Richard Rhor's daily meditations
Richard Rohr, OFM, (born 1943) is an American author, spiritual writer and Franciscan friar based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
He was ordained to the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church in 1970. He has been called "one of the most popular spirituality authors and speakers in the world."
Meditations@cac.org
Week Seventeen Summary
Listening to Creation
April 21 – April 26, 2024
Sunday
Daily cosmic events in the sky and on the earth are the Reality above our heads and beneath our feet every minute of our lives: a continuous sacrament, signs of God’s universal presence in all things.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
When we visit and revisit the wild places that are special to us, experiences of transcendence are waiting for us there.
—Tony Jones
Tuesday
The desert is the homeland of my heart. My spiritual path is cultivating a heart as spacious as the desert: wide open to every direction of the compass, wide open to every creature that walks, flies, or crawls through it, wide open to every change in the weather: darkness and light, sun and rain, aridity and dew, heat, cold, and wind.
—Tessa Bielecki
Wednesday
My temple, my mosque, my church of the woods is the holy place to which I return and return. It is a woods that preaches to me, fills me with wordless wisdoms. It is the place where I behold the awe-inspiring mystery of how I hope heaven will someday be.
—Barbara Mahany
Thursday
In our Native way, we are more or less listening, not just to ourselves or what we would say the Spirit puts in our hearts, but to what’s going on around us.
—Randy Woodley
Friday
All I’m saying is the whole world comes to life: every kind of cactus, every kind of tree or dead branch, the sunrise, the sunset, the different kinds of birds. I find myself in the middle of a universe of belonging.
—Richard Rohr
Week Seventeen Practice
Step Outside
Spiritual writer Shannon K. Evans asks how the Divine might be communicating through the natural world:
What would it look like for you and me to open ourselves to hearing the earth ask us to reclaim something? Could the trees really have a story to tell us about the work of the Holy One on this planet? Could mountains draw us deeper into divine presence? Could the animal life scampering around us breathe renewal into our souls if we stop to watch?
Most of us have probably had a revelatory moment in nature once or twice in our lives. Maybe we assume such things are rare flukes, an occasional happenstance to treasure but not to expect. But what if we can expect them? What if the lines between the material and the spiritual were never meant to be inflexible? If I told you that were you to step outside your door right now there would be a message from God for you, would you go?...
The earth is alive with Spirit, and there is something for you every single day out that door. Maybe not lightning from heaven, but a movement of Spirit that speaks in that still, small voice inside you. The earth is inviting you to discover incarnation.
Evans suggests:
Carve out time to spend in nature, free of agenda. It might be your own backyard for half an hour or it might be a weekend camping trip at a national park.… Below are a few starting points in case you need some handrails….
What is one element of nature that I feel drawn to today? An animal, tree, body of water, wind? Perhaps that drawing I feel is because it has something to say to me.
How might God be answering a quandary in my life through this engagement with nature?
What do I feel in my body?
Practice active listening. Expect to be shown new ideas, thoughts, or realizations.
Week Sixteen Summary
Art and Contemplation
April 14 – April 19, 2024
Sunday
The Divine takes the lead in changing places. Maybe artists have easier access to this Mystery than many theologians.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Too often, art is considered decorative, and it is significantly more than that. Engaging with art means we have to slow down to allow a new experience to enter which perhaps cannot be accessed in another way.
—Lourdes Bernard
Tuesday
Art also carves pathways toward our inner isles of spirituality. When we decide to live in our heads only, we become isolated from the God who is closer than our next breath. The restoration of wonder is the beginning of the inward journey toward God.
—Barbara A. Holmes
Wednesday
Inspiration is in the air and settles on people without regard for their skin color, their social background, or their educational level. How many illiterate artists have emerged in [Brazil], in marginal communities, and were never noticed? Boasting is not the Spirit’s way.
—Leonardo Boff
Thursday
The thing is to allow ourselves to become a vessel for a work of art to come through and allow that work to guide our hands. Once we do, we are assenting to a sacred adventure. We are saying yes to the transcendent and embodied presence of the holy.
—Mirabai Starr
Friday
Great art and great myth try to evoke an epiphany in us. They want to give us an inherent and original sense of the holy. They make us want to kneel and kiss the ground.
—Richard Rohr
Week Sixteen Practice
Dancing as Spiritual Practice
In the latest issue of Oneing, CAC staff member and dancer Jenna Keiper writes of the healing wisdom of embodied movement:
My ancestors, the wild siblings of old oak forests and the ruddy wanderers of windy peaks, knew communal rhythmic movement. All our ancestral Indigenous communities—as far as we can possibly know—have danced in community rituals to cope with the terror and awe of human life. [1] Anthropologists the world over have found the practice of communal dance to be fascinating in its predictability. It’s so very … human. Humans have, all along, had the answers today’s scientists “discover” written in our communal rhythms. Perhaps it would be wise to listen.
Remember, electrons whisper as the music slows, remember. Together, our Bodies calm and soften. Many Bodies lead their Souls into positions on the floor. Curling and rocking, our breathing slows, together. Remember….
God in the earth. God in the trees. God in myself. God, embodied. She speaks through every Body, and so the invitation is extended to every Body: Gray hair, unlined faces, stiff joints, supple muscles. Tall and short and bigger-bodied. Slow, quick, pregnant, dying. Alone in your room or on the floor in community. If you have a Body that moves in any way, then movement is your birthright. And if your Body can no longer move, then we will find a way to move in energy with you. Welcome, fellow travellers. Where words fade, the Body speaks.
Week Fifteen Summary
Tending the Fire Within
April 7 - April 12, 2024
Sunday
From time to time the divine grants itself with this kind of fire, a quiet luminosity that has great depth and intimacy to it.
—James Finley
Monday
We have to create a contemplative culture in our heart. We must vow to ourselves: I will not play the cynic. I will not break faith with my awakened heart.
—James Finley
Tuesday
After a week of the body toiling away in inane work and the spirit being assaulted with insult and loss, Sunday was set aside to recultivate the soul’s appreciation for beauty, truth, love, and eternity.
—Renita J. Weems
Wednesday
We’ve come to understand the importance of practice in sports, in most therapies, in any successful business, and in creative endeavours, but for some reason most of us do not see the need for it in the world of spirituality. Yet it’s probably more important there than in any other area.
—Richard Rohr
Thursday
Whenever we seek to understand how we can best live our lives with meaning and purpose, through prayer, meditation, or other practice of spiritual discernment, we’re engaging with our spirituality as a radical resilience skill.
—Alice Updike Scannell
Friday
True encounter with Christ liberates something in us, a power we did not know we had, a hope, a capacity for life, a resilience, encounter an ability to bounce back when we thought we were completely defeated, a capacity to grow and change, a power of creative transformation.
—Thomas Merton
Week Fifteen Practice
Experiencing Love
Author Felicia Murrell invites us to practice knowing and experiencing God’s love:
God is in our midst, a God who exults over us with joy, who quiets us in love, who rejoices over us with shouts of joy and gathers those who grieve (see Zephaniah 3:17–18).
But how do we get to the place where this is the God we see, the God we encounter and know, the God who frames our imaginings when we think of God?
Stillness, perhaps. Contemplative prayer, maybe.
For me, Divine Love is unveiled through communion, connection, and acts of living that create openhearted wonder.
Consistent engagement with spiritual practices often invites us into such spaciousness, creating access points for us to become more consciously aware of Divine Love’s kenotic expression in us and through us.
To that end, all spiritual practices have this purpose—to allow us to touch the depths of our inner selves and to live a generous life of participation with Divine Love in absolute openheartedness; to move from what we know in our heads about God to living and moving and having our being in God; to be present in this life, to the world around us, and to Divine Love.
What is true about God? God is Love (1 John 4:16).
The experience of Love loving us allows us to feel and then to see. As Love invades our numbed-out parts, awakening us from cloudy misperception to Truth, we are invited to heal and to believe what Love believes about us, to trust in the benevolence and kind intentions of Love. Trust flourishes in the soil of Love. And there, our God image transforms.
We don’t just decide to see God as loving; Love is who God is. To encounter Divine Love is to encounter our deepest self.
Week Fourteen Summary
A Resurrection Faith
March 31 – April 6, 2024
Sunday
Easter is the feast of hope. This is the feast that says God will have the last word and that God’s final judgment is resurrection. God will turn all that we maim and destroy and hurt and punish into life and beauty.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
The pattern of transformation, the pattern that connects, the life that Reality offers us is not death avoided, but always death transformed. In other words, the only trustworthy pattern of spiritual transformation is death and resurrection.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
I worry [that] if Christians lose our belief in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, we will also lose the ferocity of our hope, the holy restlessness that leads us to action, the commitment to justice that fuels our prophetic lament, solidarity, resilience, and courage.
—Debie Thomas
Wednesday
The resurrection starts on earth with Jesus dead and buried, and ends up in God with Jesus the Living One transformed by the power of the Spirit. Alive in God, his presence is no longer bound by earth’s limits but partakes of the omnipresence of God’s own love.
—Elizabeth A. Johnson
Thursday
Sunrise in the story of Easter is not just a time of day; it is a state of the heart. Sunrise is the space where nighttime fears move aside for hope, where we feel peace about our mortality in the scope of the universal truth that love abides.
—Becca Stevens
Friday
The resurrection is not Jesus’ private miracle; it’s the new shape of reality. It’s the new shape of the world. It’s filled with grace. It’s filled with possibility. It’s filled with newness.
—Richard Rohr
Week Fourteen Practice
Celebrating the Risen Christ
Ilia Delio invites us to find creative ways to “go to church” and celebrate new life and resurrection:
Where is this risen Christ? Everywhere and all around us—in you, your neighbor, the dogwood tree outside, the budding grape vine, the ants popping up through the cracks. The whole world is filled with God, who is shining through even the darkest places of our lives. To “go to church” is to awaken to this divine presence in our midst and respond in love with a yes: Your life, O God, is my life and the life of the planet….
We have an invitation to go to church in a new way, by praying before the new leaves budding through dormant trees or the wobbly flowers by the side of the road pushing through the solid earth…. [Like Francis of Assisi,] we too can sing with the air we breathe, the sun that shines upon us, the rain that pours down to water the earth. And we can cry with those who are mourning, with the forgotten, with those who are suffering from disease or illness, with the weak, with the imprisoned. We can mourn in the solidarity of compassion but we must live in the hope of new life. For we are Easter people, and we are called to celebrate the whole earth as the body of Christ. Every act done in love gives glory to God: a pause of thanksgiving, a laugh, a gaze at the sun, or just raising a toast to your friends at your virtual gathering. The good news? “He is not here!” Christ is everywhere, and love will make us whole.
Week Thirteen Summary
The Scapegoating Pattern
March 24 – March 29, 2024
Sunday
Human nature, when seeking power, wants either to play the victim or to create victims of others. Once we start feeling sorry for ourselves, we will soon find someone else to blame, accuse, or attack—and with impunity!
—Richard Rohr
Monday
If Jesus’s life reversed the fate of victims he had met, then his death reverses the fate of future victims. He becomes the scapegoat to end all scapegoats—and exposes the truth that could end human blame and violence once and for all.
—Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
Tuesday
The central message of Jesus on love of enemies, forgiveness, and care for those at the bottom was supposed to make scapegoating virtually impossible and unthinkable.
—Richard Rohr
Wednesday
Because God was present with Jesus on the cross and thereby refused to let Satan and death have the last word about his meaning, God was also present at every lynching in the United States…. The lynching tree is the cross in America. —James Cone
Thursday
Jesus came to reveal and resolve the central and essential problem—humanity’s tendency toward fear and hate. Love is the totally enlightened, entirely nonsensical way out of this pattern. Love has to be worked toward, received, and enjoyed.
—Richard Rohr
Friday
God is not revealed in killing and conquest … in violence and hate. God is revealed in this crucified man—giving of himself to the very last breath, giving and forgiving.
—Brian McLaren
Week Thirteen Practice
Lingering in the Tension
Author Kat Armas reflects on the spiritual practice of lingering in the tension between winter and spring, the cross and resurrection:
You know those last few weeks before spring, when winter is trying desperately to hold on, her bony fingers cold and frail, losing their grip to the warmth of the sun? The trees towering above your head might still be bare, but when you look down, buds of purple are sprinkled across the ground, bursting forth from earth’s womb….
If we pay close attention, we might notice the earth constantly beckoning us to receive this gift. On bended knees with cool breath and a warm touch, the natural world asks us to stay in this moment. Right here. A little longer.
Do you feel it?...
The life and death of Jesus offers an invitation to sit in a sacred tension, but many are not comfortable doing this. We are a people hell-bent on fix-its, uncomfortable with struggle or with sadness. Perhaps this is why, for many of us, Holy Saturday has long been ignored. This is the day between the death of Christ on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. In the immigrant Catholic church I attended with abuela [grandma] growing up, this holy day of waiting was as important as Easter Sunday because it mirrored our reality—the constant push and pull between sorrow and joy, death and resurrection. On this day, we lit velas (candles) and sat in front of the altar for what felt like years. We knew joy would come, but there was no rush. The holy tension was a space in which we felt most alive. I didn’t know it back then, but la Espíritu Santa [Holy Spirit] was forming something sacred in me.
Armas invites us to consider:
What moments of sacred tension stand out in your life? What did they speak to you about your humanity?
Week Twelve Summary
Everyday Mysticism: Weekly Summary
March 17 – March 23, 2024
Sunday
For me, “mysticism” simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, as opposed to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
I’m describing mysticism as a natural part of everyday life … just a deep understanding of the sacred and a willingness to allow the gifts to lead.
—Barbara A. Holmes
Tuesday
Today, we are not looking for colossal mysteries like the parting of the seas. We just want to tap into, or at least recognize, everyday mysticism.
—Barbara A. Holmes
Wednesday
Everyday mystics are people who commune with the presence of God, receive guidance, … and commit themselves to living for God rather than solely for themselves. Their vision for life is larger and more expansive, knowing that they are alive for a reason, a purpose that will benefit human spirits they may never meet.
—Lerita Coleman Brown
Thursday
I can set a little altar, in the world or in my heart. I can stop what I am doing long enough to see where I am, who I am there with, and how awesome the place is. I can flag one more gate to heaven.
—Barbara Brown Taylor
Friday
The mystical heart knows there is a fellow Fisherman nearby who is always available for good advice. He stands and beckons from the shores, at the edges of every ordinary life, every unreligious moment, and every “secular” occupation.—Richard Rohr
Week Twelve Practice
Letting Things Be Enough
Father Richard describes how “gazing” brings him in touch with God in all things:
As some of you know, I’ve transitioned to a form of prayer that I just call “gazing”—gazing without judgment, without analysis, without critique. Yesterday afternoon, a rather mild winter day in Albuquerque, I took my dog Opie out for a little walk. There’s a bench at the other end of the parking lot, and I just sat down there. Opie jumped up next to me, and we just gazed there together from about 3:00 p.m. to almost 4:30 p.m.
I believe gazing is a form of prayer that lets things having no right to draw forth awe leave us awestruck. I looked at the cracked asphalt. There it is. Why is it there? I don’t know why, but its mere being made me love it, made me appreciate it, made me thank it. I did the same with three dumpsters in the lot. Really! They were ugly and covered with graffiti. Fortunately, the graffiti right on the front says, “I love you!” Facing toward my house, a little graffiti saying, “I love you!” I even looked at the raggedy fence line, torn and repaired. I looked at it until it was at least a little bit beautiful. That’s what kept happening for the whole hour and a half.
It was just beautiful because I let it be beautiful, or God let it be beautiful. I wasn’t looking for answers, I was just a ruminating mind, gazing, and the more I gazed without judgment, without analysis, without critique, the more beautiful everything became.
We didn’t have one of our deep, blue New Mexico skies. It was pale blue but pretty, and it was enough. It was all more than enough. The nakedness of life in its nakedness becomes enough, and even brings forth a kind of praise.
Week Eleven Summary
Encountering Reality: Weekly Summary
March 10 – March 15, 2024
Sunday
When we live inside the Really Real, we live in a “threshold space” between this world and the next. We learn how to live between heaven and earth, one foot in both, holding them precious together.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
People with a distorted image of self, world, or God will be largely incapable of experiencing what is Really Real in the world. They’ll see instead what they need reality to be. That’s the opposite of true contemplatives, who have an ability to see what is, whether that reality causes weeping or rejoicing.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
If we are to leave a beautiful world for you and your grandchildren, we have to take seriously the fact that creation does not belong to us; we are part of creation. We cannot do what we like with earth, water, and other human beings. God expects us to keep the earth in good condition.
—Mercy Oduyoye
Wednesday
For centuries, people of color have been invisibly bleeding on the floor of systemic oppression, gasping for breath, dying from the thirst of repression, and starving from the lack of recognition and dignity. They have been the “least of these” of whom Jesus spoke (Matthew 25:40). They challenge us all to be aware of their dignity. They demand that we face what we have become.
—Patrick Saint-Jean
Thursday
We honor our stories, our pain, and the actual flesh-and-blood realities we live with. There is no bypassing reality, and there is no bypassing the bodies that have carried us in and through this reality. This is where we must begin.
—Aundi Kolber
Friday
Living and accepting our reality will not feel very spiritual. It will feel like we are on the edges rather than dealing with the essence. But the edges of our lives—fully experienced suffered, and enjoyed—lead us back to the center and the essence, which is Love.
—Richard Rohr
Week Eleven Practice
Reality: The Great Teacher
Father Richard offers a prayer to welcome reality, so we can experience the Reign of God, what he calls the Really Real.
Great religion seeks utter awareness and full consciousness, so that we can, in fact, receive all. Everything belongs and everything can be received. We don’t have to deny, dismiss, defy, or ignore. What is, is okay. What is, is the great teacher.
The purpose of prayer and religious seeking is to see the truth about reality, to know what is. And at the bottom of what is is always goodness. The foundation is always love.
Enlightenment is to recognize and touch the big mystery, the big pattern, the Big Real. Jesus called it the Reign of God; Buddha called it enlightenment. Philosophers might call it Truth. Many of us experience it as Foundational Love. Here is a mantra you might repeat throughout your day to remind yourself of this:
God’s life is living itself in me. I am aware of life living itself in me.
God’s love is living itself in me. I am aware of love living itself in me.
We cannot not live in the presence of God. This is not soft or sentimental spirituality; it ironically demands confidence that must be chosen many times and surrender that is always hard won.
Week Ten Summary
The Soul of Nature
March 3 – March 8, 2024
Sunday
While calling ourselves intelligent, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. As a result, we’ve lost touch with our own souls. I believe we can’t access our full intelligence and wisdom without some real connection to nature.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
One of the foundational reasons for our sense of isolation and unhappiness is that we have lost our contact with nature.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
After almost fifty years of being a Franciscan Sister, I learned that beauty for Franciscan theologians and philosophers is the ultimate and most intimate knowing of God, another name for God, the name for God.
—Marya Grathwohl
Wednesday
We will be spiritually nourished by this world or we will be starved for spiritual nourishment. No other revelatory experience can do for the human what the experience of the natural world does.
—Thomas Berry
Thursday
What can we give back through a pattern of reciprocity to a planet that gives us so much? What will make the more-than-human creation glad that we are here?
—Debra Rienstra
Friday
I’m not saying that God is all things or that all things are God (pantheism). I am saying that each living thing reveals some aspect of God. God is greater than the whole of our universe, and as Creator inter-penetrates all created things (panentheism).
—Richard Rohr
Week Ten Practice
Breathing with the Earth
Mindfulness teacher Susan Bauer-Wu invites us into a way of praying with and for the Earth:
Please start by grounding yourself with the Earth beneath you. Pay attention to how your feet or any other part of your body that is touching the floor is placed. Notice how you are rooted, through a chair or floor, to the Earth and how she literally holds you up—unconditionally, effortlessly, compassionately….
Notice your incoming breath—the air entering your nostrils, your mouth, filling up your belly…. Every aspect of you right now, the air that fills your lungs, the clothes that you wear, the food you ate today, all of that comes from outside of you. This ever-present, life-encompassing, compassionate Earth sustains you. You are part of this effortless cycle of give-and-take. You are participating in an exchange with the elements, with other living beings, with the Earth herself. With each inhale, breathe in the Earth’s compassion and with each exhale, breathe out gratitude.
Relax here in this indivisible connection with all that surrounds you; breathe in compassion, and breathe out gratitude.
Now comes the hard part. Visualize a place or being or community you love that is suffering from climate and environmental harm.... Resting in and rooted by the compassion and gratitude you hold, I want you to access your intention, your motivation to alleviate the suffering of your beloved. Now, when you inhale, breathe in their suffering; and when you exhale, breathe out your compassion….
When you are ready … let yourself inhale the Earth’s gratitude for your existence; and when you exhale, offer the compassion and love you have for her. You are inextricably connected with her in every moment and there is no division here.
Week Ten: The Soul of Nature 3rd March
The Soul of Nature
Father Richard encourages us to recognize how the soul of nature mirrors our own:
The modern and postmodern self largely lives in a world of its own construction, and it reacts for or against its own human-made ideas. While calling ourselves intelligent, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. As a result, we’ve lost touch with our own souls. I believe we can’t access our full intelligence and wisdom without some real connection to nature.
My spiritual father Francis of Assisi spent many days, weeks, and even months walking the roads of Umbria and letting nature teach him. Francis knew and respected creation, calling animals, sun, moon, and even the weather and the elements his brothers and sisters. Through extended time in nature, Francis became intimately connected with non-human living things and came to recognize that the natural world was also imbued with soul. Almost all male initiation rites—including those of Jesus and John the Baptist (see Matthew 3:13–17)—took place in nature, surely for that reason.
Without such soul recognition and mirroring, we are alienated and separated from nature, and quite frankly, ourselves. Without a visceral connection to the soul of nature, we will not know how to love or respect our own soul. Instead, we try various means to get God and people to like or accept us because we never experience radical belonging to the world itself. We’re trying to say to ourselves and others, “I belong here. I matter.” Of course, that’s true! But contrived and artificial means will never achieve that divine purpose. We are naturally healed in this world when we know things center to center, subject to subject, and soul to soul.
I think of soul as anything’s ultimate meaning which is held within. Soul is the blueprint inside of every created thing telling it what it is and what it can become. When we meet anything at that level, we will respect, protect, and love it.
Many human beings simply haven’t found their own blueprint or soul, so they cannot see it anywhere else. Like knows like! When we only meet reality at the external level, we do not meet our own soul and we have no ability to meet the soul of anything else either. We clergy would have done much better to encourage Christians to discover their souls instead of “save” them.
While everything has a soul, in many people it seems to be dormant, disconnected, and ungrounded. They are not aware of the inherent truth, goodness, and beauty shining through everything. If God is as great, glorious, and wonderful as religions claim, then wouldn’t such a God would make such “wonderfulness” universally available? Surely, such connection and presence are as freely available as the air we breathe and the water we drink.
Week Eight Summary
Life as a Spiritual Journey
February 18 – February 23, 2024
Sunday
The hero’s journey is not to just keep going to new places, making the trip a vacation or travelogue. We have to return to where we started and know it in a new way and do life in a new way.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
By denying their pain and avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual journeys and depths—and therefore have been kept from their own spiritual heights.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
The sacred task at hand is to let yourself be reclaimed by something deeper than the immediacy of struggle and pain. This something need not be identified or fixated upon, but surrendered to.
—Pixie Lighthorse
Wednesday
The journey is absolutely sacred because we are not just flesh and blood. We are also spirit beings. And what other kind of journey could a spirit being take except for a spiritual journey?
—Barbara A. Holmes
Thursday
Jesus wanted his followers to know that the journey they would make involved knowing and enlivening the teachings he advocated. In other words, Jesus was cautioning them, “If you decide to give yourselves to what truly counts in this life, it will cost you.”
—Joyce Rupp
Friday
The hero “falls through” what is merely their life situation to discover their Real Life, which is always a much deeper river, hidden beneath the appearances. This deeper discovery is largely what religious people mean by “finding their soul.”—Richard Rohr
Week Eight Practice
For Living without Control
Public theologian Kate Bowler shares a prayer for times when we aren’t sure of our next move. She writes:
I had a very tender podcast conversation with theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas. We have worked together for almost two decades now, and I rely on him to be incredibly certain about what makes a life good and virtuous…. After describing how many twists and turns that life had taken, he had come to a conclusion: “The ability to live well is the ability to live without so many certainties.”
We will have to develop a high tolerance for having so little control and so few bedrock assumptions. So let’s ask our God to “unplan” our days a little and help us live that way.
God, I come to you as I am.
It is all I have, really.
And the next one I’m conscious of
will be the same.
I can feel the way I move,
moment to moment,
without the comfort of “solutions.”
It seems wild to me now how I imagined
any once-and-for-all cure for this,
or a master plan to ensure things
will work out.
But, truth be told, that’s always been
my secret hope.
So, Lord, let’s try again.
I’m begging for a new plan.
I want a plan that is an “unplan.”
I must keep moving and planning,
trying and changing,
knitting my days together even as
they unravel.
So can we do this together?
Remind me to pray: come Lord
and quiet the worry.
I step, and you steady me.
I give, and you keep my hands open.
I act, and you fortify me with courage
to try and try and try again.
This life is uncertain, Lord,
but your love is not.
You tell the story of my life
regardless of how little I know
about how it ends, except to say,
you were there since the beginning
and you appear on every page.
Reflection Prompt
Now that we know that we don’t know, let’s enjoy that thought for a moment. Isn’t it delicious that the God who flung stars into space also knows every beginning and end? So let’s settle in for a moment and let ourselves not know in the presence of the God who already knows.
Week Seven Summary
Mystics on Fire with Love
February 11 – February 16, 2024
Sunday
Mystics have plumbed the depths of both suffering and love, and emerged with depths of compassion for the world, and a learned capacity to recognize God within themselves, in others, and in all things.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Since my Beloved is for me and I for my Beloved, who will be able to separate and extinguish two fires so enkindled? It would amount to laboring in vain, for the two fires have become one.
—Teresa of Ávila
Tuesday
Love is a fire of transformation that constantly needs wood to keep the fire alive. Throw yourself into the spiritual fire of divine love and everything you grasp for yourself will be destroyed until there is nothing left but the pure truth of yourself.
—Ilia Delio
Wednesday
The fire in the heart of God is the same fire that burns in us once we have the interior vision that lets us acknowledge divinity within ourselves.
—David Richo
Thursday
Love is a school of fire, Rumi teaches. You embrace its mystery only in losing yourself, in finally becoming what you love. In the process, you discover that what you had thought to be entirely outside had been within you all along.
—Belden Lane
Friday
Mystics and sages of all traditions speak of the inner fire, the divine spark hidden in our very cells and in all that lives. This flame of love is the pure presence of God.
—Paula D’Arcy
Week Seven Practice
Praying to Become Fire
Spiritual writer Christine Valters Paintner retells a famous story from the Desert Fathers:
Abba Lot came to Abba Joseph and said:
Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation, and contemplative silence; and, according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do?
The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became lit like ten lamps of fire.
He said: Why not become fire? [1]
Paintner invites readers to become aware of the fire within:
I love the story from the desert fathers above. In the spiritual life we keep our practices, spend time in prayer, seek God in all things, and yet at some point even all this is not enough—and we are asked to become fire. Becoming fire means letting our passion for life and beauty ignite us in the world…. We are called to set the whole world on fire with our passion for God.
We may find ourselves drawn to creative expression because it taps into what is most vital and alive in us. This burning in our blood seeks expression in the world, whether through art, song, cooking, gardening, our work, relationships, or in our presence to others. Becoming fire means saying yes to life by the very way we live….
Our internal fire maintains our body heat and keeps us alive. Take some time in prayer to get in touch with your body’s fire through your pulse and the beating of your heart. Rest your hand on your heart and find your heartbeat. Feel the warmth of your body rising up from your skin and give thanks for the gift of being alive. Go for a long walk, and pause every so often to experience the rising heat in your body and to feel your body’s pulse speeding up.
Week Six Summary
The Seven Stories: Part Two
February 4 – February 9, 2024
Sunday
If we’re honest, culture forms us much more than the gospel. It seems we have kept the basic storyline of human history in place rather than allow the gospel to reframe and redirect the story.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
If we simply give ourselves over to this narrative, to the storyline of “Uns and Nots” … then we abdicate the one thing that can reposition our relationship to the entire experience of our life: responsibility.
—angel Kyodo williams
Tuesday
Whether it’s bigger sofas or bigger houses or bigger jobs or bigger bank accounts or reputation or ego or a bigger empire, we don’t have to look too far to find the accumulation story at work. The more you think you need to accumulate, the bigger fence you need to build around yourself and the fewer people you will trust and let into your life.
—Gareth Higgins
Wednesday
Jesus doesn’t give up on his story, but to the very end, he lives this Seventh Story. In the resurrection stories, he doesn’t come back saying, “Okay, enough of that love story. I’m going to come back a second time to get revenge on all those people.” The story of the resurrection is, “Let’s keep this story going.” Jesus lives and dies by a story of love, and the protagonist of the story is love. —Brian McLaren
Thursday
I’m seeing people waking up, being in relationship, grieving and raging and marching together, reimagining their own area of public life, their own sphere of influence in ways that I never imagined possible before. In those acts, in those moments and those gatherings around fierce love, I feel like I see glimpses of the nation, the world, that is wanting to be born.
—Valarie Kaur
Friday
The Trinity has tremendous practical, pastoral, and political implications. We don’t have time for anything less than loving! Fear will never build a “new creation” (Galatians 6:15); threat is an entirely bankrupt and false storyline.
—Richard Rohr
Week Six Practice
Living by Our Values
Randy Woodley points to the values that have been essential to Indigenous wisdom:
Why would human beings promote systems, structures, ideologies, and lifestyles that work against their own survival?
Good air quality is also a medicine. So is clean water. And healthy soil. Even a stress-free life is known to prolong people’s lives. It seems to me that people in the Western world are working against their own self-interest—against their own healing—and against their own grandchildren’s well-being. What will it take to change?
The only way I see such a destructive lifestyle changing is if people begin adopting different values and then living out these values. Our Indigenous ancestors figured this out—by trial and error and through necessity—so many years ago. These are the ancient values … that help us reconnect to sacred Earth.
Respect: Respect everyone. Everyone and everything is sacred.
Harmony: Seek harmony and cooperation with people and nature.
Friendship: Increase the number and depth of your close friends and family.
Humor: Laugh at yourself; we are merely human.
Equality: Everyone expresses their voice in decisions.
Authenticity: Speak from your heart.
History: Learn from the past. Live presently by looking back.
Balance work and rest: Work hard, but rest well.
Generosity: Share what you have with others.
Accountability: We are all interconnected. We are all related.
This is by no means a comprehensive list. But if we nurture these values in our lives, we will become more rooted in the community of creation. Begin working your way down the list and incorporating these Indigenous values into your own life. Search for songs, ceremonies, and stories from your own ancestry. Look for friends who align with these values. Then commit to immersing yourself in a new way of living….
Remind yourself that you are part of the community of creation. Choose one or two of the values on the list and try to embody them today.
Week Five Summary
The Seven Stories: Part One
January 28 – February 2, 2024
Sunday
When we believe in a deep way that life is good, God is good, and humanity is good, we do exciting and imaginative things because we are confident that we are part of a storyline that is going somewhere good.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
In the Seventh Story, the story of reconciliation, we still get to win, just not at anybody else’s expense. In the Seventh Story, human beings are not the protagonists of the world. Love is.
—Gareth Higgins and Brian McLaren
Tuesday
In Genesis, the nature of God in the first creation story is not God dominating and forcing the world into a certain mold. It is “Let there be light.” It’s a permission-giving power.
—Brian McLaren
Wednesday
Unless a restorative consciousness is engaged, revolutions run the risk of merely turning the tables, replacing one set of broken relationships with yet more domination, perhaps a slightly less oppressive form of domination, but domination nonetheless.
—Gareth Higgins
Thursday
All the people that Jesus hangs out with and eats with are people who are being scapegoated, people who are being used for somebody else’s purification narrative. These are the people that Jesus humanizes.
—Brian McLaren
Friday
Instead of withdrawing from the world, whether as individuals or groups or nations, we are called to be fully immersed in the places we are. Our contemplative practices are always ways of being more alive in the world and more active for the common good.
—Gareth Higgins
Week Five Practice
Peace and Light
Brian McLaren and Carmen Acevedo Butcher offered this meditation at the end of the CAC online gathering Stories That Wound, Stories That Heal as a way of encouraging listeners to live by the Seventh Story.
McLaren: I’d like to invite you to take a couple of deep breaths, get comfortable sitting or standing where you are, and let your body come to rest for a moment. Imagine this Seventh Story as a tiny point of light. The story comes through your ears or you see it lived out in someone’s life. It enters who you are. The story of peace, whose hero is love. It’s a story of justice and equity and safety and joy. Imagine that story as a little point of light that comes to rest in the center of your being. Then imagine that little point of light becoming a pool of light and a spring or a fountain of light. Just for the next few moments, picture that point of light growing within you.
Butcher: Imagine yourself becoming full of that light. Now imagine that light filling you and that light shining out through you. Imagine now that this light coming out from you touches those around you, those in your family, your neighbors, others in your neighborhood, those in your workplace, those in your faith community, and all others you meet. Imagine that this light embraces them and also that it fills them.
McLaren: We all know that there are many other stories at work in the world, stories that are wounding people, stories that maybe wounded each of us. Let’s realize that we can be tempted to respond to those stories that wound in a way that continues that [wounding] story. For a few moments, let’s hold in our heart a prayer, a request, a plea for help, that our lives would not be sucked into the stories that wound, but that we would live on a steady course of a story that heals.
McLaren: May I live in the story of peace, whose hero is love. May that story live in me.
Butcher: May the story of God’s peace bring healing to us and to the world.
McLaren: And may the story of God’s love bring healing to us and to the world. Amen.
Week Four Summary
Faithful Resilience
January 21 – January 26, 2024
Sunday
Resilience is really a secular word for what religion was trying to say with the word faith. Without a certain ability to let go, to trust, to allow, we won’t get to any new place.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
When you take on the confusion and the violence and you refine them, purify them into something new, you are doing what in the vocabulary of faith we call consecrating your chaos. To consecrate is to make holy, to put it into service for good.
—Otis Moss III
Tuesday
When there is more fluidity, there is more potential for care, and that care helps us to reduce violence against ourselves and others. Freedom is the agency to choose how we want to be in relationship with ourselves and the world around us.
—Lama Rod Owens
Wednesday
The joy spoken of in Holy Scripture is accessible, but also has a certain “beyondness” to it: The world didn’t give it and the world can’t take it away. As we hear from Jesus in John 16:22: “So you have pain now; but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
—Barbara A. Holmes
Thursday
If we are not trained in a trust of mystery and some degree of tolerance for ambiguity and suffering, we will not proceed very far on the spiritual journey.
—Richard Rohr
Friday
If there is any bravery in me, it is in my refusal to let fear eclipse my imagination for anything other than pain. To maintain imagination for both the beautiful and the terrible is to marry prudence and hope.
—Cole Arthur Riley
Week Four Practice
Gaining Equanimity
Psychologist Rick Hanson suggests we can increase our ability to feel and act from compassion through nurturing our own equanimity:
The word “compassion” comes from the Latin roots com and pati which mean “to suffer with.” We add the suffering of others to our own, a gift at the heart of being human. How can we be moved by the sorrows of others without becoming flooded, drained, or burned out?
To sustain compassion, we need equanimity, a kind of inner shock absorber between the core of your being and whatever is passing through awareness.… With equanimity, you can feel the pain of others without being swept away by it—which helps you open to it even more fully.…
As you face the enormity of the suffering in this world, you might feel flooded with a sense of despair at the impossibility of ever doing enough. If this happens, it can help to take some kind of action, since action eases despair.…
Think about the people in your life, including those you don’t know well. Could you make a difference to someone? Seemingly little things can be very touching. Consider humanity in general as well as nonhuman animals, and see if something is calling to you. Not to burden you, but to push back against helplessness and despair.…
Also take some time to reflect on what you have already done to help others and on what you are currently doing. Imagine how all this has rippled out into the world in ways seen and unseen. The truth of what you have given rests alongside the truth that there is still so much suffering, and knowing the one will help your heart stay open to the other.
Week Three Summary
Holding the Tension
January 14 – January 19, 2024
Sunday
I am talking about just holding the tension, not necessarily finding a resolution or closure to paradox. We must agree to live without resolution, at least for a while. I think opening to this holding pattern is the very name and description of faith.—Richard Rohr
Monday
Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
Tuesday
Remember that we are braced by a God who is too big for one-dimensional truths, and this is a good thing. It’s not that we hold paradox; it’s that paradox holds us. We are held in a deep place. An ample place. A generous place. Though we might fear paradox, God does not.
—Debie Thomas
Wednesday
Reality is paradoxical. If we’re honest, everything is a clash of contradictions, and there is nothing on this created earth that is not a mixture at the same time of good and bad, helpful and unhelpful, endearing and maddening, living and dying.—Richard Rohr
Thursday
It’s a strange affair to be Black and live in America, and even stranger to be Black and a person of faith in these yet-to-be-United States, to carry around the burden of a socially constructed idea called race and yet be filled with a divinely inspired mandate to eradicate all limitations to the human soul.
—Otis Moss III
Friday
The times when we meet or reckon with our contradictions are often turning points, opportunities to enter into the deeper mystery of God.
—Richard Rohr
Week Three Practice
Prayer: For Beauty in the Mundane
In Cole Arthur Riley’s book Black Liturgies, she prays for our capacity to hold together the extraordinary and the ordinary:
God of every beautiful thing,
Make us people of wonder. Show us how to hold on to nuance and vision when our souls become addicted to pain, to the unlovely. It is far easier to see the gloom and decay; so often it sings a louder song. Attune our hearts to the good still stirring in our midst, not that we would give ourselves to toxic positivity or neglect the pain of the world, but that we would be people capable of existing in the tension. Grant us habits of sacred pause. Let us marvel not just at the grand or majestic, but beauty’s name etched into every ordinary moment. Let the mundane swell with a mystery that makes us breathe deeper still. And by this, may we be sustained and kept from despair. Amen.
Engaging with a World on Fire
January 7 – January 12, 2024
Sunday
Every day Jesus would follow the same rhythm: withdraw for solitude, but then come back to engage by healing, feeding, caring, welcoming, binding up the wounds of this world, and implanting in people a vision of resilience, engaging with a world on fire.
—Brian McLaren
Monday
Amidst this time of planetary change and disruption, the CAC envisions a movement of transformed people working together for a transformed world.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
We must allow our imaginations to begin to live within the world that responsible science is telling us will be our fate unless drastic changes are made soon. We must do this so that we can acknowledge where our hope really resides—not with us, but in the power of love and renewal that lives within the universe, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God.
—Sallie McFague
Wednesday
We’re on a quest to find out how to have an engaged expression of deep spiritual life that makes a difference in a world on fire.
—Brian McLaren
Thursday
We need regular quiet time with God in order to have the strength, courage, and vitality required for social action: for moving against injustices, speaking truth to power, and assisting in humanitarian efforts.
—Lerita Coleman Brown
Friday
God offers us quiet, contemplative eyes; God also calls us to prophetic and critical involvement in the pain and sufferings of our world—both at the same time. This is so obvious in the life and ministry of Jesus that I wonder why it has not been taught as an essential part of Christianity.
—Richard Roh
Week Two Practice
Reclaiming Our Attention
Buddhist teacher Oren Jay Sofer considers how we engage with the world’s suffering:
How do we meet our challenges and choose wisely? To truly meet something is to encounter it with awareness, enter into relationship with it, and respond appropriately. How do we respond when we contact pain, sorrow, and injustice? Do we become broken, embittered, lost, or frozen? Do we lash out in anger, fear, or hatred, adding fuel to the fire? Or are we able to find the balance and clarity to meet the suffering of our world with tenderness, wisdom, and skillful action?
Sofer recommends beginning with the grounding practice of attention.
Unraveling the hurt we carry and finding our place in a world on fire start wherever we are. Directing attention begins to train the heart. Like a green shoot breaking through concrete, attention cracks the façade of the past so we are not prisoners of our habits or the programming of culture.…
Contemplative practice is one powerful way to reclaim attention. Rest your attention with an anchor, a home base for meditation such as the breath, a sensation, an image, a sound, or a mantra. An anchor is a primary meditation object to help steady your attention and limit mind-wandering, like an anchor for a ship.… This mental action—recognizing that attention has wandered and then consciously redirecting it—strengthens your capacity to pay attention and develops a host of other skillful qualities, including patience, kindness, and concentration.…
The more you cultivate this quality of attention, the more you build inner resources. I am not encouraging you to avoid the painful realities of life and look only at what’s uplifting. The idea here is to strengthen your capacity to choose what you attend to. Then—when you turn to face pain, distress, and hardship—instead of feeling helpless or demoralized, you will have more energy, confidence, and clarity to meet the challenge.
Week One Summary
Radical Resilience
December 31, 2023 – January 5, 2024
Sunday
If we’re going to help people take wise action and imagine a better future amid coming troubles, then we will have to help people find that better future within themselves, so they can live that better future out into the world. And that’s what we hope to do together in 2024. —Brian McLaren
Monday
We humans as a species are not attracted to change. We like things the way we like things. And yet the first words out of Jesus’ mouth tell us that he’s come to give us a philosophy of change: “Repent,”—change your mind—“for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 3:2).
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
We usually think of resilience as the ability to recover from an adverse experience and pick up our lives where we left off…. But there are times when adversity permanently changes our reality and we can’t go back to the way things were…. Resilience then becomes the work of coming through the adversity.
—Alice Updike Scannell
Wednesday
In each generation, we are tested. Will we love our neighbors as ourselves? How do we survive together? How do we resist together? How do we respond to unspeakable brutality and the collective oppression of our neighbors?
—Barbara Holmes
Thursday
People who fail to do something right, by even their own definition of right, are those who often break through to enlightenment and compassion.
—Richard Rohr
Friday
The roots of fear run deep. The hope we embrace must run just as deep. No matter what happens we must keep dancing, hand in hand, joined in a circle of equality, constantly moving in the slow rotation of justice and prayer.
—Steven Charleston
Week One Practice
New Year, New Opportunities
Joanna Macy (b. 1929) has worked for decades to support the Great Turning, a movement towards life-sustaining cultures and economies. She writes:
When a change wants to happen, it looks for people to act through. How do we know when a change wants to happen? We feel the want inside us. There is a desire, a tugging at us to be involved. But that doesn’t make the change inevitable, because standing in our way are all those who say we’re wasting our time, that it isn’t possible, that it will be too hazardous. For the change to happen through us, we need to counter those voices. A shift can happen within us when we break through a resistance that has been holding us back.
When we see with new eyes, we recognize how every action has significance, how the bigger story of the Great Turning is made up of countless smaller stories of communities, campaigns, and personal actions.… If you were freed from fear and doubt, what would you choose to do for the Great Turning?
Macy and co-author Chris Johnstone offer several practical questions to help identify one’s goals and resources for change:
If you knew you could not fail, what would you most want to do for the healing of our world?
What specific goal or project could you realistically aim to achieve in the next twelve months that would contribute to this?
What resources, inner and outer, do you have that will help you do this? …
What resources, inner and external, will you need to acquire? What might you need to learn, develop, or obtain?
How might you stop yourself? What obstacles might you throw in the way?
How will you overcome these obstacles?
What step can you take in the next week, no matter how small—making a phone call, sending an email, or scheduling in some reflection time—that will move you toward this goal.
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