Father Richard describes how practicing contemplation moves us beyond dualistic thinking:
I used to think most of us begin with contemplation and a unitive encounter with God and are then led through that experience to awareness of and solidarity with the suffering in the world by some form of action. I do think that’s true for many people, yet as I read the biblical prophets and observe Jesus’ life, I think the reverse also happens: first action, and then needed contemplation.
No life is immune from suffering. When we’re in solidarity with people facing pain, injustice, war, oppression, colonization—the list goes on and on—we face immense pressure to despair, to become angry or dismissive. When reality is split dualistically between good and bad, right and wrong, we too are torn apart. Yet when we’re broken, we are most open to contemplation, or nondual thinking. We’re desperate to resolve our own terror, anger, and disillusionment, and so we allow ourselves to be led into the silence that holds everything together in wholeness.
The contemplative, nondual mind is not saying, “Everything is beautiful,” even when it’s not. However, we may come to “Everything is still beautiful” by contemplatively facing the conflict between how reality is and how we wish it could be. We must face dualistic problems, name good and evil, and differentiate between right and wrong. We can’t be naive about evil, but if we stay focused on this duality, we’ll become unlovable, judgmental, dismissive people. I’ve witnessed this pattern in myself. We must eventually find a bigger field, a wider frame, which we call nondual thinking.
Jesus doesn’t hesitate to name good and evil and to show evil as a serious matter. Jesus often speaks in dualistic images; for example, “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). He draws a stark line between the sheep and the goats, the good and the wicked (Matthew 25:31–46). Yet Jesus overcomes these dualisms by what we would call the contemplative mind. We must be honest about what the goats fail to do, but we can’t become hateful, nor do we need to punish them. We keep going deeper until we can also love them, as Jesus did.
Beginning with necessary, dualistic action and moving toward contemplation seems to be the more common path these days. We see this pattern in Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and many others. Such people enter into the pain of society and have to go to God to find rest for their soul, because their souls are so torn by the broken, split nature of almost everything, including themselves.
The most important word in our Center’s name is not Action, nor is it Contemplation, but the word and. We need both action and contemplation to have a whole spiritual journey. It doesn’t matter which comes first; action may lead us to contemplation and contemplation may lead us to action. But finally, they need and feed each other.
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Five for Friday Skye Jatheni
| 1.”I often wonder if religion is the enemy of God. It’s almost like religion is what happens when the Spirit has left the building.”- Bono, Lead Singer of U2I have shared this quote before, but Bono touches on a perennial topic here. Of course, everything depends on how you understand religion. Religion is a bit like a cup that carries coffee to me. The cup needs the coffee and the coffee needs the cup. A cup without coffee is pointless and deserves to be moved on from, yet some people cling to it because it once had a good experience of coffee in it. Coffee without a cup is a mess, it spills everywhere and burns us, and it becomes a desperate experience to hold the coffee in our own hands. All said, I agree with Bono. I just would take the metaphor in a different direction. Religion needs Spirit or else it is like an empty coffee cup, and Spirit needs Religion because it paradoxically needs a finite little cup for us to experience it. 2.”There is no part of the world, no matter how lost, no matter how godless, that has not been accepted by God in Jesus Christ and reconciled to God.”- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran PastorBonhoeffer was the first pastor and theologian I ever heard who gave a full treatment to the New Testament idea of the “reconciliation of all things.” It is a topic that I believe is avoided and not fully taught in Western Christianity because it completely challenges the entire framework. Western Christianity seems to be beholden to the idea that some things or people are saved and others are damned, some are reconciled because of what they have done or prayed while others are choosing their own perdition. In full honesty, when I did church work, I was reprimanded and told not talk about it or teach it. Anyways, here is what Paul says in Colossians 1:15-20… “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” I swear, it feels as though the reconciliation of all things in Christ is a taboo secret that should never have become such a taboo secret. 3.“The Christian of the future will be a mystic or they will not exist at all.”- Karl Rahner, German Jesuit TheologianNot an Evangelical, not a Pastor, not a Theologian, not a Catholic, not a Baptist, not an Eastern Orthodox, not a Methodist, not a Lutheran, not an Activist, not a Politician, not a Biblical Scholar, not anything like those things. If the Christian of the future is not encouraged to experience or taught how to experience God in all things and all things in God, if they are not romanced by the mystery of the Presence in everything, then they will not exist at all. Rahner writes about this topic in The Mystical Way in Everyday Life. 4.”When the intellect attains prayer that is pure and free from passion, the demons attack no longer with sinister thoughts but with thoughts of what is good. For they suggest to it an illusion of God’s glory in a form pleasing to the senses, so as to make it think that it has realized the final aim of prayer.”- Evagrios the Solitary, Desert Hermit from the 4th CenturyThis one stopped me in my tracks this week. The idea that the demons would stop attacking a person with evil thoughts, and begin attacking them with seemingly good ones is so insightful. A few weeks ago I remember reading about some other mega-church pastor who was found to have sexually abused a minor decades earlier. During his tenure, he was known to often say, “God told me he wanted me to be famous to make Him famous.” If that doesn’t scream narcissism within a “pastor” then I don’t know what else does. What I enjoy about the early Church desert monasticism is that it was something like the opposite of celebrity culture today, which has unfortunately also infected the church world. The early Church seemed to be aware of the temptations of riches, reputation, adoration, etc. and warned people deeply against wanting those things. The further I dive into the desert monastics, the more I think that their wisdom is desperately needed today for the sake of our generation’s spiritual formation. I guess, if I think about it, this whole 5 on Friday newsletter began as a result of my thinking that the ancient, deep, and wide wisdom of the Christian tradition was being overlooked. In a way, this weekly newsletter is very much about sharing the underappreciated wisdom of the Christian tradition. 5.”Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”- Paulo Friere in Pedagogy of the OppressedI believe Moses and Jesus would agree. |
