Ways of Knowing

October 14th, 2019 by Dave Leave a reply »

Doing the Homework
Sunday, October 13, 2019

Contemplation is an entirely different way of knowing reality that has the power to move us beyond mere ideology and dualistic thinking. Mature religion will always lead us to some form of prayer, meditation, or contemplation to balance out our usual calculating mind. Believe me, it is major surgery, and we must practice it for years to begin to rewire our egocentric responses. Contemplation is work, so much so that most people give up after their first futile attempts. But the goal of contemplation is not success, only the continuing practice itself. The only people who pray well are those who keep praying! In fact, continued re-connecting is what I mean by prayer, not occasional consolations that we may experience.

The capacity for nondual knowing that is developed through contemplation allows us to be happy, rooted in God, comfortable with paradox and mystery, and largely immune to mass consciousness and its false promises. This is true wisdom knowing, and it is the job of elders to pass it on to the next generation so we need not start at zero.

Contemplation is meeting as much reality as we can handle in its most simple and immediate form—without filters, judgments, or commentaries. The ego doesn’t trust this way of seeing, which is why it is so rare, “a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matthew 7:14, New Jerusalem Bible). The only way we can contemplate is by recognizing and relativizing our own compulsive mental grids—our practiced ways of judging, critiquing, blocking, filtering, and computing everything. But we first have to catch ourselves in the act and recognize how habitual our egoic, dualistic thinking is. Each person must do this homework for themselves. It cannot be achieved by reading someone else’s conclusions.

When our judgmental mind and all its commentaries are placed aside, God finally has a chance to get through to us, because our pettiness and self-protective filters are at last out of the way. Then Truth stands revealed on its own—quite simply—and we will experience a rebirth of the soul.

Coexistence: Beliefs and Experience
Monday, October 14, 2019

We cannot know God only by thinking thoughts. Unfortunately, for much of Christianity, faith largely became believing statements to be true or false (intellectual assent) instead of giving people concrete practices so they could themselves know how to open up (faith), hold on (hope), and allow an infilling from another source (love). Contemplation opens our heads, hearts, and bodies to God’s living presence. 

Over the last couple weeks, I shared about my own Franciscan order. Benedictines, who follow the Rule of St. Benedict (c. 480–547), are another Catholic order that often emphasizes practical, experiential spirituality. During one homily, Brother Michael, a member of the Benedictine monastic community of Weston Priory in Vermont, reflected on the day’s Scripture readings (1 Corinthians 3:1-9; Luke 4:38-44):

What I heard Paul saying, basically, was that although he has preached, there was something more for the Corinthians than simply listening to preaching. It was their actual experience of believing. And I think Paul was trying to ask them really the question: what do you believe?

I think that’s such an open question for ourselves right now, when there’s a lot of information, a lot of preaching, a lot of answers given to us. But the same basic question remains: what is our experience of our beliefs?

For myself that was the real window into the Gospel today that talks about the miracle stories of Jesus. These stories are not about the suspension of natural laws. The Gospel writers are trying to tell us that something new was happening. I think that Jesus was somehow able to wake people up, to cure them and heal them of their dis-ease. I think that there was something in his message; the reign of God is close at hand. What does that mean? What does that experience signify for us? I think it brings it right into our own time, into our life together. Trying to move into our experience of believing, of living, of loving, and finding within it, within the many challenges, that that’s where our hearts are fully engaged.

Maria Guarino reflects on Brother Michael’s message: 

It may seem radical for a man in a Christian vocation to call the literal truth of the miracle stories into question, but this is exactly the kind of grounding . . . spoke[n] to in [his] reflections. Just as [another] admonished his monks to take the Rule of Benedict very seriously but not to take it literally, so the brothers took matters of spirituality, scripture, and faith very seriously but with an open-mindedness grounded in the immediate reality of experience. . . . As in all aspects of the Benedictine life, there is a balance to be struck. . . . The brothers were open to mystery and the ineffable, but . . . the mysterious did not require suspension of the rational or the intellectual. For them, the rational mind and the spiritual heart coexist. Head and heart, rational and spiritual, need not stifle or silence one another. Both are necessary as the brothers position themselves toward an experience of God that is immediate yet distant, familiar yet ineffable, immanent yet transcendent, and as rational as it is unknowable.

Summary: Week Forty-one

Franciscan Way: Part Two

October 6 – October 11, 2019

This is the miracle of love: to discover that all creation is one, flung out into space by a God who is a Father, and that if you present yourself as [God] does, unarmed and peaceably, creation will recognize and meet you with a smile. —Carlo Carretto (Sunday)

If we haven’t been able to kiss many lepers, if we haven’t been able to tame many wolves, it’s probably because we haven’t made friends with our leper and wolf within. (Monday)

Francis and Clare of Assisi both found their inner and outer freedom by structurally living on the edge of the inside of both church and society. (Tuesday)

Francis was fully at home in this created world. He saw all things in the visible world as endless dynamic and operative symbols of the Real, a theater and training ground for a heaven that is already available to us in small doses in this life. What you choose now, you shall have later seems to be the realization of the saints. Not an idyllic hope for a later heaven but a living experience right now. (Wednesday)

With great wisdom, Francis was able to distinguish between institutional evil and the individual who is victimized by it. (Thursday)

Intercession visualizes an alternative future to the one created by the momentum of current forces. Eight centuries after Francis we are called, as he was, to pray and act for a new future of peace. —Louie Vitale, OFM (Friday)

Practice: Lectio Divina in Nature

Step out onto the Planet.
Draw a circle a hundred feet round.

Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody’s ever really seen

How many can you find? 

—Lew Welch [1]

We are created to read the book of creation so that we may know the Author of Life. —Ilia Delio, OSF [2]

Lectio divina (Latin for sacred reading) is a contemplative way of reading and praying with Scripture. Rather than trying to rationally understand a static text, this practice helps us be present to the Living Word of God and allow it to change us. In lectio divina, God teaches us to listen for and seek God’s presence in silence. Although the Bible is most often used, many people practice lectio divina with nature. Franciscans believe that the first act of divine revelation is Creation itself, so it makes sense to “read” or observe God’s presence in Brother Sun and Sister Moon, in animals and plants.

As with other forms of lectio divina, the practice is divided into four steps. Find a place where you are surrounded by the beauty of nature and where you feel safe to be quiet and alone for 20 or more minutes.

1. Lectio/Read

In silence, be attentive to your surroundings, opening to the mystery of these beings’ existence and prayerfully asking them to address you. Simply asking is creating a space in which a response can happen. If you like, use a journal to write down any impressions that arise.

2. Meditatio/Meditate

Ponder what you are observing, being attentive to whatever is in front of you as though you could be in dialogue with it. For example, as you look around, if you see a flower, gaze at it and also consider what it would feel like for the flower to look back at you. What it would be like to be in mutual relationship with all of Creation?

3. Oratio/Pray

Oratio is an opportunity to enter into dialogue with God, offering gratitude as well as lifting up your hopes, fears, and pains. In oratio, you are invited to surrender all of these things and allow God to transform you and the world through this encounter.

4. Contemplatio/Contemplate

Contemplatio is simply abiding in the presence of God. Rest joyfully in Mystery after lifting up your prayers and problems to God, confident that your needs are known.


Making Peace Like St. Francis

Friday, October 11, 2019

My Franciscan brother Fr. Louie Vitale, who has been a peace activist for almost 40 years, tells how St. Francis was working for peace even at the end of his life. At the time, Bishop Guido of Assisi excommunicated the mayor of Assisi on the pope’s orders because the mayor supported another war with Perugia. In response, the mayor proclaimed that no one could sell to or buy anything from the bishop or have legal dealings with him. This story illustrates the practical power of nonviolent, restorative justice. Vitale writes:

This was not just a misunderstanding or an argument between the bishop and the mayor. There was serious structural violence involving the nobility, the new merchant class, the city and the Church. . . . Theologian and biblical scholar Walter Wink would name this as an example of the “Domination System” and its efforts to control society. In the case of thirteenth-century Assisi, this struggle turned on the question of who would be in control—the powerful factions in the city or the people allied with the pope?

In Wink’s terminology, these institutions are “powers” which enforce domination and preclude peaceful resolution. “What people in the Bible experienced and called ‘Principalities and Powers’ was in fact real,” Wink writes. “They were discerning the actual spirituality at the center of the political, economic and cultural institutions of their day. . . . I use the expression ‘the Domination System’ to indicate what happens when an entire network of Powers becomes integrated around idolatrous values [like greed and superiority].” [1] . . .

Wink writes: “The Powers are good. The Powers are fallen. The Powers must be redeemed.” [2] While recognizing the demonic in each of the institutions involved, Francis also acknowledged the source of their creation and sought to restore them to the God-given purpose for which they were created. . . . Wink sees the Gospel as the alternative power to the Domination System. Francis brought this Gospel alternative to new life. . . .

[Knowing that] both the mayor and the bishop held Francis in the highest esteem, Francis used a subtle nonviolent approach. He added another verse on peace to his Canticle of the Creatures. He sent one of his brothers to invite the mayor to go to the bishop’s palace, and another to prepare the bishop. Francis did not go but remained in prayer. The brothers sang the canticle with its message of peace to the mayor and the bishop, which included the new verse:

Happy those who endure in peace,
By you, Most High, they will be crowned.

Both were moved to great repentance and mutual embrace. “In this moment, a centuries-old struggle for power ended,” historian Arnaldo Fortini [himself a former mayor of Assisi] wrote, crediting this intervention with bringing true peace into being.

Walter Wink stresses that a key dimension of nonviolent action is prayer. . . . Intercession visualizes an alternative future to the one created by the momentum of current forces. . . . Eight centuries after Francis we are called, as he was, to pray and act for a new future of peace.

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