Contemplation in Action E-Book

Richard Rohr

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2006

Seitenzahl: 179

Beschreibung

Where else can you find spiritual inspiration from Richard Rohr, Edwina Gateley, Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington, Paula D'Arcy, and others in one accessible volume? This book, designed for bedside devotion, offers the best of Richard Rohr's Radical Grace newsletter, published by Rohr's Center for Action and Contemplation.

Leseprobe

The essays in this volume were all previously published in Radical Grace, the quarterly publication of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Radical Grace includes the most recent work of the founder of the CAC, Fr. Richard Rohr, along with up-to-date information on the CAC’s conferences, internships, and available resources. For more information go to www.cacradicalgrace.org.

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.crossroadpublishing.com

Copyright © 2006 by Richard Rohr

Cover photo © 2006 Getty Images

Cover design by Stefan Killen Design

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

“The Duty of Confrontation” by Thomas Keating first appeared as a chapter in Awakenings, published by The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rohr, Richard.

Contemplation in action / Richard Rohr and friends.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-8245-2388-1 (alk. paper)

1. Contemplation.   2. Christian life.   I. Title.

BV5091.C7R635 2006

242 – dc22

2006003938

ISBN-10: 0-8245-2388-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-8245-2388-6

EPUB ISBN: 978-0-8245-0283-6

MOBI ISBN: 978-0-8245-0286-7

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Center for Action and Contemplation

Epigraph

A Publisher’s Welcome

Part One

TO ACT JUSTLY

1. Contemplation and Compassion:

The Second Gaze

Richard Rohr, O.F.M.

2. Playing the Prophet Close

Richard Rohr, O.F.M.

3. Tell Somebody

Esther Armstrong

4. Some

Daniel Berrigan

5. Who, Me Tired?

Christine Schenk

6. The Christian Call to Restorative Justice

A. Companion

7. Eyes That See

Aaron Froehlich

8. I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life

Edwina Gately

9. Edifying Tales of Nonviolence

Walter Wink

Part Two

TO LOVE TENDERLY

10. “Contemplation” as the False Self

Richard Rohr, O.F.M.

11. The Formation of the False Self and Coming into the True Self

M. Basil Pennington, O.C.S.O.

12. To Dream and Hope for a Better World

Frederika Carney

13. And Laugh at Gilded Butterflies:

Reflections on Aging

Frederika Carney

14. My Integration

Robin Chisholm

15. Thoughts on Psalm 23

Paula D’Arcy

16. The Duty of Confrontation

Thomas Keating

Part Three

TO WALK HUMBLY WITH YOUR GOD

17. A Passage through India

Richard Rohr, O.F.M.

18. A Clandestine Christian

Richard Rohr, O.F.M.

19. Learning to Be Human

Justine Buisson

20. Sustainability and Spirituality

John E. Carroll

21. Freeing the Soul through Art

Barbara Coleman

22. Blue Dresses in the Jungle

Avis Crowe

23. Simplicity as a Key to Holiness of Life

Wayne Teasdale

About Richard Rohr

Also by Richard Rohr

Center forAction and Contemplation

Our Mission

The Center for Action and Contemplation

Supports a new reformation

From the inside!

~ In the spirit of the Gospels

~ Confirming people’s deeper spiritual intuitions

~ Encouraging actions of justice rooted in prayer

~ With a new appreciation for, and cooperation with, other denominations, religions, and cultures

Our Core Principles

The teaching of Jesus is our central reference point.

(criterion)

We need a contemplative mind in order to do compassionate action.

(process)

The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Oppositional energy only creates more of the same.

(emphasis)

Practical truth is more likely found at the bottom and the edges than at the top or the center of most groups, institutions, and cultures.

(perspective)

We will support true authority, the ability to “author” life in others, regardless of the group.

(non tribal)

Life is about discovering the right questions more than having the right answers.

(primacy of discernment)

True religion leads us to an experience of our True Self and undermines my false self.

(ultimate direction)

This is what Yahweh asks of you; only this:

to act justly,

to love tenderly,

and to walk humbly with your God.

—Micah 6:8

A Publisher’s Welcome

The Crossroad Publishing Company welcomes you to Contemplation in Action. If you’ve visited the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, you already know how the Center nourishes spiritual seekers. Perhaps you knew Richard Rohr from his cassettes and books, and came to hear lectures by him and other guest speakers. Perhaps you came to volunteer for a season, or to learn more about the Men as Learners and Elders (MALE) movement. Or perhaps, like many, you’ve never personally visited the Center but have always supported its mission and have learned much about it in the Radical Grace newsletter.

Whatever your connection to the Center, this book will help introduce you to many of the voices who’ve contributed to the Center’s life. As you read through the book, we encourage you to apply the ideas, questions, and reflection to your own life—are you being called to new ways of contemplation and action? We also encourage you to act. If you can’t make the trip to New Mexico, to sit in the desert sun with the colorful Sandia mountains rising in the distance and a labyrinth marking your path, your best destination is the Center’s website at www.cacradicalgrace.org.

See you there!

The Publisher

Part One

TO ACT JUSTLY

1

Contemplation and Compassion

The Second Gaze

RICHARD ROHR, O.F.M.

Contemplation happens to everyone. It happens in moments when we are open, undefended, and immediately present.

—Dr. Gerald May

My immediate response to most situations is with reactions of attachment, defensiveness, judgment, control, and analysis. I am better at calculating than contemplating. Let’s admit that we all start there. The false self seems to have the “first gaze” at almost everything.

On my better days, when I am “open, undefended, and immediately present,” I can sometimes begin with a contemplative mind and heart. Often I can get there later and even end there, but it is usually a second gaze. The True Self seems to always be ridden and blinded by the defensive needs of the false self. It is an hour-by-hour battle, at least for me. I can see why all spiritual traditions insist on daily prayer, in fact, morning, midday, evening, and before-we-go-to-bed prayer too! Otherwise, I can assume that I am back in the cruise control of small and personal self-interest, the pitiable and fragile “richard” self.

The first gaze is seldom compassionate. It is too busy weighing and feeling itself: “How will this affect me?” or “How does my self-image demand that I react to this?” or “How can I get back in control of this situation?” This leads us to an implosion, a self preoccupation that cannot enter into communion with the other or the moment. In other words, we first feel our feelings before we can relate to the situation and emotion of the other. Only after God has taught us how to live “undefended” can we immediately stand with and for the other, and for the moment. It takes lots of practice. Maybe that is why many people even speak of their “spiritual practice”?

My practice is probably somewhat unique because of the nature of my life. I have no wife, family, or even constant community. My Franciscan tradition and superiors have allowed me in these later years to live alone, in a little “hermitage” behind the friary and parish, that I call East of Eden. I am able to protect long hours of silence and solitude each day (when I am home), which I fill with specific times of prayer, study, journaling and writing, spiritual reading, gardening, walking, and just gazing. It is a luxury that most of you do not have. (My 50 percent of time on the road is much harder to balance, and probably more like your life.)

On a practical level, my at-home day is two extremes: both very busy (visitors and calls, counselees, work at the CAC, mail, writing, and some work at Holy Family parish), yet on the opposite side my life is very quiet and alone. I avoid most social gatherings, frankly because I know my soul has other questions to ask and answer as I get older (thank God, my Franciscan community has honored this need). Small talk and “busyness about many things” will not get me there. If I am going to continue to address groups, as if I have something to say, then I have to really know what I know, really believe what I believe, and my life has to be more experiential and intimate than mere repetition of formulas and doctrines. I am waiting, practicing, and asking for the second gaze.

I suppose this protected interiority was the historic meaning of cloister, vows of silence, silence in church, and guarded places and times inside of monasteries, where you were relieved of all the usual social pleasantries and obligations. Some had to be free to move beyond ego consciousness to deeper contact with the unconscious, the shadow self, the intimate journey of the soul, toward conscious union with God. Traditionally, you were never allowed to live as a “hermit” until later in life, and only after you had paid your dues to community and concrete relationships. Only community and marriage force you to face, own, and exorcise your own demons. Otherwise, loners are just misanthropes or sociopaths, people with poor social skills, or people who desire to have total control of their day and time. This is not holiness. Avoiding people does not compute into love of God; being quiet and alone does not make you into a contemplative. Introversion and shyness are not the same as inner peace or communion. “Still waters run deep,” they say, but that water can be either very clear or quite toxic.

Your practice must somehow include the problem. Prayer is not the avoiding of distractions, but precisely how you deal with distractions. Contemplation is not the avoidance of the problem, but a daily merging with the problem, and finding its full resolution. What you quickly and humbly learn in contemplation, is that how you do anything is probably how you do everything. If you are brutal in your inner reaction to your own littleness and sinfulness, your social relationships and even your politics will probably be the same—brutal. One sees a woman overcome this split in an autobiography like St. Therese of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul. This young contemplative nun is daily dealing with her irritations, judgments, and desire to run from her fellow sisters in the convent. She faces her own mixed motives and pettiness. She is constant in her concern for those working actively in the missions. But her goal is always compassion and communion. She suffers her powerlessness until she can finally break through to love. She holds the tension within herself (the essence of contemplation) until she herself is the positive resolution of that tension. Therese always gets to the second gaze.

It has taken me much of my life to begin to get to the second gaze. By nature I have a critical mind and a demanding heart, and I am impatient. These are both my gifts and my curses, as you might expect. Yet I cannot have one without the other, it seems. I cannot risk losing touch with either my angels or my demons. They are both good teachers. A life of solitude and silence allows them both, and invariably leads me to the second gaze. The gaze of compassion, looking out at life from the place of Divine Intimacy is really all I have, and all I have to give, even though I don’t always do it.

I named my little hermitage “East of Eden” for some very specific reasons, not, however, because of John Steinbeck’s marvelous novel (and movie) of the same name. On a humorous level, it was because I moved here six years ago, there hundred yards “east” of Holy Family Friary where I had previously lived. We had a fine community while I was there, consisting of three priests, two brothers, and many visitors who genuinely enjoyed one another—most of the time anyway! All my needs and desires were met in very good ways. It was a sort of “Eden.”

But I also picked the name because of its significance in the life of Cain, after he had killed his brother Abel. It was a place where God sent Cain, this bad boy, after he had failed and sinned, yet ironically with a loving and protective mark: “So Yahweh put a mark on Cain so that no one would do him harm. He sent him to wander in the land of Nod, east of Eden” (Genesis 4:16).

By my late fifties I had had plenty of opportunities to see my own failures, shadow, and sin. The first gaze at myself was critical, negative, and demanding, not helpful at all, to me or to others. I am convinced that such guilt and shame are never from God. They are merely the protestations of the false self as it is shocked at its own poverty—the defenses of a little man who wants to be big man. God leads by compassion toward the soul, never by condemnation. If God would relate to us by severity and punitiveness, God would only be giving us permission to do the same (which is tragically, exactly what has happened!). God offers us, instead, the grace to “weep” over our sins more than to ever perfectly overcome them, to humbly recognize our littleness rather than become big. It is the way of Cain, Francis, and Therese. It is a kind of weeping and a kind of wandering that keeps us both askew and awake.

So now my later life call is to “wander in the land of Nod,” enjoying God’s so often proven love and protection, and look back at my life, and everybody’s life, the One-And-Only-Life, marked happily and gratefully with the sign of Cain. Contemplation and compassion are finally coming together. This is my second gaze. It is well worth waiting for, because only the second gaze sees fully and truthfully. It sees itself, the other, and even God with God’s own eyes, which are always eyes of compassion.

2

Playing the Prophet Close

RICHARD ROHR, O.F.M.

In the church, God has given the first place to apostles, the second to prophets, the third to teachers. (1 Cor. 12:28)

In this time, when the United States seems to be setting itself up for a perpetual war posture, when the Pentagon can get by with trillions of dollars of unaccountable funds, when a kind of unthinking patriotism seems to be the ideal, it is going to be all the more important that prophetic voices be clear, grounded, and very certain trumpets. Here at the Center for Action and Contemplation, we try to call forth the prophetic charism in what we call the “third way.” It is different from direct advocacy of a certain political or theological opinion. It is also different from denying the problem or looking the other way. It is waiting and thinking and praying until something more refined emerges, until God has had a chance to speak, and until we have truly heard the other position. The third way is neither fight nor flight. It is, as someone wisely put it, “holding the opposites together long enough till you know they are not true.” Another word for it is contemplation.

Since most of our readers are of a more progressive mind-set, this essay will first amount to a “third way critique” of the so-called liberal response, so that the peace movement can bring true and holy liberation to the issues at hand. American liberalism does not tend to build anything that lasts. This new imperialism in America is too self-assured and too disguised to be resolved with any flash-in-the-pan kinds of fires. We need a more purified and enduring fire now, which means we need some real prophets. A prophet must first of all be capable of spiritual depth—and that always includes a demanding capacity for self-criticism and honesty. We must first of all play the prophet to ourselves before we can dare to be prophetic for America or for the churches. Those are the only prophets worth trusting, and right now, neither knee-jerk pacifism nor knee-jerk patriotism seems to be guided by the Spirit. Finally, a prophet must be able to challenge both ends of the spectrum, but he or she has to start at home base.

Prophecy for the Liberals

“Liberal” is a term that became a household word in America only in the 1960s. Before that time, we were all just Americans, middle class, and Judeo-Christian. After the postmodern mind emerged in the late 1960s, we have taken sides on just about everything. We disagree about what the very goal of life is, and we surely disagree on how to get there. The postmodern mind rejects in principle any “big story.” There is only the individual, and the social constructs that we create.

I fear that the conservatives will have their endless war against terrorism because the liberals are incapable of doing anything together—beyond analysis and protest itself. Liberals seem unable to call their own consumer lifestyles into question. They cannot see their complicity in the system and thus cannot radically critique it. You cannot make an art form out of critique itself; it is not the kind of deep passion or positive faith that can stand up to war, or vengeance, or long-haul injustice. It hooks the negative voices inside of all of us, which the young especially do not yet need. They have not yet found a truly positive vision. You have to be able to find a deep yes before you can dare to say no.

Let’s try to explain how we got to this strange point. What were the two underlying worldviews that made us divide so sharply in the I960s, and from which we have still not recovered? The dominant worldview was what we now call a traditional worldview. It was based on supposedly religious values of loyalty, hard work, obedience, law and order, and a clear sense of a transcendent goal of “heaven.” Not too much concern about justice or truth here, but it did perform a strong social function. We could get justice and truth later, but our job was to make the best of this world by love of family, religion, and personal sacrifice. It worked in many ways and gave a lot of people superficially happy lives both at the top and at the bottom of the pile. We at least knew where we stood in the great scheme of things, and that took away a huge amount of anger and anxiety. But this worldview was built on massive and denied injustice and oppression. We were blissfully unaware of the dark side of our successes, our money, our wars, our racism, our sexism, and our “self-evident truths.”

So the opposite had to show itself. By 1968 the tidal wave had landed full force in America. “How could we have been so blind? How could we have not seen what was hidden in plain sight?” Thirty years later we are still living in guilt, shame, and a pendulum swing of reaction to our stupidity about injustice. “We are never going to be so wrong again! In fact, we will find a way to be perfectly right!” It is called American liberalism, and it is half right; it has initiated many crucial social reforms. But it is also half wrong, and is largely incapable of seeing this.

The brilliant Huston Smith puts it this way: “The goals it [postmodernism] espouses are mainly the right ones, but the question is whether the climate of opinion it builds is conducive to the realization of those very goals [emphasis added].” If you want strong social cohesion, compelling vision, or in-depth transformation, you almost always have to resort to very traditional groups and values! This is very humiliating to admit for liberal types. Only the Dorothy Days can go to the local parish Mass on Sunday and critique the cardinal and mayor of New York on Monday. The connection between tradition and critique is at the heart of the prophetic charism. The Hebrew prophets were always radical traditionalists. By their definition, most liberals are not radical enough, and most conservatives are not traditional at all.

In my experience, liberalism creates suspicious people more than loving people. They begin by asking, “Who has the power here?” instead of, “How can I serve here?” Life is an issue to be informed about or fixed, but seldom a mystery to participate in—even in its broken state. That is probably the core difference between a mere liberal and a truly transformed individual.

Liberals need to find that rare ability to live happily in a broken world, and still work for its reform. It is a work of art that I believe only spirituality can achieve. Mere ideology is not sufficient to the task. Behind every cynic I meet, there was once a youthful idealist who could not make his ideas work outside of his head. Liberals seem incapable of being a part of a tainted anything: food, institutions, histories, explanations, groups, churches, and most especially authority structures of any kind. Soon they themselves cannot lead—or follow good leaders, because they mistrust power and leadership itself. Yet, history makes it clear that good leadership is necessary for real change.