{"id":18549,"date":"2020-01-21T09:32:33","date_gmt":"2020-01-21T14:32:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=18549"},"modified":"2020-01-21T09:32:33","modified_gmt":"2020-01-21T14:32:33","slug":"action-and-contemplation-part-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=18549","title":{"rendered":"Action and Contemplation: Part Three"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/IMzLPWy6SeE\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>The Prayer of Quiet<\/strong><br>Tuesday, January 21, 2020<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The&nbsp;Desert&nbsp;Fathers and&nbsp;Mothers withdrew from cities to the desert to live freely, apart from the economic, cultural, and political structure&nbsp;of&nbsp;the Roman Empire.&nbsp;At first, the empire&nbsp;persecuted the church, but&nbsp;in 313&nbsp;CE, Constantine&nbsp;gave Christianity&nbsp;a privileged status, not out of enlightenment or goodwill but in&nbsp;service of&nbsp;uniformity and control. The&nbsp;Desert&nbsp;Fathers and&nbsp;Mothers knew, as&nbsp;we&nbsp;should&nbsp;today, that empire would be an unreliable partner. They recognized that they had to find inner freedom from the system before they could return to it with true love, wisdom, and helpfulness. This is&nbsp;a&nbsp;useful&nbsp;dynamic&nbsp;for all of us who want to act on behalf of the world. If we stay&nbsp;immersed in&nbsp;culturally acceptable&nbsp;ways of thinking and doing,&nbsp;Christianity\u2019s&nbsp;deep,&nbsp;transformative power is largely lost.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So how do we find inner freedom?&nbsp;We can begin by noticing&nbsp;that whenever we suffer pain, the mind is always quick to identify with the negative aspects of things and replay them&nbsp;over and over again, wounding us deeply. This pattern must be recognized early and definitively. Peace of mind is&nbsp;actually an&nbsp;oxymoron.&nbsp;<em>When you\u2019re in your mind, you\u2019re hardly ever at peace, and when you\u2019re at peace, you\u2019re never only in your mind.<\/em>&nbsp;The&nbsp;early Christian&nbsp;<em>abbas<\/em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>ammas<\/em>&nbsp;knew this and first insisted on finding the inner&nbsp;silence&nbsp;necessary to tame the obsessive mind. Their method was&nbsp;originally&nbsp;called&nbsp;the prayer of quiet&nbsp;and eventually referred to as contemplation. It is the core teaching in the early Christian period, but&nbsp;it has been&nbsp;emphasized much more in the Eastern Church than in the West.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In&nbsp;<em>The&nbsp;Sayings of the Desert Fathers<\/em>,&nbsp;Benedicta Ward relates this story, one of the briefest but most popular of all the desert sayings: \u201cA brother came to&nbsp;Scetis&nbsp;to visit Abba Moses and asked him for a word. The old man said to him, \u2018Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.\u2019\u201d&nbsp;[1]&nbsp;But you don\u2019t have to have a cell, and you don\u2019t have to run away from the responsibilities of an active life, to experience solitude and silence.&nbsp;In another story,&nbsp;Amma&nbsp;Syncletica&nbsp;said, \u201cThere are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one\u2019s mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.\u201d&nbsp;[2]&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>By solitude, the desert mystics didn\u2019t mean mere privacy or protected space, although there is a need for that too. The desert mystics saw solitude, in Henri Nouwen\u2019s words, as a \u201cplace of conversion, the place where the old self dies and the new self is born, the place where the emergence of the&nbsp;[person]&nbsp;occurs.\u201d&nbsp;[3]&nbsp;Solitude is a courageous encounter with our naked, most raw and real self, in the presence of pure&nbsp;Love.&nbsp;This&nbsp;level of contemplation cannot help but bring about action.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Prayer of QuietTuesday, January 21, 2020 The&nbsp;Desert&nbsp;Fathers and&nbsp;Mothers withdrew from cities to the desert to live freely, apart from the economic, cultural, and political structure&nbsp;of&nbsp;the Roman Empire.&nbsp;At first, the empire&nbsp;persecuted the church, but&nbsp;in 313&nbsp;CE, Constantine&nbsp;gave Christianity&nbsp;a privileged status, not out of enlightenment or goodwill but in&nbsp;service of&nbsp;uniformity and control. The&nbsp;Desert&nbsp;Fathers and&nbsp;Mothers knew, as&nbsp;we&nbsp;should&nbsp;today, that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18549"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18550,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18549\/revisions\/18550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}