Engaging with a World on Fire
In each quarter of 2024, we will explore a different aspect of Radical Resilience. In this video, CAC teacher Brian McLaren reflects upon the first theme: Engaging with a World on Fire.
Way back in 2007, I wrote a book called Everything Must Change. I wanted to understand what our greatest challenges and threats and problems were here on Earth as a global civilization. I spent a year researching the literature of global crises, and I came away with an understanding of four deep problems that we face.
First, we face a crisis with our planet. We are literally destroying our life support system, disrupting our climate, destroying our oceans, depleting our soil, polluting everything, committing ecocide against the whole web of life.
Second, we have a crisis of poverty and unequal distribution of wealth and power, concentrating more and more wealth and power among a tiny minority of people.
That leads to a third problem: the crisis of peace. We know we’re in trouble, so what do we do? We disseminate more and more weapons of increasing kill power. We set on fire all of our divisions: racial, economic, religious, social, gender related, and more.
We have the crises of the planet, poverty, peace; the fourth crisis is religion because all too often our religious communities are remaining on the sidelines. As Thomas Merton said, they’re “guilty bystanders.” I think much religion has been selling people an evacuation plan rather than helping them participate in a transformation plan.
McLaren points to people who integrated spirituality and action in service of the world’s healing:
The great Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn came of age in Vietnam right as his nation was descending into civil war. He didn’t want to be part of a religious community that was disengaged from his culture at a time of great need. He began to articulate what he called a form of engaged Buddhism.
It was the same with Thomas Merton. He became a Trappist monk. We might think of Trappists as people who are withdrawn from all the events and affairs of the world. But Merton, who wrote New Seeds of Contemplation, also wrote a book called Seeds of Destruction because he said he wanted a form of engaged contemplative Christian faith.
When Richard Rohr started the CAC, he wanted it to be the Center for Action and Contemplation: engaged contemplation rooted in a Christian tradition. And of course, this just draws from the example of Jesus, who withdrew for a period of contemplative silence at the beginning of his ministry, a period of forty days, the story says. But then of course, he engaged with the struggles and challenges of his people in his time.
Every day Jesus would follow that same rhythm: withdraw for solitude, but then come back to engage by healing, feeding, caring, welcoming, binding up the wounds of this world, and implanting in people a vision of resilience, engaging with a world on fire.
Contemplation, Love, and Action
Father Richard explains the importance of engaging with the world’s needs as a way of holding action and contemplation together:
I’m inspired by the word “engaged” from my Buddhist friends who talk about engaged Buddhism. What Jesus talks about is not attending or belonging but doing. He focuses on the way we do life and do life with and for the neighbor. If going to service on Sunday morning keeps us from volunteer work on Monday, service work on Thursday, and pro bono work on Friday, I don’t think it’s what Jesus had in mind. The soul is refined in engagement, in relationship, in doing, in connecting. [1]
When we named the Center for Action and Contemplation, I hoped our rather long name would itself keep us honest and force us toward balance and ongoing integration. However, over the years, I have witnessed how many of us attach to contemplation or to action for the wrong reasons. Introverts may use contemplation to affirm quiet time; those with the luxury of free time sometimes use it for “navel-gazing.” On the other hand, some activists see our call to action as an affirmation of their particular agenda and not much else. Neither is the delicate art and balance that we hope to affirm.
By contemplation, we mean the deliberate seeking of God through a willingness to detach from the passing self, the tyranny of emotions, the addiction to self-image, and the false promises of the world. Action, as we are using the word, means a decisive commitment to involvement and engagement in the social order. Issues will not be resolved by mere reflection, discussion, or even prayer; nor will they be resolved only by protests, boycotts, or votes. Rather, God works together with all those who love (see Romans 8:28).
Though “Love” is not in our Center’s name, I hope that it is the driving force behind all we do, just as it was for Jesus who knew God’s love intimately and fully, and for the early church who proclaimed that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Amidst this time of planetary change and disruption, the CAC envisions a movement of transformed people working together for a transformed world.
The only way out and through any dualism, including that between action and contemplation, is a kind of universal forgiveness of reality for being what it is. This becomes the bonding glue of grace which heals all separations that law, religion, or logic can never finally or fully restore.
We are all on this journey together and we are all in need of liberation (which might be a better word than salvation). God’s intention is never to shame the individual (which actually disempowers), but solidarity with and universal responsibility for the whole (which creates healthy people). That is an act of radical solidarity that few Christians seem to enjoy but which the CAC is committed to fostering. [2]
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From our friend of Friday Five… John Chaffee
It may be disruptive but we always need to be growing, changing, and evolving further into who we are here to be.
Why?
Because…
Your growing IS the world’s growing.
Your deepening IS the world’s deepening.
Your healing IS the world’s healing.
Your maturing IS the world’s maturing.
In my life experience, formal church work did not actually want or approve of my own growing, deepening, healing, and maturing. For anyone to do those things was dangerous to it’s status quo.
But we can’t stop growing just because it makes others uncomfortable. In the words of Gregory of Nyssa (an early Church Father), “To refuse to grow is a sin.”
