Dear Dave & JD
I believe my first real spiritual experience happened when I was probably five years old. I was alone in the living room of our home in Kansas and only the Christmas tree was lit. I had the sense that the world was good, I was good, and I was part of the good world—and I just wanted to stay there. It was like being taken to another world—the real world, the world as it’s meant to be, where the foundation is love and God is in everything.
I remember feeling very special, very chosen, very beloved, and it was my secret. The rest of my family didn’t know what I was knowing—see how my ego was already getting involved? Like the Apostle Paul, I now believe that chosenness is for the sake of letting everybody else know they are chosen, too.
My hope for our near future lies in those who are waking up to this Divine DNA that was there from the start—especially amid the painful experiences of life. We must all move through the universal pattern of Order, Disorder, and Reorder, and we must do it again and again and again.
By choosing a life of simplicity, service, generosity, and even powerlessness, we can move forward trusting both Love and Mystery. We don’t need to be perfectly certain before taking the next step.
Our job is to be who we say we are and who God says we are—carriers of the divine image. “My deepest me is God,” as St. Catherine of Genoa said. I can only imagine how differently our lives, families, and nations would look if we trusted the foundational promise of Christian incarnation. When you can see Christ in all things (including yourself!), you will see and live differently.
I’ve spent my life trying to remind people of their inherent belovedness, and I pray that our work at the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) has played a role in helping you to see, feel, and experience the hope of your own chosenness in God.
Your support is what enables this work of sharing the transformative wisdom of the Christian contemplative tradition with people all over the world. Thank you for being part of this community. I hope our work has been helpful in your life this year and we are so grateful for your partnership in making it possible.
Please take a moment to read our Executive Director Michael’s note below. Tomorrow the Daily Meditations will continue exploring the challenging theme of Apocalyptic Hope.
In the words of Teilhard… “Christ ever greater,”
Dear Friends,
All of us at the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) are honored and grateful to be a part of this incredible community—especially given this past year.
Like many of you, we had no idea how much the challenges of 2020 would force us to change or adapt. Thanks to your support, the CAC has been able to continue the work of reminding more and more people of their inherent belovedness. And, if the tremendous volume of emails and letters we’ve received is any indication, there continues to be a great appreciation and growing need for this to continue to expand. Here is one example from last month:
I want to let you know that the daily meditations and podcasts helped me tremendously to live through the pandemic, the political uncertainties and many other difficulties. Words cannot describe how important they are to me during these times. It calmed me down in my panics, fears and hopelessness. It kept me from sinking to the bottom. It has been ‘the’ one and only place that helps me to see God clearly and feel his love dearly.
Thank you, and God bless you.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to pass along this message of thanks, because it isn’t just for Father Richard or the CAC, but for each of you as well. Your generous contributions are what allow this work to reach people—all over the world!
The CAC’s programs and resources are designed to help deepen prayer practice and strengthen compassionate engagement. Whether you’re reading the Daily Meditations, listening to a podcast, or working through an online course—everything the CAC offers is in service to awakening Love in you and in the world.
Thank you for being part of this community and one of the partners that makes it possible. The CAC is not funded by any denomination, endowment, or even large foundation; we are supported by thousands of small donations from people like you. We deeply appreciate any support you are able to provide.
Please consider making a one-time donation or a recurring gift to support the future of this work. If you are able, please consider making your donation a monthly one. Monthly support helps create the stability the CAC needs to share this message in new and increasingly accessible ways.
I am so thankful for your partnership with us on the journey, and I hope we all can continue to help those who need a reminder of their chosenness and beloved identity in God to find it.
Peace and Every Good,
Michael Poffenberger
Executive Director, Center for Action and Contemplation
This Is an Apocalypse
In April of last year, I was invited by the Call to Unite [1] to share my thoughts about what we might learn from the COVID-19 pandemic. I knew it might be a risk, but I felt a strong urge to speak about the much-misunderstood meaning of biblical apocalypse. Here is a portion of that conversation:
What apocalyptic means is to pull back the veil, to reveal the underbelly of reality. It uses hyperbolic images, stars falling from the sky, the moon turning to blood. The closest thing would be contemporary science fiction, where suddenly you’re placed in an utterly different world, where what you used to call “normal” doesn’t apply anymore. That perfectly describes this COVID-19 event.
So hear this word rightly—it is meant to shock: this is an apocalypse, happening to us in our lifetime, that’s leaving us utterly out of control. We’re grasping to retake control, by things like refusing to wear masks and defying boundaries at potential superspreader events. But I think we now know in a new way that we can’t totally take control.
There is a giveaway in all of the apocalyptic sections of the three Synoptic Gospels. In Matthew 24:8, hidden there in the middle of the wars and earthquakes it says, “All this is only the beginning of the birth pangs.” Apocalypse is for the sake of birth not death. Yet most of us have heard this reading as a threat. Apparently, it’s not. Anything that upsets our normalcy is a threat to the ego but in the Big Picture, it really isn’t. In Luke 21, Jesus says right in the middle of the catastrophic description: “Your endurance will win you your souls.” Falling apart is for the sake of renewal, not punishment. Again, such a telling line. In Mark 13, Jesus says “Stay awake” four times in the last paragraph (Mark 13:32–37). In other words, “Learn the lesson that this has to teach you.” It points to everything that we take for granted and says, “Don’t take anything for granted.” An apocalyptic event reframes reality in a radical way by flipping our imagination.
We would have done history a great favor if we would have understood apocalyptic literature. It’s not meant to strike fear in us as much as a radical rearrangement. It’s not the end of the world. It’s the end of worlds—our worlds that we have created. In the book of Revelation (also called the Apocalypse, or Revelation to John), John is trying to describe what it feels like when everything falls apart. It’s not a threat. It’s an invitation to depth. It’s what it takes to wake people up to the real, to the lasting, to what matters. It presents the serious reader with a great “What if?”
Our best response is to end our fight with reality-as-it-is. We will benefit from anything that approaches a welcoming prayer—diving into the change positively, preemptively, saying, “Come, what is; teach me your good lessons.” Saying yes to “What is” ironically sets us up for “What if?” Otherwise, we get trapped in the negative past.
A Time of Unveiling
I believe this past year has been an apocalyptic time, though not necessarily in the way we might think. When the CAC staff first started speaking with me in the fall of 2020 about potential themes for the 2021 Daily Meditations, we were about seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing and staying home were the norm. The presidential campaign, with all its ugly rhetoric, was in full swing. Only half-joking, I suggested “apocalypse” as a theme! But the Daily Meditations editorial team took my idea seriously and transformed it into something broader, deeper, and much more accessible. We called this year’s theme “A Time of Unveiling.” For many of us, the word “apocalypse” conjures thoughts of the rapture, fear, a vengeful God, and violent and exclusive religion. It is an overwhelming judgment on Western Christianity that it is drawn to such beliefs. But despite its misuse, I’m convinced the biblical meaning of apocalypse is a helpful and ultimately hopeful framework.
A quick etymology of the word will help: kaluptein is the Greek word for “to cover” and apo means “un,” so apokaluptein means to uncover or unveil. While we primarily use the word “apocalypse” to mean to destroy or threaten, in its original context, apocalypse simply meant to reveal something new. The key is that in order to reveal something new, we have to get the old out of the way.
I begin my book Eager to Love with these poetic words from Neale Donald Walsch that put this quite nicely.
Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that. You cannot hold onto the old all the while declaring that you want something new. The old will defy the new; the old will deny the new; the old will decry the new. There is only one way to bring in the new. You must make room for it. [1]
That’s what apocalyptic literature does. It helps us make room for something new by clearing out the old—old ideas, old stories, old ways of thinking—especially if we’ve become overly attached to them. The goal of apocalyptic language, as used in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, is to shake people out of their reliance on conventional wisdom and undercut where we all operate on cruise control.
The most common mistake is to confuse apocalyptic literature with prophetic literature. They serve very different functions. Apocalyptic writing deconstructs the “taken-for-granted world” by presenting a completely different universe, similar to what a good novel or even a science fiction movie does for us. As the Buddhist heart sutra says it, “Gone, gone, utterly gone, all has passed over to the other side.” It makes room for the reconstruction of a new vision of peace and justice, which is the job of the prophets. Yes, prophets do plenty of deconstruction too, but it is always to make room inside the mind and soul for vision, expansion, hope, and a future inhabited by God and not by fear.
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