{"id":23288,"date":"2024-01-15T10:48:37","date_gmt":"2024-01-15T15:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=23288"},"modified":"2024-01-15T11:26:58","modified_gmt":"2024-01-15T16:26:58","slug":"23288","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/?p=23288","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Andrew Peterson - &quot;Behold The Lamb of God&quot; (Official Lyric Video)\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZFEK68ncZ7o?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Inefficiency of Faith<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Richard Rohr writes<\/em><em>&nbsp;that holding the tension of paradox helps us grow in consciousness and love.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>All the great religions at the more mature levels learn and teach a different consciousness, which we call the contemplative mind, the nondual mind, or the mind of Christ. The <strong>levels of spiritual development begin with dualistic, exclusionary, either\/or thinking and become increasingly nondual, allowing for a deeper, broader, wiser, more inclusive and loving way of seeing.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we are to live on this Earth, we cannot bypass the <strong>necessary tension of holding contraries and inconsistencies together. <\/strong>Daily ordinary experiences teach us nonduality in a way that is not theoretical or abstract. It becomes obvious in everything and everybody, every idea and every event, almost hidden in plain sight. Everything created is mortal and limited and, if we look long enough, paradoxical. By paradox, I mean <strong>something that initially looks contradictory or impossible, but in a different frame or at a different level is in fact deeply true.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I am talking about<strong> just\u00a0<em>holding the tension,<\/em>\u00a0not necessarily finding a resolution or closure to paradox. We must agree to live without resolution, at least for a while. <\/strong>This is very difficult for most people, largely because we have not been taught how to do this mentally or emotionally. We didn\u2019t know we could\u2014or even should. As Paul seems to say (and I paraphrase),\u00a0<strong><em>hope\u00a0<\/em>would not be the virtue that it is if it led us to quick closure and we did not have to \u201cwait for it with patience\u201d<\/strong> (Romans 8:24\u201325).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I think opening to this holding pattern is the very name and description of\u00a0<em>faith.<\/em>\u00a0Unfortunately, in Christianity, faith largely became believing things to be true or false (intellectual assent) instead of<strong> 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).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>We must move from a belief-based religion to a practice-based religion, or little will change.<\/strong> We will merely continue to argue about what we are supposed to believe and who the unbelievers are. <strong>We need contemplative practices to loosen our egoic attachment to certainty and retrain our minds to understand the wisdom of paradox<\/strong>. [1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Contemplative prayer is largely just being present: holding the tension instead of even talking it through, offering the moment to God instead of fixing it by words and ideas, loving reality as it is instead of understanding it fully. <\/strong>In our daily lives, this prayer is most commonly articulated as a <strong>willingness to say, \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d We must not push the river, we must just trust that we are already in the river, and God is the certain flow and current.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That may sound impractical, but the <strong>way of faith is not the way of efficiency<\/strong>. <strong>So much of life is just a matter of listening and waiting and enjoying the expansiveness that comes from such willingness to hold. <\/strong>[2]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Tension of Nonviolence<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Peace activist John Dear recalls how Martin Luther King Jr. (1929\u20131968) used nonviolence to bring long-ignored racial tension and injustice to global awareness:&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One of Dr. King\u2019s greatest examples of creative nonviolence was his 1963 direct action campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Thousands of African Americans, mainly teenagers, were arrested by white police officers for marching against segregation. They kept coming forward, even marching into the face of the fire hoses, and one day, a miracle happened\u2014the white firemen put down their fire hoses and let them march. When that happened, segregation fell. King himself spent Easter week behind bars where he wrote his \u201cLetter from a Birmingham Jail,\u201d<strong> perhaps the greatest document in U.S. history. \u201cWe are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,\u201d he wrote in his jail cell. \u201cWhatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.\u201d [1]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>In his letter, King illustrated how a nonviolent stance both creates and \u201cholds the tension\u201d of conflict, opening opportunities for transformation:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored\u2026. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister\u2026. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but <strong>there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.\u2026 So the purpose of the direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation\u2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension<\/strong>. <strong>We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with.<\/strong> Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured. [2]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Dear describes the creative and healing outcome of Jesus\u2019 nonviolent life:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If we engage in active nonviolence as the nature of God \u2026 as Jesus did, then we will discover that nonviolence is infinitely creative. <strong>There are vastly more creative alternatives with nonviolent resistance to evil and injustice than with violent resistance\u2026<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>From the perspective of creative nonviolence, the Gospels present a new image of what it means to be human. In the life of Jesus, we discover that to be human is to be nonviolent, to be nonviolent is to become, like Jesus, fully human\u2026.<strong> Nonviolence leads us to the fullest possibilities of humanity\u2014to becoming people of universal love, universal compassion, universal solidarity, universal peace, indeed, total nonviolence.<\/strong> [3]<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>================<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/image-500x466.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-23293\" width=\"774\" height=\"721\" srcset=\"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/image-500x466.png 500w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/image-300x280.png 300w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/image-768x716.png 768w, http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/image.png 1144w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 774px) 100vw, 774px\" \/><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Inefficiency of Faith Richard Rohr writes&nbsp;that holding the tension of paradox helps us grow in consciousness and love. All the great religions at the more mature levels learn and teach a different consciousness, which we call the contemplative mind, the nondual mind, or the mind of Christ. The levels of spiritual development begin with [&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\/23288"}],"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=23288"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23295,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23288\/revisions\/23295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/co2mannatoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}