Richard Rohr 5

Step Eleven
Wednesday, June 8, 2016
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our

conscious contact with God, as we understood God,
praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the
power to carry that out. [1]

In his book, Addiction and Grace, psychiatrist Gerald
May--who was a personal friend of mine and a true
holy man--pointed out how addictive behavior uses up
good desire and drains away spiritual desire. May was
convinced, and I am too after my years as jail chaplain,
that many addicts in their younger years were people
with spiritual insight and desire. In spiritual direction,
addicts will often admit to early youthful moments of
"unitive consciousness." These were moments when it
all made sense and we knew we were good, God was
good, it was all good. We were in touch with our true
source of power, our spiritual desire, the indwelling
Holy Spirit.

When this incipient spiritual yearning was frustrated;
when communion, connection, and compassion didn't
happen; when we were instead met with religions'
legalism, exclusivity, and ritualism--there was a great
disappointment. Some then try to maintain an
experience of communion through substance abuse or
a process addiction (for example, shopping or
gambling). We attach to substances and processes the
way we first wanted to attach to God. We want to
attach to something that will never let us down,
something all-powerful, all-nurturing, truly liberating.

Whatever your attachment might be, it gives you the
feeling that this will always be here to control your
moods. Maybe it's a superficial meaning, but somehow
buying a new thing takes away the emptiness for about
ten minutes. Of course, like any addiction, you need
more and more of it because each time you experience
the emptiness afterward. It's never enough to fill the
God-sized hole inside of you.

Prayer and meditation allow you to reconnect with
your true source of power. Bill Wilson recalled that the
new experience of spiritual vitality he felt in his
recovery was exactly what he felt years earlier after
visiting Winchester Cathedral in England as a young
soldier. He writes, "The real significance of my
experience in the Cathedral burst upon me. For a brief
moment, I had needed and wanted God. There had
been a humble willingness to have God with me--and
God came. But soon the sense of divine presence had
been blotted out by worldly clamors, mostly those
within myself. And so it had been ever since. How blind
I had been." [2]

Alcoholics Anonymous, the first Twelve-Step program,
was developed before Thomas Merton reintroduced
contemplation to the modern Western world. Although
the "prayer and meditation" described by Bill Wilson
and his friends was not exactly the type of
contemplative prayer we teach today, it was indeed
focused on surrendering to God, seeking God's will, and
relying on God's power. It was amazing that Wilson
used the uncommon word "meditation" in the 1930s, a
time when most would have thought that was a
practice from "Eastern religion."

A contemplative practice, done over time, actually
rewires our brains so that we can detach from our
addictive patterns of thinking and feeling and our
unworkable programs for happiness. Now many
neuroscientists affirm such very real change and call it
neuroplasticity: chosen neural pathways gradually
grow stronger; unused pathways actually die away.
Contemplative "practice" works!

Nobody describes the outcome of such contemplative
practice better than Gerald May: "As attachment ceases
to be your motivation, your actions become
expressions of divine love." [3]
Gateway to Silence
Thy will be done.
References:
[1] "J," A Simple Program: A Contemporary Translation of the
Book "Alcoholics Anonymous" (Hyperion: 1996), 55.
[2] Ibid., 12.
[3] Gerald G. May, Will and Spirit (Harper San Francisco: 1982),
238.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Little Way: A Spirituality of
Imperfection (CAC: 2007), MP3 download;
How Do We Breathe Under Water? The Gospel and 12-Step
Spirituality (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2005), disc 1
(CD, DVD, MP3 download);and
Emotional Sobriety: Rewiring Our Programs for "Happiness"
(CAC: 2011), CD, DVD, MP3 download.
Step Twelve
Thursday, June 9, 2016
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these

steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to
practice these principles in all our affairs. [1]

Step Twelve tells addicts that they will never really
come to appropriate the power and importance of the
first eleven steps until and unless they personally take
it upon themselves to give it away to other people in
need. This necessary reciprocity, a pattern of outflow
and inflow, is one that many Christians have never
committed to, and the whole religion has suffered
because of it. I am convinced that in neglecting the
need to serve and to pay back, many Christians lose
whatever they might have gained in their private
devotions; in fact they live inside a false peace, and
sometime even a well-disguised narcissism.

If I have grown at all in my decades of being a priest,
it's in part through this role of being a preacher and
teacher. I have had to stand before crowds for years
and describe what I thought I believed, and then I often
had to ask myself, "Do I really believe that myself?" In
my attempt to communicate something, I usually found
that I'd only scratched the surface of understanding it
myself. In sharing, in giving it away, you really own it
for yourself and appreciate more fully its value, beyond
what you ever imagined.

The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says, "Helping
others is the foundation stone of your recovery. A
kindly act once in a while isn't enough. You have to act
the Good Samaritan every day, if need be. It may mean
the loss of many nights' sleep, great interference with
your pleasures, interruptions to your business. It may
mean sharing your money and your home, counseling
frantic spouses and relatives, innumerable trips to
court, hospitals, jails and asylums." [2] A little later the
Big Book says, "Your job now is to be at the place
where you may be of maximum helpfulness to others."
[3]

This reminds me of Pope Francis' description of the
Church as a field hospital: "a Church that goes forth
toward those who are 'wounded,' who are in need of an
attentive ear, understanding, forgiveness, and love." [4]

Bill Wilson ends his own story with this: "There is,
however, a vast amount of fun about it all. I suppose
some would be shocked at our seeming worldliness
and levity. But just underneath there is deadly
earnestness. Faith has to work twenty-four hours a day
in and through us, or we perish." [5]

I have often said that the Twelve-Step programs are the
best at helping people achieve sobriety from an
addictive substance. But if people do not seriously
practice all the steps in their daily lives, especially Step
Eleven (prayer and meditation) and Step Twelve
(action and service) they will not progress. We can be
very grateful for Bill Wilson and his friend Dr. Bob
Smith for cooperating with the Spirit and designing a
practical program for suffering humanity.
Gateway to Silence
Thy will be done.
References:
[2] Ibid., 89.
[3] Ibid., 94.
[4] Pope Francis, The Name of God Is Mercy: A Conversation with
Andrea Tornielli (Random House: 2016), 53.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the
World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 12-13; and
Christ, Cosmology, and Consciousness: A Reframing of How We See
(CAC: 2010), MP3 download.
The Divine Paradox

Friday, June 10, 2016
We're many months away from Christmas, but I want

to share with you Bill Wilson's Christmas letter to A. A.
members years ago:

Greetings on Our 10th Christmas, 1944

Yes, it's in the air! The spirit of Christmas once more
warms this poor distraught world. Over the whole
globe millions are looking forward to that one day
when strife can be forgotten, when it will be
remembered that all human beings, even the least are
loved by God, when men will hope for the coming of the
Prince of Peace as they never hoped before.

But there is another world which is not poor. Neither is
it distraught. It is the world of Alcoholics Anonymous,
where thousands dwell happily and secure. Secure
because each of us, in his own way, knows a greater
power who is love, who is just, and who can be trusted.

Nor can men and women of AA ever forget that only
through suffering did they find enough humility to
enter the portals of that New World. How privileged we
are to understand so well the divine paradox that
strength rises from weakness, that humiliation goes
before resurrection; that pain is not only the price but
the very touchstone of spiritual rebirth.

Knowing its full worth and purpose, we can no longer
fear adversity, we have found prosperity where there
was poverty, peace and joy have sprung out of the very
midst of chaos.

Great indeed, our blessings!

And so, Merry Christmas to you all--

from the Trustees, from Bobbie
and from Lois and me.
Bill Wilson [1]
Twelve-Step Spirituality:
Week 2
Summary
Sunday, June 5-Friday, June 10, 2016
Step Six: Were entirely ready to have God remove all

these defects of character.

Step Seven: Humbly asked God to remove our
shortcomings. (Sunday)

Step Eight: Made a list of all persons we had harmed,
and became willing to make amends to them all.

Step Nine: Made direct amends to such people
wherever possible, except when to do so would injure
them or others.(Monday)

Step Ten: Continued to take personal inventory and
when we were wrong promptly admitted it. (Tuesday)

Step Eleven: Sought through prayer and meditation to
improve our conscious contact with God, as we
understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's
will for us and the power to carry that out.
(Wednesday)

Step Twelve: Having had a spiritual awakening as the
result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to
alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our
affairs. (Thursday)

"How privileged we are to understand so well the
divine paradox that strength rises from weakness, that
humiliation goes before resurrection; that pain is not
only the price but the very touchstone of spiritual
rebirth." --Bill Wilson (Friday)
Practice
Litany of the Holy Spirit
When we come to the end of our rope and hit rock

bottom, we are not dashed but fall into God's hands. It
is here at our lowest that we discover our true source
of power, the indwelling Holy Spirit. Many years ago,
during a hermitage in Arizona, I had a particularly
strong sense of the Holy Spirit, the One who is fully
available to all of us "if we but knew the gift of God"
(John 4:10). I slowly composed this prayer--imagining
many names and movements of the Spirit--to awaken
and strengthen this Presence within you. Recite it
whenever you are losing faith in God or in yourself.

Pure Gift of God
Indwelling Presence
Promise of the Father
Life of Jesus
Pledge and Guarantee
Defense Attorney
Inner Anointing
Homing Device
Stable Witness
Peacemaker
Always Already Awareness
Compassionate Observer
God Compass
Inner Breath
Mutual Yearning
Hidden Love of God
Implanted Hope
Seething Desire
Fire of Life and Love
Truth Speaker
Flowing Stream
Wind of Change
Descending Dove
Cloud of Unknowing
Uncreated Grace
Filled Emptiness
Deepest Level of Our Longing
Sacred Wounding
Holy Healing
Will of God
Great Compassion
Inherent Victory

You who pray in us, through us, with us, for us, and in
spite of us.
Amen, Alleluia!
Gateway to Silence
Thy will be done.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as
the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 168-
169.
For Further Study:

Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the
Twelve Steps
Richard Rohr, Emotional Sobriety: Rewiring Our Programs for
"Happiness" (DVD, CD, MP3 download)
Richard Rohr, How Do We Breathe Under Water? The Gospel and
12-Step Spirituality (DVD, CD, MP3 download)
Entering the Dark Wood

Monday, June 13, 2016
The mystics of all the great religions, along with classic

literature like Homer's Odyssey, intuited that life was a
journey involving completion of a first half and
transition to a second half, sometimes called "a further
journey." Yet most of us were given the impression that
life was a matter of learning and obeying the rules; and
those who obeyed them won. Many of our pastoral
problems and the foundational alienation from religion
in Europe and North America stems from the lack of
initiation and depth. Mainline Christianity does not
seem to be giving people access to God, to the soul, or
to the joy and freedom promised in the Scriptures.
Christianity is not doing its primary job well--moving
people from the first to the second half of life.

At some point along the journey, if you're honest and
open, you will realize there's more to life. This
experience is hardly inviting or encouraging, and so
many of us turn back. In "The Inferno: Canto 1," The
Divine Comedy, Dante describes the human experience:
"In the middle of life, I found myself in a dark wood." If
you're letting life happen to you, you will be led to the
dark wood where you have to ask: "What does it all
mean? Why am I doing this? Why don't I feel fully alive
or that my life has meaning? What am I doing wrong?"
Most of us have bouts of immense self-doubt and even
sometimes self-hatred at this point.

This is why Jesus says, "By faith you will be saved"
(Luke 7:50, 18:42). It is only by a foundational trust in
the midst of suffering, some ability to bear darkness
and uncertainty, and learning to be comfortable with
paradox and mystery, that you move from the first half
of life to the second half.

Novelist Robertson Davies writes, "One always learns
one's mystery at the price of one's innocence." [1] The
word innocent comes from the Latin for unwounded or
not harmed. The innocent one hasn't yet learned from
his or her wounds, and therefore doesn't know his or
her full reality yet. Human life only develops in the
shadowlands, never inside of pure light or total
darkness.

When you've stumbled--and the guilt, loneliness, and
fear come to assault you--if you don't have at least one
good friend, or if you have not developed a prayer life
where you know how to find yourself in God instead of
in your own feelings, you will simply retrench and
reassert your correctness. You'll learn nothing and
remain in the first half of life, maintaining your
container and supposed identity. This explains why
most people are stuck in the first half of life. This is
especially true for people who are highly successful or
have been able to avoid all suffering. If you only move
from success to success, or you never live in solidarity
with the suffering of others, you normally know very
little about your own soul.
Gateway to Silence
Guide me on the further journey.
References:
[1] Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (Penguin Classics: 2001),
245.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spirituality for the Two Halves of
Life (Franciscan Media: 2004), discs 1 and 3 (CD).
"People have good reasons to be angry and afraid. Racism,

poverty, climate change, and so many other injustices are causing
real suffering. But we cannot fight violence with violence. Only the
contemplative mind has the ability to hold light and dark together;
only unitive consciousness allows transformation at the deepest
levels."
--Richard Rohr

The CONSPIRE 2016 conference brings together teachers who
show us what is possible, with our participation: reconciliation,
healing, and wholeness.

Join Richard Rohr, Christena Cleveland, James Alison, and Mirabai
Starr in person at Hotel Albuquerque or online via live webcast.
Friday, July 15-Sunday, July 17, 2016
Everything belongs, including you!

Learn more and register at cac.org.

Seating is limited for the in-person conference. Scholarships are available--
please apply prior to registering.
Prayer as Surrender
Tuesday, September 6, 2016
One must fully recognize that mystics like Francis and Clare lived from a place
of conscious, chosen, and loving union with God; such union was realized by
surrendering to it, not by achieving it. Surrender to Another, participation with
Another, and divine union are finally the same thing. Once we have experienced
this union, we look out at reality from a much fuller Reality that now has eyes
beyond and larger than our own. This is precisely what it means to “live in
Christ” (en Christo), to pray “through Christ,” or to do anything “in the name of
God,” phrases with which Christians are quite familiar.
Such a letting go of our own small vantage point is the core of what we mean by
conversion, but also what we mean by Franciscan “poverty.” Poverty is not just a
life of simplicity, humility, restraint, or even lack. Poverty is when we recognize
that myself—by itself—is powerless and ineffective. John’s Gospel puts it quite
strongly when it says that a branch that does not abide in Jesus “is withered and
useless” (John 15:6). The transformed self, living in union, no longer lives in
shame or denial of its weakness, but even lives with rejoicing because it does not
need to pretend that it is any more than it actually is—which is now more than
enough!
After the sixteenth century, the Poor Clares only learned the older tradition of
the prayer of quiet through their own desire and through the Holy Spirit
(Romans 8:26). As far as I know, contemplation was no longer systematically
taught anywhere. By the time I joined the Franciscan Order, our elders gave us
the scaffolding (telling us to “say” the Office, “attend” the Mass), but seldom the
substance of prayer. “Fighting distractions” is an impossible goal (“Don’t think
of an elephant”); it sent us on the wrong course toward willful concentration
instead of the willing prayer of receptivity (e.g., Mary’s “Let it be,” Luke 1:38).
Almost all thinking is obsessive, but no one taught us that. I am sad to say that
many of my contemporaries just gave up, either by formally leaving, or worse,
by staying and no longer even trying.
The “how” of letting go is so counter to ego consciousness that it has to be
directly taught, and it can only be taught by people who know the obstacles and
have experienced surrender as the path to overcoming them. The contemplative
mind, which is really prayer itself, is not subject to a mere passing on of
objective information. It must be practiced and learned, just like playing the
piano or basketball. I do suspect that the Poor Clares’ overwhelming emphasis
on poverty and letting go gave them a head start in understanding prayer as
surrender more than a performance that somehow pleased God. They were
already experts in self-emptying (kenosis) and letting go. In other words,
“poverty” (inner non-acquisition) is first of all for the sake of prayer, never an
end in itself.
Gateway to Silence:
Surrender to love.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of
Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 30-31, 145-146.

Rise Up Rooted Like Trees

Sunday, August 28, 2016
How surely gravity’s law,

strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again

to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left [God].
This is what the things can teach us:

to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
—Rainer Maria Rilke [1]
In my work with men’s initiation, I’ve found that all great spiritual wisdom, all
true soul wisdom, can be found in nature. I do believe that’s true. St. Francis
didn’t learn by only reading Bibles and books, but by observing the natural
world, which we call “the first Bible” (see Romans 1:20).
When you sit quietly and for extended times in nature, you see that everything
changes. If you stay longer, you see that everything dies or erodes. Nothing stays
in the same shape or form for long. Plants and animals seem to accept this
dying. All of the natural world seems to accept the change of seasons. Nature
fights for life but does not resist dying. It learns gravity’s fall, as it were. Only
one species resists this natural movement: humans—you and me. The very
freedom that can lead us into intimacy with an utterly free God who invites our
cooperation and participation also allows us to resist, oppose, or deny Love. We
are free to cling to our own egoic resources, to climb instead of to descend. But
we must fall if we are ever to fly.
Meister Eckhart said, “God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a
process of subtraction.” [2] In our consumer culture, religion and spirituality
have very often become a matter of addition: earning points with God, attaining
enlightenment, producing moral behavior. Yet authentic spirituality is not about
getting, attaining, achieving, performing, or succeeding—all of which tend to
pander to the ego. It is much more about letting go—letting go of what we don’t
need anyway, although we don’t know that ahead of time. On the mental level, it
is more “the shedding of thoughts,” as the Desert Fathers called it, than piling
on more thoughts.
Gateway to Silence:
Let be. Let love.
References:
[1] Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated by Anita
Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books: 1996), 116-117. Used with permission.
[2] Meister Eckhart, translated by James M. Clark and John V. Skinner, Meister Eckhart:
Selected Treatises and Sermons Translated from Latin and German with an Introduction
and Notes (Faber and Faber: 1958), 194.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis
(Sounds True: 2010), disc 1 (CD).
Solidarity with Pain

Monday, September 5, 2016
Both Francis and Clare of Assisi lost and let go of all fear of suffering; all need
for power, prestige, and possessions; any need for their small self to be
important; and they came out the other side knowing something essential—who
they really were in God and thus who they really were. Their house was then
built on “bedrock,” as Jesus says (Matthew 7:24).
Francis and Clare had an ability to really change and heal people, which is often
the fruit of suffering and various forms of poverty, since the false self does not
surrender without a fight to its death. If suffering is “whenever we are not in
control” (my definition), then you 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. Then we become usable instruments because we can share
our power with God’s power (Romans 8:28).
Such a counterintuitive insight surely explains why these two medieval

dropouts, Francis and Clare, tried to invite everyone into their happy run
downward, to that place of “poverty” where all 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
wrong. They trusted that Jesus’ way was the way of solidarity and communion
with the larger world which is indeed passing away and dying, but always with
great resistance. They turned such resistance into a proactive welcoming prayer
instead. By God’s grace, they could trust the eventual passing of all things and
where they are passing to. They did not wait for liberation later—after death—
but grasped it here and now.
When we try to live in solidarity with the pain of the world and do not spend our
lives running from necessary suffering, we will encounter various forms of
“crucifixion.” Many say pain is physical discomfort, but suffering comes from
our resistance, denial, and sense of injustice or wrongness about that pain. I
know that is very true for me. This is the core meaning of suffering on one level
or another, and we all learn it the hard way. Pain is the rent we pay for being
human, some say; but suffering is usually optional. The cross was Jesus’
voluntary acceptance of undeserved pain as an act of total solidarity with all of
the pain of the world. Reflection on this mystery of love can change your whole
life.
Gateway to Silence:
Surrender to love.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of
Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 20-21.
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Image credit: Dancers (detail), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), 1899. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Spain.
Trinity: Week 3
Join in the Dance

Thursday, September 29, 2016
Once you learn to take your place inside the circle of praise and mutual
deference, all meaningful distinctions between secular and sacred, natural and
supernatural, fall away. In the Divine Economy, all is useable, even our mistakes
and our sin. The cross shouted this message of “failure undone and used,” yet
we still struggle to hear or accept it.
Everything is holy now. The only resistance to that divine flow of holiness and
wholeness is our human refusal to see, to enjoy, and to participate.
We are each a transmitter station, a relay station, but sadly this is somehow
humiliating for the ego. I was so happy when I first preached in Germany and
found out that my last name, Rohr, was translated as “conduit” or “pipe.”
Alleluia!
But my ego self is not satisfied to be a pass-through account; it wants to be a

substantial “Richard Rohr!” Yet this small, egoic frame of reference is going to
be gone in a few years in the form that I presently identify with. All I can be is a
part of the circle of praise. Just knowing that I’m part of the team becomes more
than enough, especially when I recognize that it was all given to me freely
anyway.
I didn’t ask to be born. I thank God I was born, and I’m grateful to be here. My
sister, St. Clare of Assisi, is reported to have said right before she died, “Thank
you for letting me be a human being.” There it is. It’s almost too simple and too
clear. We each get our little chance to dance on this stage of life, to reflect the
glory of God back to God and to participate with everything and everyone else.
Once I was able to move from pyramid thinking to circular thinking, by reason
of the Trinity—ah! My mind let go of its own defenses and stopped refusing and
resisting the dance. Being a wallflower is not much fun.
Here’s how Thomas Merton more poetically puts it:
For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of
the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in
misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into
strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve
ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much,
because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things; or stain the joy of the
cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in
the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast
our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance. [1]
Gateway to Silence:
Dance with Us.
References:
[1] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (Shambhala: 2003), 303.
Adapted from Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your
Transformation (Whitaker House: 2016), 182. This book is available for pre-order at
thedivinedance.org.

Let the Flow Happen

Friday, September 23, 2016
Think of your own experience: how many people do you know, including
yourself, who are really in this divine dance with an appropriate and balanced
degree of self-love and self-giving? It is the very definition of psychological
maturity. Even so, we all make a lot of missteps as we learn the dance.
Insofar as an appropriate degree of self-love is received, held, enjoyed, trusted,

and participated in, this is the same degree to which love can be given away to
the rest of the world. You can and you must “love your neighbor as you love
yourself” (Matthew 19:19)—for your own wholeness and for theirs. Without this
full flow in and out, we frankly have many “constipated” believers.
This “Golden Rule” is also the gold standard for all growth and development.
We learned it from the Trinity. This is the never-ending dance: the movement in
and out, of receiving and handing on.
If it’s not flowing out of you, it’s probably because you’re not allowing it to flow
toward you. Love can flow toward you in every moment: through a flower, in a
grain of sand, in a wisp of cloud, in any one person whom you allow to delight
you. You might be experiencing this flow of love when you find yourself smiling
at things for no apparent reason.
Spiritual joy has nothing to do with anything “going right.” It has everything to
do with things going, and going on within you. It’s an inherent, inner aliveness.
Joy is almost entirely an inside job. Joy is not first determined by the object
enjoyed as much as by the prepared eye of the enjoyer.
When the flow is flowing, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. You don’t have to
be a priest on the altar or a preacher in a pulpit, that’s for sure. You can be a
homemaker in a grocery store or a construction worker at a work site; it doesn’t
matter. It’s all inherently sacred and deeply satisfying. As the nineteenth-
century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it, “Earth’s crammed with heaven,
and every common bush afire with God.” [1]
All is whole and holy in the very seeing, because you are standing inside the One
Flow of Love without the negative pushback of doubting. This is all that there
really is. Call it Consciousness, call it God, call it Love; this is the Ground of all
Being out of which all things—and especially all good things—come (see James
1:17).
The river is already flowing, and you are in it whether you are enjoying it or not.
The Spirit is your implanted placeholder who teaches you how to pray, how to
believe, how to hope, and how to love. As Paul so honestly says, “We do not
know how to pray” (Romans 8:26).
You just have to let go of whatever it is within you that is saying no to the flow,
judging it as impossible. Let go of any shame that is keeping the Indwelling
Spirit from guiding you. Even your sins will become good teachers. The Great
Flow makes use of everything, absolutely everything. “Where sin abounds, grace
abounds even more” (Romans 5:20). Even your mistakes will be used in your
favor, if you allow them to be. That’s how good God is.
Gateway to Silence:
Love flows in and out, in and out.
Image credit: Dancers (detail), Edgar Degas (1834-1917), 1899. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Spain.
Trinity: Week 3

Laughter, Liking, Delighting, Loving

Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Let me share an astounding bit of poetry from Meister Eckhart, the wonderful
fourteenth-century German Dominican mystic:
Do you want to know
what goes on in the core of the Trinity?
I will tell you.
In the core of the Trinity
the Father laughs
and gives birth to the Son.
The Son laughs back at the Father
and gives birth to the Spirit.
The whole Trinity laughs
and gives birth to us. [1]
God has done only one constant thing since the beginning of time: God has
always, forever, and without hesitation loved “the Son”—and yes, you can
equally and fittingly use “the Daughter”—understood in this sense as creation,
the material universe, you, and me. The quality of the relationship toward the
other is the point, not gender or even species.
God cannot not love God’s self in you (see 2 Timothy 2:13)! The “you” that holds
the indwelling Spirit, which many of us call the soul, is always considered
eternal and intrinsically good because of its inherent connection to God.
This flow of love goes full circle. The “Son” also creates the “Father” precisely as
Father—as any parent can attest. A parent is not truly a parent until the child
returns the flow. Watch the joy and tears on a mother or father’s face when their
little one first says “Mama!” or “Dada!”
Anything less than such divine laughter, liking, delighting, and loving we do not
have time for anymore! Fear will never build a “new creation” (Galatians 6:15);
threat is an entirely worn out and false story line. The lowest level of motivation
is guilt, shame, reward, and punishment; and it has not moved us anywhere
close to a civilization of love.
The Trinity beautifully undoes all negativity by a totally positive movement that
never reverses its direction. God is always giving, even in those moments when
we experience the inaccessibility of love as if it were divine anger.
When you find yourself drawing these conclusions, look deeply inside yourself
and you will probably find that you are angry and projecting your anger onto
God. This very human pattern is illustrated throughout the Bible, as the text
mirrors both the growth and resistance of the human soul. I call it three steps
forward and two steps back. References to the “wrath” of God are an example of
the two steps back. But the whole text moves slowly and inexorably toward
inclusivity, mercy, unconditional love, and forgiveness. [2]
I do not believe there is any wrath in God whatsoever—it’s theologically

impossible when God is Trinity.
Gateway to Silence:
Dance with Us.
References:
[1] Meister Eckhart, Meditations with Meister Eckhart, trans. and ed. Matthew Fox (Bear
and Company: 1983), 129.
[2] See my book Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media: 2007) for
more on how the biblical text mirrors human development, both the growth and resistance
of the soul.
Transformation (Whitaker House: 2016), 136-140, 166-167. This book is available for pre-
order at thedivinedance.org.
Vulnerability
Tuesday, September 27, 2016
Did you ever imagine that what we call “vulnerability” might just be the key to
ongoing growth? In my experience, healthily vulnerable people use every
occasion to expand, change, and grow. Yet it is a risky position to live
undefended, in a kind of constant openness to the other—because it means
others could sometimes actually wound us. Indeed, vulnera comes from the
Latin for “to wound.” But only if we take this risk do we also allow the opposite
possibility: the other might also gift us, free us, and even love us.
If and when we can live an honestly vulnerable life—the life we see mirrored in a
God who is described as three persons perfectly handing themselves over,
emptying themselves out, and then fully receiving what has been handed over—
there will always be a centrifugal force flowing through, out, and beyond us.
Then our spiritual life simply becomes “the imitation of God” (see Ephesians
5:1), as impossible as this sounds to our ordinary ears.
This, then, seems to be the work of the Spirit: to keep you vulnerable to life and
love itself and to resist all that destroys the Life Flow. Notice that the major
metaphors for the Spirit are always dynamic, energetic, and moving: elusive
wind, descending dove, falling fire, and flowing water. Spirit-led people never
stop growing and changing and recognizing the new moment of opportunity.
How strange to think that so much of religion became worship of the status quo
and a neurotic fear of failure. It does make sense, though, when we consider that
the ego hates and fears change and failure.
What, then, is the path to holiness? It’s the same as the path to wholeness. And
we are never “there” yet. We are always just in the river. Don’t try to push the
river or make the river happen; it is already happening, and you cannot stop it.
All you can do is recognize it, enjoy it, and ever more fully allow it to carry you.
As John O’Donohue put it:

I would love to live
Like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise
Of its own unfolding. [1]
This is the great surprise, and for some a disappointment: this divine Flow has
very little to do with you. The Flow doesn’t have to do with you being perfect,
right, belonging to the right group, or even understanding the Flow. Jesus never
has any such checklist test before he heals someone. He just says, as it were,
“Are you going to ask for or allow yourself to be touched? If so, let’s go!”
The touchable ones are the healed ones; it’s pretty much that simple. There’s no
doctrinal or moral test whatsoever. Jesus doesn’t check if the people he heals
are Jewish, gay, baptized, or in their first marriage. There’s only the one
question, which he asks in various ways:
Do you want to be healed?
If the answer is a vulnerable, trusting one, the Flow always happens, and the
person is always healed, usually on several levels. That is the real New
Testament message, much more than miraculous medical cures.
Gateway to Silence:
Dance with Us.
References:
[1] John O’Donohue, “Fluent,” Conamara Blues (Cliff Street Books: 2001), 23.
Transformation (Whitaker House: 2016), 57-59. This book is available for pre-order at
thedivinedance.org.

Participatory Knowing
Sunday, September 18, 2016
All authentic knowledge of God is participatory. I must say this directly and
clearly because it is a very different way of knowing reality—and it should be the
unique, open-horizoned gift of people of faith. But Christians have almost
entirely lost this way of knowing, ever since the food fights of the Reformation
and the rationalism of the Enlightenment, leading to fundamentalism on the
Right and atheism or agnosticism on the Left. Neither of these sides know how
to know!
Divine knowing—some would call it spiritual intuition—is actually an allowing

of Someone Else to know in us, through us, for us, and even as us! It demands
what I like to call an “identity transplant.” It’s “I live no longer, not I” as dear
Paul would put it (Galatians 2:20).
This isn’t some New Age idea! Esteemed sixteenth-century Carmelite friar,
teacher, and high level mystic Saint John of the Cross describes this Trinitarian
transplant this way:
One should not think it impossible that the soul be capable of so sublime an
activity as this breathing in God, through participation as God breathes in her
[the soul].
For, granted that God favors her by union with the Most Blessed Trinity, in
which she becomes deiform and God through participation,
How could it be incredible that she also understand, know, and love—or better
that this be done in her—in the Trinity, together with it, as does the Trinity
itself!
Yet God accomplishes this in the soul through communication and

participation.
This is transformation in the three Persons in power and wisdom and love, and
thus the soul is like God through this transformation.
He created her in His image and likeness that she might attain such
resemblance. [1]
Such knowing does not inflate the ego but beautifully humbles it, teaching us
patience, because even a little bit of spiritual knowing goes a long way. Read
Paul’s Sermo Sapientiae (Sermon on Wisdom, 1 Corinthians 1:17–2:16), a
masterful attempt to describe this alternative way of knowing. It is, frankly, why
the gifts of the Spirit distinguish between knowledge and wisdom, which most of
us think are the same thing (see both Isaiah 11:2 and 1 Corinthians 12:8).
Spiritual knowing is often called wisdom and must be distinguished from
merely having correct information or knowledge.
In other words, God (and uniquely the Trinity) cannot be known as we know
any other object—such as a machine, an objective idea, or a tree—which we are
able to “objectify.” We look at objects, and we judge them from a distance
through our normal intelligence, parsing out their varying parts, separating this
from that, presuming that to understand the parts is to understand the whole.
Our dualistic approach is really more taxonomy than true knowing of a thing in
its wholeness.
God can never be objectified in this way, but can only be “subjectified” by
becoming one with the Source! When neither you nor the other is treated as a
mere object, but both rest in an I-Thou of mutual admiration, you have spiritual
knowing. [2] Some of us call this nondual consciousness or contemplative
knowing. To even begin to understand Trinity or our deepest self, we must move
beyond the dualistic thinking of judging to experience things center-to-center,
subject-to-subject, both an I and a Thou. Love and knowledge are almost the
same thing now.
Gateway to Silence:
Love flows in and out, in and out.
References:
[1] St. John of the Cross, “The Spiritual Canticle,” stanza 39, commentary, no. 4, in The
Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio
Rodriguez, O.C.D. (ICS Publications [Institute of Carmelite Studies]: 1973), 558.
[2] See Martin Buber, I and Thou (Scribner: 1958).
thedivinedance.org.

God Is for Us
Friday, September 30, 2016
Love is just like prayer; it is not so much an action that we do, but a dialogue
that already flows through us. We don’t decide to “be loving”; rather, to love is
to allow our deepest and truest nature to show itself. The “Father” doesn’t
decide to love the “Son.” Fatherhood is the flow from Father to Son, one
hundred percent. The Son does not choose now and then to release some love to
the Father, or to the Spirit. Love is the full modus operandi between all three of
them! (Remember these classic names are just placeholders. You can replace
them with any form of endearment that works for you, but make sure something
works!)
The love in you—which is the Spirit in you—always somehow says yes (see 2
Corinthians 1:19-20). Love is not something you do; love is Someone you are. It
is your True Self. [1] Love is where you came from and love is where you’re
going. It’s not something you can attain. It’s not something you can work up to,
as much as something you allow yourself to fall into! It is the living presence of
God within you, often called the Holy Spirit, or what some theologians name
uncreated grace.
You can’t manufacture this by any right conduct. You can’t make God love you
one ounce more than God already loves you right now. You can go to church
every day for the rest of your life, but God isn’t going to love you any more than
God already loves you right now.
You cannot make God love you any less, either—not an ounce less. You could do
the most terrible thing and God wouldn’t love you any less. (You would probably
love yourself much less, however.)
You cannot change the Divine mind about you! The flow is constant and total
toward your life. God is for you!
You can’t diminish God’s love for you. What you can do, however, is learn how
to believe it, receive it, trust it, allow it, and celebrate it, accepting Trinity’s
whirling invitation to join in the cosmic dance.
Catherine LaCugna ends her giant theological tome on Trinity with one simple
sentence. It’s taken her two-and-a-half inches of book to get to this one line, and
its simplicity might overwhelm you, but I can’t end in any better place than she
does:
The very nature of God, therefore, is to seek out the deepest possible
communion and friendship with every last creature on this earth. [2]
That’s God’s job description. That’s what it’s all about. The only things that can
keep you out of this divine dance are fear, doubt, or self-hatred. What would
happen in your life—right now—if you accepted being fully accepted?
It would be a very safe universe.
You would have nothing to be afraid of.
God is for you.
God is leaping toward you!
God is on your side, honestly more than you are on your own.
Gateway to Silence:
Dance with Us.
References:
[1] See Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-Bass:
2013) for a thorough teaching on your True Self and how to access it.
[2] Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life
(HarperSanFrancisco: 1993), 411.
thedivinedance.org.

Image credit: Claude Monet in Argentuil (detail), Édouard Manet, 1874.
Simplicity
Enoughness and Contentment

Tuesday, October 4, 2016
(Feast of St. Francis of Assisi)
We live in a society that places great importance upon external signs of success.
We have to assure ourselves and others that we are valuable and important—
because we inherently doubt that we are! Thus we are often preoccupied with
“one-upping” others. I am afraid that most lose inside of such a “winner-takes-
all” society. We have great difficulty finding our inherent value with such a
world view. Few have deep conviction about their own soul or the Indwelling
Holy Spirit.
People living under capitalism find it almost unnatural to know their own
center. Dignity must always be “acquired” and earned. We live in an affluent
society that’s always expecting more, wanting more, and believes it even
deserves more. But the more we own, ironically enough, the less we enjoy. This
is the paradox of materialism. The more we project our soul’s longing onto
things, the more things disappoint us. Happiness is an inside job. When we
expect to find happiness outside of ourselves, we are always disappointed. We
then seek a “higher” or more stimulating experience and the spiral of addiction
and consumption continues.
Francis of Assisi, whose feast we celebrate today, experienced radical

participation in God’s very life. Such practical knowing of his value and identity
allowed Francis to let go of status, privilege, and wealth. Francis knew he was
part of God’s plan, connected to creation and other beings, inherently in
communion and in love. Francis taught his followers to own nothing so they
would not be owned by their possessions.
If you don’t live from within your own center of connection and communion,
you’ll go spinning around things. The true goal of all religion is to lead you back
to the place where everything is one, to the experience of radical unity with all of
humanity, and hence to the experience of unity with God.
When you live in pure consciousness, letting the naked being of all reality touch
your own naked being, you experience foundational participation. Out of that
plentitude—a sense of satisfaction and inner enoughness, a worldview of
abundance—you find it much easier to live simply. You realize you don’t “need”
as much. You’ve found your satisfaction at an inner place, at a deeper level
inside you. You’re able to draw from this abundance and share it freely with
others. And you stop trying to decide who is worthy of it, because you now know
that you are not “worthy” either. It is one hundred percent pure gift!
Gateway to Silence:
Live simply so that others may simply live.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go (The Crossroad
Publishing Company: 1991, 2003), 86-87, 89; and
The Great Chain of Being: Simplifying Our Lives (CAC: 2007), MP3 download.

Ahimsa: Love Is Your Nature

Sunday, October 9, 2016
Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart. —St. Francis of
Assisi [1]
Christianity seems to have forgotten Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence. We’ve

relegated visions of a peaceful kingdom to a far distant heaven, hardly believing
Jesus could have meant we should turn the other cheek here and now. It took
Gandhi, a Hindu, to help us apply Jesus’ peace-making in very practical ways.
As Gandhi said, “It is a first class human tragedy that people of the earth who
claim to believe in the message of Jesus, whom they describe as the Prince of
Peace, show little of that belief in actual practice.” [2] Martin Luther King, Jr.,
drawing from Gandhi’s work, brought nonviolence to the forefront of civil rights
in the 1960s.
Nonviolent training has understandably emphasized largely external methods

or ways of acting and resisting. These are important and necessary, but we must
go even deeper. Unless those methods finally reflect inner attitudes, they will
not make a lasting difference. We all have to admit that our secret inner
attitudes are often cruel, attacking, judgmental, and harsh. The ego seems to
find its energy precisely by having something to oppose, fix, or change. When
the mind can judge something to be inferior, we feel superior. We must
recognize our constant tendency toward negating reality, resisting it, opposing
it, and attacking it on the level of our mind. This is the universal addiction, as I
say in the introduction to Breathing Under Water. [3]
Authentic spirituality is always first about you—about allowing your own heart
and mind to be changed. It’s about getting your own who right. Who is it that is
doing the perceiving? Is it your illusory, separate, false self; or is it your True
Self, who you are in God?
As Thomas Keating says:

We’re all like localized vibrations of the infinite goodness of God’s presence. So
love is our very nature. Love is our first, middle, and last name. Love is all; not
[love as] sentimentality, but love that is self-forgetful and free of self-interest.
This is also marvelously exemplified in Gandhi’s life and work. He never tried to
win anything. He just tried to show love; and that’s what ahimsa really means.
It’s not just a negative. Nonviolence doesn’t capture its meaning. It means to
show love tirelessly, no matter what happens. That’s the meaning of turning the
other cheek. Once in a while you have to defend somebody, but it means you’re
always willing to suffer first for the cause—that is to say, for communion with
your enemies. If you overcome your enemies, you’ve failed. If you make your
enemies your partners, God has succeeded. [4]
Gateway to Silence:
Be peace.
References:
[1] Paraphrase of Francis of Assisi, Opuscoli di S. Francesco d’Assisi, ed. Fr. Bernardo da
Fivizzano (Firenze Tip. della SS. Concezione di R. Ricci: 1880), 272.
[2] Mahatma Gandhi, Truth is God, ed. R. K. Prabhu (Navajivan Publishing House: 1955),
145.
[3] See Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
(Franciscan Media: 2011).
[4] Thomas Keating, Healing Our Violence through the Journey of Centering Prayer
(Franciscan Media: 2002), disc 5 (CD).
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Mary and Nonviolence (CAC: 2002), CD, discontinued; and
Richard Rohr and Thomas Keating, Healing Our Violence through the Journey of
Centering Prayer (Franciscan Media: 2002), discs 2 and 5 (CD).

Image credit: Le Bateau-atelier (detail), 1874, by Claude Monet (1840-1926), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.
Nonviolence
The Inner Witness

Monday, October 10, 2016
We each carry a certain amount of pain from our very birth. If that pain is not
healed and transformed, it actually increases as we grow older, and we transmit
it to people around us. We can become violent in our attitudes, gestures, words,
and actions.
We must nip this process in the bud by acknowledging and owning our own
pain, rather than projecting it elsewhere. For myself, I can’t pretend to be loving
when inside I’m not, when I know I’ve thought cruel, judgmental, and harsh
thoughts about others. At the moment the thought arises, I have to catch myself
and hand over the annoyance or anger to God. Contemplative practice helps me
develop this capacity to watch myself and to connect with my loving Inner
Witness. Let me explain why this is important.
If you can simply observe the negative pattern in yourself, you have already
begun to separate from it. The watcher is now over here, observing yourself
thinking that thought—over there. Unless you can become the watcher, you’ll
almost always identify with your feelings. They feel like real and objective truth.
Most people I know are overly identified with their own thoughts and feelings.
They don’t really have feelings; their feelings have them. That may be what
earlier Christians meant by being “possessed” by a demon. That’s why so many
of Jesus’ miracles are the exorcism of devils. Most don’t take that literally
anymore, but the devil is still a powerful metaphor, which demands that you
take it quite seriously. Everyone has a few devils. I know I’m “possessed” at least
once or twice a day, even if just for a few minutes!
There are all kinds of demons—in other words, there are lots of times when you
cannot not think a certain way. When you see certain people, you get afraid.
When you see other people, you get angry. For example, numerous studies show
that many white people have an implicit, unacknowledged fear of black men.
Thank God, most of us are not explicitly racist, but many of us have an implicit
and totally denied racial bias. This is why all healing and prayer must descend
into the unconscious where the lies we’ve believed are hidden in our wounds.
During contemplation, forgotten painful experiences may arise. In such cases, it

helps to meet with a spiritual director or therapist to process old wounds and
trauma in healthy ways.
Over a lifetime of practice, contemplation gradually helps you detach from who
you think you are and rest in your authentic identity as Love. At first this may
feel like an “identity transplant” until you learn how to permanently rest in God.
Gateway to Silence:
Be peace.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Mary and Nonviolence (CAC: 2002), CD, discontinued.


Image description: Whirlpool Galaxy: The crossed pattern within the nucleus of M51 indicating two dust rings around
the black hole at the center of the nebula. Credit: NASA/ESA
The Cosmic Christ:

Week 1
God in All Things

Sunday, October 23, 2016
The day of my spiritual awakening

was the day I saw and knew I saw
all things in God and God in all things.
—Mechtild of Magdeburg (c. 1212—c. 1282) [1]
Understanding the Cosmic Christ can change the way we relate to creation, to
other religions, to other people, to ourselves, and to God. Knowing and
experiencing the Cosmic Christ can bring about a major shift in consciousness.
Like Saul’s experience on the road to Damascus (see Acts 9), you won’t be the
same after encountering the Risen Christ.
As with the Trinity, the Cosmic Christ is present in both Scripture and Tradition
and the concept has been understood by many mystics, though not as a focus of
mainline Christianity. We just didn’t have the eyes to see it. The Cosmic Christ is
about as traditional as you can get, but Christians—including many preachers—
have not had the level of inner experience to know how to communicate this to
people.
The Cosmic Christ is Divine Presence pervading all of creation since the very
beginning. My father Francis of Assisi intuited this presence and lived his life in
awareness of it. Later, John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) put this intuition into
philosophical form. For Duns Scotus, the Christ Mystery was the blueprint of
reality from the very start (John 1:1). Teilhard de Chardin brought this insight
into our modern world. God’s first “idea” was to become manifest—to pour out
divine, infinite love into finite, visible forms. The “Big Bang” is now our
scientific name for that first idea; and “Christ” is our theological name. Both are
about love and beauty exploding outward in all directions. Creation is indeed
the Body of God! What else could it be, when you think of it?
In Jesus, this eternal omnipresence had a precise, concrete, and personal

referent. God’s presence became more obvious and believable in the world. But
this apparition only appeared in the last ten seconds of December 31, as it were
—scaling the universe’s entire history to a single year. Was God saying nothing
and doing nothing for 13.8 billion years? Our code word for that infinite saying
and doing was the “Eternal Christ.” (See John 1:1-5, Colossians 1:15-20,
Ephesians 1:9-12 if you think this is some new idea.)
Vague belief and spiritual intuition became specific and concrete and personal
in Jesus—with a “face” that we could “hear, see, and touch” (1 John 1:1). The
formless now had a personal form, according to Christian belief.
But it seems we so fell in love with this personal interface with Jesus that we
forgot about the Eternal Christ, the Body of God, which is all of creation, which
is really the “First Bible.” Jesus and Christ are not exactly the same. In the early
Christian era, only a few Eastern Fathers (such as Origen of Alexandria and
Maximus the Confessor) cared to notice that the Christ was clearly historically
older, larger, and different than Jesus himself. They mystically saw that Jesus is
the union of human and divine in space and time, and the Christ is the eternal
union of matter and Spirit from the beginning of time.
When we believe in Jesus Christ, we’re believing in something much bigger than
just the historical incarnation that we call Jesus. Jesus is just the visible map.
The entire sweep of the meaning of the Anointed One, the Christ, includes us
and includes all of creation since the beginning of time. Revelation was
geological, physical, and nature-based before it was ever personal and fully
relational (see Romans 1:20).
Gateway to Silence:
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
References:
[1] Sue Woodruff, Meditations with Mechtild of Magdeburg (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co.,
1982), 46.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Cosmic Christ, discs 1 & 2 (CAC: 2009), CD, MP3
download; and
Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Franciscan Media: 2014), 185,
210, 222.
Image credit: Claude Monet in Argentuil (detail), Édouard Manet, 1874.
Simplicity
Enoughness and Contentment

Tuesday, October 4, 2016
(Feast of St. Francis of Assisi)

We live in a society that places great importance upon external signs of success.
We have to assure ourselves and others that we are valuable and important—
because we inherently doubt that we are! Thus we are often preoccupied with
“one-upping” others. I am afraid that most lose inside of such a “winner-takes-
all” society. We have great difficulty finding our inherent value with such a
world view. Few have deep conviction about their own soul or the Indwelling
Holy Spirit.
People living under capitalism find it almost unnatural to know their own
center. Dignity must always be “acquired” and earned. We live in an affluent
society that’s always expecting more, wanting more, and believes it even
deserves more. But the more we own, ironically enough, the less we enjoy. This
is the paradox of materialism. The more we project our soul’s longing onto
things, the more things disappoint us. Happiness is an inside job. When we
expect to find happiness outside of ourselves, we are always disappointed. We
then seek a “higher” or more stimulating experience and the spiral of addiction
and consumption continues.
Francis of Assisi, whose feast we celebrate today, experienced radical

participation in God’s very life. Such practical knowing of his value and identity
allowed Francis to let go of status, privilege, and wealth. Francis knew he was
part of God’s plan, connected to creation and other beings, inherently in
communion and in love. Francis taught his followers to own nothing so they
would not be owned by their possessions.
If you don’t live from within your own center of connection and communion,
you’ll go spinning around things. The true goal of all religion is to lead you back
to the place where everything is one, to the experience of radical unity with all of
humanity, and hence to the experience of unity with God.
When you live in pure consciousness, letting the naked being of all reality touch
your own naked being, you experience foundational participation. Out of that
plentitude—a sense of satisfaction and inner enoughness, a worldview of
abundance—you find it much easier to live simply. You realize you don’t “need”
as much. You’ve found your satisfaction at an inner place, at a deeper level
inside you. You’re able to draw from this abundance and share it freely with
others. And you stop trying to decide who is worthy of it, because you now know
that you are not “worthy” either. It is one hundred percent pure gift!
Gateway to Silence:
Live simply so that others may simply live.
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go (The Crossroad
Publishing Company: 1991, 2003), 86-87, 89; and
The Great Chain of Being: Simplifying Our Lives (CAC: 2007), MP3 download.

Richard Rohr's new book, The Divine Dance, is here!
Father Richard is calling this “the most important book I’ve ever written.”
Changing our view of God—from scorekeeper or Santa Claus to friendship and
interdependence—can change everything. The Trinity shows us how to
reconnect with our True Selves, each other, creation, and God.
Order the book at thedivinedance.org.
When you order the book before October 16, 2016, you will receive Gifts for Your Journey,
a free digital download. This resource includes the audio recordings that inspired The
Divine Dance and eBooks from Brother Lawrence, Athanasius, and others.
If you already ordered the book from another bookseller, let us know, and we’ll send you
access to this gift! Go to thedivinedance.org/pre-order-here and complete a short
questionnaire.
2016 Daily Meditation Theme
Richard Rohr's meditations this year invite us to discover, experience, and

participate in the foundation of our existence—Love. Throughout the year, Fr.
Richard's meditations follow the thread of Love through many of his classic
teachings in 1-2 week segments. Learn more and watch a video introduction
at cac.org/2016-daily-meditations-overview/.
Did someone forward this message to you?

Sign up to receive CAC's free daily, weekly, or monthly emails for yourself by clicking here!
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations are made possible through the generosity of CAC's
donors. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation. Click here to donate securely
online.
You are receiving this message because you subscribed to the CAC's email list. You can
unsubscribe or update your preferences and email address using the links at the bottom of
this email. If you require assistance to change your email address, please visit our Email
Subscription FAQ page for more information.
Please do not reply to this email. For more information about:
 CAC Bookstore, visit store.cac.org

 Technical Help with Daily Meditations, email techassist@cac.org
Copyright © 2016
Center for Action and Contemplation
Infinite Presence, Infinite Love

Monday, November 7, 2016
When he considered the primordial source of all things, [St. Francis] was filled
with even more abundant piety, calling all creatures, no matter how small, by
the name of brother and sister, because he knew they had the same source as
himself. —Saint Bonaventure (1221-1274) [1]
If Christianity would have paid attention to the teachings and example of Jesus
and Francis, our planet—“Mother Sister Earth,” as Francis called her—would
perhaps be much healthier today. But it took until the 21st century for a pope to
write an entire encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home,
making this quite clear and demanding.
We have not honored God’s Presence in the elemental, physical world. We made
God as small as our own constricted hearts. We just picked and chose, saying,
“Oh, God is really only in my group, in baptized people, in moral people, etc.” Is
there that little of an Infinite God to go around? Do we have to be stingy with
God? As Isaiah put it “the arm of God is not too short to save!” (59:1). Why
pretend only we deserve God, and not other groups, religions, animals, plants,
the elements, Brother Sun, and Sister Moon? It just won't sell any more.
God is saving creation and bringing all creatures back where they began—into
union with their Creator. God loves everything that God has made! All created
things God proclaimed “good” (see Genesis 1:9-31 and Wisdom 11:24-12:1). But
we, with our small minds, can’t deal with that. We have to whittle God and Love
into small parts that our minds can handle and portion out. Human love is
conditional and operates out of a scarcity model. There’s not enough to go
around, just like Andrew said about the boy’s five loaves and two small fish
(John 6:9). Humans can’t conceptualize or even think infinite or eternal
concepts. We cannot imagine Infinite Love, Infinite Goodness, or Infinite
Mercy.
Tertullian, a third century Father of the Church, often called the first Christian
theologian, said “enfleshment is the hinge of salvation.” [2] We don’t come to
the God Mystery through concepts or theories but by connecting with what is—
with God’s immediate, embodied presence which is all around us. I want you to
begin to notice that almost all of Jesus’ common stories and examples are
nature based and relationship based—and never once academic theory! (Fr.
Thomas Berry [1914-2009] taught the same way in our time, and I hope to share
his work much more in my writings and teachings in the future.)
We have not recognized the one Body of Christ in creation. Perhaps we just
didn’t have the readiness or training. There is first of all the seeing, and then
there is the recognizing; the second stage is called contemplation. We cannot
afford to be blind any longer. We must learn to see and recognize how broad
and deep the Presence is if we are to truly care for our common home.
Gateway to Silence:
Brother Sun, Sister Moon, help me see God in all things.
References:
[1] Bonaventure, The Life of Saint Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins (HarperCollins: 2005), 84.
[2] Tertullian, “Caro salutis est cardo,” from De resurrectione carnis (Treatise on the
Resurrection), 8, 2.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “The Christification of the Universe,” a homily at Holy Family
Parish, August 16, 2016, Center for Action and Contemplation,
https://cac.org/christification-of-the-universe/; and
Taking Heart in Tough Times, disc 2 (CAC: 2009), no longer available.

Join Richard Rohr, Cynthia Bourgeault,

and Wm Paul Young
Trinity: The Soul of Creation

April 6–9, 2017
Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Online
God is bringing creation to fullness and wholeness. We have the privilege of

being co-creators with Divine Reality. The Trinity—dynamic relationship and
flow of love—invites us to participate with full heart, mind, and body in this
ecstatic dance.
Come for a weekend of listening, conversation, contemplative practice, and

movement!
Register at cac.org/trinity.
A student rate and scholarships are available.
2016 Daily Meditation Theme
Richard Rohr's meditations this year invite us to discover, experience, and

participate in the foundation of our existence—Love. Throughout the year, Fr.
Richard's meditations follow the thread of Love through many of his classic
teachings in 1-2 week segments. Learn more and watch a video introduction
at cac.org/2016-daily-meditations-overview/.
Did someone forward this message to you?
Sign up to receive CAC's free daily, weekly, or monthly emails for yourself by clicking here!
Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations are made possible through the generosity of CAC's
donors. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation. Click here to donate securely
online.
You are receiving this message because you subscribed to the CAC's email list. You can
unsubscribe at any time by using the "Unsubscribe" link at the bottom of this email. If you
instead wish to update the frequency of emails you receive from CAC, click here. If you
require assistance to change your email address, please visit our Email Subscription FAQ
page for more information.
Please do not reply to this email. For more information about:
 CAC Bookstore, visit store.cac.org

 Technical Help with Daily Meditations, email techassist@cac.org
Copyright © 2016
Center for Action and Contemplation
Image credit: Tree with visible roots in Kiental, between Herrsching and Andechs, Germany, Wikimedia.org.
The Perennial Tradition

What We Are Looking For Is Doing the Looking
Wednesday, November 23, 2016
I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath moves through,

listen to this music. —Hafiz (c. 1320-1389) [1]
Aldous Huxley’s definition of “the perennial philosophy” is an adequate

definition of my own understanding of the same:
The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of
things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something
similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality, and the ethic that places man’s
[sic] final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all
being. This is immemorial and universal. [2]
Thus, the Perennial Tradition says that there is a capacity, a similarity, and a
desire for divine reality inside all humans. What we seek is what we are, which
is exactly why Jesus says that we will find it (see Matthew 7:7-8). The Perennial
Tradition invariably concludes that you initially cannot see what you are looking
for because what you are looking for is doing the looking. The seeker becomes
the seen. God is never an object to be found or possessed as we find other
objects, but the One who shares our own deepest subjectivity—or our “self.”
Merely physical things can be known subject to object; spiritual knowing is to
know things subject to subject, center to center (see 1 Corinthians 2:10-13). This
is how the soul knows. Not surprisingly, the soul recognizes soul in
whatever it sees: soil, waters, trees, animals, and fellow humans.
Only such a depth of seeing can enter into a fruitful and mutual
exchange with God. To objectify God in any way is not to know God.
I believe the Christ is the archetypal True Self offered to history, where matter
and spirit finally operate as one, where divine and human are held in one
container, where the psychic and the physical are two sides of the same coin,
and “where there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male
and female” (Galatians 3:28). The Christ Self fully allows and enjoys the human-
divine exchange. The small self thinks about whether it could be true and
usually ends up saying no.
David Benner writes in CAC’s journal Oneing:
The moral of the Perennial Wisdom Tradition is, “Don’t settle for less than the
truth of your Christ-self.” The ego-self, with which we are all familiar, is a small
cramped place when compared with the spaciousness of our true self-in-Christ.
This is the self that is not only at one within itself; it is at one with the world,
and with all others who share it as their world. It is, therefore, one with Ultimate
Reality. [3]
Gateway to Silence:
All truth is one.
References:
[1] Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz, “The Christ’s Breath,” Love Poems from God: Twelve
Sacred Voices from the East and West, rendered by Daniel Ladinsky (Penguin Compass:
2002), 153.
[2] Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), vi.
[3] David G. Benner, “Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Living,” “The Perennial
Tradition,” Oneing, Vol. 1, No. 1 (CAC: 2013), 28. (This issue of Oneing, a limited edition
publication, is no longer available in print; however, the eBook is available from Amazon
and iTunes. Explore additional issues of Oneing at store.cac.org.)
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-
Bass: 2013), xii-xiii.
Evolutionary thinking is actually contemplative thinking because it leaves the

full field of the future in God’s hands and agrees to humbly hold the present
with what it only tentatively knows for sure. Evolutionary thinking agrees to
both knowing and not knowing, at the same time. To stay on the ride, to trust
the trajectory, to know it is moving, and moving somewhere always better, is
just another way to describe faith. We are all in evolution all the time, it seems
to me. It is the best, the truest, way to think. —Richard Rohr, “Evolutionary
Thinking”
Order this issue of Oneing at store.cac.org.

Contemplative Seeing
Friday, December 2, 2016
Spirituality is about seeing—seeing things in their wholeness, which can only be

done through the lens of our own wholeness. That is the key! It’s about taking
responsibility for our way of relating to things rather than aiming for any kind of
perfect results or necessary requirements. Once you see skillfully, the rest
follows. You don’t need to push the river, because you are already in
it. The One Life is living itself within us, and we learn how to say yes to that one
shared life, which includes both the good and the bad sides of everything. This
Divine Life is so large, deep, and spacious that it even includes its seeming
opposite, death. This one, great life does not end, it merely changes. This is true
in the entire physical world, and Jesus tells us it is true in the spiritual world
too.
My life is not about me; it is about God, and God is about love. When
we don’t know love, when we experience only the insecurity and fragility of the
small self, we become restless, violent, and hateful. But in contemplation we
move to a different space where we see the illusion of separateness. We
experience what my recently deceased friend Sister Paula Gonzalez referred to
as “a self surrounded by a semipermeable membrane.” There’s a constant flow,
in both directions, through that membrane.
The older we get, the more we’ve been betrayed, hurt, and disappointed (and
this is “part of the deal,” according to the Buddha!); most of us learn to put up
many barriers and resistances to love without even knowing it. This is why the
healing work of spiritual practices is so necessary.
Notice how most of Jesus’ ministry is about healing people (yet I grew up in a
church that hardly used the word “healing”). Notice also how many of those
healings have to do with blindness, chosen blindness (John 9:41), the gradual
healing of blindness (Mark 8:22-26), and the distorted worldviews that come
from chosen blindness (Luke 6:39-42). Why? Because the contemplative mind
is able to see fully and freely, which is to be healed of its hurts, unforgiveness,
and agendas which always get in the way.
For years, I would begin my classes on the contemplative mind by repeating the
same sentence twice: “Most people do not see things as they are because they
see things as they are!” Which is not to see at all. Their many self-created filters
keep them from seeing with any clear vision. The whole of life is almost perfectly
calibrated to get you out of your own way, which is normally achieved by having
to give up control or through a persistent sadness, pain, or fear. Notice how the
blind people invariably cry out to Jesus “Lord have pity on me” (Luke 18:39).
From our pitiable state, what the recovery movement calls “powerlessness,” we
can often recognize that we are our own worst enemy, and from that
humiliation, we can learn how to see and love things as they are—and not just as
we want them to be.
Gateway to Silence:
Everything—yes, everything—belongs.
References:
[1] See Richard Rohr’s meditation “All-Inclusive, All-Pervading,” November 1, 2016.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The
Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 33-34, 40, 58-59, 80.
Thank you!

Image credit: Early Autumn (detail), Qian Xuan (1235-1305), 13th century, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan, USA.
Union
Already in Union
Sunday, December 11, 2016
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities,
nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor
any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which
is in Christ Jesus our Lord. —Romans 8:38-39 [1]
We are already in union with God! There is an absolute, eternal union between
God and the soul of everything. At the deepest level, you and I are “hidden with
Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3) and “the whole creation . . . is being brought into
the same glorious freedom as the children of God” (Romans 8:21). The problem
is that Western religion has not taught us this. Our ego over-emphasizes our
individuality and separateness from God and others, and, as I said a few weeks
ago, we limited God’s redemption to the human species—and not very many
individuals within that species!
Daily contemplative prayer helps you rediscover your inherent union and learn
how to abide in Presence, trusting that you are already good and safe in God.
You don’t have to worry about your little private, separate, insecure self. I am
one with you and you are one with your neighbor and you are one with God.
That’s the Gospel! That’s the whole point of communion or Eucharist; we
partake of the bread and the wine until it convinces us that we are in
communion. It seems easier for God to convince bread and wine of its identity
than to convince us.
You’re not here to save your soul. That’s already been done once and for all—in
Christ, through Christ, with Christ, and as Christ (see Ephesians 1:3-14). By
God’s love, mercy, and grace, we are already the Body of Christ: the one
universal body that has existed since the beginning of time. You and I are here
for just a few decades, dancing on the stage of life, perhaps taking our
autonomous self far too seriously. That little and clearly imperfect self just
cannot believe it could be a child of God. I hope the Gospel frees you to live
inside of a life that is larger than you and cannot be taken from you. It is the
very life of God which cannot be destroyed.
As Thomas Merton wrote in his journal, “We are already one. But we imagine
we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to
be is what we already are.” [2]
Gateway to Silence:
We are already in union with God.
References:
[1] Romans 8:38-39, New American Standard Bible.
[2] Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions,
1973), 308. Emphasis mine.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “There Is Only One Suffering; There Is Only One Happiness,”
homily, September 13, 2015, https://cac.org/there-is-only-one-sufferingonly-one-
happiness/; and
Emotional Sobriety: Rewiring Our Programs for “Happiness,” (CAC: 2011), CD, DVD,
MP3 download.
Christian Nonduality—Seriously?
a live webcast with Cynthia Bourgeault
Thursday, January 5, 2017
4:30-6:00 p.m. U.S. Mountain Standard Time
Join Cynthia Bourgeault for a conversation on her new book, The Heart of
Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice.
In this talk, Cynthia will share how leading research on the neuroscience of
meditation sheds new light on how Centering Prayer can pattern nondual,
heart-centered awareness.
Watch the live webcast or view the replay, available online through February 5,
2017. To allow as many people as possible to participate, registration is on a
“pay what you can” basis.
Register for as little as $1 at cac.org.
Grace Is Key
Monday, February 1, 2016
The following three paragraphs came to me very

clearly in a very short time while I was walking along
the Pacific Ocean during my Lenten hermitage in 2012.
I think they sum up why, for me, grace is the key to
accepting all deaths--and experiencing all
resurrections.
1. The goodness of God fills all the gaps of the

universe, without discrimination or preference.
God is the gratuity of absolutely everything.
The space in between everything is not space
at all but Spirit. God is the "Goodness Glue"
that holds the dark and light of things
together, the free energy that carries all
death across the Great Divide and transmutes
it into Life. When we say that Christ "paid the
debt once and for all," it simply means that
God's job is to make up for all deficiencies in
the universe. What else would God do?
Basically, grace is God's first name, and
probably last too. Grace is what God does to
keep all things God has made in love and alive--
forever. Grace is God's official job description.
Grace is not something God gives; grace is
who God is. If we are to believe the primary
witnesses, an unexplainable goodness is at work
in the universe. (Some of us call this
phenomenon God, but the word is not necessary.
In fact, sometimes it gets in the way of the
experience, because too many have named God
something other than grace.)
2. Death is not just our one physical dying, but it is

going to the full depth, hitting the bottom, going
the distance, beyond where I am in control, and
always beyond where I am now. No wonder it is
scary. Such death is called "the descent into hell"
in the early Apostles' Creed, while in other
sources, "the pit," "the dark night," "Sheol," or
"Hades." We all die eventually; we have no choice
in the matter. But there are degrees of death
before the final physical one. If we are honest, we
acknowledge that we are dying throughout our
life, and this is what we learn if we are attentive:
grace is found at the depths and in the death of
everything. After these smaller deaths, we know
that the only "deadly sin" is to swim on the
surface of things, where we never see, find, or
desire God or love. This includes even the surface
of religion, which might be the worst danger of
all. Thus, we must not be afraid of falling,
failing, going "down."
3. When you go to the full depths and death,

sometimes even the depths of your sin, you can
always come out the other side--and the word for
that is resurrection. Something or someone builds
a bridge for you, recognizable only from the far
side, that carries you willingly, or even partly
willingly, across. All that we hear from reputable
and reliable sources (mystics, shamans, near-
death visitors, and "nearing-death experiences")
indicates no one is more surprised and delighted
than the traveler himself or herself. Something or
someone seems to fill the tragic gap between
death and life, but only at the point of no return.
None of us crosses over by our own effort or
merits, purity, or perfection. We are all
carried across by an uncreated and unearned
grace--from pope, to president, to princess, to
peasant. Worthiness is never the ticket, only
deep desire, and the ticket is given in the
desiring. The tomb is always finally empty.
There are no exceptions to death, and there
are no exceptions to grace. And I believe, with
good evidence, that there are no exceptions to
resurrection.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for

Our True Self (Jossey-Bass: 2013), xx-xxii.
Gateway to Silence
Everything is grace.
Inner Authority
Sunday, January 22, 2017
This week we will focus on the third wheel of our tricycle of transformation:
Experience. [1] The other two wheels, Scripture and Tradition, can be seen as
sources of outer authority, while your personal experience is your inner
authority. I am convinced you need and can have both. Both Scripture and
Tradition help name and validate your inner experience, if you are willing to do
your homework here. Only when inner and outer authority come together do we
have true spiritual wisdom. Christianity in most of its history has largely relied
upon outer authority. But we must now be honest about the third wheel of inner
experience, which of course was at work all the time but was not given credence.
In fact, we were told not to trust it! If you were Catholic, you were told to trust
the Tradition as interpreted by the authorities; if you were Protestant you were
told to trust the Bible, also as interpreted by your denominational authorities.
Information from outer authority is not necessarily transformation, and we

need genuinely transformed people today, not just people with answers. I do not
want my words here to separate you from your own astonishment or to provide
you with a substitute for your own inner experience. Theology has done that for
too many. I hope these daily meditations can invite you on your own inner
journey rather than become a substitute for it.
I am increasingly convinced that the word prayer, which has become a

functional and pious thing for believers to do, was meant to be a descriptor and
an invitation to inner experience. When spiritual teachers invite you to “pray,”
they are in effect saying, “Go inside and know for yourself!” My dear friend,
Father Thomas Keating writes:
The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separated
from Him. If we get rid of that thought, our troubles will be greatly reduced. We
fail to believe that we are always with God and that He is part of every reality.
The present moment, every object we see, our inmost nature are all rooted in
Him. But we hesitate to believe this until our personal experience gives us
confidence to believe in it. This involves the gradual development of intimacy
with God [through contemplative prayer]. God constantly speaks to us through
each other as well as within. The interior experience of God’s presence activates
our capacity to experience Him in everything else—in people, in events, in
nature. We may enjoy union with God in any experience of the external senses
as well as in prayer. [2]
So there is the mysticism of ordinary experience, the mysticism of true

friendship, the mysticism of suffering—and each of these can only be sustained
and deepened by an ongoing mysticism of prayer.
Gateway to Silence:
Awaken me to Love this day.
References:
[1] I am grateful to Carolyn Metzler for this helpful analogy, a dynamic improvement upon
the traditional three-legged stool model for Scripture, Tradition, and Experience (or
Reason, as most commonly used).
[2] Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart: The Contemplative Dimension of the Gospel
(Amity House: 1986), 44.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media:
2008), 5, 7.
Contemplative Consciousness
Monday, January 30, 2017
Nondual or contemplative consciousness is not the same as being churchy,

reflective, or introverted. Unfortunately this is the way the word is often used
today, even by people who should know better. Contemplation is a panoramic,
receptive awareness whereby you take in all that the situation, the moment, the
event offers, without judging, eliminating, or labeling anything up or down,
good or bad. It is a pure and positive gaze, unattached to outcome or critique.
Being present and conscious in this way does not come naturally to modern and
postmodern people. You have to work at it and develop practices whereby you
can recognize your compulsive and repetitive patterns and allow yourself to be
freed from them. Moments of great love and great suffering are often the first
experiences of nondual thinking. Practices of prayer largely maintain what
many people first experience in deep love and suffering.
It seems we are all addicted to our need to make distinctions and judgments,
which we mistake for “thinking.” Most of us think we are our thinking, yet
almost all thinking—even among highly educated people—is repetitive and
immensely self-referential. That is why all forms of meditation and
contemplation are teaching us a way of quieting this self-protective and self-
aggrandizing mind. After a while, we see that this repetitive process cannot get
us very far, simply because reality is not all about us and our preferences!
Nondual consciousness is about receiving and being present to the moment, to

the now, without judgment, analysis, or critique, without your ego deciding
whether you like it or not. Reality does not need you to like it in order to be
reality. This is a much more holistic knowing, where your mind, heart, soul, and
senses are open and receptive to the moment just as it is, which allows you to
love things in themselves and as themselves. You learn not to divide the field of
the moment or eliminate anything that threatens your ego, but to hold
everything—both the attractive and the unpleasant—together in one accepting
gaze.
The nondual, contemplative mind is a whole new mind for most people! With it,
you can stand back and compassionately observe the self or any event from an
appropriately detached viewing platform. This is the most immediate and
practical meaning of “dying to self” I can think of. As a general rule, if you
cannot detach from something, you are far too attached to it! Eventually, you
can laugh or weep over your little self-created dramas without being overly
identified with them or needing to hate them. Frankly, few people fully enjoy
this emotional freedom.
Gateway to Silence:
We are oned in love.
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (CAC
Publishing: 2016), 275.
Overtaken by Oceanic Oneness

Friday, February 3, 2017
Today’s guest writer, CAC faculty member James Finley, shares what it is like
to be within nondual consciousness.
We approach nondual consciousness by means of our contemplative experience.

“To contemplate” means to observe carefully, to pay attention. Throughout the
day, things catch our eye and we momentarily contemplate them. In the
quietness of the sustained attentive gaze, we recognize a preciousness—an
immediate worth or value for which no words can do justice. And we sense this
is so because the worth or value is God’s presence pouring itself out and giving
itself away in and as the gift and miracle in whatever it is that may have
captured our attention. Furthermore, we recognize ourselves to be one with this
intimately realized experience of God pouring itself out in and as the gift and
miracle of our life.
Let’s say, for example, that you go out to do some gardening. You begin in
dualistic consciousness, trying to get some things done. But while you are
working—in your deepening attentiveness to the earth—you are graced with a
felt sense of oneness with the preciousness of the earth and the gift of life. This
attentiveness brings you an experience of oneness with the earth, which in turn
gives rise to a sense of your own preciousness in your oneness with that life all
around you.
This experience is true for all of us. We have each had a taste of nondual
consciousness: the face of our beloved, a child at play, the sound of running
water, the intimacy of darkness in the middle of a sleepless night. Our lives
move in and out of nondual consciousness. In these moments, we intuitively use
the word God for the infinity of the primordial preciousness we, in such
moments, realize ourselves to be one with. In these moments we realize that
nothing is missing anywhere and what fools we are to worry so.
As I reflect on this, it dawns on me that the root of sorrow is my estrangement

from the intimately realized oneness and preciousness of all things. I’m
skimming over the surface of the depths of my life. Yet, I know in my heart that
the God-given, godly nature of every breath and heartbeat is hidden in the ever
present depths over which I am skimming in my preoccupations with the day’s
demands.
So the question becomes, how can I learn not to play the cynic, not to break
faith my awakened heart? In my most childlike hour, I have tasted the presence
of God that is perpetually manifesting and giving itself to me as my very life.
While the value of my life is not dependent upon the degree to which I realize
this unitive mystery that is always there, the experiential quality of my life is
profoundly related to the degree to which I am learning to live in habitual
awareness of and fidelity to the God-given, godly nature of the life that I’m
living.
I cannot make moments of nondual consciousness happen. I can only assume

the inner stance that offers the least resistance to be overtaken by the grace of
nondual consciousness. Two lovers cannot make moments of oceanic oneness
happen, but together they can assume the inner stance that allows them to be
overtaken by the oceanic oneness that blesses their life.
My spiritual practice is to sit each day in childlike sincerity with an inner stance
that offers the least resistance to being overtaken by the God-given, godly nature
of myself just the way I am.
This is my sense of what nondual consciousness is and the contemplative way of

life in which we, with God's grace, become ever more habitually grounded in it.
Gateway to Silence:
We are oned in love.
Reference:
Adapted from James Finley, exclusive CAC Living School curriculum, Unit 1.

Centering Prayer
The Recovery of Christian Contemplation

Sunday, February 12, 2017
There are numerous forms of contemplative prayer. Each Saturday, following

the summary of the week’s meditations, I introduce a new “Practice” that I
invite you to try. I also hope you’ll sink your roots deeply into one particular
practice for a long period of time. Only by practicing daily, allowing
contemplation to reveal our habitual and egoic thoughts, can our minds be re-
wired so that contemplation becomes a way of life more than a momentary
state of consciousness.
This week Cynthia Bourgeault, a member of CAC’s core faculty, explores the
unique method of Centering Prayer in depth, beginning with its origins.
Centering Prayer, along with its sister discipline Christian Meditation, made its
appearance in the modern Christian world in the mid-1970s. As early as the
1960s, Thomas Merton was writing books calling for a recovery of Christian
contemplative prayer not only within the monastery but beyond it. Thomas
Keating and John Main responded to Merton’s prophetic call, developing simple
meditation methods solidly rooted in the Christian spiritual tradition and
suitable for use not only within the cloister walls, but in a world hungry for the
recovery of its spiritual roots. All three of these men recognized meditation not
as a newfangled innovation, let alone the grafting onto Christianity of an
Eastern practice, but rather, as something that had originally been at the very
center of Christian practice and had become lost.
In the case of Centering Prayer, Thomas Keating noticed the number of young
people in the 1960s who had been raised Christian and were flocking to Eastern
traditions in order to find a “path”—a meditation-based practice that actually
changes the way you perceive reality and live your life. Frustrated, Keating
issued a challenge to his Cistercian monastic community: “Is it not possible to
put the essence of the Christian contemplative path into a meditation method
accessible to modern people living in the world?” One of the monks, Father
William Meninger (the official “founder” of the method of Centering Prayer),
took Keating up on the challenge. In his well-thumbed copy of The Cloud of
Unknowing, a 14th-century spiritual classic by an anonymous English monk,
Meninger found the following instructions:
[Lift] up your heart toward God with a meek stirring of love. . . . For
a naked intent direct to God is sufficient without anything else.
And if you desire to have this aim concentrated and expressed in one
word in order that you might be better able to grasp it, take but one
short word of a single syllable . . . and clasp this word tightly in your
heart so that it never leaves no matter what may happen. [1]
This became the cornerstone of what was first called “Prayer of the Cloud,” but
“Centering Prayer,” originally coined by Thomas Merton, seemed to offer a more
inviting description. The practice caught on, particularly among lay retreatants,
and has grown steadily ever since. [2]
Gateway to Silence:
Return to God.
References:
[1] The Cloud of Unknowing, introductory commentary and translation by Ira Progoff (New
York: Delta Books, 1957), 76.
[2] Contemplative Outreach, an international network founded by Fathers Thomas Keating,
William Meninger, and Basil Pennington, provides opportunities for the teaching and
practice of Centering Prayer. Learn more at contemplativeoutreach.org.
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Cowley
Publications: 2004), 55-58.
Yearning for a new way will not produce it.

Only ending the old way can do that.
—Richard Rohr
The Method
Monday, February 13, 2017
Guest writer Cynthia Bourgeault continues exploring the contemplative

practice of Centering Prayer.
For nearly thirty years now, the following four guidelines have successfully
introduced tens of thousands of people worldwide to Centering Prayer
1. Choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God’s

presence and action within.
2. Sitting comfortably and with eyes closed, settle briefly and silently
introduce the sacred word as the symbol of your consent to God’s presence
and action within.
3. When engaged with your thoughts [including body sensations, feelings,
images, and reflections], return ever so gently to the sacred word.
4. At the end of the prayer period, remain in silence with eyes closed for a
couple of minutes. [1]
Father Thomas Keating suggests praying for twenty minutes twice a day.
So are we really saying that in Centering Prayer you meditate by simply letting
go of one thought after another? That can certainly be our subjective experience
of the practice, and this is exactly the frustration expressed by an early
practitioner. In one of the very earliest training workshops led by Keating
himself, a nun tried out her first twenty-minute taste of Centering Prayer and
then lamented, “Oh, Father Thomas, I’m such a failure at this prayer. In twenty
minutes I’ve had ten thousand thoughts!”
“How lovely,” responded Keating, without missing a beat. “Ten thousand

opportunities to return to God.”
This simple story captures the essence of Centering Prayer. It is quintessentially

a pathway of return in which every time the mind is released from engagement
with a specific idea or impression, we move from a smaller and more constricted
consciousness into that open, diffuse awareness in which our presence to divine
reality makes itself known along a whole different pathway of perception.
That’s what the anonymous author of the fourteenth century spiritual classic
The Cloud of Unknowing may have had in mind when he wrote, “God can be
held fast and loved by means of love, but by thought never.” [2] “Love” is this
author’s pet word for that open, diffuse awareness which gradually allows
another and deeper way of knowing to pervade one’s entire being.
Out of my own three decades of experience in Centering Prayer, I believe that

this “love” indeed has nothing to do with emotions or feelings in the usual sense
of the word. It is rather the author’s nearest equivalent term to describe what we
would nowadays call nondual perception anchored in the heart.
And he is indeed correct in calling it “love” because the energetic bandwidth in

which the heart works is intimacy, the capacity to perceive things from the
inside by coming into sympathetic resonance with them. Imagine! Centuries
ahead of his time, the author is groping for metaphors to describe an entirely
different mode of perceptivity.
Gateway to Silence:
Return to God.
References:
[1] Thomas Keating, “The Method of Centering Prayer: The Prayer of Consent,”
Contemplative Outreach,
http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/category/category/centering-prayer.
[2] The Cloud of Unknowing, introductory commentary and translation by Ira Progoff
(New York: Delta Books, 1957), 72.
Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity
in Theory and Practice (Shambhala: 2016), 14, 28-29, 120, 123.
Intention
Wednesday, February 15, 2017

“Centering Prayer is not done with attention but with intention,” Thomas
Keating repeatedly reminds us. Unlike other methods of meditation, Centering
Prayer does not furnish an object for your attention—whether it be repeating a
mantra, following your breath, or watching your thoughts as they arise. Rather,
you simply withdraw your attention from anything that brings it to a focal point
and return again and again to your underlying intention—what The Cloud of
Unknowing calls your “naked intent direct to God.”
In Centering Prayer, then, everything begins with and keeps returning to

intention. What am I really up to in this prayer? What is my aim?
It is difficult, admittedly, to put words around an experience that is deeply

personal and intuitive. But in general, you’re in the right ballpark if your
intention is “to be totally open to God”: totally available, all the way down to
that innermost point of your being; deeper than your thinking, deeper than your
feelings, deeper than your memories and desires, deeper than your usual
psychological sense of yourself. Ultimately, what will go on in this prayer is “in
secret” (the words that Jesus used in his instructions on prayer in Mathew 6:6):
hidden even from yourself, in that inmost sanctuary of your being—where your
life is “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).
The sacred word in Centering Prayer serves as a placeholder for your intention.
It’s the spiritual equivalent of a little piece of red string tied around your finger
to remind yourself of your willingness to “do the deal.” Unlike a mantra, you
don’t repeat it constantly; you only use it when you realize you’ve gotten tangled
up in a thought. Then it helps gently and quickly to clear the mental debris and
return you to that bare, open awareness.
Gateway to Silence:
Return to God.
Reference:
in Theory and Practice (Shambhala: 2016), 17-20.

—Richard Rohr
Pure Awareness
Thursday, February 16, 2017

Attention, as we normally understand it in the West, is implicitly an energy

connecting subject to object: “I pay attention to my driving.” “I pay attention to
the lecture.” “I pay attention to my breathing.” But there is also a different
configuration for the attention, in which it does not flow in a straight line
linking subject to object, but can rather hold a certain tensile strength as a
three-dimensional field of awareness. The best way I can describe it is through a
beautiful metaphor from Rumi: “quivering like a drop of mercury.”
When removed from its container and allowed to organize itself on a flat
surface, mercury can either act like a liquid and spread out in a puddle, or it can
hold its own shape as a drop, rolling about like a Weeble (the children’s
weighted toy that will wobble but won’t fall down). Your attention is much like
that. In its “liquid” form, it connects subject to object. In its solid, “Weeble”
form, it is a tensile field of vibratory awareness, within which you can be
conscious of the whole without having to split the field into the usual
subject/object polarity. It is actually a higher energetic state. The Tibetan
Buddhists call it rigpa: “pure awareness.”
I have come to suspect that the contemplative masters of our own Christian
lineage were also well aware of this state and that this is actually what is
intended by the word “vigilance” in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and
“recollection” in the West. It doesn’t mean thinking deeply about something,
recalling it. Rather, it means that you yourself are gathered—“re-collected”—
within that deeper inner attentiveness whose much more powerful energetic
vibrancy allows a different mode of perception to unfold.
In the nanosecond between the cessation of one thought and the arising of the
next, there is a moment of pure consciousness where subject and object poles
drop out and you’re simply there. For a nanosecond, there’s no “you” and no
God. No experience and no experiencer. There’s simply a direct, undivided,
sensate awareness of a single, unified field of being perceived from a far deeper
place of aliveness. And what is first tasted in a nanosecond can indeed become a
stable and integrated state.
As the author of The Cloud of Unknowing puts it, you “pay attention not to what
you are, but to that you are.” [1] With all due respect to our author, I might
amend that slightly to say you pay attention from what you are: from that
deeper pool of recollected selfhood. There is a deeper current of awareness, a
deeper and more intimate sense of belonging, which flows beneath the surface
waters of your being and grows stronger and steadier as your attention is able to
maintain itself as a unified field of objectless awareness.
Gateway to Silence:
Return to God.
References:
[1] James A. Walsh, ed., The Pursuit of Wisdom and Other Works by the Author of the
Cloud of the Unknowing (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1988), 221.
in Theory and Practice (Shambhala: 2016), 129-130, 134.

—Richard Rohr
Centering Prayer
A Seamless Whole
Friday, February 17, 2017

The fruits of Centering Prayer are found in daily life. Do not look for signs that
this prayer is working for you in your subjective experiences during the prayer
period. The place to look for results is in what happens after you get up from
your meditation cushion.
Perhaps the subtlest fruit of the practice of Centering Prayer (and the most
delicious!) is a gradually deepening capacity to abide in the state of “attention of
the heart,” as it’s known in the Christianity of the East. You might describe this
as a stable state of mindfulness or “witnessing presence,” but emanating from
the heart, not the head, and thus free of intrusion from that heavy-handed
mental “inner observer” who seems to separate us from the immediacy of our
lives. Once you get the hang of it, attention of the heart allows you to be fully
present to God, and at the same time fully present to the situation at hand,
giving and taking from the spontaneity of your own authentic, surrendered
presence.
As this capacity grows in you, it gradually takes shape as a felt center of gravity
within you, the place where the pendulum of your being naturally comes to rest.
It’s not so much a place you pay attention to as a place you pay attention from.
As I see it, the purpose of Centering Prayer is to deepen your relationship with
God (and at the same time with your own deepest self) in that bandwidth of
formless, objectless awareness that is the foundation of nondual consciousness.
There you discover that you, God, and the world “out there” are not separate
entities, but flow together seamlessly in an unbreakable dynamism of self-giving
love, which is the true nature of reality and the ground of everything. In that
space you discover the meaning of Thomas Keating’s famous statement: “The
notion that God is absent is the fundamental illusion of the human condition.”
Contemplative prayer is no longer a luxury; it is an absolute necessity. Up to

now, many have thought of contemplation as a devotional, wellness, or personal
transformation practice. We’re not just doing our meditation to chill out and get
right with the world. We are trying to bring to bear a structure of perception, a
system of consciousness, that allows us to empathize and relate to each other
without fear, judgment, demonization, or division.
Contemplation is a nonnegotiable. If we want our world to come to oneness,

each one of us must take on the responsibility of bringing the mind into the
heart so we can become contemplatives not in lifestyle only, but in a complete
revisioning and cleansing of the lens of perception. People at the nondual level
are much more useful, flexible, versatile, attuned cosmic servants.

Gateway to Silence:
Return to God.
References:
in Theory and Practice (Shambhala: 2016), 36, 38-39; and
“Christian Nonduality—Seriously?” an unpublished webcast (CAC: 2017).

—Richard Rohr
Centering Prayer
Summary: Sunday, February 12-Friday, February 17, 2017
This week guest writer Cynthia Bourgeault explored the contemplative

Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, and John Main recognized meditation not as
a newfangled innovation, let alone the grafting onto Christianity of an Eastern
practice, but rather, as something that had originally been at the very center of
Christian practice and had become lost. (Sunday)
Centering Prayer is a pathway of return in which every time the mind is

released from engagement with a specific idea or impression, we move from a
smaller and more constricted consciousness into that open, diffuse awareness in
which our presence to divine reality makes itself known along a whole different
pathway of perception. (Monday)
Each time you manage to disengage from a thought, you are doing so in
solidarity with Jesus’ own kenotic stance; and in the process patterning that
stance more and more deeply into your being until it eventually becomes your
default response to all life’s situations. (Tuesday)
It could be said that in Centering Prayer your intention is “to be totally open to
God”: totally available, all the way down to that innermost point of your being;
deeper than your thinking, feelings, memories, and desires. (Wednesday)
There is a deeper current of awareness, a deeper and more intimate sense of

belonging, which flows beneath the surface waters of your being and grows
stronger and steadier as your attention is able to maintain itself as a unified field
of objectless awareness. (Thursday)
Once you get the hang of it, attention of the heart allows you to be fully present
to God, but at the same time fully present to the situation at hand, giving and
taking from the spontaneity of your own authentic, surrendered presence.
(Friday)
Practice: Centering Prayer
As Cynthia Bourgeault shared earlier this week, here is the simple method for
practicing Centering Prayer as taught by Thomas Keating. I hope you’ll try it
and stay with it for a while!
1. Choose a sacred word as the symbol of your intention to consent to God’s

presence and action within.
2. Sitting comfortably and with eyes closed, settle briefly and silently
introduce the sacred word as the symbol of your consent to God’s presence
and action within.
3. When engaged with your thoughts [including body sensations, feelings,
images, and reflections], return ever so gently to the sacred word.
4. At the end of the prayer period, remain in silence with eyes closed for a
couple of minutes. [1]

Gateway to Silence:
Return to God.
Reference:
[1] Thomas Keating, “The Method of Centering Prayer: The Prayer of Consent,”
Contemplative Outreach,
http://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/category/category/centering-prayer.
For Further Study:

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening (Cowley Publications: 2004)
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and
Practice (Shambhala: 2016)
Thomas Keating and Richard Rohr, Healing Our Violence through the Journey of
Centering Prayer (Franciscan Media: 2002)

—Richard Rohr
Resurrection
Dying into Life

Sunday, May 7, 2017
The Resurrection is not a one-time miracle that proved Jesus was God. Jesus’
death and resurrection name and reveal what is happening everywhere and all
the time in God and in everything God creates. Reality is always moving toward
resurrection. As prayers of the Catholic funeral Mass affirm, “Life is not ended
but merely changed.” This is the divine mystery of transformation, fully evident
in the entire physical universe. This is why I believe in the physical resurrection
of Jesus, even if it is a new kind of physicality, which Paul struggles to describe
(see 1 Corinthians 15:35).
Resurrection is not an isolated miracle as much as it is an enduring relationship.

The best way to speak about the Resurrection is not to say “Jesus rose from the
dead”—as if it was self-generated—but to say “Jesus was raised from the dead”
(as many early texts state). The Eternal Christ is thus revealed as the map, the
blueprint, the “promise,” “pledge,” and “guarantee” (Paul’s metaphors) of what
is happening everywhere, all summed up in one person so we can see it in
personified and singular form.
I think this is why Jesus usually called himself “The Son of Man,” as in the
Archetypal Human. His resurrection is not so much a miracle that we can argue
about, believe, or disbelieve, but an invitation to look deeper at the pattern of
death and rising in all that is human. Jesus, or any member of “the Body of
Christ,” cannot really die because we are all participating in something eternal—
the Universal Christ that has existed “from the beginning.”
Death is not just the death of the physical body, but all the times we hit bottom
and must let go of how we thought life should be and surrender to a Larger
Power. And in that sense, we all probably go through many deaths in our
lifetime. These deaths to the small self are tipping points, opportunities to
choose transformation early. Unfortunately, most people turn bitter and look
for someone to blame. So their death is indeed death for them, because they
close down to growth and new life.
But if you do choose to walk through the depths—even the depths of your own
sin and mistakes—you will come out the other side, knowing you’ve been taken
there by a Source larger than yourself. Surely this is what it means to be saved.
Being saved doesn’t mean that you are any better than anyone else or will be
whisked off into heaven. It means you’ve allowed and accepted the mystery of
transformation here and now. And as now, so later!
If we are to speak of miracles, the most miraculous thing of all is that God uses
the very thing that would normally destroy you—the tragic, sorrowful, painful,
or unjust—to transform and enlighten you. Now you are indestructible; there
are no dead ends. This is what we mean when we say we are “saved by the death
and resurrection of Jesus.” This is not a one-time cosmic transaction, but the
constant pattern of all growth and change. Jesus is indeed saving the world by
guiding us through all would-be deaths to a life that is always bigger than death.
Gateway to Silence:
Alleluia, alleluia, amen!
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Easter Homily: Reality Moves Toward Resurrection,” March
27, 2016, Holy Family Parish, Albuquerque, New Mexico, https://cac.org/easter-homily-
reality-moves-toward-resurrection/.
Grace Is Key
Monday, May 8, 2017
(Feast of Lady Julian of Norwich)
The goodness of God fills all the gaps of the universe, without discrimination
or preference. God is the gratuity of absolutely everything. The space in between
everything is not space at all but Spirit. God is the “Goodness Glue” that holds
the dark and light of things together, the free energy that carries all death across
the Great Divide and transmutes it into Life. When we say that Christ “paid the
debt once and for all,” it simply means that God’s job is to make up for all
deficiencies in the universe. What else would God do? Grace is what God does
to keep all things God has made in love and alive—forever. Grace is not
something God gives; grace is who God is. If we are to believe the primary
witnesses, an unexplainable goodness is at work in the universe. (Some of us call
this phenomenon God, but the word is not necessary. In fact, sometimes it gets
in the way of the experience, because too many have named God something
other than grace.)
Death is not just our one physical dying, but it is going to the full depth, hitting
the bottom, going the distance, beyond where I am in control, and always
beyond where I am now. No wonder it is scary. Such death is called “the
descent into hell” in the early Apostles’ Creed, while in other sources, “the pit,”
“the dark night,” “Sheol,” or “Hades.” We all die eventually; we have no choice
in the matter. But there are degrees of death before the final physical one. If we
are honest, we acknowledge that we are dying throughout our life, and this is
what we learn if we are attentive: grace is found at the depths and in the death
of everything. After these smaller deaths, we know that the only “deadly sin” is
to swim on the surface of things, where we never see, find, or desire God or love.
This includes even the surface of religion, which might be the worst danger of
all. Thus, we must not be afraid of falling, failing, moving “down.”
When you go to the full depths and death, sometimes even the depths of your
sin, you can always come out the other side—and the word for that is
resurrection. Something or someone builds a bridge for you, recognizable only
from the far side, that carries you across, either willingly, or even dragging your
feet. Something or someone seems to fill the tragic gap between death and life,
but only at the point of no return. None of us crosses over by our own
effort or merits, purity, or perfection. We are all carried across by an
uncreated and unearned grace—from pope, to president, to princess,
to peasant. The tomb is always finally empty. There are no exceptions to death,
and there are no exceptions to grace. And I believe, with good evidence, that
there are no exceptions to resurrection.
Gateway to Silence:
Alleluia, alleluia, amen!
Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (Jossey-
Bass: 2013), xx-xxii.

The Path of Descent
Stumbling and Falling Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Sooner or later, if you are on any classic “spiritual schedule,” some event,
person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply
cannot deal with, using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or
your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be, led
to the edge of your own private resources. At that point, you will stumble
over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it (Isaiah 8:14). You will
and you must “lose” at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-
God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric
preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey.
We must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. We must be out of the

driver’s seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to
the Real Guide. It is the necessary pattern. Until we are led to the limits of
our present game plan, and find it to be insufficient, we will not search out
or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream.
Alcoholics Anonymous calls it the Higher Power. Jesus calls this Ultimate
Source the “living water” at the bottom of the well (John 4:10-14).
The Gospel was able to accept that life is tragic, but then graciously added
that we can survive and will even grow from this tragedy. This is the great
turnaround! It all depends on whether we are willing to see down as up; or
as Jung put it, that “where you stumble and fall, there you find pure gold.”
Lady Julian of Norwich said it even more poetically: “First there is the
fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!”
Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,
pp. 58, 65-68
Gateway to Silence:
When I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Corinthians 12:10)
Scripture: Week 1
Order, Disorder, Reorder
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
The Bible reveals the development of human

consciousness and human readiness for a Divine Love
Affair. The differences between earlier and later
Scriptures clearly show an evolution of human
capacity, comprehension, and depth of experience.
Jesus, for me, represents the mature image of what God
is doing in history. In Israel's growth as a people we see
the pattern of what happens to every individual and to
every community that sets out on the journey of faith.
Israel is the "womb of the Incarnation," for it is in their
history that the whole drama is set in motion. Jesus fully
grows up inside that womb. And we must grow up too.
Little by little, human consciousness is prepared to see
how God loves and liberates us. But we will face plenty
of resistance, revealed in the constant hostility to Jesus
even and most especially from religious people, ending
in the very "killing of God."

There are many models of human and spiritual
development. We could describe three stages as Simple
Consciousness, Complex Consciousness (both "fight
and flight"), and Non-Dual Consciousness ("the unitive
way" or "third way"). More recently, I have been calling
the developmental stages Order > Disorder > Reorder.
In short, I see this pattern in the Bible and in human
lives:

1. Order: We begin with almost entirely tribal thinking,
mirroring the individual journey, which starts with an
egocentric need for "order" and "self." Only gradually
do we move toward inclusive love.
2. Disorder: We slowly recognize the invitation to a

"face to face" love affair through the biblical dialogue of
election, failure, sin, and grace, which matures the soul.
This is where we need wisdom teachers to guide us
through our "disorder."
3. Reorder: Among a symbolic few, there is a

breakthrough to unitive consciousness (for example,
figures like Abraham and Sarah, Moses, David, the
Psalmists, many of the prophets, Job, Mary, Mary
Magdalene, Jesus, and Paul). This is also what some call
enlightenment or salvation.

Conservatives normally get trapped in the first stage,
progressives are trapped in the second, and only a
minority of either group seem to get to the third. The
last stage is considered dangerous to people in the first
stage, and rather unknown and invisible to people in
the second stage. If you are not trained in a trust of
both love and mystery, and also some ability to hold
anxiety and paradox, all of which allow the divine entry
into the soul, you will not proceed very far on the
spiritual journey. In fact, you will often run back to
stage one when the going gets rough in stage two. The
great weakness of much Western spirituality is that
there is little understanding of the necessity of
darkness and "not knowing" (which is the
transformative alchemy of faith). This is what keeps so
much religion at stage one.

Thus the biblical tradition, and Jesus in particular,
praises faith even more often than love. Why? Because
faith is that patience with mystery that allows you to
negotiate the stages of life and move toward non-
egocentric love. As both John of the Cross and Gerald
May point out in their own descriptions of "the dark
night of the soul," God teaches the soul most
profoundly through darkness--and not just light! We
only need enough light to be able to trust the darkness.
Trials and darkness teach us how to trust in a very
practical way that a good God is guiding us. I don't need
to be perfectly certain before I take the next step. Now I
can trust that even my mistakes will be used in my
favor, if I allow them to be. This is a wonderful way to
grow in human love too, by the way. Darkness,
mistakes, and trials are the supreme teachers. Success
really teaches you nothing; it just feels good.

Love is the source and goal, faith is the slow
process of getting there, and hope is the willingness
to move forward without resolution and closure.
And these are indeed, "the three things that last" (1
Corinthians 13:13). People who have these gifts--faith,
hope, and love--are indestructible.
Step 6: Undergoing God

Friday, November 27, 2015
We were entirely ready to have God remove

all of these defects of character. --Step 6 of
the Twelve Steps

I like to say that we must "undergo God."
Yes, God is pure and free gift, but there is a
necessary undergoing to surrender to this
Momentous Encounter. As others have put
it, and it works well in English, to fully
understand is always to stand under and
let things have their way with you. It is
strangely a giving up of control to receive
a free gift and find a new kind of
"control." Try it and you will believe the
paradox for yourself.

The connection point is perhaps clarified by
a statement from photographer Ansel Adams
who would wait days and hours for the
perfect circumstances and ideal light to take
his iconic photos. Adams said, "Chance
favors the prepared mind." Gifted people
know this to be true. They look like
geniuses to the outsider, and often they
are, but there is a method behind their
holy madness. They have learned to wait
for and fully expect what Hungarian
psychology professor Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi brilliantly calls "flow."
It is no surprise that our common
metaphors for the Holy Spirit all honor
and point to a kind of flow experience:
living water, blowing wind, descending
flames, and alighting doves.

So the waiting, the preparing of the mind
for "chance," the softening of the heart,
the deepening of intention and desire, the
readiness to really let go, the recognition
that I really do not want to let go, the
actual willingness to change--our
readiness is the work of weeks, months,
and years of opening ourselves to God. [1]
The key is to be willing rather than
willful. I learned that from Thérèse of
Lisieux and my friend and mentor, now
deceased, Gerald May.

Gerald pointed out in his marvelous book,
The Dark Night of the Soul, that you must be
willing to endure dark periods of feeling that
God isn't here, that nothing is happening,
that God has given up on you. Gerald makes
it very clear that if God wants to work in
you, God has to do it secretly, in darkness.
God can't let you know what's going on,
because you're likely to get in the way! You
may try to engineer the process yourself and
thereby destroy it; or you may try to stop it
altogether because you are afraid of the
immense freedom and spaciousness God is
leading you toward. [2] It's only the wise,
broken ones who allow themselves to
"undergo God" and to trustingly "let go
and let God."
John of the Cross, Part II: The Dark Night
Thursday, July 30, 2015
I came out of the seminary in 1970 thinking that my job

was to have an answer for every question. What I've
learned is that not-knowing and often not even needing to
know is--surprise of surprises--a deeper way of knowing
and a deeper falling into compassion. This is surely what
the mystics mean by "death" and why they talk of it with
so many metaphors. It is the essential transitioning. Maybe
that is why Jesus praised faith even more than love; maybe
that is why Saint John of the Cross called faith "luminous
darkness." Yes, love is the final goal but ever deeper trust
inside of darkness is the path for getting there.

My good friend Gerald May shed fresh light on the
meaning of John's phrase "the dark night of the soul." He
said that God has to work in the soul in secret and in
darkness, because if we fully knew what was
happening, and what
Mystery/transformation/God/grace will eventually ask
of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the
whole process. No one oversees his or her own demise
willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying. God
has to undo our illusions secretly, as it were, when we are
not watching and not in perfect control, say the mystics.
We move forward in ways that we do not even understand
and through the quiet workings of time and grace, as
"Deep calls unto deep" (Psalm 42:8). In other words, Spirit
initiates deep resonance and intimacy with our spirit, as
the Endless Divine Yes evokes an ever-deeper yes in us.
That is the whole deal!

As James Finley, a core faculty member of CAC's
Living School, says, "The mystic is not someone who
says, 'Look what I have done!' The mystic is one who
says, 'Look what love has done to me. There's nothing
left but God's intimate love giving itself to me as me.'
That's the blessedness in poverty: when all in us that is
not God dissolves, and we finally realize that we are
already as beautiful as God is beautiful, because God
gave the infinite beauty of God as who we are."

Finley describes God as "the infinity of the unforeseeable;
so we know that [the unforeseeable] is trustworthy,
because in everything, God is trying to move us into Christ
consciousness. If we are absolutely grounded in the
absolute love of God that protects us from nothing even as
it sustains us in all things, then we can face all things with
courage and tenderness and touch the hurting places in
others and in ourselves with love." Perhaps this explains
the mysterious coexistence of deep suffering and intense
joy in saints like John of the Cross. Otherwise, he and
Teresa and most other mystics would just seem like
impossible oddities.
Compassion
The First Gaze Monday, June 30, 2014
I am just like you. 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.
The first gaze is seldom compassionate. It is too busy weighing and

feeling itself: “How will this affect me?” 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 in the
present moment. It takes lots of practice.
On my better days, when I am “open, undefended, and immediately

present,” as Gerald May says, 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, 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.”
Adapted from “Contemplation and Compassion: The Second Gaze”

(article by Fr. Richard available free on CAC website)
Gateway to Silence:
May I see with eyes of compassion.

Spirituality and the Twelve Steps
(Part Two)
A God-Shaped Hole Sunday, June 22, 2014
We humbly asked [God] to remove our shortcomings.

— Step Seven of the Twelve Steps
Gerald May, a dear and now deceased friend of mine, wrote in his very
wise book Addiction and Grace that addiction uses up our spiritual
desire. It drains away our deepest and truest desire, that inner flow and life
force which makes us “long and pant for running streams” (Psalm 42).
Spiritual desire is the drive that God put in us from the beginning for total
satisfaction, for home, for heaven, for divine union. It has been a frequent
experience of mine to find that many people in recovery have a unique and
very acute spiritual sense, often more than others, I would say. It just got
frustrated early and aimed in a wrong direction. Wild need,
meaninglessness, and unfettered desire took off before boundaries, strong
identity, impulse control, and deep God experience were in place.
The addict lives in a state of alienation, with a “God-shaped hole” inside

that is always yearning to be filled. Addicts attempt to fill it with alcohol,
drugs, food, non-intimate sex, shopping—anything they feel will give
them a sense of control over their moods and relief from the sense of
meaninglessness and emptiness. All of us, of course, have our own false
programs for happiness, which we keep using more and more to try to fill
that God-shaped hole. I suspect this is the real meaning of “sin.”
God’s positive and lasting way of removing our shortcomings is to fill the
hole with something much better, more luminous, and more satisfying.
God satisfies us at our deepest levels rather than punishing us at
superficial levels, which so much of organized religion seems to teach.
Then our old shortcomings are not driven away or pushed underground, as
much as they are exposed for the false programs for happiness that they
are. Our sins fall away as unneeded and unhelpful because now a new and
much better vitality has been found. This is the wondrous discovery of our
True Self, and the gradual deterioration of our false and constructed self.
Adapted from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps,
pp. 59, 64-65 (also available as CD audiobook);
The Little Way: A Spirituality of Imperfection
(MP3 download);
and Emotional Sobriety: Rewiring Our Programs for “Happiness”
(CD, DVD, MP3 download)
Gateway to Silence:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to
change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
An Economy of Grace
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
God’s freely given grace is a humiliation to the ego because free gifts say nothing
about being strong, superior, or moral. Thus only the soul can understand grace,
never the mind or the ego. The ego does not know how to receive things freely or
without logic. It likes to be worthy and needs to understand in order to accept
things as true. The ego prefers a worldview of scarcity or quid pro quo, where
only the clever can win. That problem—and its overcoming—is at the very center
of the Gospel plot line. It has always been overcome from God’s side. The only
problem is getting us in on the process! God’s inclusion of us reveals God’s
humility, graciousness, and love. Only inside an economy of grace can we see
that God wants free and willing partners. An economy of merit cannot process
free love or free anything. “Not servants, but friends” (John 15:15) is God’s plan.
Yet to this day, most Christians seem to prefer being servants. Actual divine
friendship is just too incredible to imagine.
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. Except for those who have experienced grace
at their core, Christianity has not created a “new mind” (Romans 12:2) or a “new
self” (Ephesians 4:23-24) that is significantly different than the cultures it
inhabits. The old, tired win/lose scenario seems to be in our cultural hard drive,
whereas the experience of grace at the core of reality, which is much more
imaginative and installs new win/win programs in our psyche, has been
neglected and unrecognized by most of Christianity. People who live their entire
lives inside of a system of competing, measuring, earning, counting, and
performing can’t understand how the win/win scenario of the Gospel would
even be interesting or attractive.
Up to now, Christianity has largely mirrored culture instead of

transforming it. Reward/punishment, good guys versus bad guys,
has been the plot line of most novels, plays, operas, movies, and
wars. This is the only way that a dualistic mind, unrenewed by
prayer and grace, can perceive reality. It is almost impossible to
switch this mind during a short sermon or service on a Sunday
morning. As long as we remain inside of a dualistic, win/lose script,
Christianity will continue to appeal to low-level and vindictive
moralisms and will not rise to the mystical banquet that Jesus
offered us. The spiritual path and life itself will be mere duty instead of
delight, “jars of purification” instead of 150 gallons of intoxicating wine at the
end of the party (John 2:6-10). We will focus on maintaining order by sanctified
violence instead of moving toward a higher order of love and healing—which is
the very purpose of the Gospel.
Gateway to Silence:
By grace I am saved.

Richard Rohr 5

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Richard Rohr 5

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Step Eleven

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these

The Divine Paradox

We're many months away from Christmas, but I want

Step Six: Were entirely ready to have God remove all

When we come to the end of our rope and hit rock

For Further Study:

Entering the Dark Wood

The mystics of all the great religions, along with classic

"People have good reasons to be angry and afraid. Racism,

Rise Up Rooted Like Trees

How surely gravity’s law,

So, like children, we begin again

This is what the things can teach us:

—Rainer Maria Rilke [1]

Solidarity with Pain

Such a counterintuitive insight surely explains why these two medieval

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Join in the Dance

But my ego self is not satisfied to be a pass-through account; it wants to be a

Here’s how Thomas Merton more poetically puts it:

Let the Flow Happen

Insofar as an appropriate degree of self-love is received, held, enjoyed, trusted,

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Laughter, Liking, Delighting, Loving

I do not believe there is any wrath in God whatsoever—it’s theologically

As John O’Donohue put it:

Do you want to be healed?

Divine knowing—some would call it spiritual intuition—is actually an allowing

Yet God accomplishes this in the soul through communication and

It would be a very safe universe.

You would have nothing to be afraid of.

God is for you.

God is leaping toward you!

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Image credit: Claude Monet in Argentuil (detail), Édouard Manet, 1874.

Enoughness and Contentment

Francis of Assisi, whose feast we celebrate today, experienced radical

Ahimsa: Love Is Your Nature

Christianity seems to have forgotten Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence. We’ve

Nonviolent training has understandably emphasized largely external methods

As Thomas Keating says:

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

The Inner Witness

During contemplation, forgotten painful experiences may arise. In such cases, it

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

The Cosmic Christ:

God in All Things

The day of my spiritual awakening

In Jesus, this eternal omnipresence had a precise, concrete, and personal

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

Image credit: Claude Monet in Argentuil (detail), Édouard Manet, 1874.

Enoughness and Contentment

Francis of Assisi, whose feast we celebrate today, experienced radical

Richard Rohr's new book, The Divine Dance, is here!

Order the book at thedivinedance.org.

2016 Daily Meditation Theme

Richard Rohr's meditations this year invite us to discover, experience, and

Did someone forward this message to you?

Please do not reply to this email. For more information about:

 CAC Bookstore, visit store.cac.org