosophy:
 The Vedas are the most ancient Sanskrit writings (as much as three
to four thousand years old) containing hymns, philosophy, guidance,
and rituals.
 The Upanishads—which means “what is learned sitting at the feet
of”—are later (800-200 BCE), even more mystical texts which
elaborate on many of the ancient themes. There are probably thirteen
major and many minor Upanishads.
 The Bhagavad Gita emerged in various translations from four
centuries before Christ to four centuries afterward. It is an extended
dialogue between Prince Arjuna, a warrior, and Lord Krishna, his
charioteer. The 700 classic verses amount to an extended
commentary on “action and contemplation.”
The Bhagavad Gita describes Lord Krishna, one of Hinduism’s central

gods, as both this and that, totally immanent and yet fully transcendent,
physical and yet formless, the deepest inner self and yet the Godself
(Bhagavad Gita 10). Krishna has even been called “The Unknown Christ
of Hinduism”—the same mystery of spirit and matter that we Western
Christians, with our dualistic minds, struggled to put together in Jesus.
Krishna, like Jesus, also shows the integration of action and contemplation.
The Gita does not counsel that we all become monks or solitaries. Rather,
Lord Krishna tells Prince Arjuna that the true synthesis is found in a life-
long purification of motive, intention, and focus in our world of action. The
Gita calls the active person to a life of interiority and soul discovery. How
can we do “pure action”? Only by gradually detaching from all the fruits of
action and doing everything purely for the love of God, Lord Krishna
teaches.
Jesus says the same thing in several places (Mark 12:30, for example):
“You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all
your mind, and with all your strength.” Jesus even counsels the same love
toward the neighbor (Matthew 22:39). The only way to integrate action and
contemplation is to go ahead and do your action, but every day to ask
yourself why you’re doing it. Is it to make money? Is it to have a good
reputation? Is it to keep busy? Or is it for the love of God? Then you will
discover the true Doer!
Reflect on these passages from the Bhagavad Gita (4:18, 23-24):
The wise see that there is action in the midst of inaction,

and inaction in the midst of action.
Their consciousness is unified,
and every act is done with complete awareness.
When a man has let go of attachments,

when his mind is rooted in wisdom,
everything he does is worship,
and his actions all melt away.
God is the offering. God

is the offered, poured out by God;
God is attained by all those
who see God in every action.
In the Gita, Prince Arjuna is the noble individual soul (“Atman”), and Lord
Krishna is the personification of the Divine (“Brahman”). Already in the
ancient Vedas, Atman and Brahman were discovered to be one, at least in a
foundational sense. This is exactly as Jesus proclaimed when he said, “I
and the Father are One” (John 10:30). Teresa of Ávila begins her journey
through The Interior Castle by proclaiming God’s castle and chosen
dwelling is precisely “the beauty and amplitude of the human soul.” [1]
This is without doubt the true Perennial Wisdom Tradition.
Reference:
[1] Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle, Mirabai Starr, trans. (Riverhead
Books: 2003), 36.
Image Credit: A Hindu Woman in Yoga Asana Meditation (detail), Lucia

Puertas, 2010, river Ganges, Varanasi, India.
Hinduism
Summary: Sunday, August 12-Friday, August 17, 2018
If anything is true, then it has always been true; and people who sincerely
search will touch upon the same truth in every age and culture, while using
different language, symbols, and rituals to point us in the same direction.
The direction is always toward more love and union—in ever widening
circles. (Sunday)
The ancient, diverse Hindu tradition led to the overwhelming consensus

and conclusion that the Atman (True Self/Individual Consciousness) is the
same as Brahman (God). This is summarized in the well-known Sanskrit
phrase Tat Tvam Asi, loosely translated as “Thou art That.” (Monday)
Hinduism emphasizes concrete practices (yogas) which allow practitioners

to know things for themselves. The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit
for the yoke which unites the seeker with the Sought. (Tuesday)
Hinduism speaks of four distinct stages to a person’s life. Western cultures

tend to recognize and honor only the first two stages at best. (Wednesday)
Advaita implies that the proper or spiritual way of understanding things is

outside the realm of comparison or judgment. The contemplative mind sees
things in their unity and connection before it separates them as not
completely one, but not two either. (Thursday)
The Bhagavad Gita calls the active person to a life of interiority and soul

discovery. How can we do “pure action”? Only by gradually detaching
from all the fruits of action and doing everything purely for the love of
God. (Friday)

Practice: Pranayama
Raja yoga, one of Hinduism’s four paths to enlightenment, follows eight

sequential steps, including pranayama (controlled breathing). Ginny
Wholley, Mindfulness and Yoga Teacher, offers this description
of pranayama.
Prana is life’s force or energy. Pranayama is willful changing of one’s

energy, often through the breath, using variations of inhalation, exhalation,
and sometimes holding the breath. From God’s breath we were created, and
from breath, life continues.
Prana as breath is inhaled into the body, carrying with it the essence of the
life. Within our being it is transformed, as well as transforming. Exhaled, it
carries our essence, our unique energetic print; it is all one breath. [1]
I invite you to follow Ginny’s simple steps for

the pranayama practice Ujjayi, ocean-sounding breath:
This breath is slow, deep, and deliberate. Focusing on the sound is an

effective technique to quiet the mind. It is very helpful in reducing mind
chatter and preparing for meditation or relaxation.
Sit comfortably with your feet flat on the ground and your hands relaxed on
your thighs.
Close your eyes or lower your gaze.
Through your nose, slowly breathe in and out while partially restricting
your throat.
It may help to imagine your throat as the size of a straw. This breath creates
an audible sound, at least to you.
An alternative image is to exhale out through your mouth as if you are

fogging a mirror, making a long “haa” sound. After trying it this way, close
your mouth and repeat the exhalation through your nose.
Put it together slowly, drawing the breath in and out of your nose.
Imagine you are on the shore. The water draws back into the ocean on the
inhalation and rolls onto the shore as you exhale. Use your breath and
limitless imagination to hear the ocean sound. [2]
References:
[1] Ginny Wholley, unpublished work, 2015. Learn more about Ginny’s
work https://www.resilientlife-yoga.com/.
[2] Ibid.
For Further Study:

Bede Griffiths, Bede Griffiths: Essential Writings, selected by Thomas
Matus (Orbis Books: 2004)
Bhagavad Gita (translated by either Stephen Mitchell or Eknath Easwaran)
Raimon Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man (Orbis Books:

2004)
The Other Half of My Soul: Bede Griffiths and the Hindu-Christian

Dialogue, compiled by Beatrice Bruteau (Quest Books: 1996)
Taoism and Buddhism
The Way of All Things

Sunday, August 19, 2018
The classic Tao Te Ching . . . reveals how both action and contemplation
are paths to experiencing harmony, peace, and unity amidst diversity. It
exemplifies both the Bodhisattva’s skillful means of being there while
getting there, every single step of the way, and the sublime secret that is the
inseparability of oneness and noneness. —Lama Surya Das [1]
Continuing our exploration of perennial wisdom traditions, we turn to the

ancient Chinese text the Tao Te Ching. By the time Lao Tzu (or Laozi)
wrote his manuscript (2,500 years ago), Tao had been part of Chinese
culture for thousands of years. Translator and annotator Derek Lin writes:
One reason Taoism has such durability is, paradoxically, because of its
flexible and inclusive nature. . . . The original conception of Tao [meaning
“way”] was simply the observation that reality has a certain way about it.
This “way” encompasses all of existence: life, the universe, and everything.
...
Because of the Tao’s inclusive nature, when Buddhism entered China
1,800 years ago, it found easy acceptance despite its differences from
Taoism. A sense of optimism and humor runs throughout the ancient Tao,
aptly expressed as “carefree wandering.” Buddhism, on the other hand, saw
life as ku hai, the bitter ocean, and focused on suffering. Despite this,
Chinese people regarded Buddhist teachings as simply another way to
express the Tao. . . .
The ultimate purpose of the Tao Te Ching is to provide us with wisdom

and insights that we can apply to life. If we cannot do that, then it doesn’t
matter how well we understand the passages. The true Tao must be lived.
[2]
Tibetan Buddhist Surya Das writes:
The sublime peace of the Tao [is] something we can all experience by . . .
coming into accord with how things actually are—what Tibetan Buddhists
call the natural state. Rather than trying to build skyscrapers to reach
heaven and bridges to cross the raging river of samsara to reach the so-
called other shore of nirvana, we could realize that it all flows right through
us right now and there’s nowhere to go, nothing to get, and all is perfect as
it is. This deep inner knowing has a lot to do with trust and letting be; there
is nirvanic peace in things just as they are.
This should not be misconstrued as a rationalization for mere quietism,

cold indifference, passivity, or dropping out. Five hundred years before
Jesus, Taoists taught passive resistance, a crucial element of world-
changing modern spiritual activists such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin
Luther King Jr., and the Dalai Lama of Tibet. The ancient masters revealed
how to be steadfast and supple, like water—flowing rather than fixed, rigid,
or static—which is of great benefit, for water is stronger than even stone:
water’s constant flow will eventually wear anything down and carry
everything away. Like the underlying continuum of reality, the great Tao is
groundless and boundless; it is flowing, dynamic, yet unmoved amidst
infinite change. “Yield and overcome, and you cannot be broken,” they
taught. “Bend and be straight.” These are powerful words, truth spoken to
power. Wisdom is as wisdom does. Awakening oneself awakens the whole
world. [3]
References:
[1] Lama Surya Das in Derek Lin, Tao Te Ching: Annotated and Explained
(Skylight Paths Publishing: 2006), vii.
[2] Derek Lin, Tao Te Ching: Annotated and Explained (Skylight Paths
Publishing: 2006), xvii-xviii, xx.
[3] Lama Surya Das in Derek Lin, Tao Te Ching, viii-ix.
Image Credit: Woman Sitting in Front of Monk
Taoism and Buddhism
The Buddha
Monday, August 20, 2018
My colleague and CAC core teacher James Finley, a student of Buddhism,

briefly shares the story of the Buddha’s life to provide some context for
Buddhist teachings.
The Buddha was born in India about the year 560 BCE and given the name
Siddhartha. His father, the king, kept him sequestered on the palace
grounds. Siddhartha grew up, married, and had a son. Around the time of
his son’s birth, he finally went into town.
On his first visit, he saw an old person; on his second visit, he saw an ill
person; and on his third visit, he saw a dead person. He asked his guide if
these things happen to everyone. Told that they did, Siddhartha became
disillusioned and disheartened. He said to himself, “How can I live in these
conditions conducive to happiness knowing that so many of my fellow
human beings do not live in these privileged conditions? How can I be
happy knowing they are out there? And how can I myself be happy,
knowing that all these possessions and all this wealth cannot protect me
from illness, old age, and death?”
Siddhartha went into town for a fourth visit and he saw a sadhu (a
wandering ascetic monk). The monk, although dressed in rags, radiated an
inner peace not dependent upon conditions conducive to happiness.
Siddhartha felt a call in his heart for a quest to come to the understanding
of the liberation from suffering, and to come to true and abiding happiness,
for himself and others. So, around age 29, he left the palace and his family
to begin a six-year inner journey.
First, he joined a yoga community that practiced deep, meditative states.

But Siddhartha came to see this as a rarified version of a life based upon
conditioned states. So, he joined a wandering group of ascetics who
practiced severe fasting. But he became so emaciated and weak that he was
in danger of dying. He realized that since his goal was to discover freedom
from suffering and to learn the nature of true happiness, things weren’t
going well! So, he started to take food. The other ascetics were scandalized
and left him.
Then Siddhartha, utterly alone, stopped and calmed himself and looked
deeply into his situation. Stripped of all superficiality and adornment of the
extremes of wealth and poverty, his situation is our situation. He reveals us
to ourselves. He is the human being who has discovered the bankruptcy of
the ego’s agenda to come to abiding happiness. He made a vow to sit there
under a Bodhi tree until he resolved the human dilemma of suffering and
the search for inner peace and fulfillment in the midst of life as it is.
Through the night, he was tempted by the demon Mara, but he was
unshaken in his resolve.
At first light, Siddhartha turned and looked at the day star with awakened
eyes, as the Buddha—meaning “the one who is awake”—seeing life the
way it really is, free from all projections, all distortions, all delusions, all
belief systems. He saw, we might say, the boundary-less, trustworthy
nature of what is. He sat in the bliss of his enlightenment for some days.
Finally, he realized that although many would not be ready to hear his
teachings, some would. The Buddha’s first words to someone after his
enlightenment were, “In this blind world, I beat the drum of deathlessness.”
Reference:
James Finley, Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening, disc 2 (Center for
Action and Contemplation: 2008), CD, DVD, MP3 download.
Taoism and Buddhism
The Four Noble Truths

Tuesday, August 21, 2018
After his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, the Buddha sat for some days
in his inner liberation, which he called a state of nirvana. As Thich Nhat
Hanh explains, “Nirvana means extinction—first of all, the extinction of all
concepts and notions. Our concepts about things prevent us from really
touching them.” [1] For the Buddha, the ability to see reality as it really is,
free of all concepts that distort it, was also the extinction of suffering.
Here’s how James Finley describes the Four Noble Truths that the Buddha
taught and embodied for the rest of his life:
The First Truth is the truth of suffering. By suffering, the Buddha means a
pervasive discontent—that the ability to abide in inner peace and
fulfillment is elusive. There is an inescapable sense of precariousness. This
suffering is the presenting problem. The illness that the Buddha seeks to
cure is the propensity for suffering. [Note that the Buddhist approach to
healing self-inflicted suffering is very different from the common Christian
notion of heroic self-sacrifice.]
The Second Noble Truth is that there is a way of life that perpetuates
suffering. There are certain habits of the mind and heart that prolong the
very suffering from which we seek to be freed. This way of life has its
basis in wanting life to be other than the way it is. This is the diagnosis.
The Third Noble Truth is that it is possible to be healed from these

symptoms by learning to live as one with the way life is. [This is similar to
Taoism.] This is the truth of nirvana—a way of abiding peace and
equanimity in the rise and fall of daily circumstances just as they are. So,
this is the hope for the cure: that it is possible to rest in abiding inner peace
and fulfillment. [Christians might call this “surrender to the will of God.”]
The Fourth Noble Truth is the Noble Eightfold Path which is the way of
life in which one is liberated from the tyranny of suffering so that one
might come to this nirvanic inner peace, the peace that passes
understanding in the midst of life as it is. What good would it do if the
Buddha just pointed out the problem and did not give us a way to be
delivered from the problem? That way is the Noble Eightfold Path. [2]
The Noble Eightfold Path includes eight “right practices”: right view, right
thinking, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right diligence, right
mindfulness, and right concentration. It is a way out of suffering, a way of
healing. As I often say, if we do not transform our pain we will most
certainly transmit it. Meditation or contemplation helps us stay on this path
and allow ourselves to be changed at the deepest levels.
References:
[1] Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Broadway
Books: 1998), 129.
[2] James Finley, Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening, disc 2 (Center

for Action and Contemplation: 2008), CD, DVD, MP3 download.
Taoism and Buddhism
Unitive Consciousness
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Paul Knitter, a theologian and colleague of mine from my days in

Cincinnati, wrote an insightful book called Without Buddha I Could Not Be
a Christian. In it, he explains that Buddhism teaches “practices that will
help Christians draw on the mystical contents of our faith. Buddhism can
help Christians to be mystical Christians . . . to realize and enter into the
non-dualistic, or unitive, heart of Christian experience—a way to be one
with the Father, to live Christ’s life, to be not just a container of the Spirit
but an embodiment and expression of the Spirit, to live by and with and in
the Spirit, to live and move and have our being in God.” [1] What a
wonderful Trinitarian description of living as an image and likeness of
God! Like Christian contemplative practices, Buddhist practices such as
meditation, silence, and living mindfully help us encounter the deepest,
truest reality—our oneness with God.
Knitter writes:
True, what Christians are after is different than what Buddhists are after.
For Christians, it’s identification with the Christ-Spirit. For Buddhists, it’s
realizing their Buddha-nature. And yet, both of these very different
experiences have something in common: they are unitive, non-dualistic,
mystical experiences in which we find that our own identity is somehow
joined with that which is both more than, and at the same time one with,
our identity. This is what the Buddhist practices are so good at—achieving
such unitive experiences in which the self is so transformed that it finds
itself through losing itself. [2]
Knitter paraphrases Raimon Panikkar, a Roman Catholic priest, theologian,

and advocate of inter-faith dialogue, by describing true nonduality: “the
interrelating partners are not two. But neither are they one! Can Christians
say something similar about the relationship between God and creation?”
[3]
According to another Catholic priest, Romano Guardini (1885-1968), they

certainly can! James Finley explains:
Guardini says that it’s a principle of logic that A cannot be B at the same
time and in the same respect that it’s A. . . . Likewise, God is the Creator
and we are the creature. And yet, Guardini adds, “Although I am not God, I
am not other than God either.” [4] He says the direct intuitive realization
that although I am not God, I am not other than God either, fans out in all
directions. Although I am not you, I am not other than you either. Although
I am not the earth, I am not other than the earth, either. As this soaks into
me, what are the implications of this in the way I act in the world, in
relationships with other people?
Finley shares how another Christian mystic understood such

interdependence: “Thomas Merton realized that people of different
religions are not other than me, and how I treat them I’m treating myself,
and as Jesus says, I’m treating Jesus. That’s the social consciousness
dimension of contemplation.” [5]
References:
[1] Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (Oneworld
Publications: 2009), 154-155.
[2] Ibid., 155.
[3] Ibid., 14.
[4] Romano Guardini, The World and the Person, trans. Stella Lange
(Regnery: 1965, ©1939), 31. Cited by James Finley, Christian Meditation
(HarperCollins: 2004), 51.
[5] James Finley, Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening, disc 6 (Center

for Action and Contemplation: 2008), CD, DVD, MP3 download.
Taoism and Buddhism
Being Peace
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Paul Knitter has been an activist for peace and justice since the 1980’s. He
is inspired by Engaged Buddhism, a term coined by Thich Nhat Hanh,
which brings insights from Buddhist practice and teaching to social,
political, environmental, and economic injustice:
Buddhists are much more concerned about waking up to our innate wisdom
and compassion (our Buddha-nature) than they are about working for
justice. If Christians insist that “if you want peace, work for justice,” the
Buddhists would counter-insist, “if you want peace, be peace.” That’s the
point Thich Nhat Hanh gently drives home in the little book . . . Being
Peace. His message is as simple and straightforward as it is sharp and
upsetting: the only way we are going to be able to create peace in the world
is if we first create (or better, find) peace in our hearts.
Being peace is an absolute prerequisite for making peace. And by “being

peace,” . . . [Thich Nhat Hanh] means deepening the practice of
mindfulness, both formally in regular meditation as well as throughout the
day as we receive every person and every event that enters our lives;
through such mindfulness we will, more and more, be able to understand . .
. whomever we meet or whatever we feel, and so respond with compassion.
Only with the peace that comes with such mindfulness will we be able to
respond in a way that brings forth peace for the event or person or feeling
we are dealing with.
This Buddhist insistence on the necessary link between being peace and
making peace reflects Christian spirituality’s traditional insistence that all
our action in the world must be combined with contemplation. . . . But the
Buddhists are very clear: while both are essential, one holds a priority of
practice. If action and contemplation form a constantly moving circle in
which one feeds into the other, the entrance point for the circle is
contemplation. [1]
I (Richard) personally believe the entrance point can be either action or

contemplation. Most people act, love, sin, risk engagement, and make
mistakes before they personally experience their own deep need for
contemplation. Until you have “loved and lost,” your contemplation is
often gazing at your navel instead of a passionate search for God and for
your calling.
Knitter continues:
Why? Just why do Buddhists insist on the priority of Awakening over

acting? Why do they want to “just sit there” before they “do anything”?
Certainly, there are different ways a Buddhist might answer this question.
But I believe that one of the recurring responses would be: to remove one’s
ego from one’s peacemaking, so that one’s actions will not be coming from
one’s ego-needs but from the wisdom and compassion that constitute one’s
true nature. [2]
When we founded the Center for Action and Contemplation over thirty
years ago, we envisioned spending half our time teaching contemplation
and half teaching social justice. But for the same reasons Knitter gave, as
well as the fact that most Western people are already geared toward action
but need training in contemplation, we now spend much of our effort
teaching various approaches to contemplation, knowing that if the inner
world is authentic, an individual’s political, economic, and service attitudes
will change organically from the inside out.
References:
[1] Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (Oneworld
Publications: 2009), 183-184.
[2] Ibid., 184.
Taoism and Buddhism

Mindfulness
Waking up this morning, I smile.

Twenty-four brand new hours are before me.
I vow to live fully in each moment
and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.
—Thich Nhat Hanh [1]
Thich Nhat Hanh, the beloved Buddhist monk, explores the meaning of the
name Buddha and applies this rich word to ordinary humans:
The appellation “Buddha” comes from the root of the verb budh—which means
to wake up, to understand, to know what is happening in a very deep way. In
knowing, understanding, and waking up to reality, there is mindfulness, because
mindfulness means seeing and knowing what is happening. [2]
Paul Knitter recalls when he “realized that [Tibetan Buddhist] Pema

Chödrön’s talk of Groundlessness and [Jesuit theologian] Karl
Rahner’s emphasis on Mystery were two different fingers pointing to
the same moon”:
For both of them, to feel the Reality of Mystery or Sunyata means to
let go of self, to trust totally in what both of them call infinite
openness. Openness to what? To what is, to what’s going on right
now, in the trust that what is going on is what I am a part of and what
will sustain and lead me, moment by moment. Only moment by
moment. There are no grand visions promised here. Just a mindful
trusting of each moment as it comes, with what it contains, with its
confusion or inspiration, with its joy or horror, with its hope or
despair. Whatever is there, this suchness right now, is the breath of
the Spirit, the power of Mystery, the connectedness of Emptiness. . . .
The suchness of each moment is the infinite Mercy of God. [3]
Pema Chödrön teaches three graces of mindfulness practice:

precision, gentleness, and letting go. Once we can honestly
acknowledge whatever is going on in the moment with clarity and
acceptance, we can let our unmet expectations go. This allows us to
live more freely and vibrantly, fully awake to Presence. Knitter
writes:
If we can truly be mind-ful of what is going on in us or around us—
that’s how we can find or feel “the Spirit” in it. Then our response to
the situation will be originating from the Spirit rather than from our
knee-jerk feelings of fear or anger or envy. And whether the
response is to endure bravely or to act creatively, it will be done
with understanding and compassion—which means it will be life-
giving or life-creating. [4]
I hope these meditations invite you to go deeper—beyond words and ideas about
mindfulness—to actual practice and experience. When you stay with your
practice, eventually you will realize, as Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “that our
life is the path, and we no longer rely merely on the forms of practice.” [5] I
hope you are seeing that Christianity and Buddhism are not in competition with
one another. Christians are usually talking about metaphysics (“what is”) and
Buddhists are usually talking about epistemology (“how do we know what is”).
In that sense, they offer great gifts to one another.
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] Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Broadway Books: 1998), 102.
[2] Ibid., 187.
[3] Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (Oneworld Publications:

2009), 159-160.
[4] Ibid., 162.
[5] Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, 122.
Taoism and Buddhism

August 19 - August 24, 2018
The classic Tao Te Ching . . . reveals how both action and contemplation are
paths to experiencing harmony, peace, and unity amidst diversity. —Lama
Surya Das (Sunday)
At first light, Siddhartha turned and looked at the day star with awakened
eyes, as the Buddha—meaning “the one who is awake”—seeing life the way it
really is, free from all projections, all distortions, all delusions, all belief
systems. He saw, we might say, the boundary-less, trustworthy nature of
what is. —James Finley (Monday)
The Third Noble Truth is that it is possible to be healed from [the propensity
for suffering] by learning to live as one with the way life is. This is the truth of
nirvana—this way of abiding peace and equanimity in the rise and fall of daily
circumstances just as they are. —James Finley (Tuesday)
Buddhism can help Christians to be mystical Christians . . . to realize and enter

into the non-dualistic, or unitive, heart of Christian experience—a way to be
one with the Father, to live Christ’s life, to be not just a container of the Spirit
but an embodiment and expression of the Spirit, to live by and with and in the
Spirit, to live and move and have our being in God. —Paul Knitter (Wednesday)
By “being peace,” . . . [Thich Nhat Hanh] means deepening the practice of

mindfulness, both formally in regular meditation as well as throughout the
day as we receive every person and every event that enters our lives; through
such mindfulness we will, more and more, be able
to understand . . . whomever we meet or whatever we feel, and so respond
with compassion. —Paul Knitter (Thursday)
If we can truly be mind-ful of what is going on in us or around us—that’s how

we can find or feel “the Spirit” in it. Then our response to the situation will be
originating from the Spirit rather than from our knee-jerk feelings of fear or
anger or envy. And whether the response is to endure bravely or to act
creatively, it will be done with understanding and compassion—which means
it will be life-giving or life-creating. —Paul Knitter (Friday)
Practice: The Four Limitless Qualities

Buddhism identifies Four Limitless Qualities: loving kindness (maitri),
compassion, joy, and equanimity. Loving kindness and compassion may appear
to be the same, but there are subtle differences. In Buddhism, compassion
includes a willingness to identify so fully with someone that you would be
willing to carry a little of their suffering. Equanimity may be close to what
Christians mean by peace. These four qualities are limitless in that they increase
with practice and use. If you don’t choose daily and deliberately to practice
loving kindness, it is unlikely that a year from now you will be any more loving.
The qualities are also limitless because they are already within you—which
beautifully parallels the Christian theology of the Holy Spirit. There is a place in
you that is already kind, compassionate, joyful, and equanimous.
Paraphrasing Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, here is a practice for

growing loving kindness or maitri. I invite you to set aside a quiet period to go
through these simple steps with intention and openness.
1. Recognize the place of loving kindness inside yourself. It is there. Honor it,
awaken it, and actively draw upon it.

2. Drawing upon the source of loving kindness within, bring to mind someone for
whom you feel sincere goodwill and tenderness, someone you love very much. From
your source, send loving kindness toward this person and bless them.

3. Awaken loving kindness for someone who is a casual friend or associate—
someone not in your inner circle, but a bit further removed, someone you admire or
appreciate. Send love to that individual.

4. Now send loving kindness to someone about whom you feel neutral or
indifferent—for example, a gas station attendant or a cashier. Send your blessing to
this person.

5. Think of someone who has hurt you, who has talked evil of you, whom you find
it difficult to like or you don’t enjoy being around. Bless them; send this would-be
enemy your love.

6. Bring all of the first five individuals into the stream of flowing love, including
yourself. Hold them here for a few moments.

7. Finally, extend this love to embrace all beings in the universe. It is one piece of
love, one love toward all, regardless of religion, race, culture, or likability.
This practice can help you know—in your mind, heart, and body—that love is
not determined by the worthiness of the object. Love is determined by the giver
of the love. These steps can be repeated for the other three limitless qualities.
Remember, spiritual gifts increase with use. Love, compassion, joy, and
equanimity will grow as you let them flow. You are simply an instrument, a
conduit for the inflow and outflow of the gifts of the Spirit. You are “inter-
being.”

For Further Study:
James Finley and Richard Rohr, Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening (Center for Action
and Contemplation: 2008), CD, DVD, MP3 download
Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (Oneworld Publications:

2009)
Derek Lin, Tao Te Ching: Annotated and Explained (Skylight Paths Publishing: 2006)
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching (Broadway Books: 1998)
Week Thirty-five

Judaism

Hasidism

The Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760)—Master of the Good Name—was the founder
of a Jewish religious movement called Hasidism that began in the eighteenth
century. The “Besht” (acronym for Baal Shem Tov) was ecstatically in love
with God. He reminds me a bit of my own spiritual father, St. Francis of Assisi
(1182-1226). Like Francis—who was simply following Jesus, who was
following the Hebrew Scriptures which always showed a bias toward the
bottom—the Baal Shem Tov began a grassroots movement of joyful love and
service that appealed to ordinary people, not only to a scholarly elite.
In his book, Hasidic Tales: Annotated and Explained, Rabbi Rami Shapiro
explains this stream of Judaism:
The ancient Rabbis taught, “God desires the heart.” They themselves, however,
seem to have preferred the head. Judaism has struggled through the ages to find
a balance between heartfelt yearning for God and the intellectual mastery of
God’s Word. Generally speaking, it was the head that won out. Yet when things
got too heady, the pendulum would swing in favor of the heart. The eighteenth-
century Jewish revivalist movement called Hasidism was one of these heart
swings. . . . The goal [of Hasidic disciples] was d’veikus, or union with God.
The concept of d’veikus (“clinging” or “cleaving”) is found in the Torah [the

Hebrew Scriptures] where the verb davak signifies an extraordinary intimacy
with the Divine: “To love YHVH your God, to listen to His voice and to cleave to
Him, for He is your life and the length of your days . . .” (Deuteronomy 30:20).
To achieve d’veikus is to realize that God is your life. While later Hasidic
masters spoke of d’veikus as a union with God requiring the dissolution of the
self, this was not the original understanding. God is your life, but your life is still
yours; that is, Torah speaks of d’veikus as an experience of feeling the fullness of
God present in your self without actually erasing your sense of self.
The essential message and practice of early Hasidism are simple. The message: .
. . “the whole earth is full of God’s glory” (Isaiah 6:3). The practice: . . . “I place
God before me always” (Psalm 16:8). Understand these and you understand
Hasidism.
. . . Hasidism tries to wake the wave up to being the ocean. Awakening to your
true nature is what it is to “place God before you always.” Everywhere you look
you see God, not as an abstract spirit but as the True Being of all beings.
The Besht believed that God was everywhere and could be found by anyone
whose heart was open, simple, and pure. At a time when Judaism was focused
on a scholar elite, he reached out to the masses with a Judaism rich in
compassion, devotion, and hope. His inner circle of disciples took his teachings
out into the larger world, creating a global movement that continues to this day.
Rami Shapiro, Hasidic Tales: Annotated and Explained (Jewish Lights Publishing: 2004,
2013), xxvii-xxviii, xxix, xxxii, xxxiv.
Image credit: Red and Orange Solar Flare (Rosette Nebula [detail])
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Thirty-six

Early Christianity

The Beginnings of the Way

Sunday, September 2, 2018
If we look closely at the evolution of religion over time, we see that there has
been gradual growth toward the goal of union with God. Religions continue to
change, “transcending and including,” as Ken Wilber says, learning from old
ways and opening to new. Christianity is no different from other religions in this
regard. Over the next few weeks I will focus on people and communities within
Christianity who were somehow transformed and “got it” at a mature level for
their time in history.
Christianity first emerged not as a new religion, but as a reform and sect of
Judaism within Judea and the Mediterranean. Wherever Paul, Peter, and other
early missionaries traveled, they formed small communities of believers in “The
Way,” a movement that emphasized Jesus’ teachings, death, and resurrection as
the path to transformation. Gradually the movement grew and took on a life of
its own, welcoming non-Jews as well as Jews, becoming more inclusive and
grace-oriented, until it eventually called itself “catholic” or universal. By 80 CE,
there were Christians as far away as India and France.
The “Early Church” period (the five hundred or so years following Jesus’
resurrection) was a time of dramatic change in culture, politics, and economy.
All these changes affected the development of the fledgling religion, shaping
liturgy, rituals, and theology. Historian Diana Butler Bass writes, “for all the
complexity of primitive Christianity, a startling idea runs through early records
of faith: Christianity seems to have succeeded because it transformed the lives of
people in a chaotic world.” [1] During this time, Christianity was not so much
about doctrines or eternal salvation, but about how to live a better life here and
now, within the “Reign of God.”
From the perspective of occupying Roman powers, the Christian sect was radical
because it encouraged alternative behaviors that were both attractive to those at
the bottom and threatening to the worldview of empire. Rather than acquiring
wealth, this new sect shared possessions equally. Followers of The Way lived
together with people of different ethnicities and social classes rather than
following classist and cultural norms.
Early Christianity is largely unknown and of little interest to most Western

Christians. The very things the early Christians emphasized—such as the prayer
of quiet, the Trinity, divinization, universal restoration, and the importance of
practice—have been neglected, to our own detriment. With the schism between
what are now the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches in 1054 CE,
Christians, in effect, excommunicated one another. Every time the church
divided, it also divided up Christ, and both sides of the divide were weaker as a
result.
Through these meditations, I will try to reclaim some of the forgotten pieces of
the Christian tradition for our wholeness and blessing, hopefully bringing us
closer to what it means to be created in the image and likeness of God. Not
knowing this early heritage will allow us to cling to superficial Christian
distinctions that emerged much later, and largely as historical accidents.
[1] Diana Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story
(HarperOne: 2009), 26.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Desert Christianity and the Eastern Fathers of the Church,”
The Mendicant, vol. 5, no. 2 (Center for Action and Contemplation: April 2015), 1.
Image credit: Saint Catherine's Monastery (detail), built between 548-565 near the town of
Saint Catherine, the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Week Thirty-six

Early Christianity

A Changing Religion
Monday, September 3, 2018
Much of what Jesus taught seems to have been followed closely during the first
several hundred years after his death and resurrection. As long as Jesus’
followers were on the bottom and the edge of empire, as long as they shared the
rejected and betrayed status of Jesus, they could grasp his teaching more
readily. Values like nonparticipation in war, simple living, inclusivity, and love
of enemies could be more easily understood when Christians were gathering
secretly in the catacombs, when their faith was untouched by empire,
rationalization, and compromise.
Several writings illustrate this early commitment to Jesus’ teachings on

simplicity and generosity. For example, the Didache, compiled around 90 CE,
says: “Share all things with your brother, and do not say that they are your own.
For if you are sharers in what is imperishable, how much more in things which
perish!” [1]
The last great formal persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire ended in
311 CE. In 313, Constantine (c. 272-337) legalized Christianity. It became the
official religion of the Roman Empire in 380. After this structural change,
Christianity increasingly accepted, and even defended, the dominant social
order, especially concerning money and war. Morality became individualized
and largely focused on sexuality. The church slowly lost its free and alternative
vantage point. Texts written in the hundred years preceding 313 show it was
unthinkable that a Christian would fight in the army, as the army was killing
Christians. By the year 400, the entire army had become Christian, and they
were now killing the “pagans.”
Before 313, the church was on the bottom of society, which is the privileged
vantage point for understanding the liberating power of Gospel for both the
individual and for society. Within the space of a few decades, the church moved
from the bottom to the top, literally from the catacombs to the basilicas. The
Roman basilicas were large buildings for court and other public assembly, and
they became Christian worship spaces.
When the Christian church became the established religion of the empire, it
started reading the Gospel from the position of maintaining power and social
order instead of experiencing the profound power of powerlessness that Jesus
revealed. In a sense, Christianity almost became a different religion!
The failing Roman Empire needed an emperor, and Jesus was used to fill the
power gap. In effect, we Christians took Jesus out of the Trinity and made him
into God on a throne. An imperial system needs law and order and clear
belonging systems more than it wants mercy, meekness, or transformation.
Much of Jesus’ teaching about simple living, nonviolence, inclusivity, and love
of enemies became incomprehensible. Relationship—the shape of God as Trinity
—was no longer as important. Christianity’s view of God changed: the Father
became angry and distant, Jesus was reduced to an organizing principle, and for
all practical and dynamic purposes, the Holy Spirit was forgotten.
[1] Didache 4:8. See Tony Jones, The Teaching of the Twelve: Believing and Practicing the
Primitive Christianity of the Ancient Didache Community (Paraclete Press: 2009), 23.
More about the Didache is available at
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/didache.html.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of
Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 48-51; and
Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2008), 100.

Early Christianity

A Rhythm of Retreat and Return

Tuesday, September 4, 2018
As Christianity rose to a position of power, rational thinking and individuals’

needs took priority over embodied, nondual consciousness and relationships.
One of our CONSPIRE 2018 teachers, Barbara Holmes, recalls the early
church’s commitment to contemplation and community and how, even when
mainstream Christianity lost these threads, groups in Africa and the Middle
East continued to cultivate them.
From the beginning, Jesus’s ministry modeled the interplay between prophetic
utterance, public theology, and intense spiritual renewal. He launches his three-
year ministry from the desert wilderness, a place that will be the home of latter-
day desert mothers and fathers. After an intense time of fasting, testing, and
submission to the leading of the Holy Spirit, Jesus returns ready to fulfill his
calling. These rhythms of activism and contemplation, engagement and
withdrawal resonate throughout his life.
As for the early church, its origins are steeped in the intimacy of close
communal groups in house churches and catacombs. During the first century,
Paul refers to the knowledge of God as an understanding that exceeds rational
and objective thought. This knowledge can be experienced as presence. The
prophets and wisdom literature celebrate the accessibility of this presence and
extol the mysteries of the human/divine relationship. Theological
contemplation usually assumes the tangible reality of God’s love, our
shortcomings, and the inexplicable possibility of reunion. Accordingly,
relationship is a primary goal of Christian life.
This willingness to engage God through a devout community of committed

individuals is a theme repeated in many religious communities. However, the
specific Christian mandate to “be in but not of the world” seems to be the
necessary orientation that fosters and encourages connections to the multiple
realities of faith. Persecution only strengthened the tendency toward a life that
emphasized interiority as well as liberation. The first era of persecution, during
the formative years of the Christian church, also spurred the development of
contemplative practices.
We are familiar with the story of persecution and martyrdom in early

Christianity. However, we are not as familiar with the history of persecution and
martyrdom . . . in the African Christian church at the hands of Emperor
Diocletian [244-311]. Those who went silently to their deaths include Saint
Sophia, Saint Catherine (martyred by Maximus), and Saint Damiana, who was
killed with the other devotees in the monastery that she founded [in Egypt]. As
most historians note, the end of public persecution marked the shift in Christian
status from a beleaguered sect to the state religion of Rome.
When Christianity began, it was small and intense, communal and set apart,
until it found favor with the state. Those adherents who witnessed Rome’s
public affirmation of Christianity in the fourth century realized that the
contemplative aspects of the faith could not be nurtured under the largesse of
the state. And so, in the fifth century, monasticism flourished in the [African
and Middle Eastern] desert as Christian converts retreated for respite and
spiritual clarity. Although the desert mothers and fathers sought harsh and
isolated sites, they soon found that they were not alone. The decision to retreat
drew others to them. Communities formed as city dwellers came out to seek
advice and solace. The historical model of contemplation offers the rhythm of
retreat and return. It was in the wilderness that African contemplatives carved
out unique spiritual boundaries.
Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church,

second edition (Fortress Press: 2017), 9-10.
Early Christianity

Christianity in the Desert

Wednesday, September 5, 2018
For too long, little or no honor has been paid to those who have laid the
foundations in Africa for the preservation of Christianity throughout the
world. . . . [T]he roots and headwaters for this monastic flourishing had their
source in African soil. Unfortunately, black saints have been depicted as white
and African bishops have been portrayed as Europeans. The remembrance
and acknowledgment of our historic spiritual foundations is long overdue. —
Paisius Altschul [1]
Today Barbara Holmes continues exploring the forgotten gifts of early

Christianity, particularly from its African legacies.
African participants in the early church remained in the shadows of the main
theological discourse despite the scholarship of Tertullian [c. 155-c. 240],
Augustine [354-430], Cyprian [c. 200-258], and others of African descent who
were instrumental in the expansion and theological grounding of the early
church. Although initially the spread of Islam limited the expansion of North
African Christian practices to sub-Saharan Africa, the trajectories of today’s
Christian contemplative practices can be traced to early Christian communities
in the Middle East and Africa.
Some of these communities were led by women. . . . After Christianity became a

state religion, the freedom that women found in Spirit-led Christian sects was
foreclosed by an increasingly hierarchical religious structure. In response, many
retreated to remote desert areas to continue their spiritual quests.
The desert may initially seem barren, dull, and colorless, but eventually our
perceptions start to change. . . . Here we empty ourselves of our own obstacles to
God. In the space of this emptiness, we encounter the enormity of God’s
presence. . . . The aromas teach us that the desert becomes the place of a mature
repentance and conversion toward transformation into true radical freedom. [2]
If the desert is a place of renewal, transformation, and freedom, and if the heat
and isolation served as a nurturing incubator for nascent monastic movements,
one wonders if a desert experience is necessary to reclaim this legacy.
One need not wonder long when there are so many deserts within reach.
Today’s wilderness can be found in bustling suburban and urban centers, on
death row, in homeless shelters in the middle of the night, in the eyes of a
hospice patient, and in the desperation of AIDS orphans in Africa and around
the world. Perhaps these are the postmodern desert mothers and fathers.
Perhaps contemplative spaces can be found wherever people skirt the margins
of inclusion. Perhaps those whom we value least have the most to teach.
We are in need of those values central to African monasticism and early

Christian hospitality; they include communal relationships, humility, and
compassion. Laura Swan sums up these virtues in the word apatheia, defined as
“a mature mindfulness, a grounded sensitivity, and a keen attention to one’s
inner world as well as to the world in which one has journeyed.” [3] Inevitably,
the journey takes each of us in different directions; however, by virtue of
circumstances or choice, each of us will at some point in our lives find ourselves
on the outskirts of society listening to the silence coming from within. During
these times, we realize that contemplation is a destination as well as a practice.
The monastics knew this and valued both.
[1] Paisius Altschul, “African Monasticism: Its Influence on the Rest of the World,” An
Unbroken Circle: Linking Ancient African Christianity to the African-American
Experience, ed. Paisius Altshul (Brotherhood of St. Moses the Black: 1997), 42.
[2] Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early
Christian Women (Paulist Press: 2001), 168.
[3] Ibid., 25.

second edition (Fortress Press: 2017), 10-12.
Early Christianity

Seeking Spiritual Freedom

Thursday, September 6, 2018
A brother was restless in the community and often moved to anger. So he said:
“I will go, and live somewhere by myself. And since I shall be able to talk or
listen to no one, I shall be tranquil, and my passionate anger will cease.” He
went out and lived alone in a cave. But one day he filled his jug with water and
put it on the ground. It happened suddenly to fall over. He filled it again, and
again it fell. And this happened a third time. And in a rage he snatched up the
jug and broke it. Returning to his right mind, he knew that the demon of anger
had mocked him, and he said: “Here am I by myself, and he has beaten me. I
will return to the community. Wherever you live, you need effort and patience
and above all God's help.” —Story of a desert father [1]
As the Christian church moved from bottom to top, protected and pampered by
the Roman Empire, people like Anthony of the Desert (c. 250-c. 356), John
Cassian (c. 360-c. 435), Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345-399), Syncletica (c. 270-c.
350) and other early Christians went off to the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and
Syria to find spiritual freedom, live out Jesus’ teachings, and continue growing
in the Spirit. It was in these deserts that a different mind
called contemplation was taught.
As an alternative to empire and its economy, these men and women emphasized
lifestyle practice, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a very simple
spirituality of transformation into Christ. The desert communities grew out of
informal gatherings of monks or nuns, functioning much like families. A good
number also became hermits to mine the deep mystery of their inner
experience. This movement paralleled the monastic pattern in Hinduism and
Buddhism.
The desert tradition preceded the emergence of systematic theology and formal
doctrine. Christian faith was first a lifestyle before it was a belief system. Since
the desert dwellers were often formally uneducated, they told stories, much like
Jesus did, to teach about essential issues of ego, love, virtue, surrender, peace,
divine union, and inner freedom.
Thomas Merton described those early Christians in the wilderness as people

“who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a
decadent state,” who didn’t wish to be ruled or to rule. He continues, saying that
they primarily sought their “true self, in Christ”; to do so, they had to reject “the
false, formal self, fabricated under social compulsion ‘in the world.’ They sought
a way to God that was uncharted and freely chosen, not inherited from others
who had mapped it out beforehand.” [2] Can you see why we might need to
learn from them?
[1] Western Asceticism, ed., trans. Owen Chadwick (Westminster John Knox Press: 2006,
©1958), 92.
[2] Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert (New Directions: 1960), 5-6.
Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 51; and
“Desert Christianity and the Eastern Fathers of the Church,” The Mendicant, vol. 5, no. 2
(Center for Action and Contemplation: April 2015), 1.
Early Christianity

Practical Prayer
Friday, September 7, 2018
In the same way as the early church, the desert Christians were deeply
committed to Jesus’ teachings and lived practice. Withdrawal to the wilderness
—whether into close-knit communities or solitude—was only for the sake of
deeper encounter and presence.
Diana Butler Bass describes the natural flow from prayer to active love:
[Jesus’ invitation to] “Come follow me” was intimately bound up with the
practice of prayer. For prayer connects us with God and others, “part of this
enterprise of learning to love.” Prayer is much more than a technique, and early
Christians left us no definitive how-to manual on prayer. Rather, the desert
fathers and mothers believed that prayer was a disposition of wholeness, so that
“prayer and our life must be all of a piece.” They approached prayer, as early
church scholar Roberta Bondi notes, as a practical twofold process: first, of
“thinking and reflecting,” or “pondering” what it means to love others; and
second, as the “development and practice of loving ways of being.” [1] In other
words, these ancients taught that prayer was participation in God’s love, the
activity that takes us out of ourselves, . . . and conforms us to the path of Christ.”
[2]
The desert fathers and mothers—abbas and ammas—learned to be sparing and
intentional with their words and to preach more through their lifestyle than
through sermons. There were few “doctrines” to prove at this time in
Christianity, only an inner life to be experienced. Abba Isidore of Pelusia (5th
century) said, “To live without speaking is better than to speak without living.
For the former who lives rightly does good even by his silence but the latter does
no good even when he speaks. When words and life correspond to one another
they are together the whole of philosophy.” [3]
An old abba was asked what was necessary to do to be saved. He was sitting
making rope. Without glancing up, he said, “You’re looking at it.” Just as so
many of the mystics have taught us, doing what you’re doing with presence and
intention is prayer. As other spiritual teachers have taught in many forms,
“When we walk, we walk; when we chop wood, we chop wood; when we sleep,
we sleep.” As you know, this is much harder than it first seems.
Belden Lane helps clear away any romanticism we might associate with desert
spirituality:
[The] desert is, preeminently, a place to die. Anyone retreating to an Egyptian or
Judean monastery, hoping to escape the tensions of city life, found little comfort
among the likes of an Anthony or a Sabas. The desert offered no private
therapeutic place for solace and rejuvenation. One was more likely to be carried
out feet first than to be restored unchanged to the life one had left. [4]
In the tradition of Moses and Jesus, the Christians who wandered into the
desert entered a wild, fierce, unknown place where they would encounter both
“demons” and “angels” (Mark 1:13)—their own shadowy selves which contained
both good and bad. Belden Lane writes: “Amma Syncletica refused to let anyone
deceive herself by imagining that retreat to a desert monastery meant the
guarantee of freedom from the world. The hardest world to leave, she knew, is
the one within the heart.” [5]

[1] Roberta C. Bondi, To Pray and to Love (Fortress Press: 1991), 12-13, 14.
[2] Diana Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story
(HarperOne: 2009), 48.
[3] The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward
(Cistercian Publications: 1975), 84.
[4] Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain
Spirituality (Oxford University Press: 1998), 165.
[5] Ibid., 168.
Early Christianity

September 2 - September 7, 2018
The very things the early Christians emphasized—such as the prayer of quiet,
the Trinity, divinization, universal restoration, and the importance of practice—
have been neglected, to our own detriment. (Sunday)
When the Christian church became the established religion of the empire, it
started reading the Gospel from the position of maintaining power and social
order instead of experiencing the profound power of powerlessness that Jesus
revealed. In a sense, Christianity almost became a different religion! (Monday)
The willingness to engage God through a devout community of committed

individuals is a theme repeated in many religious communities. However, the
specific Christian mandate to “be in but not of the world” seems to be the
necessary orientation that fosters and encourages connections to the multiple
realities of faith. —Barbara Holmes (Tuesday)
Today’s wilderness can be found in bustling suburban and urban centers, on
death row, in homeless shelters in the middle of the night. . . . Perhaps these
are the postmodern desert mothers and fathers. Perhaps contemplative spaces
can be found wherever people skirt the margins of inclusion. Perhaps those
whom we value least have the most to teach. —Barbara Holmes (Wednesday)
As an alternative to empire and its economy, the desert mothers and fathers
emphasized lifestyle practice, psychologically astute methods of prayer, and a
very simple spirituality of transformation into Christ. (Thursday)
The desert fathers and mothers believed that prayer was a disposition of
wholeness, so that “prayer and our life must be all of a piece.” —Diana Butler
Bass (Friday)
Practice: Prayer of the Heart
Abba Poemen said, “Teach your mouth to say what is in your heart.” [1] Many of
the desert fathers and mothers, as well as the collected texts of the Philokalia in
the Eastern Orthodox tradition, have described prayer as bringing your thinking
down into your heart. It always seemed like soft piety to me until someone
taught me how to do it, and I learned the immense benefits of the prayer of the
heart. As a Catholic, I was often puzzled by the continued return to heart
imagery, such as Jesus pointing to his “Sacred Heart” and Mary pointing to her
“Immaculate Heart.” I often wonder what people actually do with these images.
Are they mere sentiment? Are they objects of worship or objects of
transformation? You must return their gaze and invitation for a long time to get
the transformative message and healing. Such images keep recurring only
because they are speaking something important from the unconscious, maybe
even something necessary for the soul’s emergence.
Love lives and thrives in the heart space. It has kept me from wanting to hurt
people who have hurt me. It keeps me every day from obsessive, repetitive, or
compulsive head games. It can make the difference between being happy and
being miserable and negative. Could this be what we are really doing when we
say we are praying for someone? Yes, we are holding them in our heart space.
Do this in an almost physical sense, and you will see how calmly and quickly it
works.
Next time a resentment, negativity, or irritation comes into your mind, and you
want to play it out or attach to it, move that thought or person literally into
your heart space. Dualistic commentaries are lodged in your head; but in your
heart, you can surround this negative thought with silence. There it is
surrounded with blood, which will often feel warm like coals. In this place, it is
almost impossible to comment, judge, create story lines, or remain antagonistic.
You are in a place that does not create or feed on contraries but is the natural
organ of life, embodiment, and love. Now the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate
Heart have been transferred to you. They are pointing for you to join them
there. The “sacred heart” is then your heart too.
[1] The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward
(Cistercian Publications: 1975), 159.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-
Bass: 2013), Appendix D.
For Further Study:
Joan Chittister, In God’s Holy Light: Wisdom from the Desert Monastics (Franciscan
Media: 2015)

second edition (Fortress Press: 2017)
Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain
Spirituality (Oxford University Press: 1998)
Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist
Press: 2014)
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward
(Cistercian Publications: 1975)
Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives, and Stories of Early Christian
Women (Paulist Press: 2001)
Love

Loving the Presence in the Present

Monday, October 29, 2018
A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in

time and space. [One] experiences [oneself] . . . as something separated from
the rest—a kind of optical delusion of [one’s] consciousness. . . . Our task must
be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to
embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. —Albert
Einstein [1]
We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already in the presence of
God. What’s absent is awareness. Little do we realize that God’s love is
maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. As we take another, it
means that God is choosing us now and now and now and now. We have
nothing to attain or even learn. We do, however, need to unlearn some things.
To become aware of God’s loving presence in our lives, we must accept that
human culture is in a mass hypnotic trance. We’re sleepwalkers. All great
religious teachers have recognized that we human beings do not naturally see;
we have to be taught how to see. Jesus says further, “If your eye is healthy, your
whole body is full of light” (Luke 11:34). Religion is meant to teach us how to see
and be present to reality. That’s why the Buddha and Jesus say with one voice,
“Be awake.” Jesus talks about “staying watchful” (Matthew 25:13; Luke 12:37;
Mark 13: 33-37), and “Buddha” means “I am awake” in Sanskrit.
Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance.
It’s a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even
enjoying the Presence. The contemplative is not just aware of God’s Loving
Presence, but trusts, allows, and delights in it.
Faith in God is not just faith to believe in spiritual ideas. It’s to have confidence
in Love itself. It’s to have confidence in reality itself. At its core, reality is okay.
God is in it. God is revealed in all things, even through the tragic and sad, as
the revolutionary doctrine of the cross reveals!
All spiritual disciplines have one purpose: to get rid of illusions so we can be
more fully present to what is. These disciplines exist so that we can see what is,
see who we are, and see what is happening. What is is love, so much so that
even the tragic will be used for purposes of transformation into love. It is God,
who is love, giving away God every moment as the reality of our life. Who we are
is love, because we are created in God’s image. What is happening is God living
in us, with us, and through us as our unique manifestation of love. And each one
of us is a bit different because the forms of love are infinite.
[1] Albert Einstein, Condolence letter to Norman Salit (March 4, 1950). Reprinted in The
New York Times, March 29, 1972, https://www.nytimes.com/1972/03/29/archives/the-
einstein-papers-a-man-of-many-parts-the-einstein-papers-man-of.html.
Adapted from Richard Rohr: Essential Teachings on Love, ed. Joelle Chase and Judy
Traeger (Orbis Books: 2018), 12, 25.
Image credit: Man praying on sidewalk with food, Sergio Omassi.
Week Forty-three

Suffering

Freedom from Fear

Thursday, October 25, 2018
Man suffers most through his fears of suffering. —Etty Hillesum [1]
Over the next couple days, James Finley shares insights on suffering drawn
from Jesus’ example and teaching.
I would like to reflect on the role of Jesus as the one whose very presence is
incarnational testimony of how to approach our life and the ways we suffer. In
the Christian tradition, the cross is right at the center of this great mystery.
Jesus is the archetypal master teacher, who reveals his teaching through the
very concreteness of his life. What is it that allows Jesus to face all kinds of
suffering, including his own, and how can we follow him?
We might start this way: In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus sweat blood
because he was afraid (Luke 22:44). It is possible that he was infinitely more
afraid than we could ever be. But the difference is: Jesus was not afraid of being
afraid, because he knew it was just fear. So why are we so afraid of fear? We are
afraid of fear because we believe that it has the power to name who we are, and
it fills us with shame. We feel ashamed that we're going around as a fearful
person, and so we pretend that we're not afraid. We try our best to find our own
way out of feeling afraid, but this is our dilemma, our stuck place, that Jesus
wants us to be liberated from. But we cannot do it on our own.
When we start on our path, our hope is that we will be liberated from fear in
light of the mystery of Christ. Certainly, this includes doing our best to be as safe
as we can be and to help others do the same. And when scary things are
happening, it always includes doing our best to find our way to safer places and
to help others do the same. But as for the fear that remains, Jesus invites us to
discover that our fear is woven into God’s own life, whose life is mysteriously
woven into all the scary things that can and do happen to us as human beings
together on this earth. This is liberation from fear in the midst of a fearful
situation.
As we long for and work toward this kind of liberation, it is important not to
romanticize a person’s fear and painful experience by speaking in spiritual
terms that can leave the person who is hurting feeling unseen and unmet. At a
very basic level, any real response to suffering must always include letting the
hurting person know sincerely, “I am so sorry you are having to go through this
painful experience. What can I do that might possibly be helpful?”
Here we might also turn to our teacher Jesus who was not one who had risen
above human frailty; to the contrary, he discovered directly through his
presence that inexhaustible compassion and love flow through human frailty.
Our practice is to become present to that infinite flow of compassion and love
and bring it to bear in a tender-hearted and sincere manner in our very presence
to the painful situation. We do this knowing that God is sustaining and guiding
us all in unexplainable ways that are not dependent on how the painful situation
might turn out.
[1] Etty Hillesum, Diary entry (September 30, 1942). See An Interrupted Life: The Diaries,
1941–1943 and Letters from Westerbork, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Henry Holt and
Company: 1996), 220.
Adapted from James Finley, Thomas Merton's Path to the Palace of Nowhere, disc 5
(Sounds True: 2004), CD.
Image Credit: Jonah and the Whale (detail), by Pieter Lastman, 1621. Kunstpalast Museum,
Düsseldorf, Germany.
Suffering

Freedom from Fear
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Man suffers most through his fears of suffering. —Etty Hillesum [1]
Over the next couple days, James Finley shares insights on suffering drawn
from Jesus’ example and teaching.
I would like to reflect on the role of Jesus as the one whose very presence is
incarnational testimony of how to approach our life and the ways we suffer. In
the Christian tradition, the cross is right at the center of this great mystery.
Jesus is the archetypal master teacher, who reveals his teaching through the
very concreteness of his life. What is it that allows Jesus to face all kinds of
suffering, including his own, and how can we follow him?
We might start this way: In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus sweat

blood because he was afraid (Luke 22:44). It is possible that he was
infinitely more afraid than we could ever be. But the difference is:
Jesus was not afraid of being afraid, because he knew it was just
fear. So why are we so afraid of fear? We are afraid of fear because
we believe that it has the power to name who we are, and it fills us
with shame. We feel ashamed that we're going around as a fearful
person, and so we pretend that we're not afraid. We try our best to
find our own way out of feeling afraid, but this is our dilemma, our
stuck place, that Jesus wants us to be liberated from. But we cannot
do it on our own.
When we start on our path, our hope is that we will be liberated from
fear in light of the mystery of Christ. Certainly, this includes doing
our best to be as safe as we can be and to help others do the same.
And when scary things are happening, it always includes doing our
best to find our way to safer places and to help others do the same.
But as for the fear that remains, Jesus invites us to discover that our
fear is woven into God’s own life, whose life is mysteriously woven
into all the scary things that can and do happen to us as human
beings together on this earth. This is liberation from fear in the
midst of a fearful situation.
As we long for and work toward this kind of liberation, it is important not to
romanticize a person’s fear and painful experience by speaking in spiritual
terms that can leave the person who is hurting feeling unseen and unmet. At a
very basic level, any real response to suffering must always include letting the
hurting person know sincerely, “I am so sorry you are having to go through this
painful experience. What can I do that might possibly be helpful?”
Here we might also turn to our teacher Jesus who was not one who
had risen above human frailty; to the contrary, he discovered
directly through his presence that inexhaustible compassion and
love flow through human frailty. Our practice is to become present
to that infinite flow of compassion and love and bring it to bear in a
tender-hearted and sincere manner in our very presence to the
painful situation. We do this knowing that God is sustaining and
guiding us all in unexplainable ways that are not dependent on how
the painful situation might turn out.
Suffering

Wounded Healers
Friday, October 26, 2018
Only people who have suffered in some way can usually save
anybody else—exactly as the Twelve-Step program illustrates. They
alone have the space and the capacity for the other. Deep
communion and compassion are formed much more by shared pain
than by shared pleasure. Jesus told Peter, “You must be ground like
wheat, and once you have recovered, then you can turn and help the
brothers” (see Luke 22:31-32). In general, you can lead people on the
spiritual journey as far as you have gone. Transformed people
transform people. When you can be healed yourself and not just talk
about healing, you are, as Henri Nouwen said, a “wounded healer”—
which is probably the only kind of healer!
James Finley shares insights drawn from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ work with the
dying:
Those who come to acceptance in death don’t look up at you from their
deathbeds to say how happy they are in the ways we typically speak of
happiness. For those who come to acceptance in death pass beyond the dualism
of happiness and sadness as emotional states that depend on conditions that are
conducive to happiness. Those who come to acceptance in death have about
them a certain transparent childlike quality, an uncanny peace. It's a peace not
of this world. For in accepting their seemingly unacceptable situation, they are
transformed in ways that leave us feeling strangely touched and privileged to be
in their presence. Being in their presence can open up in us a deep sense of how
invincibly precious we are in the midst of our fragility.
This experience of being with those who have come to an acceptance in death
can help us renew our ongoing efforts to learn from God how to die to the last
traces of clinging to anything less or other than God’s sustaining love. For
insofar as we learn from God how to die to all that is less than or other than
God’s love as our sole security and identity, it just might be possible that when
the moment of our death finally comes, nothing will happen. For in some deep,
unexplainable way we will have already crossed over into the deathless love of
God. [1]
We can see Etty Hillesum’s work to find this kind of acceptance in letters she
wrote from the Westerbork transit camp:
This is something people refuse to admit to themselves: at a given point you can
no longer do, but can only be and accept. [2]
Such peace allowed Hillesum to serve and love her fellow humans, even when,
as she wrote, they “don’t give you much occasion to love them.” She discovered
“there is no causal connection between people’s behavior and the love you feel
for them. Love for one’s fellow man is like an elemental glow that sustains you.”
[3]
Finally, on a card that she threw out of the train on her way to Auschwitz, Etty
wrote:
In the end, the departure came without warning. On sudden special orders from
The Hague. We left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly,
Mischa, too. We shall be traveling for three days. Thank you for all your
kindness and care. [4]
Hard to believe these could be her last written words. Where does such
generosity of spirit come from? From God, only from an Infinite God and an
Infinite Source of Love.
[1] James Finley, Thomas Merton's Path to the Palace of Nowhere, disc 5 (Sounds True:
2004), CD.
[2] Etty Hillesum, Letter (July 10, 1943). See An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941–1943
and Letters from Westerbork, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Henry Holt and Company: 1996),
314.
[3] Hillesum, Letter (August 8, 1943). Ibid., 323.
[4] Hillesum, Postcard (September 7, 1943). Ibid., 360.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (CAC
Publishing: 2016), 123.

Suffering

Redemptive Suffering
Monday, October 22, 2018
The “cross,” rightly understood, always reveals various kinds of resurrection. It’s
as if God were holding up the crucifixion as a cosmic object lesson, saying: “I
know this is what you’re experiencing. Don’t run from it. Learn from it, as I did.
Hang there for a while, as I did. It will be your teacher. Rather than losing life,
you will be gaining a larger life. It is the way through.”
The mystery of the cross has the power to teach us that our suffering is not our
own and my life is not about “me”; instead, we are actually living inside of a
larger force field of life and death. One moves from “me” to “us” inside of this
field of deep inner experience. This is the gateway to compassion, and thus
redemption. When I can see and accept my suffering as a common participation
with Jesus and all humanity, I am somehow “saved” and I become “whole in
him” (see Colossians 2:9–10). I fully admit this is often hard to do when we are
still in the midst of our suffering, and we just want to be delivered from it.
Hopefully, a time will come when the life of Christ will be so triumphant in us
that we care more about others than our own selves, or, better, when there is no
longer such a sharp distinction between my self and other selves. More than
anything else, conversion is a reconstituted sense of the self. As Paul stated, “I
have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in
me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved
me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).
Rather than going into hiding, Etty Hillesum spent her last weeks of freedom
supporting people who were facing deportation to Auschwitz. In her diaries she
wrote:
I am not afraid to look suffering straight in the eyes. And at the end of each day,
there was always the feeling: I love people so much. Never any bitterness about
what was done to them, but always love for those who knew how to bear so
much although nothing had prepared them for such burdens. [1]
We should be willing to act as a balm for all wounds. [2]
. . . [A]ll we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we
safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as
well. Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our
circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot
help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the
last. [3]
Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in
ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more
peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world. [4]
[1] Etty Hillesum, Diary entry (October 8, 1942). See An Interrupted Life: The Diaries,
1941–1943 and Letters from Westerbork, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Henry Holt and
Company: 1996), 227.
[2] Hillesum, Diary entry (October 13, 1942). Ibid., 231.
[3] Hillesum, Diary entry (July 12, 1942). Ibid., 178.
[4] Hillesum, Diary entry (September 29, 1942). Ibid., 218.
Publishing: 2016), 122.

Suffering

Traumatization of Spirituality
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
James Finley, one of my fellow faculty members at the Center for Action and
Contemplation, is a clinical psychologist. He speaks expertly—from a
professional, personal, and mystical perspective—on suffering and healing.
Here Jim explains how Spanish mystic John of the Cross (1542–1591) allowed
trauma to transform him.
John of the Cross was invited by Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) to join her in
reforming the Carmelite Order by returning to a renewed fidelity to prayer,
simplicity, and poverty. The priests of the order did not take kindly to the
suggestion that they needed reform and demanded that John stop his
involvement. John said that he would not stop because he discerned in his heart
that God was calling him to continue with this work. The priests responded in a
very harsh manner, capturing him and putting him in a small dark prison cell
with little protection from the elements. John was imprisoned for nine months.
During that time, on a number of occasions, he would be taken out of his cell,
stripped to the waist, and whipped.
John felt lost. It wasn’t just because of the severity of his imprisonment. This
was the Church! The priests who were mistreating him were people he had
emulated. John went through what we could call the traumatization of
spirituality, which can be described as a kind of dark night of faith in which we
lose experiential access to God’s sustaining presence in the midst of our
struggles. [I, Richard, imagine many are going through a similar experience
as we learn about the Catholic Church’s extensive cover-up of sexual abuse.]
Trauma is the experience of being powerless to establish a boundary between

our self and that which is about to inflict, or is already inflicting, serious harm or
even death. It is one of the most acute forms of suffering that a human being can
know. It is the experience of imminent annihilation. And so, when your faith in
God has been placed in the people who represent God’s presence in your life and
those people betray you, you can feel that God has betrayed you. And it is in this
dark night that we can learn from God how to find our way to a deeper
experience and understanding of God’s sustaining presence, deeper than
institutional structures and authority figures.
For John of the Cross, his suffering opened up onto something unexpected.
John discovered that although it was true that he could not find refuge from
suffering when he was in his prison cell, he also discovered that the suffering he
had to endure had no refuge from God’s love that could take the suffering away,
but rather permeated the suffering through and through and through and
through and through. Love protects us from nothing, even as it unexplainably
sustains us in all things. Access to this love is not limited by our finite ideas of
what it is or what it should be. Rather, this love overwhelms our abilities to
comprehend it, as it so unexplainably sustains us and continues to draw us to
itself in all that life might send our way.
This is why John of the Cross encourages us not to lose heart when we are
passing through our own hardships, but rather to have faith in knowing and
trusting that no matter what might be happening and no matter how painful it
might be, God is sustaining us in ways we cannot and do not need to
understand. John encourages us that in learning to be patiently transformed in
this dark night we come to discover within ourselves, just when everything
seems to be lost, that we are being unexplainably sustained by the presence of
God that will never lose us. As this painful yet transformative process continues
to play itself out in our lives, we can and will discover we are finding our way to
the peace of God that surpasses understanding.
Adapted from James Finley, Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, disc 3 (Center for Action and
Contemplation: 2013), CD, MP3 download.
Suffering

Invincible Preciousness
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
My colleague James Finley is someone who incarnates the truth that the
suffering we carry is our solidarity with the one, universal longing of all
humanity, and thus it can teach us great compassion and patience with both
ourselves and others. Here he shares the intimate truth of his own suffering. I
invite you to witness Jim’s experience (and perhaps your own trauma) with
tenderness and love:
Mysticism doesn’t really come into its own and isn’t really incarnational unless
it becomes integrated into the sometimes-painful realities of our daily lives. I
think I relate so deeply to Christian mystic John of the Cross who wrote
soulfully about a kind of dark night of faith because I was raised in a home with
a lot of trauma—physical, sexual, and emotional abuse—and I was very
fragmented by all of it. I graduated from high school, ran away from home,
became a monk, and joined a monastery.
When I entered the monastery, I thought I had left the trauma behind me. I was
in this silent cloister, with Thomas Merton for my spiritual director. I was
walking around reading John of the Cross, and I felt like I had it made, really.
And then I was sexually abused by one of the monks, my confessor. It
completely shattered me. I never thought it was possible. I didn’t see it coming.
I decompensated and became extremely dissociative. All the stuff that I lived
with growing up came out as feelings of fear and confusion over which I seemed
to have no control. There was no refuge for me. I didn’t tell anyone what had
happened. I just left. I started a new life as a way to bury all the pain and move
on.
Years later, I found myself in therapy and all hell broke loose. But
with prayer and gentle pacing, I learned to see, feel, accept, and find
my way through the long-term internalized effects of the trauma I
had to endure in my childhood and adolescence. It was in this
process that I came upon what I call the axial moment in which our
most intimate experience of who we are turns, as on a hidden axis of
love, down through the pain into a qualitatively richer, more
vulnerable place. It is in the midst of this turning that we discover
the qualitatively richer, more vulnerable place is actually the abyss-
like, loving presence of God, welling up and giving itself in and as the
intimate interiority of our healing journey. When we risk sharing what
hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon
us, we unexpectedly come upon within ourselves what Jesus called the pearl of
great price: the invincible preciousness of our self in our fragility.
In the act of admitting what we are so afraid to admit—especially if

admitting means admitting it in our body, where we feel it in painful
waves—in that scary moment of feeling and sharing what we thought
would destroy us, we unexpectedly come upon within ourselves this
invincible love that sustains us unexplainably in the midst of the
painful situation we are in.
As we learn to trust in this paradoxical way God sustains us in our

suffering, we are learning to sink the taproot of our heart in God,
who protects us from nothing even as God so unexplainably sustains
us in all things. As this transformative process continues, we find
within and beyond ourselves resources of courage, patience, and
tenderness to touch the hurting places with love, so they might
dissolve in love until only love is left. This for me is a very deep,
contemplative way to understand that Christ’s presence in the world
is being bodied forth in and as the gift and miracle of our very
presence in the world.
Adapted from James Finley, Intimacy: The Divine Ambush, disc 3 (Center for Action and
Contemplation: 2013), CD, MP3 download; and Transforming Trauma: A Seven-Step
Process for Spiritual Healing, with Caroline Myss (Sounds True: 2009), CD, MP3
download.
Summary: Week Forty-three

Suffering

October 21 - October 26, 2018
The genius of Jesus’ ministry is that he reveals that God uses tragedy, suffering,
pain, betrayal, and death itself (all of which are normally inevitable), not to
punish us but, in fact, to bring us to God and to our True Self, which are
frequently a simultaneous discovery. (Sunday)
The mystery of the cross has the power to teach us that our suffering is not our
own and my life is not about “me” but we are actually living inside of a larger
force field of life and death. One moves from “me” to “us” inside of this field of
deep inner experience. (Monday)
Although it is true that there is no refuge from suffering; it’s also true that
suffering has no refuge from love that permeates it through and through and
through and through and through. Love protects us from nothing, even as it
unexplainably sustains us in all things. —James Finley (Tuesday)
We can learn to sink the taproot of our heart into that invincible love and
draw out from it resources of courage, patience, and tenderness to touch the
hurting places with love, so they might dissolve in love until only love is left.
This is Christ’s presence in the world. —James Finley (Wednesday)
Our practice is to become present to that infinite flow of compassion and love
and bring it to bear in a tender-hearted and sincere manner in our very
presence to the painful situation. We do this knowing that God is sustaining
and guiding us all in unexplainable ways that are not dependent on how the
painful situation might turn out. —James Finley (Thursday)
In general, you can lead people on the spiritual journey as far as you have gone.
Transformed people transform people. When you can be healed yourself and not
just talk about healing, you are, as Henri Nouwen said, a “wounded healer.”
(Friday)
Practice: Where to Start
This past week in our daily meditations we have been talking about suffering.
Through practice we can discover that God is present with us in our suffering,
permeating it with love and compassion and sustaining us in ways we cannot
understand. God’s presence in our suffering means that our suffering, fear, or
shame do not have the power to name who we are. God’s love names us as
infinitely precious in our vulnerability.
James Finley, one of our core faculty members, and Alana Levandoski, a
Living School alum, collaborated on a beautiful musical experience that can
lead us through our suffering to discover our preciousness. Listen to their
words and music and open your heart to taking the first step, to learn how to
be “vulnerable and safe at the same time” in the heartfelt presence of a
trustworthy guide.
I don’t know where to start.
Or how to bare this heart.
But I fear I’ve become what’s been done to me.
Move slowly, move slowly,
move slowly into deep water.
You are safe with me,
no longer thrown out to sea.
Now it’s time to breathe.
Click here to listen to these gentle, encouraging songs.
James Finley and Alana Levandoski, Sanctuary: Exploring the Healing Path (Cantus
Productions: 2016), CD. Used with permission. Visit alanalevandoski.com to learn more
about Alana and her work.
For Further Study:
John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. Mirabai Starr (Riverhead Books: 2002)
James Finley, Intimacy: The Divine Ambush (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2013),
CD, MP3 download
James Finley, Thomas Merton's Path to the Palace of Nowhere (Sounds True: 2004), CD
James Finley, Transforming Trauma: A Seven-Step Process for Spiritual Healing, with
Caroline Myss (Sounds True: 2009), CD, MP3 download
Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941–1943 and Letters from Westerbork,
trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Henry Holt and Company: 1996)
Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (CAC Publishing: 2016)
Week Forty-four

Love

Becoming Pure in Heart

Tuesday, October 30, 2018
We can’t risk walking around with a negative, resentful, gossipy, critical mind,
because then we won’t be in our true force field. We won’t be usable instruments
for God. That’s why Jesus commanded us to love. It’s that urgent. It’s that
crucial.
True religion is radical; it cuts to the root (radix is Latin for root). It moves us
beyond our “private I” and into the full reality of we. Jesus seems to be saying in
the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) that our inner attitudes and states are
the real sources of our problems. We need to root out the problems at that
deepest interior level. Jesus says not only that we must not kill, but that we must
not even harbor hateful anger. He clearly begins with the necessity of a “pure
heart” (Matthew 5:8) and knows that the outer behavior will follow. Too often
we force the outward response, while the inward intent remains like a cancer.
If we walk around with hatred all day, morally we’re just as much killers as the
one who pulls the trigger. We can’t live that way and not be destroyed from
within. Yet, for some reason, many Christians have thought it acceptable to
think and feel hatred, negativity, and fear. The evil and genocide of both World
War I and World War II were the result of decades of negative, resentful, and
paranoid thinking and feeling among even good Christian people.
Jesus tells us not to harbor hateful anger or call people names in our hearts like
“fool” or “worthless person” (Matthew 5:22). If we’re walking around all day
thinking, “What idiots!” we’re living out of death, not life. If that’s what we think
and feel, that’s what we will be—death energy instead of life force. We cannot
afford even inner disconnection from love. How we live in our hearts is our real
and deepest truth.
In Matthew 5:44, Jesus insists that we love our enemies and pray for those who
persecute us. Once we recognize that whatever we do in conscious, loving union
with Reality is prayer, we can better understand what Paul means when he says,
“Pray unceasingly” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). If prayer is merely words or
recitations, such constant prayer is impossible in any practical sense.
Adapted from Richard Rohr: Essential Teachings on Love, ed. Joelle Chase and Judy
Traeger (Orbis Books: 2018), 157.
Image credit: Man praying on sidewalk with food, Sergio Omassi.
Week Forty-six

Death and Resurrection

The Ground of Being

Sunday, November 11, 2018
The fact that life and death are “not two” is extremely difficult to grasp, not
because it is so complex, but because it is so simple. —Ken Wilber [1]
We miss the unity of life and death at the very point where our ordinary mind
begins to think about it. —Kathleen Dowling Singh [2]
To accept death is to accept God. —Thomas Keating [3]

It is no surprise that we humans would deny death’s coming, fight it, and seek to
avoid the demise of the only self we have ever known. As hospice worker and
psychotherapist Kathleen Dowling Singh put it, “[Death] is the experience of ‘no
exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly
at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being. . . . It is absurd and
monstrous.” [4]
“The Ground of Being,” a commanding phrase that theologian Paul Tillich

(1886–1965) used, is an excellent metaphor for what most of us would call God
(Acts 17:28). For Singh, it is the source and goal that we deeply desire and
desperately fear. It is the Mysterium Tremendum of Rudolf Otto (1869–1937),
which is alluring and frightful at the same time. Both God and death feel like
“engulfment,” as when you first gave yourself totally to another person. It is the
very union that will liberate us, yet we resist, retrench, and run. This is why
historic male initiation rites invited the young man to face God and death head
on—ahead of time—so he could know for himself that it could do his True Self
no harm—but in fact would reveal it. Though we may resist dying at first,
afterward we can ask ourselves, “What did I ever lose by dying?”
Death—whether one of many deaths to the false self or our physical dying—is
simply returning to our spacious Ground of Being, to our foundation in Love.
Kathleen Singh again:
Love is the natural condition of our being, revealed when all else is
relinquished, when one has already moved into transpersonal levels of
identification and awareness. Love is simply an open state with no boundaries
and, as such, is a most inclusive level of consciousness. Love is a quality of the
Ground of Being itself. In this regard and at this juncture in the dying process,
love can be seen as the final element of life-in-form and the gateway to the
formless. [5]

Nearing Death
Monday, November 12, 2018
Yesterday I introduced Kathleen Dowling Singh (1946–2017), a hospice

worker and psychotherapist who accompanied many people at death’s
threshold. She was a dear friend and someone whose wisdom I greatly
respect. Last year Singh made her own journey passing from life through
death and into greater life. In her remarkable book, The Grace in Dying, Singh
described what she called the “Nearing Death Experience” that she observed
time and again:
I realized that what I had been witnessing in the process of dying was grace, all
around, shimmering and penetrating. I began, with newly opened eyes, to
observe the subtlety of this grace and to observe the qualities of grace in those
nearing death. I became aware that all of the observed qualities of the Nearing
Death Experience point to the fact that there is profound psychoalchemy
occurring here, a passage to deeper being. As I worked with dying people from
all walks of life and at many different levels of spiritual evolution, normative
patterns of change, of transformations in consciousness, became apparent.
There appears to be a universal, sequential progression into deeper, subtler, and

more enveloping dimensions of awareness, identity, and being as we begin to
die—a movement from the periphery into the Center. Further, I realized that the
transformation I was observing in people who were nearing death was the same
psychoalchemy—in a greatly accelerated mode—that I had noticed in myself
through two and a half decades of practicing contemplative disciplines and in
the people with whom I had worked as a psychospiritual counselor.
I have come to believe that the time of dying effects a transformation from
perceived tragedy to experienced grace. Beyond that, I think this transformation
is a universal process. Although relatively unexamined, the Nearing Death
Experience has profound implications. Dying offers the possibility of entering
the radiance, the vastness, of our Essential Nature, at least for a few precious
moments. . . .
The Nearing Death Experience implies a natural and conscious remerging with
the Ground of Being from which we have all once unconsciously emerged. A
transformation occurs from the point of terror at the contemplation of the loss
of our separate, personal self to a merging into the deep, nurturing, ineffable
experience of Unity.
My experience is that most people who are dying have no conscious desire for
transcendence; most of us do not live at the level of depth where such a longing
is a conscious priority. And, yet, everyone does seem to enter a transcendent
and transformed level of consciousness in the Nearing Death Experience. . . . It
is rather profound and encouraging to contemplate these indications that the
life and death of a human being is so exquisitely calibrated as to automatically
produce union with Spirit.
Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort, and Spiritual
Transformation (HarperOne: 2000), 14, 15. Emphasis mine.
Image credit: Woman Knitting (detail), fancycarve.

The Illusion of Separation

Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Hopefully we begin life as “holy innocents” in the Garden, with a conscious

connection to Being. The gaze of loving, caring parents can mirror us as the
beloved and gives us a primal experience of life as union. But sooner or later we
all have to leave the Garden. We can’t stay there. We begin the process of
individuation, which includes at least four major splits, ways of forgetting our
inherent oneness and creating an illusion of separation.
The first split is very understandable. We split ourselves from other selves. We
see mom and dad and other family members over there, and we’re over here.
We start looking out at life with ourselves as the center point. It’s the beginning
of egocentricity. My ego is the center; what I like, what I want, what I need is
what matters. Please know that the ego is not bad; it is just not all. The
development of a healthy, strong ego is important to human growth.
The second split divides life from death. It comes when we first experience the
death of someone we know, perhaps a beloved pet or grandparent. The ego
begins differentiating those who are alive and those who are gone. We may then
spend our whole life trying to avoid any kind of death, including anything that’s
negative, uncomfortable, difficult, unfamiliar, dangerous, or demanding. But at
some point, we’ll discover that life and death, negative and positive, are part of
the same unavoidable reality. Everything is living and dying simultaneously.
The third split separates mind from body and soul. In the West, we typically
give the mind priority and come to identify strongly with our thoughts. As
Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” By the age of seven most of us “think
we are our thinking” and it’s our thinking that largely defines us. This is the lie
that meditation helps us unravel.
The fourth split is the acceptable self from the unacceptable self. We split from
our shadow self and pretend to be our idealized self, or what others say we
should be. The shadow self contains not only the qualities of which we’re
ashamed but also the positive and beautiful traits we’ve forgotten or fear (our
“golden” shadow, as some call it).
Splitting is a coping mechanism, a way of surviving. But as we grow, find healing

for trauma, and develop mature emotional and spiritual practices, we become
able to incorporate that which we have denied and from which we’ve split. Each
of these four illusions must—and will—be overcome, either in this world, in our
last days and hours, or afterward. That is “resurrection”!
Each of these splits from reality makes any experience of God or our True Self
largely impossible. Spiritual practices and the process of dying are both about
overcoming these four splits. Kathleen Dowling Singh observed:
The Path of Return involves the healing of previously created dualities [or splits]
—in reverse order. . . . The mental ego is humblingly and disturbingly divested
of its false sense of being and stripped of its illusions. The sense of self, quite
often kicking and screaming, begins its return to the underlying Ground of
Being, its own Essential Nature. [1]
[1] Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort, and
Spiritual Transformation (HarperOne: 2000), 73, 75.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That which I Am Seeking disc 4
(Center for Action and Contemplation: 2012), CD, MP3 download; and
Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self ((Jossey-Bass: 2013), 29.

Becoming Who You Are

Thursday, November 15, 2018
There is a thread you follow. It goes among

Things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
—William Stafford [1]
My words for the thread that Stafford speaks of are the True Self. Your True Self
is who you are, and always have been, created in the image and likeness of God
who is love (1 John 4:8, 16). Love is both who you are and who you are still
becoming, like a sunflower seed that becomes its own sunflower. Most of human
history has called the True Self your “soul” or your participation in the eternal
life of God.
The great surprise and irony is that “you,” or who you think you are, have
nothing to do with your True Self’s original creation, and you can never get rid
of it. It’s sort of disempowering and utterly empowering at the same time, isn’t
it? All you can do is nurture your True Self, which is saying quite a lot. It is love
becoming love in this unique form called “me.”
The dying process at every stage of life is a natural opportunity to let go of the
small, separate self and return to the fullness of True Self. Kathleen Dowling
Singh, who spent hundreds of hours contemplatively ministering to dying
people, wrote:
As we return and/or are returned to our Original Nature, virtues that we have
acquired, usually through deliberate cultivation, flow naturally as water from a
spring. The qualities of loving-kindness, compassion, presence, centeredness,
spaciousness, mercy, and confidence all radiate naturally forth from our
transformed being as we come closer to death. . . . Many a time I have seen the
dying comfort those in pain around them. . . .
Love appears to be the last connection the dying have with the world of form.
We become expressive vehicles for the power of the Ground of Being [i.e., God],
inhabited and vitalized by far greater Being. . . . The Ground of Being is, in a
very real sense, Love. As we merge with it, self-consciousness and all questions
of self-worth and previous psychological issues of lovability spontaneously melt.
Love simultaneously pours into and pours out of us. . . .
With this basic change in identity, in the sense of who we are, death is no longer
seen through the peephole of the mental ego. It ceases being a frightening
enemy, a defeat, an unfortunate error in the universe and becomes, instead, an
incredible moment of growth and transformation. It is a graduation into a
previously unimaginable scale of being. [2]

Do Not Be Afraid
Friday, November 16, 2018
I am aware of the phrase “true self” occurring only once in the Bible. Paul used
the words to describe what he was desperately trying to locate in the midst of
some major trials with his false self. He wrote of it in a telling way: “When I act
against my own will, then it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in
me” (Romans 7:20, Jerusalem Bible). Somehow, he knew there was a part of
him that was authentic, steadfast, and true to its God-given and loving nature.
Paul then contrasted the true self with what we are calling the false self and he
called “sin” (7:14-25). It is the self that is always passing away. This is our cozy
image of ourselves as individual and autonomous, as separate from God and
everyone and everything else. When this “separate” self is all we think we are, no
wonder we are afraid of dying. Because this is all we know and have—if we have
not discovered our soul, that is. The false self is terrified of death because it
knows the mental construct that it calls “myself” is indeed passing away because
it is merely self-constructed and fragile. The false self has no substance, no
permanence, no vitality, only various forms of immediate gratification.
Whenever we are fearing death, whether physical death or the loss of some egoic
attachment, we are in our false self at that moment. The false self is not really
bad or evil, but just inadequate to the big questions of love, death, suffering,
God, or infinity. God allows and uses all our diversionary tactics to get us to
move toward our full and final destination, which is divine union—and thus
wholeness. That is how perfect and patient divine love is: Nothing is wasted;
even our mistakes are the raw material to turn us back into love.
The True Self will surely have doubts about the unknown. But the True Self is
the Risen Christ in you, and hence, it is not afraid of death. It has already been
to hell and back. The Risen Christ in us knows that it will never lose anything
real by dying. This is the necessary suffering of walking the full human path.
That is what Jesus did and why we are invited to “reproduce the pattern of his
death,” each in our own way, so that we can also take our place in the “force
field” of God’s universal resurrection (see Philippians 3:10-11 and Acts 3:21).
In Thich Nhat Hanh’s words, “Enlightenment for a wave is the moment the
wave realizes that it is water. At that moment, all fear of death disappears.” [1]
And in Stephen Levine’s:

But water is water, no matter what its shape or form. The solidity of ice
imagines itself to be its edges and density. Melting, it remembers; evaporating,
it ascends. [2]
So do not be afraid. Death to false self and the end of human life is simply a
return to our Ground of Being, to God, to Love. Life doesn’t truly end; it simply
changes form and continues evolving into ever new shapes and beauty.

[1] Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (Riverhead Books: 1995), 138.
[2] Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Who Dies?: An Investigation of Conscious Living and
Conscious Dying (Anchor Books: 1989, ©1982), 194.
Bass: 2013), 142-144.

November 11 - November 16, 2018
Death—whether one of many deaths to the false self or our physical dying—is
simply returning to our spacious Ground of Being, to our foundation in Love.
(Sunday)
The life and death of a human being is so exquisitely calibrated as to

automatically produce union with Spirit. —Kathleen Dowling Singh (Monday)
Twice a year we pause the Daily Meditations to ask for your support. When I
founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987—and even when we
began sending my Daily Meditations in 2007—I never imagined how this work
would evolve and grow, thanks to our donors’ generosity. (Tuesday)
Life and death, negative and positive are part of the same unavoidable reality.
Everything is living and dying simultaneously. (Wednesday)
Your True Self is who you are, and always have been, created in the image and
likeness of God who is love. Love is both who you are and who you are still
becoming. (Thursday)
The True Self is the Risen Christ in you, and hence, it is not afraid of death. It
has already been to hell and back. (Friday)

Practice: Practicing Dying
Elizabeth Lesser, author and co-founder of Omega Institute, offers ways of

practicing death:
Become an “I don’t know it all.”
Whenever you find yourself getting anxious about the big and small deaths of
daily life—being out of control, not getting what you want, endings and partings
—take a few minutes to allow in the possibility that you do not see the full
picture. Often what looks terrible today will, in retrospect, have been a blessing.
Just allow that possibility in. You do not have to understand or figure everything
out. You can relax into the mystery of not knowing.
Disengage from the ego.
Develop a simple meditation practice. Every day, spend some time sitting in
silence. . . . Sit with a straight back and relaxed body. Feel the nobility, patience,
and strength of the posture. Allow your identification to broaden out beyond the
ego with its constant thoughts and its shifting likes and dislikes. Just observe
everything. . . . This is the practice of meditation.
Take birth and death back from the experts.
Because we are more frightened of what is not known to us, it makes sense to
become familiar with the two bookends of life: birth and death. If you can, be at
the births and deaths of family members and friends; sit with sick people; help
others who are suffering. Do not shy away from what makes you uncomfortable.
Learn about death—study its biological and spiritual stages. [1]
Elizabeth Lesser, “Five Ways of Practicing Dying,” https://www.elizabethlesser.org/tool-

box/.
For Further Study:
Thomas Keating with Carl J. Arico, The Gift of Life: Death & Dying, Life & Living
(Contemplative Outreach, Ltd.: 2013)
Stephen and Ondrea Levine, Who Dies?: An Investigation of Conscious Living and
Conscious Dying (Anchor Books: 1989, ©1982)
Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-Bass: 2013)
Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort, and Spiritual
Transformation (HarperOne: 2000)

The Abyss of Grief

My friend and brilliant translator of many mystics, Mirabai Starr, who lives
nearby in Taos, New Mexico, has encountered numerous deaths and losses,
each cultivating in her a deeper spiritual practice and longing for God. But the
death of her fourteen-year-old daughter, Jenny, in a car crash was “an
avalanche,” Starr writes, “annihilating everything in its path”:
Suddenly, the sacred fire I have been chasing all my life engulfed me. I was
plunged into the abyss, instantaneously dropped into the vast stillness and
pulsing silence at which all my favorite mystics hint. So shattered I could not see
my own hand in front of my face, I was suspended in the invisible arms of a
Love I had only dreamed of. Immolated, I found myself resting in fire.
Drowning, I surrendered, and discovered I could breathe under water.
So this was the state of profound suchness I had been searching for during all
those years of contemplative practice. This was the holy longing the saints had
been talking about in poems that had broken my heart again and again. This
was the sacred emptiness that put that small smile on the face of the great sages.
And I hated it. I didn’t want vastness of being. I wanted my baby back.
But I discovered that there was nowhere to hide when radical sorrow unraveled
the fabric of my life. I could rage against the terrible unknown—and I did, for I
am human and have this vulnerable body, passionate heart, and complicated
mind—or I could turn toward the cup, bow to the Cupbearer, and say, “Yes.”
I didn’t do it right away, nor was I able to sustain it when I did manage a breath
of surrender. But gradually I learned to soften into the pain and yield to my
suffering. In the process, compassion for all suffering beings began
unexpectedly to swell in my heart. I became acutely aware of my connectedness
to mothers everywhere who had lost children, who were, at this very moment,
hearing the impossible news that their child had died. . . . .
Grief strips us. According to the mystics, this is good news. Because it is only
when we are naked that we can have union with the Beloved. We can cultivate
spiritual disciplines designed to dismantle our identity so that we have hope of
merging with the Divine. Or someone we love very much may die, and we may
find ourselves catapulted into the emptiness we had been striving for. Even as
we cry out in the anguish of loss, the boundless love of the Holy One comes
pouring into the shattered container of our hearts. This replenishing of our
emptiness is a mystery, it is grace, and it is built into the human
condition.
Few among us would ever opt for the narrow gate of grief, even if it were
guaranteed to lead us to God. But if our most profound losses—the death of a
loved one, the ending of a marriage or a career, catastrophic disease or
alienation from community—bring us to our knees before that threshold, we
might as well enter. The Beloved might be waiting in the next room.
Mirabai Starr, God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
(Monkfish Book Publishing Company: 2012), 63-65.
Image credit: Autumn Leaves (detail), Koan, 2018.

Returning Home
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
I ask . . . that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in
You. . . . I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity. . . .
Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I
am. . . . —John 17:20-24
At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I

know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known. —1 Corinthians
13:12
Two dear friends, Fathers Thomas Keating (1923–2018) and Joseph Boyle
(1941–2018), lived many years in community at St. Benedict’s Monastery in
Snowmass, Colorado, where they welcomed guests for contemplative retreats. A
couple years ago, Lucette Verboven interviewed both of them. She asked Father
Joseph if he expected at death to be transformed:
Yes, I expect death to be a transition. I think it is a movement into a space that is
not limited by our body and our senses that are quite limited now. I like the
phrase in St. Paul, that we will “see God face to face” [1 Corinthians 13:12] and
we’ll relate to people and the beauty of who they are without the ego-agendas we
have right now.
I see [life after death] as infinite love, as if the whole atmosphere of heaven is
filled with God as a kind of vibration going through us. I think that we are going
to see and know each other in God, whatever that word means. It strikes me as a
homecoming, us returning home to where we come from. . . and all of our
brothers and sisters are coming home as well. . . . I certainly have a very deep
hope that it is a transition into an incredible related life. [1]
Similarly, Keating wrote:
Death is only a part of the process of living. If the Communion of Saints has
become real for us, then every funeral is a celebration of eternal life. That is the
great insight of the Mass of the Resurrection, the new funeral rite. Death is not
an occasion only for sorrow, but an occasion of rejoicing that our friends or
relatives have moved to a deeper level of union and that we will be with them
again. [2]
We are all always connected to God and each other and every living being. Most
of us just don’t realize it. Jesus prays that we could see things in their unity and
wholeness.
Either we learn how to live in communion with others, or, quite simply, we’re
not ready for heaven and are already in hell. We have been invited—even now,
even today, even this moment—to live in the Communion of Saints, in the
Presence, in the Body, in the Life of the eternal and eternally Risen Christ.
There is only One Love that will lead and carry us across when we
die. If we are already at home with Love here, we will quite readily
move into heaven, Love’s eternal home. Death is not a changing of
worlds, as most imagine, as much as the walls of this world infinitely
expanding.
[1] Thomas Keating and Joseph Boyle with Lucette Verboven, World Without End
(Bloomsbury: 2017), 147-148.
[2] Thomas Keating, Fruits and Gifts of the Spirit (Lantern Books: 2007), 89.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Seeing Is Not Always Recognizing,” homily, May 8, 2016,
https://cac.org/seeing-not-always-recognizing/; and
Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 206-
207.

Transition and Transformation

Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Just as we have borne the image of the earthy one, we shall also bear the
image of the heavenly one. . . . Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all fall
asleep, but we will all be changed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye, at the
last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised incorruptible,
and we shall be changed. For that which is corruptible must clothe itself with
incorruptibility, and that which is mortal must clothe itself with immortality.
—1 Corinthians 15:49, 51-53
Father Thomas Keating reflected on the process and meaning of death:
Death and resurrection, in the Christian perspective at least, can never be

separated, and . . . in a very real sense, death is resurrection.
Death seems to be a process of transformation.
The idea that something is dying needs to be investigated to see what it is. It is
not we who are really dying but only the false self that is experiencing the end of
its illusory view of life—our personal, homemade self, which has been the object
of our efforts and is secretly present in virtually all of our good deeds.
What’s dying is not the deepest self, but our dependence and over-identification
with the mental ego and its projects, and our cultural conditioning and over-
identification with it, including our roles in life.
From this perspective, the dying process is the culmination or the peak of the
whole development of the spiritual journey, in which total surrender to God
involves the gift of life itself, as we know it.
For that reason it’s not really death, but life reaching out to a fullness that we
can’t imagine from this side of the dying process.
So death is . . . the final completion of this process of becoming fully alive and
manifesting the triumph of the grace of God in us. [1]
Death could be looked upon as the birth canal into eternal life. A little confining
and scary, maybe, yet it’s the passage into a vastly fuller life. Eternal life means
perfect happiness without space or time limitations. It is spaciousness itself. You
begin to taste it in deep contemplative prayer. You realize that you don’t give it
to yourself; it’s already within you. [2]
Our new body will be spiritualized and not limited to its present physical
presence and limitations. One aspect of creation is that, once you have been
born into this world, you never die because, as the Hindu religions teach, each
of us possesses deep within us an inalienable spark of divine love. [The Song of
Songs says that love is stronger than death (8:6).] That spark is the same energy
that created the Big Bang. . . . [3]
Nothing is more certain than death. It can’t simply be a disaster. It’s rather a
transition like all the other transitions and developments of human
consciousness all the way up to unity with Ultimate Reality. The latter involves
freedom from the senses and our thinking processes; in other words, entering
into the simplicity of the divine energy that pours itself out into the world
through continuing creation. The divine energy sustains us with immense love
and patience through all the stages of consciousness. [4]

[1] Thomas Keating with Carl J. Arico, The Gift of Life: Death & Dying, Life & Living
Companion Book (Contemplative Outreach, Ltd.: 2013), 12-13,
https://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/product/gift-life-%E2%80%93-death-dying-life-
living-companion-book.
[2] Thomas Keating, From the Mind to the Heart (Temple Rock Company: 2017). Pages are
not numbered. Available from https://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/product/thomas-
keating-mind-heart.
(Bloomsbury: 2017), 83.
[4] Ibid., 87.

Dying Before We Die

Thursday, November 22, 2018
Thanksgiving in the United States
In one way or another, almost all religions say that you must die before you
die, and then you will know what dying means—and what it does not mean!
Your usual viewing platform is utterly inadequate to see what is real. It is largely
useless to talk about the very ground of your being, your True Self, or your
deepest soul until you have made real contact with these at least once. That
demands dying to the old viewing platform of the mental ego and the false self.
There is just no way around that. If you do make contact, you forever know that
something is there that can be talked about, relied upon, and deeply trusted.
You move from religion as mere belief to religion as a new kind of knowing.
Kathleen Dowling Singh explains why we must die before we die: “The ordinary
mind and its delusions die in the Nearing Death Experience. As death carries us
off, it is impossible to any longer pretend that who we are is our ego. The ego is
transformed in the very carrying off.” [1]
Some form of death—psychological, spiritual, relational, or physical

—is the only way we will loosen our ties to our small and separate
false self. Only then does it return in a new shape which we might
call the Risen Christ, the soul, or the True Self.
What dies? Your false self—and it is just a matter of when, not if.
Who lives? The God Self that has always lived, but now includes you.
Note that it’s a what that dies, and a who that lives!
Once you know that life and death are not two but are part of a whole, you will
begin to view reality in a holistic, undivided way, and that will be the change
that changes everything. This is nondual consciousness. No one can teach you
this. Even Jesus had to walk it on his own, which is the only meaning of God
“requiring” his death of him. Jesus calls this goal the “destiny” of the “Human
One” (Mark 8:31), and he seems to know that he is a stand-in for all of us (Mark
10:39)—much more than he ever walks around saying, “I am God”! The only
person Jesus ever calls a “devil” is Peter when he, the so-called “infallible”
first pope, tries to oppose Jesus’ central message of death and
resurrection (Matthew 16:23).
[1] Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort, and

Spiritual Transformation (HarperOne: 2000), 219.
Bass: 2013), 59-60, 62, 66, 81.


Life-Death-Life
Friday, November 23, 2018
The whole process of living, dying, and then living again starts with
YHWH “breathing into clay,” which becomes “a living being” called Adam (“of
the earth”; see Genesis 2:7). Breath and what appears to be mere dirt become
human (the word “human” comes from the Latin humus). Matter and spirit are
bound together; divine and mortal interpenetrate and manifest one another.
The Formless One forever takes on form as “Adam and Eve” (and in Jesus “the
new Adam”), and then takes us back to the Formless One, once again, as each
form painfully surrenders the small self that it has been for a while. Jesus
says, “I am returning to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be”
(John 14:3). Resurrection is simply incarnation taken to its logical
conclusion: what starts in God ends in God—who is eternal.
Buddhists are looking at the same Mystery from a different angle when they say,
“Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form,” and then all forms eventually
return to formlessness (spirit or “emptiness”) once again. Christians call it
incarnation > death > resurrection > ascension. This is about all of us, including
all of creation—not just Jesus—coming forth as individuals and then going back
to God, into the Ground of All Being. That cyclical wholeness should make us
unafraid of death and thus able to fully appreciate life.
The Risen Christ represents the final and full state of every True Self: God-in-
you who is able to see and honor God-everywhere-beyond-you too! In other
words, Christ is more than anything else a “holon”—a scientific term for
something that is simultaneously a whole by itself and yet a part of a larger
whole, too. Jesus is telling us that we are all holons! We all participate in the
one single life of God.
“To God, all people are in fact alive,” as Jesus put it (Luke 20:38). We are just in
different stages of that aliveness—one of which we experience as dying.

Bass: 2013), 81-84.

November 18 - November 23, 2018
As I’ve come to understand that life “composts” and “seeds” us as autumn does
the earth, I’ve seen how possibility gets planted in us even in the hardest of
times. —Parker Palmer (Sunday)
We can cultivate spiritual disciplines designed to dismantle our identity so

that we have hope of merging with the Divine. Or someone we love very much
may die, and we may find ourselves catapulted into the emptiness we had been
striving for. —Mirabai Starr (Monday)
I see [life after death] as infinite love, as if the whole atmosphere of heaven is
filled with God as a kind of vibration going through us. It strikes me as a
homecoming, us returning home to where we come from. —Joseph
Boyle (Tuesday)
The dying process is the culmination or the peak of the whole development of
the spiritual journey, in which total surrender to God involves the gift of life
itself. It’s not really death, but life reaching out to a fullness that we can’t
imagine from this side of the dying process. —Thomas Keating (Wednesday)
Some form of death—psychological, spiritual, relational, or physical—is the only
way we will loosen our ties to our small and separate false self. Only then does it
return in a new shape which we might call the Risen Christ, the soul, or the True
Self. (Thursday)
We are each a holon, a part that is simultaneously whole within itself and part of

a larger whole! We all participate in the one single life of God. (Friday)
Practice: Vinyasa and Savasana
The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit for “to yoke”—to join or unite. The
intentional movement, breath, and relaxation within yoga provides an
opportunity to welcome the seeming contradictions of our life. Muscles are
engaged and the body releases into deeper stretches. The mind is both
concentrated and stilled. Within vinyasa the body flows through a series of
poses, such as Sun Salutation (Surya Namaskara), and then finally rests in
Corpse Pose (Savasana).
If you are not familiar with yoga, consider joining a class in your area or find a
short video online to lead you through the poses and breaths of Sun Salutations.
If you already have a yoga practice, reflect on the wholeness of life and death as
you go through the familiar movements.
As you salute the sun, bend and bow in gratitude for the life force that flows
freely in you without your striving or control, yet invites your complete
participation.
As you inhale and exhale through each of the bends and lunges, challenge
yourself to breathe deeper, to stretch more fully, and let this practice be easy,
natural, without effort or strain.
As you lie on your back and let each muscle in your body—from toes to the top
of your head—relax and sink into the ground, remember that you will die, but
there is nothing to fear. Not even death can separate you from Love, and from
death comes Life. Rest in this awareness.

Publishing: 2016), 136-137.
For Further Study:
Thomas Keating, From the Mind to the Heart (Temple Rock Company: 2017)
Thomas Keating and Joseph Boyle

with Lucette Verboven, World Without End (Bloomsbury: 2017)
Thomas Keating with Carl J. Arico, The Gift of Life: Death & Dying, Life & Living
Companion Book (Contemplative Outreach, Ltd.: 2013)
Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old (Berrett-
Koehler Publishers, Inc.: 2018)
Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-Bass: 2013)
Mirabai Starr, God of Love: A Guide to the Heart of Judaism, Christianity and

Islam (Monkfish Book Publishing Company: 2012)
Christ in Paul's Eyes

Inseparable
Thursday, February 28, 2019
And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither
death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our
worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from
God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing
in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is
revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. —Romans 8:38-39, New Living Translation
Did you ever notice that Jesus tells the disciples to proclaim the Good News to
“all creation” or “every creature” (Mark 16:15), and not just to humans? Paul
affirms that he has done this very thing when he says, “Never let yourself drift
away from the hope promised by the Good News, which has been preached to
every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become the servant”
(Colossians 1:23). Did he really talk to and convince “every creature under
heaven” in his short lifetime? Surely not, but Paul knew that he had announced
to the world the deepest philosophical ground of things by saying that it all was
in Christ—and he daringly believed that this truth would eventually stick and
succeed.
I have never been separate from God, nor can I be, except in my mind. I would
love for you to bring this realization to loving consciousness! In fact, why not
stop reading now and just breathe and let it sink in? It is crucial that you know
this experientially and at a cellular level—which is, in fact, a real way of knowing
just as much as rational knowing. Its primary characteristic is that it is nondual
and thus an open-ended consciousness, which does not close down so quickly
and so definitively as dualistic thought does.
Regrettably, Christians have not protected this radical awareness of oneness

with the divine. Paul’s brilliant understanding of a Corporate Christ, and thus
our cosmic identity, was soon lost as early Christians focused more and more on
Jesus alone and even apart from the Eternal Flow of the Trinity, which is
theologically unworkable. Christ forever keeps Jesus firmly inside the Trinity,
not a later add-on or a somewhat arbitrary incarnation. Trinitarianism keeps
God as Relationship Itself from the very beginning, and not a mere divine
monarch.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change
Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent: 2019), 44-45.
Image credit: St. Paul Preaching in Athens (detail), Raphael, 1515, Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, England.
Week Fifty

Contemplation

Centering Prayer
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
My good friend Thomas Keating (1923–2018), who recently passed away,

dedicated the last several decades of his life to inter-spiritual dialogue and to
teaching Centering Prayer, which he developed with William Meninger and
Basil Pennington. Keating explained this contemplative practice in this way:
Centering Prayer is a method designed to facilitate the development of

contemplative prayer by preparing our faculties to receive this gift. . . . It is at
the same time a relationship with God and a discipline to foster that
relationship. This method of prayer is a movement beyond conversation with
Christ to communion with Him. [1]
Centering Prayer is based on the wisdom saying of Jesus in the Sermon on the
Mount (Matthew 6:6): “If you want to pray, enter your inner room, close the
door and pray to your Father in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will
reward you.” Notice that “Father” refers to a personal relationship, whether you
call it father, mother, brother, soul-friend, spouse or anything else.
The first step in Centering Prayer is to enter your inner room, which is
symbolized by the heart in most traditions; that is, your innermost self beyond
the senses and beyond thinking. . . .
Second, “close the door,” symbolizing your intention of letting go of all thoughts,
preoccupations, memories and plans during this time. As soon as you are
overtaken by thoughts, which is inevitable in the beginning, return to your
original intention to let go of all thinking. You can do this in a very simple and
extremely gently way, like saying a sacred word briefly, noticing your breath, or
turning to God with a brief glance of faith in His presence.
Finally, you pray in secret to the Father who speaks to you beyond words and
who invites you to ever deeper silence. . . .
The steps I have just mentioned are guidelines. Instead of using a word or
noticing your breath, you can also use a sacred image to return to. These
symbols do not establish you in interior silence; they simply reaffirm your
original intention to be in God’s presence and to be open to the divine action. . . .
The fruit of this prayer is not something you produce. You simply reduce the
obstacles by providing an interior environment in which the Spirit can speak
without words in the inmost depths of your being.
As you practice Centering Prayer, you begin to experience the value of inner
silence, which reveals the true self. The presence of God can also be experienced
through the love of nature, deep friendship, conjugal love, generous service of
others, or the discoveries of genuine science. There are many roads leading to
the awakening of the original endowment that God has given every human
being, of which the gift of contemplation is one. Contemplation . . . is a gift that
has already been given. You have got it! What you have to do is to allow it to
awaken within you. [2]
[1] Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart, 20th anniversary edition
(Bloomsbury: 2006), 175.
(Bloomsbury: 2017), 29-31.
Image credit: Brown Wooden Chair, Marcelo Jaboo.
Contemplation

The Unconscious
Friday, December 14, 2018
Feast Day of St. John of the Cross
Both Jesus and Paul love to use the subtle metaphor of leaven or yeast. Paul says
that we should “Throw out the old yeast and make ourselves into a totally new
batch of bread” (see 1 Corinthians 5:7). He seems to equate the old yeast with
our predisposition toward negativity and contentiousness, which we must bring
to consciousness or it will control us from a hidden place.
Jesus uses yeast in both a positive way, to describe a growth-inducing “yeast

which is hidden inside the dough” (see Matthew 13:33), and in a very negative
way, when he warns the disciples against “the yeast of the Pharisees and of
Herod” (see Mark 8:15).
I would like to suggest these passages tell us that leaven or yeast is a metaphor
for things hidden in the unconscious, which will have a lasting effect on us if we
do not bring them to consciousness. Carl Jung seemed to think that ninety
percent of our energy—good and bad—resides in the unconscious, over which
we have little direct control or accountability.
If we do not discover a prayer practice that “invades” our unconscious and

reveals what is hidden, we will actually change very little over our lifetime. This
was much of the genius of John of the Cross (1542–1591) who, in a highly
externalized Spanish Catholicism, spoke from personal experience of darkness,
inner journeys, and the shadow self. He was centuries ahead of the modern
discovery of the unconscious, and thus many of his fellow Carmelites considered
him heretical and dangerous.
Prayer should not be too rational, social, verbal, linear, or transactional. It must
be more mysterious, inner, dialogical, receptive, and pervasive. Silence, symbol,
poetry, music, movement, and sacrament are much more helpful than mere
words.
When you meditate consistently, a sense of your autonomy and private self-
importance—what you think of as your “self”—falls away, little by little, as
unnecessary, unimportant, and even unhelpful. The imperial “I,” the self that
you likely think of as your only self, reveals itself as largely a creation of your
mind.
Through regular access to contemplation, you become less and less

interested in protecting this self-created, relative identity. You don’t
have to attack it; it calmly falls away of its own accord and you
experience a kind of natural humility.
If your prayer goes deep, “invading” your unconscious, as it were,

your whole view of the world will change from fear to connection,
because you don’t live inside your fragile and encapsulated self
anymore.
In meditation, you move from ego consciousness to soul awareness, from being
fear-driven to being love-drawn. That’s it in a few words!
Of course, you can only do this if Someone Else is holding you, taking away your
fear, doing the knowing, and satisfying your desire for a Great Lover. If you can
allow that Someone Else to have their way with you, you will live with a new
vitality, a natural gracefulness, and inside of a Flow that you did not create. It is
actually the Life of the Trinity, spinning and flowing through you.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (CAC Publishing: 2017), 61-62, 66-67.
Image credit: Brown Wooden Chair, Marcelo Jaboo.
Contemplation

A Revolutionary Matter
Monday, December 17, 2018
Contemplation is beyond the normal consciousness of the mind, granting

access to the mystery, known only by love. Here, the normal activities of the
human personality come to rest, in order to hear what has remained unheard
and to see what has been hidden or veiled. The mystics call this kind of
knowing “unknowing” insofar as it approaches reality from the spiritual core
of the person and not from the mind alone. Far more than a meditative
practice or a temporary respite from worldly concerns, contemplation
revolutionizes conventional attitudes and roles in order to transform the
foundation upon which life is lived. And to illuminate the hidden teaching of
love inscribed in our souls. —Beverly Lanzetta [1]
Contemplation is radical in that it goes to “the root” (radix) of all our problems.
Contemplation is the heart of the matter because it changes consciousness and
thus transforms how we enter into communion with God, with ourselves, with
the moment. Without the contemplative mind, all our talk about and action for
social change and justice can actually do more harm than good. In working for
social change, we all get angry, disillusioned, alienated, and hurt. We make
mistakes, we don’t agree with others, we discover that change takes longer than
we’d hoped and the solution isn’t as simple as we’d imagined. I have seen far too
many give up, grow bitter, or just nurse a quiet cynicism when they can’t hold
disappointment with a contemplative, nondual consciousness. Action needs to
be accompanied by contemplation for us to stay on the journey for the long haul.
Otherwise, we’re just constantly searching for victims and perpetrators, and
eventually we start playing the victim or perpetrator ourselves.
Contemplation is not a new idea; it’s one of the treasures of our Christian
tradition. Jesus himself modeled this way of praying and being. It was taught
systematically in monasteries for centuries, for example, by Francisco de Osuna
(1492–1540), a Spanish Franciscan friar, whose writing liberated Teresa of
Ávila. The desert mothers and fathers in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and Cappadocia
understood and cultivated it for centuries. While systematic contemplative
teaching was largely lost for the last 500 years, today interfaith and inter-
denominational interest in contemplation continues to grow all over the world.
In 2012, Pope Benedict XVI invited Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of

Canterbury and leader of the Anglican Church in England, to address the Synod
of Catholic Bishops. Williams emphasized the foundational and radical
importance of contemplation:
[Contemplation] is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do:
it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed
humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world
with freedom—freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted
understanding that come from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only
ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and
our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us
to inhabit. To learn contemplative prayer is to learn what we need so as to live
truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter. [2]
[1] Beverly Lanzetta, The Monk Within: Embracing a Sacred Way of Life (Blue Sapphire
Books: 2018), 51-52.
[2] Rowan Williams, “The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Address

to the Thirteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops
on The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith,” (October 10,
2012), 8, emphasis
mine, http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/2645/archbishops-
address-to-the-synod-of-bishops-in-rome.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Contemplation and Action: An Informal Session of

Questions, Responses and Teachings, disc 2 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2009),
MP3 download; and
Transforming the World through Contemplative Prayer, disc 1 (Center for Action and
Contemplation: 2013), CD, MP3 download.
Image credit: Dancers in Green and White Dresses, Vinicius Vilela.
Contemplation

Perceiving Reality
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
All forms of contemplation share the same goal: to help us see through the
deceptions of self and world in order to get in touch with what Howard
Thurman called “the sound of the genuine” within us and around us.
Contemplation does not need to be defined in terms of particular practices,
such as meditation, yoga, tai chi, or lectio divina. Instead, it can be defined by
its function: contemplation is any way one has of penetrating illusion and
touching reality. —Parker Palmer [1]
The German mystic Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) said, “Let us pray to God
that we may be free of God that we may gain the truth. . . .” [2] There is no
concept of God that can contain God. As Saint Augustine (354–430) preached,
“If you comprehend it, it is not God.” [3] Thomas Keating described how
contemplation evolves our perception of reality and God:
Contemplation is awakening to the contemplative dimension of life. In the

Eastern traditions some call it meditation or the path to enlightenment. Every
development in contemplation reveals more and more of the
mystery of silence and the importance of receptivity over effort,
especially in prayer. It gives you a whole new perspective on reality.
. . . Contemplative Prayer is gradually detaching us from the God we know to the

God who actually is and whom we don’t know. At a certain point in our spiritual
development, we realize we have known Him [sic] only through our human
limitations. The nature of our prayer reflects our idea of God, and that idea
changes as our consciousness continues to evolve. A child becomes an adult who
is capable of more intimate relationships. . . . Every human being has the
potential for a unique relationship with God, and God is totally committed to
the transformation of each of us into Himself. . . .
The world desperately needs people, free of cultural illusions, who

are undertaking a dedicated exploration of true reality, not just to
know the material nature of things, but also to know the very Source
of everything that exists. An unfolding contemplative practice
eventually becomes total receptivity. In that receptivity, one is aware
of a silence that is becoming an irresistible attraction. Silence leads
to stillness; stillness leads to surrender. While this doesn’t happen
every time we sit down to pray, interior silence gradually opens to an
inner spaciousness that is alive. In this context, if we speak of
emptiness, we are not speaking of just emptiness, but of emptiness
that is beginning to be filled with a Presence. Perhaps we could say
that contemplation occurs when interior silence morphs into
Presence.
This Presence, once established in our inmost being, might be called

spaciousness. There is nothing in it except a certain vibrancy and
aliveness. You’re awake. But awake to what, you don’t know. You are
awake to something that you can’t describe and which is absolutely
marvelous, totally generous, and which manifests itself with
increasing tenderness, sweetness, and intimacy. [4]
[1] Parker Palmer, On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old (Berrett-
Koehler Publishers, Inc.: 2018), 57.
[2] Meister Eckhart, Beati Pauperes Spiritu, Sermon on Matthew 5:3. See The Complete
Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, tr. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe (The Crossroad
Publishing Company: 2009), 422.
[3] Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 117:5 on John 1:1. Original text: “Si enim comprehendis,
non est Deus.”
[4] Thomas Keating, From the Mind to the Heart (Temple Rock Company: 2017), pages are
unnumbered.
Contemplation

Sustaining Awareness
Thursday, December 20, 2018
As we saw yesterday, there are many forms of contemplative practice. CAC

faculty member James Finley describes how meditation—another name for
contemplation—is simply any practice that opens us up to Presence:
There is something about simply sitting still, quietly attentive to your

breathing, that tends to evoke less agitated, less thought-driven
modes of meditative awareness. When this shift . . . embodies a
sincere desire for God, a new capacity to realize oneness with God
begins to emerge. Resting in this awareness offers the least
resistance to God. . . .
As our resistance to God’s quiet persistence diminishes, our

experience of ourselves as other than Christ dissolves into a
meditatively realized oneness with Christ. Little by little, or all at
once, we come to that point of blessedness and freedom in which we
can say, along with Saint Paul, “For me to live is Christ” (Philippians
1:21). . . .
And this is what has happened to us many times: we are graced with moments
of spontaneous meditative experience of God’s presence in the midst of our
daily living, only to go on as if no awakening had been granted. . . . But not
quite. For the coming and going of our moments of awakening began to graze
our hearts with longing. This is what makes us seekers of the inner way—this
longing, in which we find ourselves going about with a certain holy discontent, a
holy restlessness, a kind of homesickness. . . .
Perhaps by trial and error, with no one to guide us, we find our own way to
respond to the unconsummated longings of our awakened heart. We, in effect,
discover our own personal ways to meditate. By meditation I mean, in this
context, any act habitually entered into with our whole heart as a way of
awakening and sustaining a more interior meditative awareness of the
present moment. The meditation practice we might find ourselves gravitating
toward could be baking bread, tending the roses, or taking long, slow walks to
no place in particular. Or we might find ourselves being interiorly drawn to
painting or to reading or writing poetry or listening to certain kinds of music.
Our meditation practice may be that of being alone, truly alone, without any
addictive props or escapes. Or our practice may be that of being with the person
in whose presence we awakened to what is most real and vital in our life. . . . We
cannot explain it, but when we give ourselves over to these simple acts, we are
taken to a deeper place. We become once again more grounded and settled in a
meditative awareness of the depth of the life we are living.
We discover we cannot make our moments of spontaneous meditative

awakening occur. But even so, we . . . freely [choose] to make ourselves as open
and receptive as possible to the graced event of awakening to that meditative
sense of oneness with God one with us in life itself.
James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God

(HarperSanFrancisco: 2004), 42-43, 45-46.
Contemplation

Kenosis: Letting Go
[Contemplative] practices beckon earthbound bodies toward an expanded

receptivity to holiness. . . . Receptivity is not a cognitive exercise but rather the
involvement of intellect and senses in a spiritual reunion and oneness with
God. . . . [The] contemplative moment is a spiritual event that kisses the
cognitive but will not be enslaved to its rigidities. —Barbara Holmes [1]
Over the past two weeks I’ve shared how contemplation is a way (or many
ways) of opening our hearts, minds, and bodies to God’s presence. It helps us
recognize and surrender our egoic, small self and live into our True Self, made
in the image and likeness of God.
Cynthia Bourgeault, one of CAC’s core faculty members, describes the power of
contemplative practices such as Centering Prayer to instill in us the mind of
Christ.
[Centering Prayer’s] simple but powerful pathway of transformation illumines . .

. what it means to “put on the mind of Christ.” . . . The theological basis for
Centering Prayer lies in the principle of kenosis, Jesus’s self-emptying love that
forms the core of his own self-understanding and life practice. . . .
Saint Paul explains this principle by way of his beautiful hymn in Philippians
2:6-11, prefacing his comments by saying, “Let the same mind be in you that was
in Christ Jesus”:
Though his state was that of God,
yet he did not deem equality with God
something he should cling to.
Rather he emptied himself,

and assuming the state of a slave,
he was born in human likeness. . . .
The phrase “emptied himself” in line 4 is the English translation of the Greek
verb kenosein, which is where the word kenosis comes from. In context, you’ll
see exactly what it means: it’s the opposite of the word “cling” in line 3. Jesus is
practicing gentle release. And he continues to practice it in every moment of his
life, as the next verse of the hymn makes clear:
He being known as one of us
humbled himself obedient unto death,
even death on a cross.
How beautifully simple—the path of Jesus hidden right there in plain sight!
While some Christians are still reluctant to think of Jesus as teaching a path
(isn’t it enough simply to be the Son of God?), in fact, the Gospels themselves
make clear that he is specifically inviting us to this journey and modeling how to
do it. Once you see this, it’s the touchstone throughout all his teaching: Let go!
Don’t cling! Don’t hoard! Don’t assert your importance! Don’t fret. “Do not be
afraid, little flock, it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom!”
(Luke 12:32).
And it’s this same core gesture we practice in Centering Prayer: thought by
thought by thought. You could really summarize Centering Prayer as kenosis in
meditation form.
[1] Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church,
2nd edition (Fortress Press: 2017), 3.
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity
in Theory and Practice (Shambhala: 2016), 33-34.
Contemplation

December 16 - December 21, 2018
The effectiveness of action depends on the source from which it springs. If it is

coming out of the false self with its shadow side, it is severely limited. If it is
coming out of a person who is immersed in God, it is extremely effective. —
Thomas Keating (Sunday)
Contemplation is radical in that it goes to the root (radix) of all our problems.
Contemplation is the heart of the matter because it changes consciousness and
thus transforms how we enter into communion with God, with ourselves, with
the moment. (Monday)
Contemplation is any way one has of penetrating illusion and touching reality.
—Parker Palmer (Tuesday)
[Centering down] is not an escape from the din of daily life; rather, it requires
full entry into the fray but on different terms. . . . Always, contemplation
requires attentiveness to the Spirit of God. —Barbara A. Holmes (Wednesday)
As our resistance to God’s quiet persistence diminishes, our experience of

ourselves as other than Christ dissolves into a meditatively realized oneness
with Christ. —James Finley (Thursday)
Centering Prayer’s simple but powerful pathway of transformation illumines

what it means to “put on the mind of Christ.” [Its basis] lies in the principle of
kenosis, Jesus’s self-emptying love that forms the core of his own self-
understanding and life practice. —Cynthia Bourgeault (Friday)
Practice: A Long, Loving Look
Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of

your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and
pleasing and perfect. —Romans 12:2
Be renewed in the spirit of your minds. . . . —Ephesians 4:23–24
Nondual or contemplative consciousness is about receiving and being present to

the moment and to the Now, exactly as it is, without splitting or dividing it,
without judgment, analysis, negative critique, mental commentary, liking, or
disliking; without resistance; and even without registering your preferences.
In other words, your mind, heart, soul, and senses are open and
receptive to the moment, just as it is. That allows you to say, “Just
this,” and love things in themselves, as themselves, and by
themselves, regardless of how they benefit or make demands on you.
Is there any other way to really love anything?
You gradually learn to hold everything—attractive and non-attractive

alike—together in one accepting gaze. This is divine seeing.
Contemplation has been well-described as “a long, loving look at the
Real.” Contemplata in Latin means to gaze at something eagerly or
with intense interest. Note that it is a deep looking more than a knee-
jerk thinking (which is not really thinking at all, but usually
narcissistic reacting).
Contemplative consciousness is a whole new mind! It is a different “software

and processing system” than most Westerners typically develop on our own, so
we must be taught how to see in this way.
Contemplation is another word for prayer, a kind of prayer that

doesn’t seek to fix, control, or explain but surrenders to Presence
and synthesizes the full reality, “warts and all.” Contemplative practice
is an exercise in humiliation as we come to see the repetition and power of our
thoughts. We realize that our thinking brain can’t help us understand or
experience the deep, significant things in life like love, suffering, death, infinity,
or God.
The mystics of all the world’s great religions understood that what I call the
“calculative” or dualistic mind cannot access God. Contemplative consciousness
leads to compassion and loving, which is the way to God. Here’s how the
Muslim mystic Shams-ud-din Mohammed Hafiz (1320–1389) put it:
Pulling out the chair
Beneath your mind
And watching you fall upon God—
There is nothing else for Hafiz to do
That is any fun in this world! [1]
[1] Daniel Ladinsky, inspired by Hafiz, “Laughter,” I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope
and Joy (Penguin: 2006), 65. Used with permission.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (CAC Publishing: 2017), 29-30; and Contemplation
and Action: An Informal Session of Questions, Responses and Teachings, disc 2 (Center for
Action and Contemplation: 2009), MP3 download.
For Further Study:
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and
Practice (Shambhala: 2016)
James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God

(HarperSanFrancisco: 2004)
Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, 2nd
edition (Fortress Press: 2017)
Thomas Keating, From the Mind to the Heart (Temple Rock Company: 2017)
Richard Rohr, Contemplation and Action: An Informal Session of Questions, Responses

and Teachings (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2009), MP3 download
Richard Rohr and Laurence Freeman, Transforming the World through Contemplative
Prayer (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2013), CD, MP3 download
Week Fifty

Contemplation

The Unconscious
Feast Day of St. John of the Cross
Both Jesus and Paul love to use the subtle metaphor of leaven or yeast. Paul says
that we should “Throw out the old yeast and make ourselves into a totally new
batch of bread” (see 1 Corinthians 5:7). He seems to equate the old yeast with
our predisposition toward negativity and contentiousness, which we must bring
to consciousness or it will control us from a hidden place.
Jesus uses yeast in both a positive way, to describe a growth-inducing “yeast

which is hidden inside the dough” (see Matthew 13:33), and in a very negative
way, when he warns the disciples against “the yeast of the Pharisees and of
Herod” (see Mark 8:15).
I would like to suggest these passages tell us that leaven or yeast is a metaphor
for things hidden in the unconscious, which will have a lasting effect on us if we
do not bring them to consciousness. Carl Jung seemed to think that ninety
percent of our energy—good and bad—resides in the unconscious, over which
we have little direct control or accountability.
If we do not discover a prayer practice that “invades” our unconscious and

reveals what is hidden, we will actually change very little over our lifetime. This
was much of the genius of John of the Cross (1542–1591) who, in a highly
externalized Spanish Catholicism, spoke from personal experience of darkness,
inner journeys, and the shadow self. He was centuries ahead of the modern
discovery of the unconscious, and thus many of his fellow Carmelites considered
him heretical and dangerous.
Prayer should not be too rational, social, verbal, linear, or transactional. It must
be more mysterious, inner, dialogical, receptive, and pervasive. Silence, symbol,
poetry, music, movement, and sacrament are much more helpful than mere
words.
When you meditate consistently, a sense of your autonomy and

private self-importance—what you think of as your “self”—falls away,
little by little, as unnecessary, unimportant, and even unhelpful. The
imperial “I,” the self that you likely think of as your only self, reveals
itself as largely a creation of your mind.
Through regular access to contemplation, you become less and less

interested in protecting this self-created, relative identity. You don’t
have to attack it; it calmly falls away of its own accord and you
experience a kind of natural humility.
If your prayer goes deep, “invading” your unconscious, as it were,

your whole view of the world will change from fear to connection,
because you don’t live inside your fragile and encapsulated self
anymore.
In meditation, you move from ego consciousness to soul awareness,

from being fear-driven to being love-drawn. That’s it in a few words!
Of course, you can only do this if Someone Else is holding you, taking away your
fear, doing the knowing, and satisfying your desire for a Great Lover. If you can
allow that Someone Else to have their way with you, you will live with a new
vitality, a natural gracefulness, and inside of a Flow that you did not create. It is
actually the Life of the Trinity, spinning and flowing through you.
The Natural World

Nature as a Mirror of God

Monday, March 12, 2018
Long ago, St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), named a Doctor of the Church in
2012, communicated creation spirituality through music, art, poetry, medicine,
gardening, and reflections on nature. She wrote in her famous book, Scivias:
You understand so little of what is around you because you do not use what is
within you. [1]
This is key to understanding Hildegard and is very similar to Teresa of Ávila’s

understanding of the soul. Without using the word, Hildegard recognized that
the human person is a microcosm with a natural affinity for or resonance with
its macrocosm, which many call God. Our little world reflects the big world. The
key word here is resonance. Contemplative prayer allows your mind
to resonate with what is visible and right in front of you. Contemplation erases
the separateness between the seer and the seen.
Hildegard often used the word viriditas, the greening of things from within,
similar to what we now call photosynthesis. She recognized a readiness in plants
to receive the sun and to transform it into energy and life. She also saw an
inherent connection between the physical world and the divine Presence. This
connection translates into energy that is the soul and seed of everything, an
inner voice calling you to “Become who you are; become all that you are.” This is
our “life wish” or what Carl Jung called the “whole-making spirit.”
Hildegard is a wonderful example of someone who lives safely inside an entire

cosmology, a universe where the inner shows itself in the outer, and the outer
reflects the inner, where the individual reflects the cosmos, and the cosmos
reflects the individual. Hildegard said, “O Holy Spirit, you are the mighty way in
which every thing that is in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth, is
penetrated with connectedness, penetrated with relatedness.” [2] It is truly a
Trinitarian universe, with all things whirling toward one another: from orbits, to
gravity, to ecosystems, to sexuality.
In another place, Hildegard has God saying:

I have created mirrors in which I consider all the wonders of my originality
which will never cease. [3]
Indeed, for Hildegard nature was a mirror for the soul and for God. This
mirroring changes how we see and experience reality. Later, Bonaventure (1217-
1274) wrote: “In the soul’s journey to God we must present to ourselves the
whole material world as the first mirror through which we may pass over to the
Supreme [Artisan].” [4] The Dominican Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) said the
same: “If humankind could have known God without the world, God would
never have created the world.” [5]
Nature is not a mere scenic backdrop so humans can take over the stage.
Creation is in fact a full participant in human transformation, since the outer
world is absolutely needed to mirror the true inner world. There are not just two
sacraments, or even seven; the whole world is a sacrament!
[1] Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 1.2.29. Translation supplied by Avis Clendenen,

“Hildegard: ‘Trumpet of God’ and ‘Living Light’” in Chicago Theological Seminary
Register 89 (2), Spring 1999, 25.
[2] Hildegard of Bingen, Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen, by Gabriele Uhlein (Santa

Fe, NM: Bear & Co., 1982), 41.
[3] Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works, with Letters and Songs, ed. Matthew Fox
(Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co., 1987), 128.
[4] Bonaventure, Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey to God, I, 9, trans. Ewert Cousins (New
York: Paulist Press, 1978), 63. Emphasis added.
[5] Meister Eckhart, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, ed. Maurice
O’Connell Walshe, rev. Bernard McGinn (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company,
2009), 275.
Adapted from Richard Rohr with John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming
Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety (Franciscan Media: 2001), 135; and
unpublished “Rhine” talks (2015).
Twelve-Step Spirituality: Week 2
Step 2: Trusting a Higher Power

We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to

sanity. —Step 2 of the Twelve Steps
You have probably heard it said that most of our problems tend to be

psychological, but our solutions are always spiritual. Alcoholics
Anonymous insists this is especially true for chronic alcoholics: they
are “100 percent hopeless, apart from divine help” as one doctor put it
in the Big Book. [1] It is “an illness which only a spiritual experience will
conquer.” [2]
Alcoholics Anonymous is very clear that “a vital spiritual experience” is

necessary for recovery. Carl Jung used that term when he told one of his
patients that it was his only hope: “Here and there, once in a while,
alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences. . . . Ideas,
emotions, and attitudes which were once the guiding forces of the lives of
these people are suddenly cast to one side, and a completely new set of
conceptions and motives begin to dominate them.” [3]
This is what I call “an identity transplant,” or as Paul describes it, “I live no
longer, not I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Your life is no longer
about you. You are about Life! This unitive encounter is the “cure” for our
inherent selfishness and separateness.
A.A. is careful to point out that this “spiritual experience” is not always
“sudden and spectacular” as it was in Bill Wilson’s case. “Most of our
experiences are what the psychologist William James calls the
‘educational variety,’ because they develop slowly over a period of
time. . . . With few exceptions, our members find that [over time] they
have tapped an unexpected inner resource which they presently
identify with their own conception of a Power greater than
themselves.” [4]
Step 2 is the necessary longing, delaying, and backsliding that invariably

precedes the full leap of faith. The statement wisely uses an active verb to
describe the movement: came to believe. The surrender of faith does not
happen in one moment, but is an extended journey, a trust walk, a gradual
letting go, unlearning, and handing over. No one does it on the first or even
second try. Desire and longing must be significantly deepened and
broadened.
To finally surrender ourselves to healing, we have to have three spaces

opened up within us, all at the same time: our opinionated head, our
closed-down heart, and our defensive and defended body. That is the
core work of all spirituality—and it is work. Yet, it is finally the work
of “a Power greater than ourselves.” [5] All we can do is keep out of
the way, note and weep over our defensive behaviors, and open our full
selves to God’s presence. The Presence that is surely the Highest Power is
then obvious, all embracing, and quickly effective. So it takes us a long
time to come to believe—which is the gradual healing and reconnecting of
head, heart, and body so they operate as one open field. [6] Without this,
many, if not most, people remain religious but not spiritual (which
organized religion has been content with for far too long).
Gateway to Silence:
Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.
References:
[1] “J,” A Simple Program: A Contemporary Translation of the Book
“Alcoholics Anonymous” (Hyperion: 1996), 40.
[2] Ibid., 41.
[3] Ibid., 25-26.
[4] Ibid., 159-160.
[5] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and

the Twelve Steps (Franciscan Media: 2011), 8.
[6] Ibid., 15.
Image Credit: Femme assise (Melancholy Woman, detail), Pablo Picasso,

1902-03, The Detroit Museum of Art.
Posted in Daily Meditations | Also tagged Alcoholics Anonymous, Big
Book, Bill Wilson, Carl Jung, Galatians 2:20, Paul, psychological, Step 2
Jung: Week 1
A Different Kind of Mystic

Sunday, October 4, 2015
(Feast of Saint Francis)
This week and next I will explore how Swiss psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-
1961) has contributed to my wisdom lineage. Some people do not like the fact that I
quote Jung at all. I don’t agree with every word he’s ever written, but he gives us more
than enough wisdom to trust him. I must admit that Jung has had much influence on me.
I first read his work when I was in college, and again and again he would offer concepts
that I knew were true. At the time, I didn’t have the education to intellectually justify it;
I just knew intuitively that he was largely right. Jung brought together de facto theology
with very good psychology. He surely is no enemy of religion, as some imagine. When
asked at the end of his life if he “believed” in God, Jung said, “I could not say I believe.
I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than
myself, something that people call God.” I’m convinced he was a mystic because he
insisted on actual inner experience of outer dogmas and doctrines, and that’s what
mystics always emphasize. [1]
Depth psychology, which in some respects is a modern secular version of traditional

spirituality and deals with many of the same issues, tells us that our lives are guided by
subconscious, ruling images which Jung calls archetypes—such as the father, the
mother, the eternal child, the hero, the virgin, the wise old man, the magician, the
trickster, the devil, and the God image. Jung claims that some of these archetypes are
found all over the world. They just keep recurring in different ways and utterly fascinate
the soul. Thus he said they are part of “the collective unconscious,” which is another of
his key ideas. These fundamental patterns show up in dreams and behavior in every
culture, and they appear in symbols and stories that go as far back in time as we can go.
[2] Hence, they actually create the perennial tradition, and are especially communicated
in myth, religion, and art—all of which the overly rational mind dismisses as
unimportant.
In our Living School, we are teaching the perennial tradition, which in effect was
affirmed by many of the broad minded documents of the Second Vatican Council in the
1960s. [3] The perennial tradition teaches us to recognize and honor the revelation of
God in all the world traditions and peoples. It emphasizes the recurring themes in all of
the world’s religions and philosophies that each say in their own way [4]:
There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things.

There is in the human soul a natural capacity, similarity, and longing for this Divine
Reality.
The final goal of existence is union with this Divine Reality. [4]
Carl Jung simply calls this the inner God archetype, the “whole-making instinct” which
drives and stirs every soul to become what it is, and become all that it is. Only the
words and symbols are different. Christians would call this whole-making instinct the
indwelling Holy Spirit “who teaches you all things and reminds you of all things” (John
14:26). We will develop this more tomorrow.
Jung: Week 1
Inner Authority
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
I think Carl Jung is one of the best friends of religion in the past
century, yet most Christians have either ignored him or criticized him.
Jung says, for example, “The main interest of my work is not
concerned with the treatment of neurosis, but instead with an
approach to the numinous [Transcendent God experience]. The
approach to the numinous is the real therapy, and inasmuch as you
attain to numinous experience, you are released from the curse of
pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character!” [1]
This becomes Jung’s major critique of Christianity. Jung felt that

Christianity contributed to a discontinuity—an unbridgeable gap—between
God and the soul by our overemphasis on externals and mere intellectual
belief in things that never touched our inner core. Jung observed that
Christianity had become dogmatized and ritualized, belonging to groups
instead of any real transformation of consciousness. He believed that
Christianity had some very good theology (“an almost perfect map for the
soul”), but it often had a very poor psychology and anthropology. Insofar
as this is true, it creates a huge disconnect even among quite good and
sincere people. The message does not “grab” them; it is not compelling or
empowering for their real life. Jung was deeply disillusioned by his own
father and six uncles, all Swiss Reformed pastors, whom he saw as
unhappy and unintegrated human beings. Jung basically said of
Christianity: “It’s not working in real life!”
I know many people think that Jung was not a “believer” and others feel
that he is saying that the human psyche itself is “God.” These views come
from an oversimplified reading of Jung’s work. He did say that the
human psyche was the mediation point, and that if God wants to speak
to you, God has to speak in words that are first going to feel like your
own thoughts. Of course he is right! How else could God speak to you?
You have to be taught to honor, allow, give authority to, and recognize
that sometimes your thoughts are God’s thoughts. This is the major
fruit of training in the contemplative mind. The dualistic or non-
contemplative mind cannot imagine how both could be true at the same
time. The contemplative mind sees things in wholes and not in divided
parts.
Jung wouldn’t have fit the bill for the classic Catholic definition of a saint.
He had a number of affairs and for a little while flirted with Nazism. He
had a mixed past—don’t we all?—yet his very mistakes usually led him
back to his depths and to his groundbreaking understanding of the shadow
self that lurks in our personal unconscious and is then projected outward
onto others. This is what Jesus had described as having a log in our own
eye, but being preoccupied with the splinter in other peoples’ eyes
(Matthew 7:3-5), or “The lamp of the body is the eye” (Matthew 6:22). The
face we turn toward our own unconscious is the face we turn toward the
world. People who accept themselves accept others. People who hate
themselves hate others. And it is only the Divine Light which gives us
freedom and permission to go “all the way down” into our depths. Without
it, we do not have the necessary courage.
By examining his own depths, Jung was able to find an inner authority that
he could trust, a voice larger than his own—and yet it was his own voice
too. Jung sought to bring back balance to the Church’s over-reliance upon
external authority—Scripture for Protestants, popes and priests for
Catholics. Rather than top-down, outside-in religion, Jung taught people to
experience the Christian symbols from the inside out. He wanted us to
recognize that there are numinous voices in our deepest depths. Jung
believed that if one did not have deep contact with one’s in-depth self, one
could not know God. I would add that knowing a loving God gives you full
freedom to love and accept every part of yourself. If one does not allow the
Whole-Making Image (“God”) to freely operate, one finds it almost
impossible to totally know, accept, and forgive oneself. We are indeed
saved by mercy.
If you think that’s just modern pop psychology, then read Teresa of
Ávila’s Interior Castle. To describe the dwelling place of God in this
creation, she says “I myself can come up with nothing as magnificent as the
beauty and amplitude of a soul!” [2] If it were not a 16 th century Spanish
Doctor of the Church making this statement, you might not dare to believe
such good psychological news. (When the Roman Catholic Church
proclaims someone a Doctor it means the Church sees their spiritual
teaching as “entirely reliable.”)
Gateway to Silence:
God-in-me sees God.
References:
[1] C. G. Jung, Letters I, August 31, 1945.
[2] Teresa of Ávila, translated by Mirabai Starr, The Interior
Castle (Riverhead Books: 2004), 36.
Adapted from Richard Rohr’s unpublished “Rhine River” talks (2015).

Heaven Now

The Gate of Heaven

Thursday, May 2, 2019
James Finley, one of the Center for Action and Contemplation’s core faculty
members, was a spiritual directee of Thomas Merton (1915–1968) at the Abbey
of Gethsemani. Drawing from this experience and his own insights as a
student of the mystics and a clinical psychologist, Finley helps us get a glimpse
of heaven.
When Merton told me that “one thing for sure about heaven is that there is not
going to be much of you there,” he was, I think, referring to the mystery that
even now we are in God’s kingdom. And that even now we can begin to realize it
if we but die to egocentric self-seeking and seek God’s will with a pure heart.
Because God is everywhere God is likewise no-where, meaning there is no

“where” in which we can see God “out there.” Closer to us than we are to
ourselves, God is too close to see. God is the heart of our heart, the hope of our
hopes, the love of our love, the ground of our being.
Where must we go to see God? Nowhere! What can we do to have

God? Nothing! All we can do, at least for a moment (an eternal
moment) is to abandon all doing and be who we are in God and open
ourselves to God’s life within us. It is then that we will at once see God and
ourselves in a unity of divine love.
In fidelity to silent prayer there is unveiled the possibility of infinite

growth in union with God. We can be so transformed through this
unveiling that we existentially realize within us that “for me to live is
Christ” [Philippians 1:21]. We realize obscurely in our being, that our
simple, concrete acts are open to a transformation through which they are “not
only Godlike, but they become God’s own acts.” [1]
There is nowhere to go. There is nothing to do. God is upon and within us. In
the midst of our humble duties, our poor, weak selves, our simple being who we
are, we can say with Jacob with overwhelming gratitude: “Truly this is the house
of God and the gate of heaven and I knew it not” [see Genesis 28:16-17]. [2]
[1] Thomas Merton, What Are These Wounds? The Life of a Cistercian Mystic, Saint
Lutgarde of Aywières (Bruce: 1950), 14.
[2] James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere: A Search for God Through Awareness of
the True Self (Ave Maria Press:1978, 1983), 112-113. Learn more from James Finley at
jamesfinley.org.
Image credit: La Sieste (detail), Paul Gauguin, 1892–1894, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, New York.
Summary: Week Eighteen

Heaven Now

April 28 - May 3, 2019
You’re choosing your destiny right now. Do you want to live in love and
communion? Or do you want to live in constant opposition to others and life
itself? (Sunday)
Union is not a place we go to later—if we are good; union is the place from
which we come, the place from which we’re called to live now. (Monday)
The concrete, the specific, the physical, the here-and-now—when we can be

present to it in all of its ordinariness—becomes the gateway to the Eternal.
(Tuesday)
If authentic God-experience first makes you overcome the primary split between
yourself and the Divine, then it should also overcome the split between yourself
and the rest of creation. (Wednesday)
In fidelity to silent prayer there is unveiled the possibility of infinite growth in

union with God. We can be so transformed through this unveiling that we
existentially realize within us that “for me to live is Christ.” —James Finley
(Thursday)
The death of our physical form is not the death of our individual personhood.
Our personhood remains alive and well, “hidden with Christ in God” (to use
Paul’s beautiful phrase in Colossians 3:3) and here and now we can draw
strength from it (and [Christ]) to live our temporal lives with all the fullness of
eternity. —Cynthia Bourgeault (Friday)
Practice: Praying Always
I don’t believe hell or heaven to be post-life destinations. I believe they are

states of consciousness largely visible here and now. A world of objects is a
kind of hell. A world of subjects—divine beings honoring the divinity in the
other—is surely heaven. —Josh Radnor [1]
Prayer is not a transaction that somehow pleases God but a transformation of

the consciousness of the one doing the praying. Prayer is the awakening of an
inner dialogue that, from God’s side, has never ceased. This is why Paul could
write of praying “always” (see 1 Thessalonians 5:17). Prayer is not changing
God’s mind about us or about anything else, but allowing God to change our
mind about the reality right in front of us (which we usually avoid or distort).
When we put on a different mind, heaven takes care of itself. In fact,

it begins now. If we resort too exclusively to verbal, wordy prayers,
we’ll remain stuck in our rational, dualistic minds and will not
experience deep change at the level of consciousness. Prayer is
sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we
are grateful, and praising God until we ourselves are an act of praise.
Jesus tells his disciples, “Be awake. Be alert. . . . You do not know when the Lord
of the house is coming, whether in the evening, at midnight, at cock crow, or in
the morning” (see Mark 13:33-35). Jesus is not threatening, “You’d better do it
right, or I’m going to get you.” He’s talking about the forever, eternal
coming of Christ now . . . and now . . . and now. God’s judgment is
always redemption. Christ is always coming. God is always present.
It’s we who fall asleep.
Be ready. Be present to God in the here and now, the ordinary, the
interruptions. Being fully present to the soul of all things will allow
you to say, “This is good. This is enough. In fact, this is all I need.”
You are now situated in the One Loving Gaze that unites all things in universal
attraction and appreciation. We are practicing for heaven. Why wait for
heaven when you can enjoy the Divine Flow in every moment, in
everyone?
[1] Josh Radnor, “Saluting the Divinity in You,” “Anger,” Oneing, vol. 6, no. 1 (Center for
Action and Contemplation: 2018), 47, 50.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2017), 16, 18,
37-38.
Image credit: La Sieste (detail), Paul Gauguin, 1892–1894, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, New York.
For Further Study:
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—A New
Perspective on Christ and His Message (Shambhala: 2008)
James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere: A Search for God Through Awareness of the
True Self (Ave Maria Press: 1978, 1983)
Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (CAC Publishing: 2016)
Richard Rohr: Essential Teachings on Love, eds. Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Orbis
Books: 2018)

Meeting Christ Within Us
God With Us
Sunday, May 26, 2019
If God’s Spirit has truly joined our spirit, then we have every reason to trust the
deepest movements of our natures. This trust becomes a key for all spirituality.
The goal of Christian spirituality is to recognize and respond to the continual
interior movements of the Spirit, for the Spirit will always lead us toward
greater union with Christ and greater love and service of God and others. —
Richard Hauser [1]
In this week’s meditations, I will be focusing on the importance of an inner life,

a life grounded in contemplation, a life that searches for the hidden wholeness
underneath the passing phenomena, a life that seeks substance instead of
simply an endless preoccupation with forms.
The West—and the United States in particular—is fascinated with forms. We like
impermanent things, maybe because they can’t nail us down to anything solid or
lasting, and we float in an ephemeral and transient world of argumentative
ideas. But this preference isn’t bearing substantial fruit. This culture seems to be
creating people who are very unsure of themselves, who are grasping in every
direction for a momentary sense of identity or importance.
The goal is to get people to a deeper level, to the unified field, or what I like to
call “nondual thinking,” where God alone can hold the contradictions together.
When Christians speak of Christ, we are naming an ever-growing encounter, not

a fixed package that is all-complete and must be accepted as is. On the inner
journey of the soul, we meet a God who interacts with our deepest selves, who
grows the person, who allows and forgives mistakes. It is precisely this give-and-
take, and knowing there will be give-and-take, that makes God so real as a
Lover.
What kind of God would only push from without and never draw from within?
Yet this is precisely the one-sided God that many Christians were offered and
that much of the world has now rejected. God unfolds our personhood from
within through a constant increase in freedom—even freedom to fail. Love
cannot happen in any other way. This is why Paul shouts in Galatians, “For
freedom Christ has set us free!” (5:1).
God loves you by becoming you, taking your side in the inner dialogue of self-
accusation and defense. God loves you by turning your mistakes into grace, by
constantly giving you back to yourself in a larger shape. God stands with you,
not against you, whenever you are tempted to shame or self-hatred. If your
authority figures resorted to threat and punishment, it can be hard to feel or
trust this inner give and take. Remember, the only thing that separates you from
God is the thought that you are separate from God!
References:
[1] Richard J. Hauser, In His Spirit: A Guide to Today’s Spirituality (Beacon:

2011), 24.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a
Place of Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 10, 11; and
The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See,
Hope For, and Believe (Convergent: 2019), 79-80.
Image credit: Knot the One, by Karen Jacobs, 1993. Used with permission of the
artist.
Inspiration for this week’s banner image: Christ’s soul and our soul are like an
everlasting knot. The deeper we move in our own being, the closer we come to
Christ. And the closer we come to Christ’s soul, the nearer we move to the heart
of one another. —John Philip Newell, explaining the teachings of Julian of
Norwich
Posted in Daily Meditations | Also tagged Christ, Contemplation, encounter,

freedom, God, Richard Hauser, Soul, Meeting Christ Within Us
God Speaks
Monday, May 27, 2019
In a time when everything was being swept away, when “the whole world is
becoming a giant concentration camp,” [Etty Hillesum] felt one must hold fast
to what endures—the encounter with God at the depths of one’s own soul and in
other people. —Robert Ellsberg [1]
To follow their own paths to wholeness, both Swiss psychoanalyst

Carl Jung (1875–1961) and Jewish Auschwitz victim Etty Hillesum
(1914–1943) trusted in and hearkened to the voice of God in their
deepest Selves. Many educated and sophisticated people are not
willing to submit to indirect, subversive, and intuitive knowing,
which is probably why they rely far too much on external law and
behavior to achieve their spiritual purposes. They know nothing else
that feels objective and solid. Intuitive truth, that inner whole-
making instinct, just feels too much like our own thoughts and
feelings, and most of us are not willing to call this “God,” even when
that voice prompts us toward compassion instead of hatred,
forgiveness instead of resentment, generosity instead of stinginess,
bigness instead of pettiness.
But think about it: If the incarnation is true, then of course God
speaks to us through our own thoughts! When accusers called Joan
of Arc (1412–1431) the victim of her own imagination, she is
frequently credited with this brilliant reply: “How else would God
speak to me?”
The inner voice so honored by Hillesum and Jung is experienced as

the deepest and usually hidden self, where most of us do not go. It
truly does speak at a level “beneath” rational consciousness, a place
where only the humble—or the trained—know how to go.
Late in his life, Jung wrote, “In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my
having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the
little clod of earth that I am.” [2] Jung, a supposed unbeliever, knew that any
authentic God experience takes a lot of humble, honest, and patient seeking.
This is where embracing the Christ Mystery becomes utterly

practical. Without the mediation of Christ, we will be tempted to
overplay the distance and the distinction between God and
humanity. But because of the incarnation, the supernatural is
forever embedded in the natural, making the very distinction false.
How good is that? This is why mystics like Hillesum, Jung,
Augustine, Teresa of Ávila, Thomas Merton, and many others seem
to equate the discovery of their own souls with the very discovery of
God. It takes much of our life, much lived experience, to trust and
allow such a process. But when it comes, it will feel like a calm and
humble ability to quietly trust yourself and trust God at the same
time. Isn’t that what we all want?
References:
[1] Robert Ellsberg, All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and
Witnesses for Our Time (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 1998, ©1997),
521.
[2] From a letter to a pupil (April 9, 1959). See C. G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-
1950, selected and edited by Gerhard Adler (Routledge: 2015, ©1973), 19, n. 8.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can
Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent: 2019), 85-87.
The Voice of God
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Among human beings, who knows what pertains to a person except the spirit of
the person that is within? Similarly, no one knows what pertains to God except
the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit that
is from God, so that we may understand the things freely given us by God. And
we speak about them not with words taught by human wisdom, but with words
taught by the Spirit, describing spiritual realities in spiritual terms. —1
Corinthians 2:11-13
If you can trust and listen to your inner divine image, your whole-making
instinct, or your True Self, you will act from your best, largest, kindest, most
inclusive self. I would also like to add “your most compassionately dissatisfied
self” because the soul’s journey invites us to infinite depth that we can never
fully plumb!
Rather than consuming spiritual gifts for yourself alone, you must receive all
words of God so that you can speak them to others tenderly and with subtlety. If
any thought feels too harsh, shaming, or diminishing of yourself or others, it is
not likely the voice of God but the ego. Why do humans so often presume the
exact opposite—that shaming voices are always from God and graced voices are
always the imagination? That is a self-defeating (“demonic”?) path.
If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward
others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God. One holy man who
recently came to visit me put it this way: “We must listen to what is supporting
us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging
us. We must listen to what is alive in us.” I personally was so trained not to trust
those voices that I often did not hear the voice of God speaking to me, or what
Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.”
Yes, a narcissistic person can misuse such advice, but someone genuinely living
in love will flourish inside such a dialogue. That is the risk that God takes—and
we must take—for the sake of a fruitful relationship with God. It takes so much
courage and humility to trust the voice of God within. Mary personifies such
trust in her momentous and free “Let it be” to the Archangel Gabriel (Luke
1:38). Don’t you suppose that Gabriel sounded just like her own mind? She
never talks about such an angel again.
We must learn how to recognize the positive flow and to distinguish it from the
negative resistance within ourselves. It takes years of practice. If a voice comes
from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the
“Accuser,” which is the literal meaning of the biblical word “Satan.” Shaming,
accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks. God is supremely nonviolent.
God only cajoles, softens, and invites us into an always bigger field and it is
always a unified field.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality
Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent: 2019), 87,
88-89.
artist.
Norwich
Posted in Daily Meditations | Also tagged encounter, God, Grace, Humility,

relationship, Soul, trust
Going to the Depths
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Christianity’s foundational belief is always incarnation. Yet Christians in the

West have focused on abstract ideas instead of actual transformation into our
own incarnate humanity. Now that very humanity has grown tired of
disembodied spiritualities that allow no validation or verification in experience.
Thus, many religions hide an actual agenda of power and control, obfuscating
and distracting us from what is right in front of us. This is exactly what we do
when we make the emphasis of Jesus’ Gospel what is “out there” as opposed to
what is “in here.”
For example, insisting on a literal belief in the virgin birth of Jesus is very good
theological symbolism, but unless it translates into a spirituality of interior
poverty, readiness to conceive, and human vulnerability, it is largely a “mere
lesson memorized” as Isaiah puts it (29:13). It “saves” no one. Likewise, an
intellectual belief that Jesus rose from the dead is a good start, but until you are
struck by the realization that the crucified and risen Jesus is a parable about the
journey of all humans, and even the universe, it is a rather harmless—if not
harmful—belief that will leave you and the world largely unchanged.
Many Westerners today are now reacquiring and accessing more of the skills we
need to go into the depths of things—and to find God’s Spirit there. Whether
they come through contemplation, psychology, spiritual direction, shadow work,
the Enneagram, Myers-Briggs typology, grief and bereavement work, or other
models such as Integral Theory or wilderness experience [1], these tools help us
to examine and to trust interiority and depth.
One of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life came in 1984 during a
journaling retreat in Ohio led by the psychotherapist Ira Progoff (1921–1998).
[2] Dr. Progoff guided us as we wrote privately for several days on some very
human and ordinary questions. I remember first dialoguing with my own body,
dialoguing with roads not taken, dialoguing with concrete memories and
persons, dialoguing with my own past decisions, and on and on.
I learned that if the quiet space, the questions themselves, and blank pages had
not been put in front of me, I may never have known what was lying within me.
Progoff helped me and many others access slow tears and fast prayers, and
ultimately intense happiness and gratitude, as I discovered depths within myself
that I never knew were there. I still reread some of what I wrote over forty years
ago for encouragement and healing. And it all came from within me!
Today we are recovering freedom and permission and the tools to move toward
depth. What a shame it would be if we did not use them. The best way out is if
we have first gone in. The only way we can trust up is if we have gone down.
That has been the underlying assumption of male initiation rites since ancient
times but, today, such inner journeys and basic initiation experiences are often
considered peripheral to “true religion.”
References:
[1] See, for example, Illuman, Outward Bound, Bill Plotkin’s Animas Valley
Institute, New Warrior Training.
[2] See IntensiveJournal.org.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can
Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (Convergent: 2019), 114-115.
artist.
Norwich

Our Deepest Desire
Thursday, May 30, 2019
Find your delight in the Lord who will give you your heart’s desire. —Psalm 37:4
One of my favorite mystics is the English anchorite Julian of Norwich (1342–

1416). After a serious illness, during which she experienced “shewings” or
revelations of Jesus’ love, she wrote about the compassionate, mothering God
she had encountered. Today’s meditation is longer as I want to share John
Philip Newell’s beautiful summary of Julian’s visions:
She says that Christ is the one who connects us to the “great root” of our
being. . . . [1] “God is our mother as truly as God is our father,” she says. [2] We
come from the Womb of the Eternal. We are not simply made by God; we are
made “of God.” [3] So we encounter the energy of God in our true depths. And
we will know the One from whom we have come only to the extent that we know
ourselves. God is the “ground” of life. [4] So it is to the very essence of our being
that we look for God. . . .
God “is in everything,” writes Julian. [5] God is “nature’s substance,” the very
essence of life. [6] So she speaks of “smelling” God, of “swallowing” God in the
waters and juices of the earth, of “feeling” God in the human body and the body
of creation. [7] . . . Grace is given to save our nature, not to save us from our
nature. It is given to free us from the unnaturalness of what we have become
and done to one another and to the earth. Grace is given, she says, “to bring
nature back to that blessed point from which it came, namely God.” [8] It is
given that we may hear again the deepest sounds within us.
What Julian hears is that “we are all one.” [9] We have come from God as one,
and to God we shall return as one. And any true well-being in our lives will be
found not in isolation but in relation. She uses the image of the knot . . . to
portray the strands of time and eternity intertwined, of the human and the
creaturely inseparably interrelated, of the one and the many forever married.
Christ’s soul and our soul are like an everlasting knot. The deeper we move in
our own being, the closer we come to Christ. And the closer we come to Christ’s
soul, the nearer we move to the heart of one another. In Christ, we hear not
foreign sounds but the deepest intimations of the human and the divine
intertwined.
And for Julian, the key to hearing what is at the heart of the human soul is to
listen to our deepest longings, for “the desire of the soul,” she says, “is the desire
of God.” [10] Of course, many of our desires have become infected or overlaid by
confusions and distortions, but at the root of our being is the sacred longing for
union. It is to this deepest root that Christ leads us. Our soul is made “of God,”
as Julian says, so it is grounded in the desires of God. And at the heart of these
holy desires is what Julian calls “love-longing.” [11] It is the most sacred and the
most natural of yearnings. The deeper we move within the human soul, the
closer we come to this divine yearning. And the nearer we come to our true self,
“the greater will be our longing.” [12]
How did we ever lose such massive, in-depth wisdom?
References:
[1] Julian of Norwich, Showings, chapter 51 (long text). See Revelation of

Divine Love, trans. Elizabeth Spearing (Penguin: 1998), 123.
[2] Chapter 59 (long text). Ibid., 139.
[6] Chapter 56 (long text). See Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James
Walsh (Paulist Press: 1978), 290.
[7] Chapter 43 (long text). See Revelation of Divine Love, Spearing, 104.
[9] Chapter 6 (short text). Ibid., 10.

John Philip Newell, Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation (Jossey-Bass:
2008), 67-69.
artist.
Norwich
Posted in Daily Meditations | Also tagged Christ, desire, encounter, God, Grace,
John Philip Newell, Julian of Norwich, Soul
God’s Temple
Friday, May 31, 2019

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom
you have from God, and that you are not your own? —1 Corinthians 6:19
I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me. —Galatians 2:20
Phileena Heuertz is a dear friend, member of our Board of Directors, and co-
founder of Gravity, a center for contemplative activism. In this excerpt from her
book Mindful Silence she reflects on the gift of contemplation.
Kataphatic prayer comes from the Greek kataphatikos, which in essence means
“with images or concepts.” . . . This kind of prayer utilizes our faculties for
reason, imagination, feelings, and will. We use words, images, and feelings to
communicate with the divine. In this sense, God is mediated through our
mental and affective capacities.
Apophatic prayer comes from the Greek apophatikos, which essentially means
“without images or concepts.” This kind of prayer lets go of reason, imagination,
feelings, and will. And in this way, our encounter with God is unmediated. It is a
naked mode of prayer—being to being or essence to essence without filtration
through the thinking or affective mind. . . .
Apophatic prayer is rooted in the doctrine of the divine indwelling (Luke 17:21;
John 7:38, 14:3; Romans 8:10-11; 1 Corinthians 6:15-20; Galatians 2:20). While
God is transcendent, God is also immanent, and chooses to dwell within us.
Contemplative spirituality helps us realize God’s presence within us.
The word contemplative derives from a root that means to set aside a place of
worship or to reserve a cleared space in front of an altar. In Hebrew and
Christian Scriptures, a contemplative stance is obvious. The Israelites cleared
space for worship with the Ark of the Covenant and finally with their temple.
Jesus honored the temple worship of his Jewish tradition but also tried to
enlighten his people to realize that sacred buildings, rituals, and rules are meant
to bring us into the awareness of the divine presence in us and in all of those
around us.
Jesus drew our attention to the doctrine of the divine indwelling in a radical
declaration that he himself was the temple (John 2:19). . . . Paul elaborates on
Jesus’ teaching of the doctrine of divine indwelling by declaring that not just
Jesus’ but our body too is the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19).
How marvelous! The Creator of the universe resides within our being.
But unfortunately, we’re not very well acquainted with God-within. We’ve
mastered the theology of God’s transcendence but have failed to embrace God’s
immanence. There’s a part of us that doubts our deep connection to this divine
love. Contemplative spirituality helps us overcome this disconnect. It’s one
thing to have a “personal relationship” with the transcendent Jesus [or Christ]—
much like a relationship with a friend or lover. It’s quite another thing to
become one with Jesus, by growing familiar with his immanence (John 17:21).
It’s from this oneness that enduring love of God and neighbor is possible.
Reference:
Phileena Heurtz, Mindful Silence: The Heart of Christian Contemplation

(InterVarsity Press: 2018), 146-147. Learn more about Gravity at
gravitycenter.com.
artist.
Norwich
Posted in Daily Meditations | Also tagged awareness, connection,

Contemplation, encounter, God, Jesus, Phileena Heuertz, prayer
Enneagram Part Three:

Head Center

The Head Center
Tuesday, March 10, 2020

My friend and Enneagram teacher Russ Hudson describes the
Head Center, the final Intelligence Center of the Enneagram, in his
own unique and “heady” way:
Some of the Eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, did a very
thorough investigation of the nature of the Head Center. That’s one
of the reasons I think Thomas Merton was drawn to studying certain
things about Buddhist practice. What [Eastern traditions] all agree
on is the true nature of Mind is complete stillness, silence, and
spaciousness. Boundless stillness, peace, clarity, forever and ever,
amen. So I would say that the Head Center gives us the possibility of
sensing, recognizing the Eternal Presence that’s right here in the
midst of phenomena. . . .
There is this process of opening to this stillness, the vast

freedom, peace, clarity of the soul, of spirit. . . . You could
see your thoughts are happening. [But] what surrounds
them and is inside them is this tremendous peace and
stillness. And . . . this stillness is not inactive. . . . The
stillness . . . brings the sense of knowing, of recognition, of
clarity and wisdom. Don [Riso] and I have called it the
sense of guidance, where you’re kind of clear it’s not you
thinking exactly. It’s like a spontaneous recognition of
truth/reality that just comes. You don’t have to plan it. It’s
like you just relax and suddenly. . . . Pow. There it is. It’s
right in your mind. [1]
Fives, Sixes, and Sevens cannot get their minds to simmer down.
This is a problem because the quiet mind allows us to feel
profoundly supported: inner knowing and guidance arise from the
quiet mind and give us confidence to act in the world. [2]
When you know this Presence directly, you experience it as the
ground of everything and especially the ground of you. And when
you know that, you know that what you are is just an expression of
that, and the core of what you are cannot be harmed or taken
away. . . . That presence is the Divine Presence. And it’s not a rumor!
It’s not something you have to believe in. . . .
Just land where you are, open to the stillness, and know that what
you seek is already here, holding everything you do every step of the
way, guiding you, supporting you, in you, around you. You can’t lose
it! And it is never failing you.
[The Five, Six, and Seven] in essence are trying to get back to or find
this sense of ground, direction, and guidance. That’s what we’re
looking for in this triad.
[The Body types] were the “I don’t want to be messed with” types.
[The] Heart types were the “See me the way I want to be seen types.”
[The Head types] are the “What can I trust?” types. In other words,
I’m looking for something to be that orientation, ground, and
guidance, which is utterly trustworthy. [3] None of us are the whole
Body of Christ, but we each offer part of the Great Gift of God.
Gateway to Action & Contemplation:

What word or phrase resonates with or
challenges me? What sensations do I notice
in my body? What is mine to do?
Prayer for Our Community:

O Great Love, thank you for living and
loving in us and through us. May all that we
do flow from our deep connection with you
and all beings. Help us become a
community that vulnerably shares each
other’s burdens and the weight of glory.
Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing
of our world. [Please add your own
intentions.] . . . Knowing you are hearing us
better than we are speaking, we offer these
prayers in all the holy names of God, amen.
Listen to Fr. Richard read the prayer.
[1] Russ Hudson, The Enneagram as a Tool for

Your Spiritual Journey, disc 5 (Center for Action

and Contemplation: 2009) CD, DVD, MP3
download.
[2] Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson, The

Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to
Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine
Personality Types (Bantam Books: 1999), 58.
[3] Hudson, The Enneagram as a Tool for Your

Spiritual Journey. 
Image credit: Female Head (detail), Leonardo da

Vinci, second half of 15th century, Uffizi Gallery,
Florence, Italy.

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The Universal Pattern

Hope and Suffering
Friday,  April 17, 2020
When we try to live in solidarity with the pain of the world—and do not spend
our lives running from it—we will encounter various forms of “crucifixion.” Pain
is physical or emotional discomfort, but suffering often comes from our
resistance to that pain.
The soul must walk through such suffering to go higher, further, deeper, or
longer. The saints variously called such suffering deaths, nights, darkness,
unknowing, spiritual trials, or just doubt itself.
Necessary suffering allows us to grow, but “in secret” (Mark 4:26–

29), which is an amazingly common concept, both in the teachings
of Jesus and of many of the mystics. Such growth must largely be
hidden because God alone can see it and steer it for our good. If we
try too hard to understand it, we will stop the process or steer it in
the wrong direction.
It seems there is a cruciform shape to reality with cross purposes, paradoxes,
and conflicting intentions everywhere. Jesus hangs right there amid them, not
even perfectly balancing them, but just holding them (see Ephesians 2:13–22).
This deserves a major “Wow!” because mere philosophy or even proper theology
would never have come to this conclusion.
The virtue of hope, with great irony, is the fruit of a learned capacity to suffer
wisely, calmly, and generously. The ego demands successes to survive; the soul
needs only meaning to thrive. Somehow hope provides its own kind of meaning,
in a most mysterious way.
The Gospel gives our suffering both personal and cosmic meaning by connecting
our pain to the pain of others and, finally, by connecting us to the very pain of
God. Did you ever think of God as suffering? Most people don’t—but Jesus came
to change all of that.
Any form of contemplation is a gradual sinking into this divine
fullness where hope lives. Contemplation is living in a unified field
that produces in people a deep, largely non-rational, and yet calmly
certain hope, which is always a surprise.
A life of inner union, a contemplative life, is practicing for heaven
now. God allows us to bring “on earth what is in heaven” (Matthew
6:10) every time we can allow, receive, and forgive the conflicts of
the moment. Such acceptance allows us to sit in some degree of
contentment—despite all the warring evidence.
God alone, it seems to me, can hold together all the seeming opposites and
contradictions of life. In
and with God, we can do the same. But we are not the Doer.

What word or phrase resonates with or challenges me? What sensations do I
notice in my body? What is mine to do?

O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and through us. May all
that we do flow from our deep connection with you and all beings. Help us
become a community that vulnerably shares each other’s burdens and the
weight of glory. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our world.
[Please add your own intentions.] . . . Knowing you are hearing us better than
we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God, amen.
Story from Our Community:

After a few desperate days in [COVID-19] confinement, I started to appreciate
the silence, admire nature through my window, pray more, rejoice in the
small things, and find pleasure in caring for my husband, who is quite old and
ailing. Bless the Lord! —L. Bernales
Share your own story with us.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (CAC Publishing: 2017), 83–85.
Image credit: Wheat Field With Crows (detail), Vincent van Gogh, 1890, Van Gogh
Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

MysticalHope
Thursday,  April 16, 2020
Hope is the main impulse of life. —Ilia Delio, OSF [1]
Because we are so quickly led to despair, most of us cannot endure suffering
for long without some sliver of hope or meaning. However, it is worth asking
ourselves about where our hope lies. My friend and colleague Cynthia
Bourgeault makes a powerful distinction between what she calls ordinary
hope, “tied to outcome . . . . an optimistic feeling . . . because we sense that
things will get better in the future” and mystical hope “that is a complete
reversal of our usual way of looking at things. Beneath the ‘upbeat’ kind of
hope that parts the seas and pulls rabbits out of hats, this other hope weaves
its way as a quiet, even ironic counterpoint.” She writes,
We might make the following observations about this other kind of hope, which
we will call mystical hope. In contrast to our usual notions of hope:
1. Mystical hope is not tied to a good outcome, to the future. It lives a
life of its own, seemingly without reference to external circumstances
and conditions.
2. It has something to do with presence—not a future good outcome,
but the immediate experience of being met, held in communion, by

something intimately at hand.
3. It bears fruit within us at the psychological level in the sensations of
strength, joy, and satisfaction: an “unbearable lightness of being.” But
mysteriously, rather than deriving these gifts from outward
expectations being met, it seems to produce them from within. . .
[It] is all too easy to understate and miss that hope is not intended to
be an extraordinary infusion, but an abiding state of being. We lose
sight of the invitation—and in fact, our responsibility, as stewards of creation—
to develop a conscious and permanent connection to this wellspring. We miss
the call to become a vessel, to become a chalice into which this divine energy can
pour; a lamp through which it can shine. . . .
We ourselves are not the source of that hope; we do not manufacture it. But the
source dwells deeply within us and flows to us with an unstinting abundance, so
much so that in fact it might be more accurate to say we dwell within it. . . .
The good news is that this deeper current does exist and you actually can find it.
. . . For me the journey to the source of hope is ultimately a theological journey:
up and over the mountain to the sources of hope in the headwaters of the
Christian Mystery. This journey to the wellsprings of hope is not something that
will change your life in the short range, in the externals. Rather, it is something
that will change your innermost way of seeing. From there, inevitably, the
externals will rearrange. . . .
The journey to the wellsprings of hope is really a journey toward the center,
toward the innermost ground of our being where we meet and are met by God.
The Prayer of Francis and Clare
Wednesday,  April 15, 2020
Both St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) and St. Clare (1194–1253) let
go of their fear of suffering; any need for power, prestige, and
possessions; and any need for their small self to be important. By
doing so they came to know who they really were in God—and thus
who they objectively were.
Such a profound ability to change is often the fruit of suffering and
various forms of poverty. The small self does not surrender without
a fight to its death. If we understand suffering to be whenever we are
not in control, then we see why some form of suffering is absolutely
necessary to teach us how to live beyond the illusion of control and

to give that control back to God and the flow of reality.
This counterintuitive insight surely explains why these two medieval
dropouts—Francis and Clare—tried to invite us all into their happy
run downward, to that place of “poverty” and powerlessness where
all of humanity finally dwells anyway. They voluntarily leapt into the
very fire from which most of us are trying to escape, with total trust
that Jesus’ way of the cross could not, and would not, be the wrong
path.
By God’s grace, they believed that they could trust the eventual
passing of all things, and where they were passing to. They did not
wait for liberation later—after death—but grasped it here and now.
Franciscan Sister Ilia Delio writes:
“[Francis’] life indicates to us that if we persevere in prayer we will
find God in the center of our lives and the bitter will become sweet
[as when Francis kissed the leper]; however, if we stay on the plain
of mediocrity then the bitter may remain bitter. To trust in the power of
God’s grace through darkness, isolation, bitterness, and rejection is to be on the
way to becoming prayer because it is the way to freedom in God. For prayer,
that deep relationship of God breathing in us, requires change and conversion.
And where there is change, there is the letting go of the old and the giving birth
to the new. To pray is to be open to the new, to the future in God. The way to life
passes through change and ultimately the change from death to life. Prayer is
the way to life because in prayer we are invited to change and to grow in love.
[1]”
I find myself in prayer much of the time right now, not simply because of the
limitations of our current circumstances, but because I want to be a witness to
such divine freedom. I believe it is this kind of prayer that may keep us from
simply hoping things quickly return to “normal” (though that is a comforting
thought to many) and instead praying for the courage to “change and grow in
love.” Such courage is surely what we and the world truly need.
[1] Ilia Delio, Franciscan Prayer (Franciscan Media: 2004), 28.
The “Backside” of God

Monday,  April 13, 2020
I feel a deep solidarity with individuals throughout the world who are wrestling
with health issues. In 2016, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and
underwent a complete prostatectomy. The wisdom lessons that God offered me
before, during, and after the surgery were pretty much constant. The
experiences were initially disempowering, sometimes scary in their immediacy,
and only in hindsight were they in any way empowering. Prayer was both
constant and impossible for much of this period.
About ten days after the surgery, during my attempt at some spiritual reading, I
opened the Bible to an obscure passage in the Book of Exodus. Moses asks
YHWH to “Show me your glory” (33:18), and YHWH shows it in a most unusual
way: “I shall place you in the cleft of the rock and shield you with my hand until
I have passed by. Then I shall take my hand away, and you will see my backside,
but my face will not be seen” (33:22–23). In several sermons, I have used that
verse to teach that our knowledge of God is indirect at best, and none of our
knowledge is fully face-to-face. God is always and forever Mystery. All we see is
the “backside” of God.
During that time, it was not the indirectness that hit me in this passage, but the
directness! My best spiritual knowing almost always occurs after the fact, in the
remembering—not seen “until God has passed by.” I realized that in the
moments of diagnosis, doctor’s warnings, waiting, delays, and the surgery itself,
I was as fragile, scared, and insecure as anybody would be. If I could stay with
the full narrative all the way into and through, only afterward could I invariably
see, trust, and enjoy the wonderful works of God (mirabilia Dei).
The foundation of faith is the ability to look at our entire salvation

history and then trust that this pattern would never—could never—
change! It is largely after the fact that faith is formed—and
gloriously transmuted into hope for the future. Only after the fact
can you see that you were being held and led during the fact. During
the fact, you do not enjoy or trust your own strength at all, in fact,
quite the opposite. You just cry out in various ways. Then God, for
some wonderful reason, is able to fill the gap.
Reality Initiating Us:
Part Two
Lesson One: My Yoke Is Easy and My Burden Is Light
Monday,  April 6, 2020 
Click here to watch a special video or listen to the audio of Richard Rohr
introducing Holy Week and this week's Daily Meditation theme on "Reality
Initiating Us," addressing our current global crisis as a collective initiation
experience which we are all undergoing.
Life is hard, and yet Jesus says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light”
(Matthew 11:28).
It is hard to bear God—but it is even harder not to bear God. The pain
one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a
greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head
on. Enlightened people invariably describe the spiritual experience
of God as resting, peace, delight, and even ecstasy.
If our religion has no deep joy and no inherent contentment about it,
then it is not the real thing. If our religion is primarily fear of self,
the world, and God; if it is primarily focused on meeting religious
duties and obligations, then it is indeed a hard yoke and heavy
burden. I’d go so far as to say that it’s hardly worthwhile. I think the
promise from Jesus that his burden is easy and light seeks to
reassure us that rigid and humorless religion is not his way and
certainly not the only way.
It is God within us that loves God, so seek joy in God and peace within; seek to
rest in the good, the true, and the beautiful. It is the only resting place that also
allows us to bear the darkness. Hard and soft, difficult and easy, pain and
ecstasy do not eliminate one another, but actually allow each other. They bow
back and forth like dancers, although it is harder to bow to pain and to failure. If
you look deeply inside every success, there are already seeds and signs of limits;
if you look inside every failure, there are also seeds and signs of opportunity.
Who among us has not been able to eventually recognize the silver lining in the
darkest of life’s clouds? You would think the universal pattern of death and life,
the lesson of the Gospel and Jesus’ life would be utterly clear to me by now, yet I
still fight and repress my would-be resurrections, even if just in my own mind.
For some reason, we give and get our energy from dark clouds much more than
silver linings. True joy is harder to access and even harder to hold onto than
anger or fear. When I walk my dog Opie and look at the beautiful cottonwood
trees in my yard, God helps me experience rest and peace.
If our soul is at rest in the comforting sweetness and softness of God,

we can bear the hardness of life and see through failure. That’s why
people in love—and often people at the end of life—have such an
excess of energy for others. If our truth does not set us free, it is not
truth at all. If God cannot be rested in, God must not be much of a
God. If God is not joy, then what has created the sunrise and sunset?
LessonFour: Passing Over to Life
Thursday,  April 9, 2020 
Holy Thursday
It is true that you are not in control, for “can any of you, for all your
worrying, add a single moment to your span of life?” (Luke 12:25-
26).
If we cannot control life and death, why do we spend so much time

trying to control smaller outcomes? Call it destiny, providence,
guidance, synchronicity, or coincidence, but people who are
connected to the Source do not need to steer their own life and
agenda. They know that it is being done for them in a much better
way than they ever could. Those who hand themselves over are
received, and the flow happens through them. Those who don’t
relinquish control are still received, but they significantly slow
down the natural flow of Spirit.
When we set ourselves up to think we deserve, expect, or need certain things to

happen, we are setting ourselves up for constant unhappiness and a final
inability to enjoy or at least allow what is going to happen anyway. After a while,
we find ourselves resisting almost everything at some level. It is a terrible way to
live. Giving up control is a school to learn union, compassion, and
understanding. It is ultimately a school for the final letting go that we call death.
Right now, as we face social restrictions, economic fragility, and the
vulnerability of our own bodies, is there something deeper that you can
surrender to, that can ground you in disruption?
Surrendering to the divine flow is not about giving in, capitulating,

becoming a puppet, being naïve, irresponsible, or stopping all
planning and thinking. Surrender is about a peaceful inner opening
that keeps the conduit of living water flowing to love. But do know
this: every time we surrender to love, we have also just chosen to die.
Every time we let love orient us, we are letting go of ourselves as an
autonomous unit and have given a bit of ourselves away to
something or someone else, and it is not easily retrieved—unless we
choose to stop loving—which many do. But even then, when that
expanded Self wants to retreat back into itself, it realizes it is
trapped in a much larger truth now. And Love wins again.
Jesus surely had a dozen good reasons why he should not have had to die so
young, so unsuccessful at that point, and the Son of God besides! By becoming
the Passover Lamb, plus the foot-washing servant, Jesus makes God’s revelation
human, personal, clear and quite concrete. Jesus is handed over to the religious
and political powers-that-be, and we must be handed over to God from our
power, privilege, and need for control. Otherwise, we will never grow up, or
participate in the Mystery of God and Love. It really is about “passing over” to a
deeper faith and life.
Part Two
Lesson Three: Your Life Is Hidden with Christ
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
It is true that your life is not about you; rather, “your life is hidden with Christ in
God. He is your life, and when he is revealed, you will be revealed in all your
glory with him” (Colossians 3:4).
Once our soul comes to its True Self, it can amazingly let go and be almost
anything except selfish or separate. The True Self does not cling or grasp. It has
already achieved its purpose by being more than by any specific doing of this or
that. Finally, we have become a human being instead of a human doing. This is
what we are practicing when we sit in contemplative prayer: we are practicing
under-doing and assured failure, which radically rearranges our inner hardware
after a while. And yet even in our pursuit of the True Self, we must be careful
not to reject the parts of ourselves that are not there yet. The most courageous
thing we will ever do is probably to accept that we are who we are. As Henri
Nouwen once shared with me personally, he believed that original sin could only
be described as “humanity’s endless capacity for self-rejection.”
All the truly transformed people I have ever met are characterized by
what I would call radical humility. They are deeply convinced that
they are drawing from another source; they are simply an
instrument. Their genius is not their own; it is borrowed. They end
up doing generative and expansive things precisely because they do
not take first or final responsibility for their gift; they don’t worry
too much about their failures, nor do they need to promote
themselves. Their life is not their own, yet at some level they know that it has
been given to them as a sacred trust. Such people just live in gratitude and
confidence and try to let the flow continue through them. They know that love
can be repaid by love alone.
In this time of crisis, we must commit to a posture of prayer and heart that
opens us to deep trust and connection with God. Only then can we hold the
reality of what is happening—both the tragic and the transformative. I am
finding myself turning more often in these days to the simple Christian prayer of
“Lord, have mercy.” From our place of humility, God can work through
us to help our loved ones, neighbors and the most vulnerable. As
Francis of Assisi said to us right before he died in 1226, “I have done
what was mine to do. Now you must do what is yours to do.” [1]
In the spiritual life, what we think we are doing is actually being

done to us. All we can do is say yes to it. This True Self is ironically
much more glorious, grounded, original, and free than any self-
manufactured person could be. We are interrelated with being,
participating with the life of God, while living out one little part of
that life in our own exquisite form. The True Self neither postures
nor pretends. It comes down to this: the soul and the True Self
know that “my life is not about me, but I am about life.”
Part Two
Lesson Two: Your Name Is Written in Heaven
Tuesday,  April 7, 2020 
You are not important, and yet Jesus says, “Rejoice because your name is
written in heaven” (Luke 10:20).
We need a still point in this twirling world of images and feelings, especially in a
time such as ours. If we are tethered at some center point, it is amazing how far
out we can fly and not get lost. The True Self, "our name in heaven," is
our participation in the great “I Am.” It is what Peter daringly calls
the “ability to share the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). This True Self is
characterized by contentment, an abiding low-level peace and
happiness. Every now and then it even becomes pure joy.
If there is no list of names in eternity, no confidence that we are known and

chosen by God, we are burdened with making a name for ourselves every day.
We must be self-made, every person out for themselves in a dog-eat-dog world,
vying with one another for zero-sum dignity and importance. Instead of
comparison, envy, competition, and scarcity, authentic spirituality is an
experience of abundance and mutual flourishing. We are tempted to count
only our material and ego gifts which decrease with usage, whereas
spiritual gifts actually increase with each use, in ourselves and in
those around us.
If we have no foundational significance, we must constantly attempt to self-

signify and self-validate. Everyone is then a competitor and rival. We cannot
help but be pushed around by our neediness and judgments, and we will push
others around too. If we have no unshakable experience of divine approval, we
will be lost in fragile momentary experiences of “victory” that cannot be
sustained or really enjoyed.
We must find our North Star outside our own little comparative systems or we
will be lost in rivalry and daily defeat. It is a whole different way of looking at
what we mean by “God saving us." God first of all saves us from
ourselves, our emotional neediness and hurt, and our obsessive
mind games. Then the truth of being is obvious and all around us.
Our importance is given and bestowed in this universe as part of the

unbreakable covenant between us and our Creator. We are declared important
“from the beginning” (Ephesians 1:4, 9), and when we really know it, we have no
need to prove it. We are reminded who we really are in God when Jesus tells us
that our “name is written in heaven.” Surely God holds medical workers and
first responders close to God’s heart right now, as they put their lives on the line
to support us all. The courage they are showing is the kind of courage that
comes from knowing the value of life. I pray we might all operate from that
place as we struggle through the coming days.
Part Two
Lesson One: My Yoke Is Easy and My Burden Is Light
Monday,  April 6, 2020 

Life is hard, and yet Jesus says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is
light” (Matthew 11:28).
It is hard to bear God—but it is even harder not to bear God. The pain
one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a
greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head
on. Enlightened people invariably describe the spiritual experience
of God as resting, peace, delight, and even ecstasy.
If our religion has no deep joy and no inherent contentment about it,
then it is not the real thing. If our religion is primarily fear of self,
the world, and God; if it is primarily focused on meeting religious
duties and obligations, then it is indeed a hard yoke and heavy
burden. I’d go so far as to say that it’s hardly worthwhile. I think the promise
from Jesus that his burden is easy and light seeks to reassure us that rigid and
humorless religion is not his way and certainly not the only way.
It is God within us that loves God, so seek joy in God and peace within; seek to
rest in the good, the true, and the beautiful. It is the only resting place that also
allows us to bear the darkness. Hard and soft, difficult and easy, pain and
ecstasy do not eliminate one another, but actually allow each other. They bow
back and forth like dancers, although it is harder to bow to pain and to failure. If
you look deeply inside every success, there are already seeds and signs of limits;
if you look inside every failure, there are also seeds and signs of opportunity.
Who among us has not been able to eventually recognize the silver lining in the
darkest of life’s clouds? You would think the universal pattern of death and life,
the lesson of the Gospel and Jesus’ life would be utterly clear to me by now, yet I
still fight and repress my would-be resurrections, even if just in my own mind.
For some reason, we give and get our energy from dark clouds much more than
silver linings. True joy is harder to access and even harder to hold onto than
anger or fear. When I walk my dog Opie and look at the beautiful
cottonwood trees in my yard, God helps me experience rest and
peace.
If our soul is at rest in the comforting sweetness and softness of God,

we can bear the hardness of life and see through failure. That’s why
people in love—and often people at the end of life—have such an
excess of energy for others. If our truth does not set us free, it is not
truth at all. If God cannot be rested in, God must not be much of a
God. If God is not joy, then what has created the sunrise and sunset?
Five Consoling Messages
Sunday,  April 5, 2020
Palm Sunday

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ
who is your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory. —
Colossians 3:3-4
In the larger-than-life, spiritually transformed people I have met, I always find
one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died.
They have followed in the self-emptying steps of Jesus, a path from death to life
that Christians from all over the world celebrate this week.

At some point, such people were led to the edge of their private resources, and
that breakdown, which surely felt like dying, led them into a larger life. They
broke through in what felt like breaking down. Instead of avoiding a personal
death or raging at it, they went through a death of their old, small self and came
out the other side knowing that death could no longer hurt them. This process of
transformation is known in many cultures as initiation. For many Christians,
the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is the preeminent example of this
pattern. Following Jesus, we need to trust the down, and God will
take care of the up. Although even there, we still must offer our yes.
If the five truths of initiation from last week seemed demanding or negative, I
want to also name the energizing source that makes them possible and that
becomes their long-term effect. I call these consolations the “common
wonderful,” the collective beauty and security that healthy people live within, no
matter what words they use for it. Some have called the lessons “the five positive
messages"; I am calling them the “five consoling messages.” The “common
wonderful” is a cosmic egg of meaning that holds us, helps us grow,
and gives us ongoing new birth and beginnings. It is our matrix for
life, our underlying worldview, and the energy field that keeps us
motivated each day. In some sense it must be held by at least a few
people around you, or it is very difficult to sustain absolutely alone.
Perhaps such people are “the two or three” gathered in Jesus’ name
(Matthew 18:20).
The five consoling messages must be a part of our inner experience,
something we know to be true for ourselves, not something we
believe because others have told us to. These five messages, which
will form the basis of the Daily Meditations this week, can be
described using New Testament quotes (although there are similar
messages in all the great religious traditions):
1. It is true that life is hard, and yet my yoke is easy and my burden is
light (Matthew 11:28).
2. It is true that you are not important, and yet do you not know that
your name is written in heaven? (Luke 10:20).
3. It is true that your life is not about you, and yet I live now not my
own life, but the life of Christ who lives in me (Galatians 2:20).
4. It is true that you are not in control, and yet can any of you, for all
of your worrying, add a single moment to your span of life? (Luke
12:26).
5. It is true that you are going to die, and yet neither death nor
life. . . can ever come between us and the love of God (Romans 8:38-
39).
Teresa of Ávila and

John of the Cross

Courage in Times of Trouble
Tessa Bielecki is a Christian hermit in the tradition of the Desert Mothers and
Fathers. Co-founder of the Spiritual Life Institute, she was a Carmelite monk
and Mother Abbess for almost 40 years, establishing experimental monastic
communities of men and women in Arizona, Colorado, Nova Scotia, and
Ireland. She has written extensively on the life, spirituality, and enduring
legacy of Teresa of Ávila. Bielecki writes that Teresa has much to teach us
about suffering:
For over forty years, [Teresa] never spent a single day without physical pain. For
most of her life she suffered such nausea that she vomited daily and couldn’t eat
until noon. She suffered the little illnesses that afflict us all—colds, headaches,
stomachaches, toothaches, and flus. But she also suffered from high fevers,
fainting spells, heart trouble, neuritis, tinnitus, her maimed left arm, a three-
year paralysis, severe convulsions, a four-day coma, and the influenza that
almost killed her in 1580, aged her terribly, and left her palsied for the last two
years of her life. . . .
As a result of her experience, Teresa teaches us that poor health is

not an obstacle to spiritual growth but actually enhances it. Why?
We learn patience and surrender. We learn how to transcend the
body and rise above both sickness and health altogether. . . .
Through this, as in all else, Teresa learned how to let go of her own will and
trust in God. She vehemently asserts that we must “determine once and for all
to swallow death and the lack of health,” or there will be no hope for us. [Italics
mine.] [1]
In a letter to the convent at Seville that she had founded, Teresa writes:
Courage, courage, my daughters. Remember, God gives no one more troubles

than [she] is able to bear, and [God] is with those who are in tribulation. [2]
And in a letter to one of her spiritual directors, the Dominican Father Gracián,
she reflects:
One must not think that a person who is suffering is not praying. He is offering
up his sufferings to God, and many a time he is praying much more truly than
one who goes away by himself and meditates his head off, and, if he has
squeezed out a few tears, thinks that is prayer. [3]
Richard again: Suffering, of course, can lead us in one of two directions. It can
make us very bitter and close us down, or it can make us wise, compassionate,
and utterly open. Our hearts open either because they have been softened, or
perhaps because suffering makes us feel like we have nothing more to lose. It
often takes us to the edge of our inner resources where we “fall into the hands
of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).
Let us all pray for the grace of this second path of softening and opening.
Teresa of Ávila and

John of the Cross

John of the Cross: Poet, Pastor, Mystic
Friday,  April 24, 2020
Father Iain Matthew is a contemporary Carmelite priest from England and

author of The Impact of God: Soundings from St John of The Cross. My copy is
all marked up, so brilliant are his insights on the predictable impact of God on
the soul. In this passage he explores the mystical and symbolic power of the
“night” for John and how it can encourage us today.
Poet, pastor, mystic, John [of the Cross] is first a witness to the impact of God in
his life. He has taken the risk of surrender, and can speak with the authority of
one who has been there. He testifies to a God who, precisely, is pressing in to
meet, to change, and to fill us in our deepest need. . . . Love changes people, and
John’s witness to God’s love may help us to trust and to be brave.
A generous God is fine when things are running smoothly. But what [about]
when they are not and darkness is invading? What [about] when trusted
patterns have broken down, or we feel too far gone to bother even trying? We
dwell at outer limits, and some events in life—loss, failure, stress, sin—remind
us of the threat of chaos.
That is where John of the Cross stands: at the threshold of uncertainty; and he
assures us that what dwells beyond is not simply chaos. The darkness bears the
Spirit of God, who broods over the waters of death and has power to work a
resurrection. . . . In our darkness, he finds Jesus’s darkness; and what he echoes
is the impact of Easter. . . .
Night: we cannot stop it, or hasten it; it just comes, and it teaches us every
twenty-four hours that we are not in complete control. John does seem to think
there is something important here. Others speak of growth, suffering,
purification, but ‘we are calling’ it ‘night’; [1] calling it ‘“dark night," very
appropriately’ [2] . . . .
John’s Toledo imprisonment and escape gave to the symbol ‘night’ its full
weight. . . . [For him] the symbol is able to carry humanity’s pain, able to hold
even such a sense of alienation from God that the inner self feels dismantled. . . .
That is the resonance of the symbol for John. Night signifies that which comes
upon us and takes us out of our own control; it announces that as the place of
resurrection. A God who heals in darkness—this is John’s word of hope in a
destabilised [sic.] world.
We have all experienced some form of “night” in our lives, of lack of control
and certainty. But we are also fortunate to have wise and good guides like
John of the Cross to accompany us, reminding us that we are not abandoned
by God in those times, but loved more deeply than we can imagine all the way
through them.
The Presence of Spirit
Many things can bring us to the “threshold” of our ordinary ways of thinking
and behaving, but even good rituals are merely “stand-ins” until Reality itself,
often in the form of great love or great suffering, steps in and changes us
forever. My friend Paula D’Arcy, with whom I have taught many times over
the years, lost her husband and young daughter in a tragic car accident while
she was pregnant with their second child. This story from Paula reveals how
liminal moments can occur at any time.
One afternoon, my heart breaking, I began sorting through the clothes my

daughter Sarah would never wear. A dress lay across my lap, a little piece of
white cotton. It evoked one more moment . . . of bitter tears and confused
disbelief. . . . Life was not supposed to turn out this way. . . .
It was such an innocent and common thing—a child’s garment. Yet even as it
broke my heart, that dress became an opening; the soft cotton tore at me from
within and began to empty me.
You are not the only heartbroken parent in the world, it said. The pain of loss
is not yours alone. Disappointment is the human condition. I continued to stare
at the cotton and lace, but something had shifted. The dress was somehow
connecting me to the texture and mystery of greater things . . .
Without fully understanding why, I began to soften. I saw life’s contour, its
density and its brilliance, just as it is, nothing more. . . . I saw how I’d been
caught in a script of my own creation and . . . was totally caught up in my own
world—my emotions, my wants, and my needs. . . . Now it was simply my time—
my turn to know the darkness and discover whether or not I was brave enough
to accept the human journey and find a way through. . . .
I slowly began to see that within the cells of every living thing is the
same essence—the presence of spirit. The heart of our journey is to
awaken to this spirit within. . . .
Hardly anything turns out the way you expected it to, and you’re
frequently ready to write life off as too paradoxical and too difficult
to endure. Then some indescribable light fights its way through the
impenetrable dark—an unpredictable, unimportant, runaway
moment that lights up everything you’ve been unable to see until
then. That light removes all the shoulds and oughts, all the illusions
about fairness. You enter liminal space . . . In that space you take
your first script [or what I call your false or separate self], the one
that weighs five hundred pounds, the script that was cutting into
your heart all along, bleeding you to death but you didn’t realize the
wound or its seriousness—and you simply let it go.
Dark Liminality
Tuesday,  April 28, 2020
When I am in that darkness, I do not remember anything about anything

human. —Angela of Foligno (1248–1309)
After working as a physician and bioethicist for decades, Living School

alumna and chair of the CAC Board LaVera Crawley became a hospital
chaplain and spiritual companion for patients and their families in the
liminality that often occurs between life and death. It seems to me that
spiritual companionship is an art many of us are learning to practice these
days, but we must be willing to be present to those in need, not just physically
(or virtually), but with our whole selves. LaVera shares some of the challenges
of this spiritual work and how it can be transformative for both parties.
There are likely few situations with the power to reliably propel us beyond the
threshold of everyday existence and into the realm of the liminal than the way of
the despair of receiving a diagnosis of a serious, life-threatening illness. It can
feel like being hit by a brick or like being hurled into the dark abyss. Once there,
the territory can be utterly disorienting and terribly frightening. . . .
Few know how to enter the liminal space where their loved one or patient has
been forced to go, let alone how to be there should they be brave enough to dare
to enter. We are uncomfortable in these kinds of liminal spaces because it is
strange and unfamiliar territory, woven with the difficult feelings we’ve been
taught to suppress by medicating them away, by bypassing them through
platitudes . . . or denying them all together. . . .
It takes willingness, fortitude, knowledge, skill, and a deep trust in Spirit to go

into these dark places as both witness and companion.
To be very clear, I am not equating darkness with something bad or negative,

any more than I would consider the apophatic way [1] as such. There is deep
beauty in the darkness, in the unknowing, in the indescribable, if only we can
open ourselves to its purpose. Metaphorically, the dark emotions of grief, fear,
and despair can be profound teachers and guides. . . . The primal howl of
existential suffering holds within it the lesson that we all must learn at some
time in our lives: To heal from our suffering—not merely to ease or palliate it,
but to transform it into the source and substance of our growth and wisdom—
requires a journey through it. We must listen attentively for whatever message it
has for us and, according to [psychotherapist Miriam] Greenspan, find
authentic ways to befriend it so that we can surrender to its transmuting power.
All spiritual traditions teach some variation of this wisdom. While it may not
come naturally to us to respond to suffering in this way, through practice, it can
become a learned skill. . . .
The art of spiritual companionship through the realm of the liminal can be
learned, whether we are accompanying others or attending to our own souls.
The first step requires trusting that, in the course of time, the very healing we
seek can emerge by our journeying through liminal space, listening attentively
to what the liminal seeks to tell us.
The Liminal Paradox
Wednesday,  April 29, 2020

Sheryl Fullerton, an editor and author with whom I have worked for many
years, received a cancer diagnosis two years ago which required a difficult
surgery. Like many individuals who are on earnest spiritual journeys, she
allowed the painful and challenging experience to transform and guide her to
greater wisdom.
When we find ourselves in liminal space, does it matter whether we are pushed
or whether we jump? Either way, we are not where or what we were before, nor
do we know how or where we will land in our new reality. We are, as the
anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983) wrote, betwixt and between. In that
space—which is mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual—we are destabilized,
disoriented. The old touchstones, habits, and comforts are now past, the future
unknown. We only wish such a time to be over. We may be impatient to pass
through it quickly, with as little distress as possible, even though that is not
likely. . . .
But what if we can choose to experience this liminal space and time, this
uncomfortable now, as . . . a place and state of creativity, of construction and
deconstruction, choice and transformation[?] I wonder whether it is, then, also
the realm of the Holy Spirit, our comforter, who does not take away the vastness
and possibility of this opened-up threshold time, but invites us to lay down our
fears and discomfort to see what else is there, hard as that may be. . . .
One transformation in this liminal time of cancer treatment and recovery was
my recognition that the staggering vulnerability I was experiencing was not
weakness, not shameful, but the source of what would allow me to survive and,
eventually, to thrive. I allowed others to see me—not just my broken, lopsided
face, but also my pain, sorrow, disappointment, and discouragement, as well as
my gratitude, resilience, joy, and recovery. . . .

Like Jonah in the belly of the sea monster, we are led where we do
not want to go—not once, but many times in our lives. Dwelling in
unsettling liminal space, whether we are pushed or we jump, we are
led to draw on resources and possibilities we may not have tapped
before. In the unknown space between here and there, younger and
older, past and future, life happens. And, if we attend, we can feel
the Holy Spirit moving with us in a way that we may not be aware of
in more settled times. In liminal time and space, we can learn to let
reality—even in its darkness—be our teacher, rather than living in
the illusion that we are creating it on our own. We can enter into the
liminal paradox: a disturbing time and space that not only breaks us
down, but also offers us the choice to live in it with fierce aliveness,
freedom, sacredness, companionship, and awareness of Presence.
Liminal Space

Between Two Worlds
Sunday,  April 26, 2020
Liminal space is an inner state and sometimes an outer situation

where we can begin to think and act in new ways. It is where we are
betwixt and between, having left one room or stage of life but not yet
entered the next. We usually enter liminal space when our former
way of being is challenged or changed—perhaps when we lose a job
or a loved one, during illness, at the birth of a child, or a major
relocation. It is a graced time, but often does not feel “graced” in any
way. In such space, we are not certain or in control. This global
pandemic we now face is an example of an immense, collective
liminal space.
The very vulnerability and openness of liminal space allows room for something
genuinely new to happen. We are empty and receptive—erased tablets waiting
for new words. Liminal space is where we are most teachable, often because we
are most humbled. Liminality keeps us in an ongoing state of shadowboxing
instead of ego-confirmation, struggling with the hidden side of things, and
calling so-called normalcy into creative question.
It’s no surprise then that we generally avoid liminal space. Much of

the work of authentic spirituality and human development is to get
people into liminal space and to keep them there long enough that
they can learn something essential and new. Many spiritual giants
like St. Francis, Julian of Norwich, Dorothy Day, and Mohandas
Gandhi tried to live their entire lives in permanent liminality, on the
edge or periphery of the dominant culture. This in-between place is
free of illusions and false payoffs. It invites us to discover and live
from broader perspectives and with much deeper seeing.
In liminal space we sometimes need to not-do and not-perform according to our

usual successful patterns. We actually need to fail abruptly and deliberately
falter to understand other dimensions of life. We need to be silent instead of
speaking, experience emptiness instead of fullness, anonymity instead of
persona, and pennilessness instead of plenty. In liminal space, we descend and
intentionally do not come back out or up immediately. It takes time but this
experience can help us reenter the world with freedom and new, creative
approaches to life.
I imagine that even if you’ve never heard the word liminal before, you likely
have a sense of what I’m talking about. It would be difficult to exist in this time
of global crisis and not feel caught between at least two worlds—the one we
knew and the one to come. Our consciousness and that of future generations has
been changed. We cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
Seeing Beyond Ourselves

Friday,  May 1, 2020

After decades of observation, I can honestly say that the United States is a
ritually starved culture. We are too easily satisfied with making a sign of the
cross or blowing out candles on our birthday cake. True rituals create liminal
space (from the Latin word limen, meaning threshold). We need them to help us
consciously spend time at the thresholds of our lives.
Without some sort of guidance and reframing, we don’t understand the

necessary ebb and flow of life, the ascents and descents, and the need to
embrace our tears as well as our triumphs. Without standing on the threshold
for much longer than we’re comfortable, we won’t be able to see beyond
ourselves to the broader and more inclusive world that lies before us. In liminal
space, we must leave business as usual and voluntarily enter a world where the
rules and expectations are quite different. Wise elders, like the ones I’ve shared
this week, help us to recognize and embrace such spaces.
Sadly, our Christian churches often fail to create such liminal space through
authentic ritual. Perhaps that is one of many reasons people are leaving
churches in the West. You could even say today that the institutions of
Christianity themselves exist in liminal space. Author and pastor Brandan
Robertson examines the threshold moment of our current religious institutions:
We are entering a truly liminal space where, for a multitude of reasons, many
are leaving the ways they’ve historically worshiped and entering into uncharted
territory. On one hand, this is an exciting time in religious history, as we
participate in radical and fundamental reforms of our institutions. On the other
hand, this process can cause great anxiety for those of us who have devoted our
lives to teaching, practicing, and guiding others in a particular spiritual or
religious tradition. . . .
What are we to do at such a threshold moment? . . . In moments of transition,

we are simply to be. We are to pause and acknowledge that a transition is taking
place. Instead of seeking to abruptly pass through a threshold, we are to tarry. . .
. A new reality is emerging, but we cannot see beyond the threshold. All we
know is that we exist in this moment, where everything is in transition. We may
experience a new way of being, but we cannot yet sense what it will look like. [1]
Not one of us has a reliable crystal ball. We don’t know what lies
ahead in this uncertain moment in history. Yet we know we are
called into relationship, with our Creator and with each other. It is
through liminal space that we may taste—however briefly —
experiences of divine union, recognizing the radical oneness we all
enjoy with everything—simply by being born.
An Embarrassing Silence
Monday, January 6, 2020
When I first learned contemplation in my Franciscan novitiate, I was taught

a practice of silent, wordless prayer. Over the decades, I have learned there
are many paths to contemplation, myriad ways to access nondual
consciousness. (The Saturday practices in the Daily Meditations are our
own attempts to help spread the good news of contemplation in many
forms.) Regardless how we practice—with stillness, breath, observation,
chanting, walking, dancing, calm conversation—contemplation calls the
ordinary thinking mind into question. We gradually come to recognize that
this thing we call “thinking” does not enable us to love God and love
others. We need a different operating system, and it both begins with and
leads to silence.
Even through practices full of sounds and words, contemplation helps us

access a foundational silence, a deep, interior openness to Presence. One of
our faculty members, Barbara Holmes, writes: “An ontological silence can
occupy the heart of cacophony, the interiority of celebratory worship. . . .
Silence [is] the source of all being. . . . Silence is the sea that we swim in.”
[1] And yet we’re often oblivious to it. Thus, the need for practice.
In my book The Naked Now, I call non-silence “dualistic thinking,” where

everything is separated into opposites, like good and bad, life and death. In
the West, we even believe that is what it means to be educated—to be very
good at dualistic thinking. Join the debate club! But both Jesus and Buddha
would call that judgmental thinking (Matthew 7:1-5), and they strongly
warn us against it.
Dualistic thinking is operative almost all of the time now. It is when we

choose or prefer one side and then call the other side of the equation false,
wrong, heresy, or untrue. But what we judge as wrong is often something
to which we have not yet been exposed or that somehow threatens our ego.
The dualistic mind splits the moment and forbids the dark side, the
mysterious, the paradoxical. This is the common level of conversation that
we experience in much of religion and politics and even every day
conversation. It lacks humility and patience—and is the opposite of
contemplation.
In contemplative practice, the Holy Spirit frees us from taking sides and
allows us to remain content long enough to let it teach, broaden, and enrich
us in the partial darkness of every situation. We need to practice for many
years and make many mistakes in the meantime to learn how to do this.
Paul rather beautifully describes this kind of thinking: “Pray with gratitude
and the peace of Christ, which is beyond knowledge or understanding
(what I would call “the making of distinctions”), will guard both your mind
and your heart in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7). Teachers of
contemplation show us how to stand guard and not let our emotions and
obsessive thoughts control us.
When we’re thinking nondualistically, with this guarded mind and heart,
we will feel powerless for a moment, stunned into an embarrassing and
welcoming silence. Then we will discover what is ours to do.
References:
[1] Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black
Church, 2nd edition (Fortress Press: 2017), 20-22.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in

Contemplation (Franciscan Media: 2014), 10-11.
Sustained in God's Love
Monday,  July 6, 2020

In the light of eternity, we’re here for a very short time, really. We’re here for
one thing, ultimately: to learn how to love, because God is love. Love is our
origin, love is our ground, and love is our destiny. —James Finley
CAC faculty member James Finley offers a contemplative practice to help us

experience the love of God even in the midst of chaos. Living out of that love
transforms both ourselves and the world.
What is the practice that matters now? A practice is any act habitually entered
into with our whole heart that takes us to the deeper place. Some of these
practices, we might not think of as prayer and meditation: tending the roses, a
long, slow walk to no place in particular, a quiet moment at day's end, being
vulnerable in the presence of that person in whose presence we're taken to the
deeper place, the pause between two lines of a poem. There are these acts that
reground us in the depth dimensions of our life that matter most; so if we're
faithful to our practice, our practice will be faithful to us. . . .
In this contemplative practice, sit and renew your awareness that

you're sitting in the presence of God all about you and within you. As
you inhale, inhale God's silent "I love you," in which God is being poured out
and utterly given away to you as the miracle of your very life. Then when you
exhale, exhale yourself in love: “I love you.” And so, we are breathing [along
with God], "I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you." From the reciprocity of
love, destiny is fulfilled, and the foundations of suffering are healed.
As we sit this way, suffering arises. The suffering then might be our anxiety and
concerns today, for ourselves, for our loved ones, for the world. As we sit in the
midst of the arising of the anxiety, when we inhale, we inhale this love of God
loving us through and through, anxiety and all, finding no hindrance in our
anxiety, loving us so unexplainably forever. Then when we exhale, we exhale
ourselves in love, anxiety and all, to the love that loves us. This requires gentle
perseverance, because anxiety arises again. It doesn't automatically go away. We
sit with it, we lean into it again, and we hold fast to this love that sustains us in
the midst of things. It is in this way, little by little, that we come to understand
the unsubstantiality of everything but love. Love and love alone has the
authority to name who we are.
This practice, then, experientially grounds us in this love wisdom. This love
wisdom—grounded in practice—empowers us to go out and share this with
other people in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Week Thirty-one

The Rhineland Mystics

Spark of the Divine
Friday,  August 7, 2020
Matthew Fox has studied, written, and taught on theology and the mystics for
decades. In one of his books on Meister Eckhart, Fox writes:
In the soul, Eckhart maintains, there is “something like a spark of divine nature,
a divine light, a ray, an imprinted picture of the divine nature.” [1] . . . But we
have to make contact with this divine spark by emptying ourselves or letting go.
And then we will know the unity that already exists. [2]
Indian-born teacher Eknath Easwaran (1910–1999) puts it in similar terms:

Life’s real and highest goal . . . [is] to discover this spark of the divine that is in
our hearts. . . . When we realize this goal, we discover simultaneously that the
divinity within ourselves is one and the same in all—all individuals, all
creatures, all of life. [3]
Meister Eckhart was frequently criticized by his contemporaries (and still is by

some people today) because his language was far too unitive. We like our
distinctions! We don’t want to hear that we have the same soul as our enemies,
not our personal ones and certainly not our cultural or global ones! We want to
hate them, don’t we? And far too often our religion seemingly gives us
permission to do so. But mystics don’t hate anyone. They simply can’t. They
pray, as Jesus does on the cross, “Father forgive them, they do not know what
they are doing” (Luke 23:34). The mystic knows the other person doesn’t know.
It’s not malice as much as ignorance and unawareness. And, of course, it’s a
burden to know; it’s a responsibility to know, because once we know that God
has inhabited all that God has created, then all of our distinctions are silly. They
are just ways to create self-importance and superiority for ourselves and put
down someone else. We’ve played this game since grade school!
Mysticism begins when we start to make room for a completely new experience
of God as immanent, present here and now, with and within all of us. God isn’t
only transcendent, “out there,” and separate from me. Augustine of Hippo
(354–430) wrote that God is “more intimate to me than I am to myself.” [4] St.
Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510) said, “My me is God: nor do I know my
selfhood except in God.” [5] Like all mystics, they overcame the gap, and we can
too. When God is no longer out there or over there, we have begun the mystical
journey. It’s not simply that we have a new relationship with God. It’s as though
we have a whole new God!
That's what Meister Eckhart meant when he said, “Let us pray to God that we
may be free of God.” [6] That’s not sacrilege; that’s a beautifully humble prayer
because we know that our present notion of God is never all God is. As
Augustine boldly stated, “Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus” (“If we
comprehend it, it is not God”). [7] Our present experience is never enough, but
it is gratefully where we begin, and these mystics teach us that we grow with
each experience of God.

True Self/Separate Self

Sunday,  August 30, 2020
The thing that we have to face is that life is as simple as this. We are living in a
world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time.
This is not just a fable or a nice story, it is true. —Thomas Merton
I learned the terms “True Self” and “false self” from Thomas Merton (1915‒
1968). These are words he used to clarify Jesus’ teaching of dying to self or
“losing ourselves to find ourselves” (see Mark 8:35). Merton rightly recognized
that it was not the body that had to “die” but the “false self” that we do not need
anyway. The false self—or what I am calling lately the “separate self,”
disconnected from Divine Love—is simply a substitute for our deepest truth. It
is a useful and even needed part of ourselves, but it is not all of us; the danger is
when we think we are only our small or separate self. Our attachment to the
false self must die to allow the True Self—our basic and unchangeable identity in
God—to live fully and freely.
Thomas Merton said that the True Self should not be thought of as anything
different than life itself—but not my little life—the Big Life. [1] Franciscan
philosopher John Duns Scotus (c. 1266‒1308) said that the human person is not
different or separate from Being itself. This is not the little being that you and I
get attached to and take too seriously, but Universal Being, “the One in whom
we live, and move, and have our being,” as Paul put it to the Athenians (Acts
17:28). We Franciscans call this “the univocity of all being” (speaking of all
beings with one consistent voice), “that all may be one” (John 17:21).
When you’ve gotten too comfortable with your separate self and you call it Life,
you will get trapped at that level. You will hold onto it for dear life—because
that’s the only life you think you have! Unless someone tells you about the
Bigger Life, or you’ve had a conscious connection with the deepest ground of
your being, there’s no way you’re going to let go of your separate self. But your
attachment to that separate self must “die” or “the single grain of wheat remains
just a single grain” (John 12:24).
Your True Self is Life and Being and Love. Love is what you were made for and
love is who you are. When you live outside of Love, you are not living from your
true Being or with full consciousness. The Song of Songs says that “Love is
strong as Death. . . . The flash of it is a flash of fire, a flame of YHWH” (8:6,
Jerusalem Bible). Your True Self is a little tiny flame of this Universal Reality
that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, Light and Fire
itself, God’s very self.

The Glory of God in Us

Monday,  August 31, 2020
Today we begin with Thomas Merton’s classic description of the True Self as
written following his “conversion” at Fourth and Walnut in Louisville. [1] It is so
inspired; I want to quote it at length:
At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin
and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to
God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which
is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.
This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God
in us. It is so to speak [God’s] name written in us, as our poverty, as our
indigence, as our dependence, as our [birthright]. It is like a pure diamond,
blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see
it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and
blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish
completely. . . . I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of
heaven is everywhere. [2]
Most people spend their entire lives living up to the mental self-images of who
they think they are, instead of living in the primal “I” that is already good in
God’s eyes. But all I can “pay back” to God or others or myself is who I really
am. This is what Merton is describing above. It’s a place of utter simplicity.
Perhaps we don’t want to go back there because it is too simple and almost too
natural. It feels utterly unadorned. There’s nothing to congratulate myself for. I
can’t prove any worth, much less superiority. There I am naked and poor. After
years of posturing and projecting, it will at first feel like nothing.
But when we are nothing, we are in a fine position to receive everything from
God. As Merton says above, our point of nothingness is “the pure glory of God in
us.” If we look at the great religious traditions, we see they all use similar words
to point in the same direction. The Franciscan word is “poverty.” The Carmelite
word is nada or “nothingness.” The Buddhists speak of “emptiness.” Jesus
speaks of being “poor in spirit” in his very first beatitude (Matthew 5:3).
A Zen master would call the True Self “the face we had before we were born.”
Paul would call it who we are “in Christ, hidden in God” (Colossians 3:3). It is
who we are before we’ve done anything right or anything wrong, before we even
have a conscious thought about who we are. Thinking creates the separate self,
the ego self, the insecure self. The God-given contemplative mind, on the other
hand, recognizes the God Self, the Christ Self, the True Self of abundance and
deep inner security.



Slowly but surely, the loving and open-ended language of the daily
meditations is replacing the rigid vocabulary of faith that I so readily
absorbed in the earlier days of my faith. In fact, I feel that I am finally
beginning to experience faith instead of just a list of things I was taught to
accept. What freedom there is in this! I also appreciate how much Fr. Richard
"passes the mic" to amplify other voices. I am grateful to have been introduced
to Barbara Holmes, Cynthia Bourgeault, and many others. These voices help
me find my own. [They] cut through the noise and help me grow from a place
of deep belonging. —Alison D.
[1] Walnut has since been renamed Muhammed Ali Boulevard.

[2] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday & Company: ©1965,
1966), 142.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer
(Crossroad Publishing: 1999, 2003), 76‒78.
Image credit: Room in New York (detail), Edward Hopper, 1932.
The Illusion of the Separate Self
Tuesday,  September 1, 2020

CAC faculty member James Finley studied under Thomas Merton as a young
monk in formation. While many have been influenced by Merton’s writings, few
have had the opportunity to learn from the mystic himself. Today, Jim reflects
on the insights on the True Self and false self that he gleaned from Thomas
Merton.
In the following text Merton makes clear that the self-proclaimed autonomy of
the false self is but an illusion. . . .
Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.
This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not
know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much
privacy.
My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the
reach of God’s will and God’s love—outside of reality and outside of
life. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion.
We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we
cherish about ourselves—the ones we are born with and which feed
the roots of sin. For most of the people in the world, there is no
greater subjective reality than this false self of theirs, which cannot
exist. A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life
of sin. [1] . . .
The false self, sensing its fundamental unreality, begins to clothe

itself in myths and symbols of power. Since it intuits that it is but a
shadow, that it is nothing, it begins to convince itself that it is what it
does. Hence, the more it does, achieves and experiences, the more
real it becomes. Merton writes,
All sin starts from the assumption that my false self, the self that
exists only in my own egocentric desires, is the fundamental reality
of life to which everything else in the universe is ordered. Thus I use
up my life in the desire for pleasures and the thirst for experiences,
for power, honor, knowledge and love, to clothe this false self and
construct its nothingness into something objectively real. And I wind
experiences around myself and cover myself with pleasures and
glory like bandages in order to make myself perceptible to myself
and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only
become visible when something visible covered its surface. [2]
Richard again: Our false self is how we define ourselves outside of

love, relationship, or divine union. After we have spent many years
laboriously building this separate self, with all its labels and
preoccupations, we are very attached to it. And why wouldn’t we be?
It’s what we know and all we know. To move beyond it will always
feel like losing or dying.
[1] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions Paperbook: 2007,
©1961), 34.
[2] Ibid., 34-35.
James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere: A Search for God through Awareness of the
True Self (Ave Maria Press: 1978), 33, 35, 36.
Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-Bass: 2013), 36.
For a deeper exploration of Thomas Merton’s teachings, tune into James Finley’s podcast,
“Turning to the Mystics,” produced by the CAC.

Trusting in the “True You”

Wednesday,  September 2, 2020
Our separate self is who we think we are, but our thinking does not make it true.
It is a social and mental construct that gets us started on life’s journey. It is a set
of agreements between us as individuals and our parents, families, school
friends, partner or spouse, culture, and religion. It is our “container.” It is
largely defined in distinction from others, precisely as our separate and unique
self. It is probably necessary to get started, but it becomes problematic when we
stop there and spend the rest of our lives promoting and protecting it. This
small and separate self is merely our launching pad: our appearance, education,
job, money, success, and so on. These are the trappings of ego that help us get
through an ordinary day.
Please understand that the separate self is not bad or inherently deceitful. It is
actually quite good and necessary as far as it goes; it just does not go far enough.
Too often, it poses and substitutes for the real thing and pretends to be more
than it is. The separate self is bogus more than bad. We need the temporary
costumes of our egoic selves to get started, but they show their limitations when
they stay around too long.
When we are able to move beyond our separate self, it will feel as if we lost
nothing important at all. Of course, if we don’t know that there is
anything “beyond” the separate self, the transition will probably feel
like dying. Only after we have fallen into the True Self, will we be
able to say with the mystic Rumi (1207‒1273), “What have I ever lost
by dying?” [1] We have discovered true freedom and liberation.
When we are connected to the Whole, we no longer need to protect
or defend the smaller parts. We are connected to something
inexhaustible and unhurtable. The True Self cannot be hurt. I said
that at the National AIDS Conference one time, and it was one of the most
healing lines for that crowd. I got letters for months afterward; they realized the
“True You” is indestructible. All our hurts and feelings of being offended come
from our separate selves.
If we do not let go of our separate self/false self at the right time and in the right
way, we remain stuck, trapped, and addicted. (The traditional word for that was
sin.) Unfortunately, many people reach old age still entrenched in their egoic
operating system. Only our True Self lives forever and is truly free in this world.



[1] Rumi, “Tell Me, What Have I Lost?” in The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected

Translations, trans. Robert Bly (Harper Perennial: 2005), 339.
Bass: 2013), 27‒29, 36; and
True Self/False Self, disc 1 (Franciscan Media: 2003), CD.

Separateness Is Suffering
Thursday,  September 3, 2020
The idea of the two “selves” within every individual—the True Self and the
separate self—is a part of the perennial wisdom and a pathway for
transformation in most faith traditions. I share the thoughts of two writers, a
rabbi and a Sufi Shaikh (elder), on why this teaching is so central to mature
spirituality.
From Rabbi Rami Shapiro:

The term “perennial philosophy”. . . refers to a fourfold realization: (1) there is
only one Reality (call it, among other names, God, Mother, Tao, Allah,
Dharmakaya, Brahman, or Great Spirit) that is the source and substance of all
creation; (2) that while each of us is a manifestation of this Reality, most of us
identify with something much smaller, that is, our culturally conditioned
individual ego; (3) that this identification with the smaller self gives rise to
needless anxiety, unnecessary suffering, and cross-cultural competition and
violence; and (4) that peace, compassion, and justice naturally replace anxiety,
needless suffering, competition, and violence when we realize our true nature as
a manifestation of this singular Reality. The great sages and mystics of every
civilization throughout human history have taught these truths in the language
of their time and culture. [1]
From Kabir Helminski:

Education as it is currently understood, particularly in the West, ignores the
human soul, or essential Self. This essential Self is not some vague entity whose
existence is a matter of speculation, but our fundamental “I,” which has been
covered over by social conditioning and by the superficiality of our rational
mind. In North America we are in great need of a form of training that would
contribute to the awakening of the essential Self. Such forms of training have
existed in other eras and cultures and have been available to those with the
yearning to awaken from the sleep of their limited conditioning and know the
potential latent in the human being. [2]
These are key reasons that the Center for Action and Contemplation
is dedicated to reinvigorating the teaching of Christian
contemplation. The consistent practice of contemplation helps to
uncover our true reality, essential Self, or fundamental “I.”
Unfortunately, separateness is the chosen stance of the small self which has a
hard time living in unity and love with the diverse manifestations of this One
Reality (i.e., ourselves, other people, and everything else). The small self takes
one side or the other in order to feel secure. It frames reality in a binary way: for
me or against me, totally right or totally wrong, my group’s or another group’s
opinion—all dualistic formulations.
That is the best the small egotistical self can do, yet it is not anywhere close to
adequate. It might be an early level of intelligence, but it is not mature wisdom.
The small self is still objectively in union with God, it just does not know it,
enjoy it, or draw upon it. Jesus asked, “Is it not written in your own law, ‘You
are gods’?” (John 10:34). But for most of us, this objective divine image has not
yet become the subjective likeness (Genesis 1:26‒27). Our life’s goal is to
illustrate both the image and the likeness of God by living in conscious loving
union with God. It is a moment by moment choice and surrender.



[1] Rami Shapiro, Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent: Sacred Teachings—

Annotated & Explained (Skylight Paths Publishing: 2013), xiv.
[2] Kabir Edmund Helminski, Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential
Self (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam: 1992), 6.
Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media:
2014), 70.

Trusting a Deeper Aliveness

Friday,  September 4, 2020
I believe a regular practice of Centering Prayer is one of the most effective

tools we have for discovering our True Selves. Sitting in silence, we become
adept at compassionately observing our separate self at work, as it tries to
maintain control of the inner narrative. Ultimately, however, with our
genuine intention and attention, our True Self is revealed, present to the
Presence of God. CAC faculty member Cynthia Bourgeault describes how this
happens:
When we enter [into] meditation [or contemplative prayer], it is like

a “mini-death,” at least from the perspective of the ego. . . . We let go
of our self-talk, our interior dialogue, our fears, wants, needs,
preferences, daydreams, and fantasies. . . . We simply entrust
ourselves to a deeper aliveness, gently pulling the plug on that
tendency of the mind to want to check in with itself all the time. In
this sense, meditation is a mini-rehearsal for the hour of our own
death, in which the same thing will happen. There comes a moment
when the ego is no longer able to hold us together, and our identity is
cast to the mercy of Being itself. This is the existential experience of
“losing one’s life.”. . .
Just as in meditation [and contemplative prayer] we participate in

the death of Christ, we also participate in his resurrection. . . . For
twenty minutes we [i.e., our ego or separate self] have not been
holding ourselves in life, and yet life remains. Something has held us
and carried us. And this same something, we gradually come to
trust, will hold and carry us at the hour of our death. To know this—
really know this—is the beginning of resurrection life. . . .
Virtually all the great spiritual traditions of the world share the
conviction that humanity is the victim of a tragic case of mistaken
identity. There is a “self” and a Self, and our fatal mistake lies in
confusing the two. The egoic self . . . is in virtually every spiritual
tradition immediately dispatched to the realm of the illusory, or at
best, transitory. It is the imposter who claims to be the whole. This imposter
can become a good servant, but it is a dangerous master. Awakening—which in
Jesus’ teaching really boils down to the capacity to perceive and act in
accordance with the higher laws of the Kingdom of Heaven—is a matter of
piercing through the charade of the smaller self to develop a stable connection
with the greater Self . . . becoming intimate with our spiritual identity, the sense
of selfhood carried in our spiritual awareness. . . .
Through meditation [like Centering Prayer] it gradually becomes ingrained in us

that “losing one’s life,” regardless of the action that may ultimately be required
of us in the outer world, entails first and foremost a passage from our ordinary
awareness to our spiritual one, because only at this deeper level of non-
fearbased, wholistic perception will we be able to understand what is actually
required of us.



Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Cowley Publications: 2004),

81, 82-83.

Wounded Healers

Transforming our Pain
Friday,  September 18, 2020
If I were to name the Christian religion, I would probably call it “The Way of the
Wound.” Jesus agrees to be the Wounded One, and we Christians are these
strange believers in a wounded healer. We come to God not through our
strength but through our weakness. We learn wisdom and come to God not by
doing it all right but through doing it all wrong.
If you were going to create a religion, would you think of creating, as your
religious image, a naked, bleeding, wounded man? It is the most unlikely image
for God, the most illogical image for Omnipotence. None of us in our wildest
imagination would have come up with it. It must expose a central problem of
human existence, for God to come into the world in this form and in this way.
Sadly, we Christians have become accustomed to the cross—perhaps
we have domesticated it—and we no longer receive the shock and the
scandal of all that this image of failure is saying. Being wounded,
suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to truly
living.
Using a scapegoat is our much-preferred method. We deny our pain,

sins, and suffering and project them elsewhere. This ancient method
still works so well that there is no reason to think it is going to end or
change. Until we are enlightened by grace, we don’t even see it; it
remains safely hidden in the unconscious where it plays itself out.
Once we spot and stop the pattern, the game is over. The cross of
Jesus was a mirror held up to history, so we could spot the
scapegoating pattern and then stop participating in it.
Only the Great Self, the True Self, the Godself, can carry the anxiety
within us. The little self can’t do it. People who don’t pray can’t live
the Gospel because the self is not strong enough to hold the anxiety
and the fear. If we do not transform our pain, we will always
transmit it. Always someone else has to suffer because we don’t
know how to suffer; that’s what it comes down to.
Most people are like electric wires: what comes in is what goes out. Someone
calls us a name, and we call them a name back. That is, most people pass on the
same energy that is given to them. Now compare an electric wire to those big,
grey transformers that you see on utility poles. Dangerous current or voltage
comes in, but something happens inside that grey box and what comes out is, in
fact, now helpful and productive. That is exactly what Jesus does with suffering.
That is what Jesus did: he did not return the negative energy
directed at him—not during his life nor when he hung on the cross.
He held it inside and made it into something much better. That is
how “he took away the sin of the world.” He refused to pass it on!
Until the world understands that, there will be no new world.



My life went from forty-seven years of striving for constant perfection to
crashing in the very setting that I thought defined me: on a stage, giving a
presentation to hundreds of people. For decades, presenting and "putting on a
show" was where I found my identity. Until that foundation was so
unexpectedly and brilliantly pulled right out from under my feet. It began a
two-year descent into deep depression and physical illness. It was the
beginning of disorder. With the help of these daily emails, there has been a
true seeing of this [separate, false] self that was created, and is now being seen
for the illusion it is. [These daily meditations] have quite literally changed my
life. —Missy M.
Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 78–80.
Image credit: Resurrection of Lazarus (detail), circa 12th‒13th century, Athens.
A Mutual Vulnerability
Earlier this year, my colleague and dear friend Jim Finley gave an
unpublished talk to Illuman, an organization that supports men in authentic
spiritual development. Jim shared some stories from his own life, including
how he began to heal from his own childhood abuse and trauma with the help
of Thomas Merton, who was his novice master and spiritual director at the
Abbey of Gethsemani.
When I went in to see Merton for direction, I was eighteen years old, I was just
out of high school. Because of my trauma history I had this issue with authority
figures. So when I went in to try to talk to him, I hyperventilated; I had a hard
time breathing. And he said to me, “What's going on?” I told him, my voice was
shaking, and I said, “I'm scared because you're Thomas Merton.”
I can remember being so ashamed, because I wanted him to think well of

me. . . . He said to me something that really was a turning point in my life. . . . I
worked at the pig barn at the time. . . . He said, “Under obedience, every day
after afternoon work, before vespers, I want you to come here every day and sit
down and tell me one thing that happened at the pig barn each day.”. . .
I remember thinking to myself, “I can do that.” And it leveled the playing

field. . . . Just two men sitting in a room, talking about daily work. And he
became a father figure for me.
I learned a big lesson, which later really was to affect me in my own

therapy and as a therapist, that when you risk sharing what hurts the
most in the presence of someone who will not invade you or abandon
you, you can learn not to invade or abandon yourself. Even deeper
down, when you risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of
someone who will not invade you or abandon you, you can discover
within yourself what Jesus called the pearl of great price [Matthew
13:46], your invincible preciousness in the midst of your fragility.
So through humility and through vulnerability, the true strength of

being empowered, my manhood came forth, sitting in this room. Out
of all the studies I've done with Merton, and my talks on Merton, I
think nothing went deeper than talking with him about the pigs.
Because that's compassion. . . .
So this is my sense of manhood, I guess: a radicality, a spirituality,

that gives me the courage to face the most broken and lost places
within myself, discovering through that acceptance the oceanic
tender mercy of God that sustains us in that brokenness, so that by
learning to be this way ourselves we can pass it on to others. We can
be someone in whose presence it's safe to be vulnerable and to be open, and
truly courageous and strong and powerful, as Jesus was strong and powerful, in
the truest, deepest sense of the word.
Adapted from James Finley, “An Illuman Watering Hole Zoom Event,” (June 18, 2020),
unpublished presentation. To learn more about this organization and its work, see
www.illuman.org/about/.
Wounded Healers

God Uses Everything
Monday,  September 14, 2020
Feast of the Triumph of the Cross
The genius of Jesus’ ministry is that he embraces tragedy, suffering,

pain, betrayal, and death itself to bring us to God. There are no dead
ends. Everything can be transmuted, and everything can be used.
Everything.
It seems that everybody wants to take easy sides. It’s so consoling for the ego to
have an answer; to be sure that my position is the final and only true answer.
Yet, as Paul says, on the cross Jesus becomes the sin and the problem. He
identifies with the wound, the pain, and the suffering (2 Corinthians 5:21). He
does not stand apart from it but enters into it. What a paradox, what a mystery!
Jesus tells Peter, “Peter, you must be sifted like wheat. And once you have
recovered, then you, in your turn, can strengthen your companions” (Luke
22:31–32). Until there has been a journey through suffering, I don’t believe that
we have true healing authority. We don’t have the ability to lead anybody
anyplace new unless we have walked it ourselves to some degree. In general,
we can only lead people on the spiritual journey as far as we
ourselves have gone. We simply can’t talk about it beyond that.
That’s why the best thing we can do for people is to stay on the
journey ourselves. We transform people to the degree we have been
transformed. When we can somehow be compassion, not just talk
about compassion; when we can be healed and not just talk about
healing, then we are, as Henri Nouwen said so well, “wounded
healers,” but not before.
It always comes through the wounding. What we do when faced with our
deepest wounds determines whether there is authentic spirituality at work or
not. If we seek to blame other people, accuse, attack, or even explain
and make perfect, logical sense out of our wounds, there will be no
further spiritual journey. But if, when the wounding happens, we
find the grace and the freedom to somehow see that it’s not just a
wound, but a sacred wound, then the journey progresses. Then we
set out to find ourselves, to find the truth, and to find God.
It’s all about what each of us does with the wound. If we ourselves
have never walked through some kind of suffering, whether betrayal,
abandonment, rejection, divorce, loss of job, struggles with
sexuality, we probably will give people “head” answers. We don’t
touch or heal their hearts because our own have not been
transformed. I don’t think it’s any accident that in most of Jesus’ healings, he
physically touches people. He’s showing that healing cannot be done through
the head, through explanations, theories and theologies, or quick, “logical”
conclusions. It must somehow be a communication of life and love energy, held
even at the cellular level.
Our Sacred Wounds
Sunday,  September 13, 2020
Ministry can indeed be a witness to the living truth that the wound,
which causes us to suffer now, will be revealed to us later as the
place where God intimated [God’s] new creation. —Henri J. M.
Nouwen (1932–1996)
Christianity, in its mature forms, keeps pushing us toward the

necessary tragic: “the foolishness of the cross,” as Paul calls it (1
Corinthians 1:18). Normally, the way God pushes us is by
disillusioning us with the present mode. Until the present falls apart,
we will never look for something more. We will never discover what
it is that really sustains us. That dreaded falling-apart experience is
always suffering in some form. All of us hate suffering, yet all
religions talk about it as necessary. It seems to be the price we pay
for the death of the small self and the emergence of the True Self—
when we finally come to terms with our true identity in God. Many
Jungians describe this in psychological terms as the “necessary soul
suffering” that comes from the death of the ego. Jesus would say,
“Unless the grain of wheat dies, it remains just a grain of wheat”
(John 12:24). By avoiding this legitimate pain of being human, we
sadly bring on ourselves much longer lasting and, often, fruitless
pain.
In the work I have done with men’s spirituality, we call that suffering
in its transformed state “the sacred wound.” The sacred wound is a
concept drawn from classical mythology, but also from the Christ
story. In mythology, the would-be hero is always wounded. The word
innocent (innocens, “not yet wounded”) is not a complimentary term
in mythology. The puer is the young boy (puella for the young girl)
who refuses to be wounded. More precisely, he refuses to recognize
and suffer the wounds that are already there. He’s just going to
remain nice and normal so everybody will accept him. In our
culture, he might smugly remain white and middle class, healthy,
“sinless,” Catholic, good-looking, and happy. Maybe he will drive a
fancy car or wear the latest clothing. He refuses to let things fall
apart. He refuses to be wounded, much less to allow the humiliating
wound to become sacred and sanctifying. Yet, I personally believe
that the Gospels are saying there is no other way to know something
essential. Allowing our always-unjust wounds to, in fact, become
sacred wounds is the unique Christian name for salvation. We
always learn our mystery at the price of our innocence.
We must trust the pain and not get rid of it until we have learned its
lessons. The suffering can be seen as a part of the great pattern of
how God is transforming all things. If there is one consistent and
clear revelation in the Bible, it is that the God of Israel is the one who
turns death into life (see Isaiah 26:19; Romans 4:17; 2 Corinthians
1:9). When we can trust the transformative pattern, and that God is
in the suffering, our wounds become sacred wounds. The actual and
ordinary life journey becomes itself the godly journey. We trust God
to be in all things, even in sin and suffering.
Healing Is a Process
Thursday,  September 17, 2020
I have been recently introduced to the work of Lama Rod Owens, a Black,
queer, American-born, Tibetan Buddhist teacher, who was raised in the
Christian church and graduated from Harvard Divinity School. Perhaps it is
because of his many identities that his teachings on love, self-compassion, and
justice seem to be drawn from the perennial wisdom of Reality itself. He
writes here of the needed work of healing our own wounds so that the healing
can be passed on:
Healing is being situated in love. Healing is not just the courage to love, but to
be loved. It is the courage to want to be happy not just for others, but for
ourselves as well. It is interrogating our bodies as an artifact of accumulated
traumas and doing the work of processing that trauma by developing the
capacity to notice and be with our pain. If we are to heal, then we must allow our
awareness to settle into and integrate with the pain and discomfort that has
been habitually avoided. We cannot medicate the pain away. We embrace it, and
in so doing establish a new relationship with the experience. We must see that
there is something that must be befriended. This is the true nature of our
experience, and in finally approaching this experience we contact basic sanity. . .
.
Healing is movement and work toward wholeness. Healing is never a definite

location but something in process. It is the basic ordinary work of staying
engaged with our own hurt and limitations. Healing does not mean forgiveness
either, though it is a result of it. Healing is knowing our woundedness; it is
developing an intimacy with the ways in which we suffer. Healing is learning to
love the wound because love draws us into relationship with it instead of
avoiding feeling the discomfort.
Healing means we are holding the space for our woundedness and allowing it to
open our hearts to the reality that we are not the only people who are hurt,
lonely, angry, or frustrated. We must also release the habitual aggression that
characterizes our avoidance of trauma or any discomfort. My goal is to befriend
my pain, to relate to it intimately as a means to end the suffering of desperately
trying to avoid it. Opening our hearts to woundedness helps us to understand
that everyone else around us carries around the same woundedness. . . .
Perhaps what I have come to understand, finally, is that somehow I have
become the one I have always wanted. This is why I do the things that I do.
There is a fierce love that wakes me up every morning, that makes me tell my
stories, refuses to let me apologize for my being here, blesses me with the
capacity to be silent, alone, and grieving when I most need to be. You have to
understand that this is what I mean when I say healing.
May all beings be seen, held kindly, and loved. May we all one day surrender to
the weight of being healed.
A Healing Community
While all Christians are called to follow Jesus, some communities have been
brought deeper into the Paschal Mystery of death and resurrection through
unjust and unrelenting collective suffering. Dr. Diana L. Hayes, an African
American Catholic theologian and scholar, describes the “wounding” of the
African American community and their faithful courage which has brought
forth so many sacred gifts in the United States and beyond. She writes:
African American spirituality was forged in the fiery furnace of slavery in the
United States. The ore was African in origin, in worldview, in culture, and in
traditions. The coals were laid in the bowels of ships named, ironically, after
Jesus and the Christian virtues, which carried untold numbers of Africans to the
Americas. The fire was stoked on the “seasoning” islands of the Caribbean or the
“breeding” plantations of the South where men, women, and children of Africa
were systematically and efficiently reduced to beasts of burden and items of
private property. Yet those who came forth from these fires were not what they
seemed. Despite the oppressive and ungodly forces applied against them, they
forged a spirituality that encouraged hope and sustained faith, which enabled
them to build communities of love and trust and to persevere in their persistent
efforts to be the free men and women they had been created to be. . . .
The African American spiritual story is one of hope in the face of despair, of
quiet determination in the face of myriad obstacles, of a quiet yet fierce dignity
over against the denial of their very humanity. Theirs is a spiritual history
literally written in the blood, sweat, and tears of countless foremothers and
forefathers who died under the lash, were sold as commodities, were treated as
less than human beings, but who struggled and survived despite and in spite of
all the forces arrayed against them. It is the story of their encounter with Jesus
Christ who enabled them to find a “way out of no way,” who justified their self-
understanding as children of God, and who enabled them to persist in the belief
that one day they would be free.
The spirituality of African Americans expresses a hands-on, down-to-earth

belief that God saw them as human beings created in God’s own image and
likeness and intended them to be a free people. . . .
It is a contemplative, holistic, joyful, and communitarian spirituality. This

means that it is expressed in prayer through a deeply conscious prayer life that
is not passive. . . . This spirituality sustained and nurtured them and enabled
them to hold their heads up and “keep on keeping on” when all and everything
seemed opposed to their forward movement. It is a spirituality expressed in
song, in dance, in prayer, in preaching, and most important, in living each day
as best they could in solidarity with one another and their God over against the
principalities and powers of their time.
Wounded Healers

September 13 - September 18, 2020

When we can trust that God is in the suffering, our wounds become sacred

wounds and the actual and ordinary life journey becomes itself the godly
journey. (Sunday)
Until there has been a journey through suffering, I don’t believe that we have
true healing authority, or the ability to lead anybody anyplace new. (Monday)
Despite the oppressive and ungodly forces applied against them, African
Americans forged a spirituality that encouraged hope and sustained faith,
which enabled them to build communities of love and trust. —Diana L. Hayes
(Tuesday)
When you risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who
will not invade you or abandon you, you can discover within yourself what
Jesus called the pearl of great price, your invincible preciousness in the midst
of your fragility. —James Finley (Wednesday)
Healing is learning to love the wound because love draws us into relationship
with it instead of avoiding feeling the discomfort. —Lama Rod Owens
(Thursday)
Being wounded, suffering, and dying are the quickest and most sure paths to
truly living. (Friday)

The Fruitful Margins of the Empire
On the margins of the Roman Empire, Ireland and Scotland helped hand
down the Christian contemplative lineage. The Romans had conquered much
of Europe by the time of Jesus’ birth; though they ruled Britain, the Romans
never occupied Ireland or parts of Scotland. This allowed the Celtic culture
and Christian monks the freedom to thrive independently. They weren’t
controlled by Roman practicality or Greek thinking. When Christian
missionaries arrived by the third century, the Celts blended their pagan or
creation-based spirituality with Christian liturgy, practice, and structure. As a
result, Celtic Christianity was still grounded in the natural world, and they
had much easier access to a cosmic notion of the Christ.
Perhaps we can think of Celtic Christians as an alternative community on the

edge of the inside of organized Christianity. Lacking the structure and support
of the organized church, radical forms of Christianity never thrive for very
long. Without the Irish monks, much of Celtic practice and thought would not
have been passed on to us at all.
Like the Desert Fathers and Mothers who influenced them, Celtic mystics
focused on rather different things than the mainstream church. The Celts drew
on their own cultural symbols and experience to emphasize other values than
the symbols of “Roman” Catholicism. For example, Celtic Christianity
encouraged the practice of confession to an anam cara (soul friend) more than
to an ordained priest.
They also saw God as a deep kind of listening and speaking presence, as in
“The Deer’s Cry.” I invite you to read this excerpt of St. Patrick’s traditional
prayer slowly, and to allow yourself, like the ancient Celts, to become aware of
the presence of Christ surrounding you through all things.
The Lorica of St. Patrick (The Deer`s Cry)
I arise to-day:
vast might, invocation of the Trinity,—
belief in a Threeness
confession of Oneness
meeting in the Creator. . . .
I arise to-day:
might of Heaven
brightness of Sun
whiteness of Snow
splendour of Fire
speed of Light
swiftness of Wind
depth of Sea
stability of Earth
firmness of Rock.
I arise to-day:
Might of God for my piloting
Wisdom of God for my guidance
Eye of God for my foresight
Ear of God for my hearing
Word of God for my utterance
Hand of God for my guardianship
Path of God for my precedence
Shield of God for my protection
Host of God for my salvation . . .
Christ with me, Christ before me,

Christ behind me, Christ in me,
Christ under me, Christ over me,
Christ to right of me, Christ to left of me,
Christ in lying down, Christ in sitting, Christ in rising up
Christ in the heart of every person, who may think of me!
Christ in the mouth of every one, who may speak to me!
Christ in every eye, which may look on me!
Christ in every ear, which may hear me!
I arise to-day:
vast might, invocation of the Trinity
belief in a Threeness
confession of Oneness
meeting in the Creator. [1]
Mystics and the Margins

Margins Create Liminal Space
Sunday,  September 27, 2020
When we are content and satisfied on the inside of any group, we seem to suffer
from a structural indifference. We do not realize that it is largely a belonging
system that we have created for ourselves. It is not until we are excluded from a
system that we are able to recognize its idolatries, lies, or shadow side. It is the
privileged “knowledge of the outsider” that opens up the playing field. People
can be personally well-intentioned and sincere, but structurally they cannot
comprehend certain things. In his ministry, Jesus quotes the call of Isaiah to
describe this collective social disregard: “You will hear and hear again, and not
understand, see and see again and not perceive . . .” (Isaiah 6:9; Mark 8:18).
Insiders are by nature dualistic because they divide themselves from the so-
called outsiders.
I believe it is for that reason that so many saints and mystics and even everyday
people have chosen to live their entire lives at the edges of most systems. They
take their small and sufficient place in the great and grand scheme of God by
“living on the edge of the inside.” They build on the solid tradition (“from the
inside”) but from a new and dynamic stance (“on the edge”) where they cannot
be co-opted by a need for security, possessions, or the illusions of power.
People such as Francis and Clare of Assisi try to live on the margins so they will
not become enamored by the illusions and payoffs of prevailing systems. They
know this is the only position that ensures continued wisdom, ever-broadening
perspective, and even deeper compassion. Such choices may be seen in the lives
of monks, nuns, hermits, or Amish communities. There are softer forms, too,
like people who do not watch TV, people who live under the level of a taxable
income, people who make prayer a major part of their day, people who
deliberately place themselves in risky situations for the greater good. It is ironic
that we must go to the edge to find the center, but that is what prophets,
hermits, and mystics invariably do.
I want to acknowledge that there is a difference between being marginalized—

forced (usually by prejudice and systemic discrimination) out of the common
benefits and goods that come from living in mainstream society—and choosing
to live on the margins. Both can be privileged places for spiritual growth and
transformation. This week we will offer examples from the broad tradition of
Christian mystics and communities who sought or accepted their location on the
margins as a place of creativity and interior freedom. Through their insights,
writings, rituals, and art, these men, women, and movements inspire us to cease
protecting the surfaces of things and fall into the core of our own souls and
experiences.

Freedom in the Desert
When Christianity became the established religion of the Roman Empire,

something remarkable and strange took place. A whole set of people began to
flock to the margins of the Empire to pursue God. They went to the deserts of
Palestine, Cappadocia, Syria, and Egypt. This is the emergence of the ones we
now call in a collective way the Desert Fathers and Mothers. These individuals
in the desert sought to reflect more deeply on the Mystery of God and God’s
will through work, prayer, and study of the Scriptures.
Thomas Merton (1915–1968) describes their movement this way:

Society—which meant pagan society, limited by the horizons and prospects of
life “in this world”—was regarded by them as a shipwreck from which each
single individual had to swim for their life. . . . These were people who believed
that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what
they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster. The fact that the
Emperor was now Christian and that the “world” was coming to know the Cross
as a sign of temporal power only strengthened them in their resolve. [1]
Benedictine Sister Laura Swan has written about the spirituality of the Desert
Mothers, and describes the quest for wholeness and salvation for which these
seekers thirsted and could find only outside the mainstream society:
Desert spirituality is characterized by the pursuit of abundant simplicity—

simplicity grounded in the possession of little—and the abundance of God’s
presence. Yearning for complete union with God, desert ascetics sought to
remove all obstacles to the deepening of this relationship. Obstacles included
unhelpful attitudes and motives, thoughts that stalled their pursuit of God, and
emotional ties that complicated their inner journeys.
The desert ascetics’ relationships were nonpossessive: They cared for others
while leaving them free. Concern for reputation was discarded. Feelings were
acknowledged and listened to for their wisdom but were subjected to the
discipline of the heart’s goal to seek God. The desert ascetics sought to mortify
disordered passions that distracted them from their deepening relationship with
God and actively to cultivate a burning love for God.
Although the journey began with giving away possessions, desert ascetics
understood that what possessed them was greater than the sum of goods owned.
All that owned them, all that possessed their minds and hearts, their
attachments and compulsions, must be healed and reconciled. Desert ascetics
called this process of moving toward inner freedom detachment. Detachment
allows for greater direct experience of the Divine Presence as the seeker is
attached to fewer distractions.
Desert ascetics understood that the cultivation of inner freedom was vital to the
deepening of their experience of God. As they deepened their interior freedom,
all aspects of their false self were removed and a clearer understanding of their
truest self emerged. It is this true self that dwells deeply with God. In the
abundant simplicity of our true self, we experience deepest joy. [2]

Faithful and Free Women

Thursday,  October 1, 2020
We have a lot to learn from communities like the beguines, or later, the
Quakers and Mennonites. These movements are made up of little groups, often
on the margins of society, sharing the Word of God and their lives together.
We might recognize this spirit at work today in the “base communities” of
Latin America, in small Bible study groups, or new monastic “intentional
communities.” They reveal to us the freedom of the Gospel. Author Laura
Swan, a Benedictine nun, has studied Christian women’s spirituality
movements and writes about the alternative lifestyle of the medieval beguines:
The beguines began to form in various parts of Europe over eight hundred years
ago—around the year 1200. Beguines were laywomen, not nuns, and thus did
not take solemn vows and did not live in monasteries. The beguines were a
phenomenal way of life that swept across Europe, yet they were never a religious
order or a formalized movement. And they did not have one specific founder or
rule to live by. But there were common elements that rendered these women
distinctive and familiar, including their common way of life, chastity and
simplicity, their unusual business acumen, and their commitment to God and to
the poor and marginalized. These women were essentially self-defined, in
opposition to the many attempts to control and define them. They lived by
themselves or together in so-called beguinages, which could be single houses for
as few as a handful of beguines or, as in Brugge, walled-in rows of houses
enclosing a central court with a chapel where over a thousand beguines might
live . . .
The inner spiritual world of the beguines was rich in imagination. These women,
and some of their monastic contemporaries, instigated a seismic shift in the
province of the imagination, bringing their embodied experience of God and
their spiritual journey into a broadened and deepened inner realm. Beguine
mystics experienced a fiercely intimate encounter with the Divine—whom they
called both “God” and “the One”. . .
For these women, prayer was being in the presence of God, seeking to unite
their minds and hearts with the One they loved (and whom they frequently
referred to as their “Beloved”). A central goal in life for beguines was unity of
will—that their personal will would become so united with the will of God that
they essentially functioned as a unified whole. God’s heart would be the seeker’s
heart; the seeker’s heart would find a home in God and God alone. This unity of
will would be evidenced by joy, mercy and compassion, and love. . . .
Beguines exhorted their followers to recognize that there existed no impediment

to a deep and meaningful prayer life. No matter what a person’s station in life,
be they educated or uneducated, poor or wealthy, it did not impede or deny
them awareness of God in their lives. God yearned to draw close to all.

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Hinduism

What is required is a meeting of the different religious traditions at the

Like so many Westerners, I grew up knowing almost nothing about

I was only slowly introduced to Hinduism’s profound mystical depths

[2] Second Vatican Council, “Nostra Aetate: Declaration on the Relation of

Inter-spiritual teacher Mirabai Starr says that “Hinduism is actually quite

Reflect on how the Perennial Tradition’s emphasis on the oneness of God

[2] Rami Shapiro, Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent:

Ways of Praying and Knowing

The summary belief in Hinduism is that there are four disciplines, yogas,

The four basic Hindu disciplines are:

 Bhakti yoga—the way of feeling, love, and the heart, preferred by

1. Yamas—five moral “thou shalt nots,” calling for non-violence,

Unless we can somehow chart this trajectory, we have no way to discern

This is foundational to the spiritual problems we are experiencing in

Becoming a “forest dweller” and “beggar” is a slow, patient learning and

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Introduction,” “Ripening,” Oneing, vol. 1 no.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

I am convinced that Jesus taught the karmic world view, but many

The third supreme idea of Hinduism is maya. This is often translated as

The Upanishads illustrate maya as “tricky” using the familiar experience

Image Credit: A Hindu Woman in Yoga Asana Meditation (detail),

Action and Contemplation

There are three major texts in Hinduism and Indian philosophy:

The Bhagavad Gita describes Lord Krishna, one of Hinduism’s central

Reflect on these passages from the Bhagavad Gita (4:18, 23-24):

The wise see that there is action in the midst of inaction,

When a man has let go of attachments,

God is the offering. God

Image Credit: A Hindu Woman in Yoga Asana Meditation (detail), Lucia

Summary: Sunday, August 12-Friday, August 17, 2018

The ancient, diverse Hindu tradition led to the overwhelming consensus

Hinduism emphasizes concrete practices (yogas) which allow practitioners

Hinduism speaks of four distinct stages to a person’s life. Western cultures

Advaita implies that the proper or spiritual way of understanding things is

The Bhagavad Gita calls the active person to a life of interiority and soul

Raja yoga, one of Hinduism’s four paths to enlightenment, follows eight

Prana is life’s force or energy. Pranayama is willful changing of one’s

I invite you to follow Ginny’s simple steps for

This breath is slow, deep, and deliberate. Focusing on the sound is an

Close your eyes or lower your gaze.

An alternative image is to exhale out through your mouth as if you are

For Further Study:

Bhagavad Gita (translated by either Stephen Mitchell or Eknath Easwaran)

Raimon Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man (Orbis Books:

The Other Half of My Soul: Bede Griffiths and the Hindu-Christian

Taoism and Buddhism

The Way of All Things

Continuing our exploration of perennial wisdom traditions, we turn to the

The ultimate purpose of the Tao Te Ching is to provide us with wisdom

Tibetan Buddhist Surya Das writes:

This should not be misconstrued as a rationalization for mere quietism,

[3] Lama Surya Das in Derek Lin, Tao Te Ching, viii-ix.

Image Credit: Woman Sitting in Front of Monk

Taoism and Buddhism

My colleague and CAC core teacher James Finley, a student of Buddhism,

First, he joined a yoga community that practiced deep, meditative states.

Image Credit: Woman Sitting in Front of Monk

Taoism and Buddhism

The Four Noble Truths

The Third Noble Truth is that it is possible to be healed from these

[2] James Finley, Jesus and Buddha: Paths to Awakening, disc 2 (Center

Taoism and Buddhism

Paul Knitter, a theologian and colleague of mine from my days in