Practice of the Presence

Brother Lawrence (1611–1691) was a lay brother in a Carmelite monastery, where he primarily worked in the kitchen. His reflections, known as Practice of the Presence of God, have inspired countless Christians and other spiritual seekers to simple practices of contemplation and presence. He begins by encouraging us to take brief moments of pause during our busy days to enhance our awareness of God’s presence. Carmen Acevedo Butcher offers a modern translation:  

During our work and other activities, even during our reading and writing, no matter how spiritual, and, I emphasize, even during our external devotions and vocal prayers, we must stop for a brief moment, as often as we can, to love God deep in our heart, to savor them [1], even though this is brief and in secret. Since you are aware that God is present before you during your actions, that they are in the deep center of your soul, why not stop your activities and even your vocal prayers, at least from time to time, to love God, praise them, ask for their help, offer them your heart, and thank them?… 

Ultimately, we can offer God no greater evidence of our faithfulness than by frequently detaching and turning from all things created so we can enjoy their Creator for a single moment. I don’t mean to give the impression, though, that you should stop working or abandon your duties. That would be impossible. Wisdom, the mother of all our spiritual strengths, will be your guide. I am saying, however, that it is a common oversight among spiritually minded people not to turn from outside engagements from time to time to worship God within ourselves and enjoy in peace some small moments of their divine presence. 

Brother Lawrence teaches that this practice begins with a faith that God is truly present with us in all times and circumstances:  

All this reverence must be done by faith, believing God is really living in our hearts, and we must honor, love, and serve them in spirit and in truth…. Infinitely excellent and with sovereign power, they deserve all that we are, and everything in heaven and on earth, now and through eternity. All our thoughts, words, and actions belong rightly to God. Let’s put this into practice. 

We must carefully consider what qualities we most need to be kind. Which are the most difficult for us to develop, which ways of harming ourselves and others do we most often fall into, and which are the most frequent and predictable of our falls? At the moment of our struggle, we must turn back to God with complete confidence. Be still in the presence of divine majesty. Respect God humbly, telling them our heartaches and our weaknesses, and asking them lovingly for the help of their grace. This is how in our fragility we find in God our strength.  

Evening

Slowly evening takes on the garments held for it by a line of ancient trees. You look, and the world recedes from you. Part of it moves heavenward, the rest falls away. And you are left, belonging to neither fully, not quite so dark as the silent house, not quite so sure of eternity as that shining now in the night sky, a point of light. You are left, for reasons you can’t explain, with a life that is anxious and huge, so that, at times confined, at times expanding, it becomes in you now stone, now star.

Book of Images

Barrows, Anita; Macy, Joanna. A Year with Rilke (p. 203). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

What We Resist Persists

Richard believes that true prayer starts with a positive “yes” and surrender to God and reality:  

When I entered the Franciscan novitiate in 1961, part of our training was learning to avoid, resist, and oppose all distractions. It was such poor teaching, but it was the only way they thought back then. It was all about willpower: celibacy through willpower, poverty through willpower, community through willpower. But what we need isn’t willpower; we need the power to surrender the will and to trust what is. That’s heroic! It was a fruitless and futile effort because if we start with negative energy, a “don’t,” we won’t get very far (see Romans 7:7–11). That was the extent of the teaching, and it’s really no teaching at all—it’s just “Don’t! Don’t do anything!” When we hear that, the ego immediately pushes back. Somedays we have strong willpower and we succeed, but most days we barely succeed. [1] 

We know the old shibboleth, “Don’t think of an elephant.” If we try not to, that dang elephant invariably sneaks back into our minds! Just wait. To actively oppose something actually engages with it and gives it energy. That’s why good spiritual teachers say, “What you resist persists.”  

Our first energy has to be “yes” energy. From there we can move, build, and proceed. We must choose the positive, which is to choose love, and rest there for a minimum of fifteen conscious seconds—it takes that long for positivity to imprint in the neurons, I’m told. [2] 

Richard advises “neither clinging nor opposing” as helpful when it comes to facing our distractions in contemplative prayer:  

If I had told my novice master that I wasn’t going to fight my distractions, he would have said, “So you’re going to entertain lustful or hateful thoughts?” But that would have largely missed the point. The real learning curve happens when we can admit we’re having a thought or feeling and see that it’s empty, passing, and part of a fantasy that has no final reality except as a lesson.  

We must listen honestly to ourselves. Listen to whatever thought or feeling arises. Listen long enough to ask, “Why am I thinking this? What is this saying about me that I need to entertain this negative, accusatory, or lustful thought?”  

We don’t have to hate or condemn ourselves for a thought or feeling, but we do have to let it yield its wisdom. Then we will see it is the wounded or needy part of us that wants these unhealthy thoughts. Our True Self, our Whole Self, does not need them, and will not identify with them.  

If we can allow our thoughts and feelings to pass through us, neither clinging to them nor opposing them—and without ever expecting perfect success—I promise that we will come to a deeper, wider, and wiser place. Even our inability to fully succeed is, in itself, another wonderful lesson. [3] 

Continuities

Some of us have long felt continuities that have little in common with the course of history. We understand what is most distinctive in this fateful moment and what future it holds. But we, squeezed between yesterday and tomorrow, will we be mindful and receptive enough to participate in the unfolding of the larger movement? Letter to Countess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe
July 9, 1915

A Year with Rilke (pp. 192-193). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

From Fear to Connection

When leading morning sit for the CAC staff, Father Richard often turns to Just This, his small book on contemplative seeing and practice. This week the Daily Meditations share wisdom that arises from focusing on “just this.” Richard begins:   

Contemplation is a panoramic, receptive awareness whereby we take in all that the situation, moment, or person offers without judging, eliminating, or labeling anything. It is pure and positive gazing that abandons all negative pushback so it can recognize inherent dignity. That takes much practice and a lot of unlearning of habitual responses.  

We have to work at it and develop practices whereby we recognize our compulsive and repetitive patterns. In doing so, we allow ourselves to be freed from the need to “take control of the situation”—as if we ever really could anyway!  

It seems we are addicted to our need to make distinctions and judgments, which we mistake for thinking. Most of us think we are our thinking, yet almost all thinking is compulsive, repetitive, and habitual. We are forever writing our inner commentaries on everything, commentaries that always reach the same practiced conclusions. That is why all forms of meditation and contemplation teach a way of quieting this compulsively driven and unconsciously programmed mind.  

The Desert Fathers and Mothers wisely called this process “the shedding of thoughts.” We don’t fight, repress, deny, identify with, or even judge them, but merely shed them. We are so much more than our thoughts about things, and we will feel this more as an unlearning than a learning of any new content. [1]  

When we meditate consistently, a sense of our autonomy and private self-importance—what we think of as our “self”—falls away, little by little, as unnecessary, unimportant, and even unhelpful. The imperial “I,” the self that we likely think of as our only self, reveals itself as largely a creation of our mind.  

Through a regular practice of contemplation, we become less and less interested in protecting this self-created, relative identity. We don’t have to attack it; it calmly falls away of its own accord and we experience a kind of natural humility.  

If our prayer goes deep, “invading” our unconscious, as it were, our whole view of the world will change from fear to connection. We don’t live inside our fragile and encapsulated self anymore, nor do we feel any need to protect it. In meditation, we move from ego consciousness to soul awareness, from being fear-driven to being love-drawn. That’s it in a few words!  

Of course, we only have the courage to do this if Someone Else is holding us, taking away our fear, doing the knowing, and satisfying our desire for a Great Lover. If we can allow that Someone Else to lead us in this dance, we will live with new vitality, a natural gracefulness, and inside of a Flow that we did not create. It is the Life of the Trinity, spinning through us. [2]  

Surrendering to the Present Moment

Father Richard invites us to remain with and surrender to the present moment: 

If we watch our minds, we will see that we live most of our life in the past or in the future. The present always seems boring and not enough. To get ourselves engaged, we will often “create a problem” to resolve, and then another, and another. The only way many of us know how to motivate ourselves is to create problems or to need to “fix” something, someone else, or ourselves.  

If we can’t be positively present right now without creating a problem, nothing new is ever going to happen. We will only experience what we already agree with and what does not threaten us and our preferred mode of being. We will never experience the unexpected depth and contentment that is always being offered to us.  

Notice that the Scriptures present God as a thief, or a master who returns before being expected (see Matthew 24:42–46), who even “puts on an apron, sits them at table and waits on them” (see Luke 12:35–38)! Do we even realize what an extraordinary notion of God Jesus must have had to talk that way? God waiting on us! No problem to solve—just an immediate intimacy to enjoy.  

It is just such a moment that can elicit both awe and surrender from within us: awe before the utterly undeserved and unexpected—and some sweet surrender to the fact that it might just be true. [1]  

The spiritual journey is a constant interplay between moments of awe followed by a process of surrender to that moment. We must first allow ourselves to be captured by the goodness, truth, or beauty of something beyond and outside ourselves. Then we universalize from that moment to the goodness, truth, and beauty of the rest of reality, until our realization eventually ricochets back to include ourselves! This is the great inner dialogue we call prayer. Yet we humans resist both the awe and, even more, the surrender. Both together are vital, and so we must practice. 

The way to any universal idea is to proceed through a concrete encounter. The one is the way to the many; the specific is the way to the spacious; the now is the way to the always; the here is the way to the everywhere; the material is the way to the spiritual; the visible is the way to the invisible. When we see contemplatively, we know that we live in a fully sacramental universe, where everything is an epiphany. While philosophers tend toward universals and poets love particulars, mystics and contemplative practice teach us how to encompass both. [2] 

Transforming Dragons

We have no reason to distrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has an abyss, it is ours. If dangers are there, we must try to love them. And if we would live with faith in the value of what is challenging, then what now appears to us as most alien will become our truest, most trustworthy friend. Let us not forget the ancient myths at the outset of humanity’s journey, the myths about dragons that at the last moment transform into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act just once with beauty and courage. Perhaps every terror is, in its deepest essence, something that needs our recognition or help. Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

Barrows, Anita; Macy, Joanna. A Year with Rilke (p. 192). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

In Jesus’ painful death, theologian Kwok Pui Lan experiences God’s solidarity with the suffering of Asian women. 

Jesus cried out for Jerusalem. His sorrow was so deep that Matthew had to use a “feminine metaphor” to describe what he actually felt: “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…” (Matthew 23:37). How much more would a mother lament over her dead son who died in the wars in Indochina? How can the mothers, wives, and lovers in Korea who are separated from their loved ones stop crying over the divided country?…  

[Asian] women suffer from the millennia-old prejudices and discriminations of the male-dominated Eastern cultures, from rampant socio-political exploitations, and from their structural vulnerability. These big burdens join hand-in-hand to rob a woman of her personhood, to render her a no-body.  

Because suffering touches the innermost part of her being, she feels the pain of the suffering God: a God who cried out from the cross … a God who was put to death by the military and political forces, who was stripped naked, insulted and spat upon. Didn’t the prophet Isaiah say: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces…” (Isaiah 53:3)? God has taken the risk to become a human being, and experiences personally what it means to be a no-body.  

It is the very person on the cross that suffers like us, was rendered a no-body, who illuminates our tragic human existence and speaks to countless women in Asia. We are not looking to Jesus as a mere example to follow, neither shall we try to idolize him. We see Jesus as the God who takes human form and suffers and weeps with us. [1] 

For Richard Rohr, the “bias from the bottom” is a way of following God and living life from the side of suffering:   Instead of legitimating what we are already doing, liberation theology simply tries to read the text from the side of the pain. That’s all. For me, that is the icon of Jesus—to read not from the side of power, but from the side of pain. Who has the pain? Where is the pain? As many have said, Jesus is on both sides of every war. The Germans in the First World War had their “Gott mit uns” [God with us] on their belt buckles, but God is in the foxholes of both sides. God is with all people crying out in their pain. Doesn’t that leave us feeling helpless? It’s not an exclusive god of our group anymore; it’s the universal God of all the earth, of all peoples. But it’s only possible to think this way when we move to the level of wisdom, which is the level of liberation. We don’t have time for group-centric religion anymore. There is too much suffering.

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Sarah Young Jesus Listens

My living Lord, Help me not to be so hard on myself! I know that You can bring good out of everything—even my mistakes. My finite mind tends to look backwards, longing to undo decisions I have come to regret. This is such a waste of time and energy, leading only to frustration! Instead of floundering in the past, I want to release my mistakes to You. As I look to You in trust, I’m confident that Your infinite creativity can weave my good choices and my bad ones into a lovely design. I know I’ll continue to make mistakes in this life—because I’m only human. You’ve shown me that thinking I should live an error-free life is a symptom of pride. My failures can actually be a source of blessing—humbling me and giving me empathy for other people in their weaknesses. Also, failure vividly highlights my dependence on You. I’m grateful that You are able to bring beauty out of the morass of my mistakes. My part is to trust You and watch to see what You will do. In Your marvelous Name, Jesus, Amen

ROMANS 8:28 ESV; And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, 

PROVERBS 11:2; When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom. 

PROVERBS 3:5 ESV; Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. 6 In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.

MICAH 7:7; But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me. 

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 212). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Heaven and Hell Are Here and Now

… Creator be with us as we are born anew 
Amidst the frail anxiety of our lives 
Come among us with your healing spirit 
Carried through Christ, our brother, your child. Amen.  
—Carol J. Gallagher, “Heaven and Hell”  

Episcopal bishop and member of the Cherokee nation Carol J. Gallagher reflects on how her Indigenous ancestry and the profound suffering of her people enrich her understanding of heaven and hell:  

To reflect on heaven and hell is to honestly walk in the ways of my ancestors…. I have heard their ancient stories, the stories of survival and persistence, and I have lived the inheritance of people who have been removed, reviled, and turned away. It has been an inheritance of pain and suffering, and an inheritance of light and beauty….  

Heaven and hell are not so much places we end up in the afterlife or places of reward and punishment, but rather, they are moments in relationship, lived experience here and in the time that follows our sojourn on this earth. On the one hand, the sense of heaven, for me, rests in the connection and interwoven sense of life that is organic to a tribal community. On the other hand, hell might be imagined as those times of severe dislocation, removal, and dis-connection to tribe and family….  

Gallagher understands heaven and hell as the impact of our choices to live in relationship with creation and to follow a God with a “bias from the bottom”: 

Our place of removal, Oklahoma Indian Territory, was a dry place, ever so different from our homelands. Yet, even there our people found promise, small hillocks and shaded streams, places that sang to us of home…. In the midst of the worst kind of hell people can live through—displacement, dislocation, and dishonor—we sought a little heaven in our little gardens and small streams, and in one another. In the night we sang our songs and told our stories. From the outside we might have looked damned, but on the inside we knew there was yet more to come. We knew our God to be understanding of the heavy burdens we were bearing, as one who walked the removal road with us, who suffered such loss and indignations, who would hold us close and carry us to a place of healing and renewal.…  

To me, then, heaven and hell are concepts that are part of all creation. Heaven and hell exist within and beyond the confines of our world of space and time. We can participate in heaven by living in harmony and respect with all of creation or in hell by bringing greed, selfishness, and disease upon the whole earth.…  

We are endowed by the Creator with power to live our lives for the well-being of all. Heaven and hell are about living (or not) in right relationship with all of creation, of honoring or dishonoring all, and knowing the love of God by sharing it with all of our relatives: human, plants, trees, four-legged, winged, water, and earth all woven together.

[59] Law and Spirit

The commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep them: the man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces. It needs a clean heart to have pure hands, all the power of a live soul to keep the law—a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not the effort of duty.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 31-32). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

God’s Universal Love

For decades, Murphy Davis (1948–2020) advocated for people on death row and for people without homes. Here she comments on Matthew 25:31–46, a passage she saw as foundational to her community and work:   

Jesus said to his followers, “The time is coming when I won’t be physically with you anymore. You need to know how to follow me, know my suffering, comfort me, and be with me. I live with you and among you in the presence of the poor and the outsider. Serve them and you are serving me. Befriend them and you will be friends of God. Shut them out, harass them, deny them what they need to sustain their lives, and you deny God.” Simply put, Jesus was teaching the disciples that God is present among us in the poor and suffering ones: the sickest, hungriest, smelliest, most neglected, most condemned. How we treat them is a direct indication of our love of God.…  

As the Latin American liberation theologians teach us, a spirituality that is not concrete is not real.… Our spirituality is how we hammer out the meaning of our encounter with God …: here, now, in this place, with these people, in the midst of this struggle. Whatever our circumstances, God comes to us in the poor and oppressed and invites us to open up our lives. When we do share, welcome, and invite, we find ourselves in the glad company of a loving God. We are no longer alone. We are not abandoned. When we reject the invitation, we choose the path of isolation. We cut ourselves off. We might still have the food or whatever we didn’t share clutched in our hand, but when we look up, there is no one to share the meal with us. We are alone. This is essential to the nature of a liberation spirituality: always we are invited in, invited into community. [1]  

Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez (b. 1928) teaches God’s love for the poor—and all of us:  

For me, the first question of theology is how do we say to the poor: God loves you?… 

One of the central axioms of liberation theology has thus been “the preferential option for the poor.” Sometimes this concept is misinterpreted to mean that there is a competition for God’s love between the rich and the poor. This is not the meaning. In fact, the concept displays the universality of God’s love for all—a love that, in a world structured to the benefit of the powerful, extends even to the least among us. In fact, Jesus shows us that God’s love is clearest there. Like a mother who tends most tenderly to the weakest and threatened of her children, so it is with God’s care for the poor. And the call of the gospel is for us to do the same, to make the same option, to show that God’s love is universal by focusing our attention on the most threatened among us. [2] 

[57] Bondage

A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (p. 31). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The Exodus Beginning

In the CAC’s early years, Richard Rohr often shared his talk “Gospel Call for Compassionate Action—Bias from the Bottom.” Richard emphasized the Hebrew experience of freedom in the Exodus:  

Something happened that allowed an enslaved group of Semitic peoples to go through a liberation experience and to be led to the lands we now call Israel and Palestine. The Exodus journey became an externalized and internalized journey, as true spirituality always is. It marked the beginnings of the creation of this people, and the creation of a spirituality that includes both action and contemplation.  

We know the man called Moses at the heart of this Exodus journey. The account begins with his early religious experience (Exodus 3:2–6). We know he is a murderer; that he escapes from the law and lives out in the desert, taking care of his father-in-law’s sheep when he has his “burning bush” experience of God. It’s a nature experience, which is very often our own first religious experience. There’s no tabernacle, church, temple, priesthood, or anything to do with formalized religion. 

Immediately upon this experience, the voice Moses hears from the bush says: “I have heard the groaning of my people in Egypt and you are to go, confront the Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go” (see Exodus 3:7–10). The contemplative “burning bush” experience comes and immediately has social, economic, and political implications. There is no authentic God experience which does not situate us in the world in a different way and cause us to see things differently and act accordingly. [1] 

Theologian Dwight Hopkins writes about what it has meant for Black Americans in poverty to read the Exodus story and discover a God who liberates:  

Today’s poor African Americans struggle for freedom and encounter oppressed conditions similar to those in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. The Hebrew Scriptures reveal [YHWH] compassionately hearing and seeing the dire difficulties experienced by the least in society, in this case, the Hebrew slaves. When the poor today read the story of Hebrew slaves and their relationship to a liberator God, they can see that they are not alone in their cruel predicament in contemporary America. 

The biblical stories of exodus feature an oppressed people (that is, the Hebrews) who suffered at the hands of brutal taskmasters; were accused falsely; were pursued by forces of prejudice; dwelled in the midst of a wilderness experience; went through periods of anxiety, fear, and doubt about the future, at times longing for a return to their former status in an inhuman system; and quarreled with their leaders while doggedly continuing along the way to freedom….

Moreover, the African American poor, reading the Hebrew Scriptures from their position on the bottom of American society, discover a whole new world different from the dominating Christianity and theology of mainstream American believers. The exodus theme does not end with harsh difficulties. On the contrary, the hope of deliverance cancels out the pain and gives today’s poor the strength to “keep on keeping on.” [2] 

Stories from the Bottom

Father Richard shows how one of the Bible’s persistent themes is how God chooses the rejected, the outsider, and the unlikely for grace and divine purpose:  

One of the few subversive texts in history is the Bible! The Bible is most extraordinary because it repeatedly and invariably legitimizes the people on the bottom, not the people on the top. Rejected sons, barren women, sinners, lepers, or outsiders are always the ones chosen by God. It’s rather obvious when pointed out to us. In every case, we are presented with some form of powerlessness—and from that situation God creates a new kind of power. This is the constant pattern found hidden in plain sight. [1] 

We repeatedly see God showing barren women favor in the Hebrew Scriptures. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was barren and past child-bearing years when God blessed her with baby Isaac (Genesis 17:15–19). Rachel, Jacob’s wife, was barren until God “opened her womb” and she bore Joseph (Genesis 30:22–24). Barren Hannah poured out her soul before the Lord, and God gave her Samuel (1 Samuel 1). [2] 

Even before Moses, God chose a “nobody,” Abraham, and made him a somebody. God chose Jacob over Esau, even though Esau was the elder, more earnest son and Jacob was a shifty, deceitful character. Election has nothing to do with worthiness but only divine usability, and in the Bible, usability normally comes from having walked through one’s own wrongness or “littleness.” God chose Israel’s first king Saul out of the tribe of Benjamin, the smallest and weakest tribe. The pattern always seems to be that “the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16). We see this especially in Mary, a “humble servant” (Luke 1:48). This is so consistently the pattern that we no longer recognize its subversive character. 

One of the more dramatic biblical stories in this regard is the story of David. God chose him, the youngest and least experienced son of Jesse, to be king over the nation. His father, who had many sons, did not even mention David as a possibility, but left him out in the fields (1 Samuel 16). David was thus the forgotten son who then became the beloved son of YHWH, the archetypal whole man of Israel, laying the foundation for the son of David, Jesus. [3] 

In case after case, the victim becomes the real victor, leading philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) to speak of the “privileged position of the most victimized victim” as the absolutely unique and revolutionary perspective of the Gospels. [4] Without it, we are hardly prepared to understand the “folly of the cross” of Jesus. Without this bias from the bottom, religion ends up defending propriety instead of human pain, the status quo instead of the suffering masses, triumphalism instead of truth, clerical privilege instead of charity and compassion. And this from the Christianity that was once “turning the whole world upside down” (Acts 17:6). 

[56] The Moral Law

The immediate end of the commandments never was that men should succeed in obeying them, but that, finding they could not do that which yet must be done, finding the more they tried the more was required of them, they should be driven to the source of life and law—of their life and His law—to seek from Him such reinforcement of life as should make the fulfillment of the law as possible, yea, as natural, as necessary.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 30-31). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Richard writes that “everything belongs” when we loosen our ego’s grip and allow ourselves to receive and dwell in the present moment: 

At the level of contemplative consciousness, we move beyond dualistic, either/or thinking. At this point, life and death, goodness and badness are not opposites. The one does not cancel out the other. There is enough spaciousness for everything to belong, a return to an elemental innocence, some kind of radical “okayness.” Our dualistic, logical minds keep coming to offer us the satanic temptation to eat again of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but this time we refuse.  

It is only the first level of consciousness that needs that kind of security system and explanation for everything. That is what it means to be like God: I will be the decider. So many Christians are absolutely sure they know who is going to heaven and who is going to hell. What a strange and horrible comfort that must be! Why would anything except the tiny mind want that? The great mind hands that back to where it belongs, with the only mind where everything does belong—which is, of course, the mind of God.  

Every bit of resistance to this contemplative consciousness comes from some previous mental explanation of how things should be, or what we want or expect them to be. If we start our day with ten expectations, we have just set ourselves up for an unhappy day. When we live out of our minds, it just creates expectations and reasons to be disappointed. Don’t do that! We’ve got to choose God here, in this moment, and whatever happens, happens. I don’t care how crowded or late the bus is or even if it breaks down three times. It’s okay. We don’t always succeed at this, but when we do, we know that everything belongs. We know that God can use even this and that maybe the experience really was all right.

It seems that simply allowing ourselves to be here, to recognize the sacrament and the grace of the present moment, is enough to allow God’s loving gaze to happen. What we are doing in the allowing is returning the gaze. That’s it. We are completing the circuit and saying it’s okay.  

I am not advocating for some kind of cheap universalism. We don’t want to become people who glibly say “everything belongs” in the face of suffering and injustice. I hope you don’t hear me saying that. It might sound like I am contradicting myself, and our calculating minds may be saying, “Come on. It can’t be that simple.” I think that is why the diabolical, beguiling mind keeps confusing us and trapping us in head trips, instead of surrendering to the naked now that God always inhabits. This is the place where the incarnation is always taking place, and where God is mysteriously present in every moment, perfectly hidden and at the same time perfectly revealed.  

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Sarah Young Jesus Listens

Blessed Jesus, I invite You to permeate my moments with Your Presence so I can see things from Your perspective. When I’m around someone who irritates me, I’m prone to focus on that person’s flaws. Instead of this negative focus, I need to gaze at You through the eyes of my heart and let those irritants wash over me without sinking in. I know that judging other people is a sinful snare—and it draws me away from You. How much better it is to simply be joyful in You, my Savior! Strength and Joy are in Your dwelling place. The more I fix my eyes on You, the more You strengthen me and fill me with Joy. Please train my mind to stay aware of You even when other things are demanding my attention. Thank You for creating me with an amazing brain that can be conscious of several things at once. I want to keep my eyes on You, Lord, enjoying the Light of Your Presence continually. In Your strong Name, Amen

MATTHEW 7:1 HCSB; Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged. 

HABAKKUK 3:18; Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.

1 CHRONICLES 16:27; Glory and honour are in his presence; strength and gladness are in his place.

HEBREWS 12:2; fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 205). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Following the examples of Jesus and Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), Richard encourages us to inclusive compassion: 

Francis, like Jesus, refused to exclude things from the garden of grace; there is no exclusionary instinct in either of them—except toward exclusion itself! Francis had a genius for not eliminating the negative, but instead using it, learning from it, and thus incorporating it. He goes to the edge and the bottom of society, he kisses the leper, he loves the poor. He doesn’t hide from his shadow self but advertises it. So much of our religion has taught us to deny or hide our shadow, which forces us into a fatal split from foundational reality.  

Just as we grow by ultimately accepting and forgiving our own failures, conscious people, like Jesus and Pope Francis, are able to say about others, “Who am I to judge?” (Luke 12:14). That’s quite the opposite of religion as exclusion! In my fourteen years as a jail chaplain, I met people who had done things that are wrong, sinful, immoral, or “bad”; yet when I drew close to a particular life, I found that the human heart is most often either sincere, mistaken, or afraid. From that place, they sought apparent good but not the true good. It made them do some stupid things; they’re suffering for that now because evil is its own punishment. But when we draw close to it, the human heart has a kind of tenderness, sweetness, and littleness, even in its fragility and fear. As Scottish minister John Watson (1850–1907) stated, “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.” [1] Remember, sisters and brothers, Jesus is really saying that we are punished by our sins rather than for our sins. None of us know the wounds that every human being carries or why they do the things they do. Human sin, failure, and imperfection are to be wept over and pitied, not something to be abhorred. [2] 

Franciscan spirituality puts a big exclamation point behind Jesus’ words, “The last will be first and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16; Luke 13:30) and Paul’s words, “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). Upside-downness is at the heart of our message, always prompting us to look more deeply and broadly at things. This opens our eyes to recognize God’s self-giving at the far edges where most of us cannot or will not see God, such as in other religions, in any we define as outsiders or sinners, and even to the farthest edge of our seeing, toward those who fight us and oppose us—our so-called enemies.  

We must grow up to our full stature to find the full stature of God (Ephesians 4:13). Small souls are incapable of knowing a great God, and great souls are never satisfied with a small or stingy God. Once we become fully conscious ourselves, all things will be beautiful. [3] 

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Sarah Young Jesus Listens

My perfect Guide, You are my Shepherd who guides and shields me. You’re the perfect Shepherd, and Your care for me is wonderfully complete: You love me with endless, unfailing Love. You know everything about me—my weaknesses and limitations, my struggles and sins, my strengths and abilities. So You are able to shepherd me like no other! Help me walk through this perilous world in trusting dependence on You. I know that You go before me and open up the way, carefully preparing the path I will follow. I’m counting on You to remove many dangers and obstacles from the road ahead—and to provide all I need for coping with the difficulties that remain. Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for You are close beside me. Your nearness comforts and delights me. As I stay in communication with You, I trust You to guide me faithfully through this day—and all my days. For You are my God forever and ever; You will be my Guide even to the end. In Your comforting Name, Jesus, Amen

PSALM 23:1 AMPC; The Lord is my Shepherd [to feed, guide, and shield me], I shall not lack.

EXODUS 15:13; In your unfailing love you will lead. the people you have redeemed. In your strength you will guide them. to your holy dwelling. 

PSALM 23:4 NLT; Even when I walk through the darkest valley,* I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.

PSALM 48:14; For this God is our God forever and ever; He will be our guide even till death.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 204). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

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Darkness into light
Light leads into life
Life breathed into man
And to man He gave a wife
But not a savior 'til
A cross became The Cross

Evil turned to rain
The rain became a flood
Flood became a promise
In the colors up above
For a savior when
A cross became The Cross

From suffering and death came resurrection
His own sacrifice to my salvation
Life on Earth gives way to life eternal
So we sing hallelujah

Virgin to a mom
A babe became the Christ
Christ became the King
Of my heart and of my life
He's my Savior 'cause
A cross became The Cross

The lame began to walk
The blind began to see
Lazarus is alive and
Jesus lives inside of me
As my Savior since
A cross became The Cross

From suffering and death came resurrection
His own sacrifice to my salvation
Life on Earth gives way to life eternal
So we sing hallelujah

A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross

A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross

Water turned to wine
Wine becomes the blood
Blood poured out for me
And now I am in love

Water turned to wine
Wine becomes the blood
Blood poured out for me
And now I am in love

With my Savior 'cause
A cross became The Cross
I'm in love with my Savior 'cause
A cross became The Cross

God Is Found in All Things

Father Richard finds the foundation for his teaching that everything belongs in the crucifixion itself:  

The cross is a perfect metaphor for what we mean by “everything belongs.” The rational, calculating mind can never fully understand the mystery of the cross. These insights can only be discovered through contemplative seeing: God is to be found in all things, even and most especially in the painful, tragic, and sinful things, exactly where we do not want to look for God. The crucifixion of the God-Human is at the same moment the worst and best thing in human history. 

Human existence is neither perfectly consistent, nor is it incoherent chaos. Instead, life has a cruciform pattern. All of life is a “coincidence of opposites” (St. Bonaventure), a collision of cross-purposes. We are all filled with contradictions needing to be reconciled. This is the precise burden and tug of all human existence. 

The price that we pay for holding together these opposites is invariably some form of “crucifixion.” Jesus himself was archetypally hung between a good thief and a bad thief, between heaven and earth, holding together both his humanity and his divinity, a male body with a feminine soul. He was a Jewish believer who forgave and loved everyone else. He “reconciled all things in himself” (Ephesians 2:14–16). Jesus really is an icon of what Carl Jung called the holy and whole-making spirit. [1] 

The demand for the perfect is the enemy of the possible good. Be peace and do justice, but let’s not expect perfection in ourselves or the world. Perfectionism contributes to intolerance and judgmentalism and makes ordinary love largely impossible. Jesus was an absolute realist, patient with the ordinary, the broken, the weak, and those who failed. Following him is not a “salvation scheme” or a means of creating some ideal social order as much as it is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world, and to love the way that God loves—which we cannot do by ourselves. 

The doctrine, folly, and image of the cross is the great clarifier and truth-speaker for all human history. We can rightly speak of being “saved” by it. Jesus crucified and resurrected is the whole pattern revealed, named, effected, and promised. Jesus did not come to found a separate or new religion as much as he came to present a universal message of vulnerability and foundational unity that is necessary for all religions, the human soul, and history itself to survive. Thus, Christians can rightly call Jesus “the savior of the world” (John 4:42), but no longer in the competitive and imperialistic way that they have usually presented him. By very definition, vulnerability and unity do not compete or dominate. The cosmic Christ is no threat to anything but separateness, illusion, domination, and the imperial ego.  

[54] Christ’s Disregards

The Lord cared neither for isolated truth nor for orphaned deed. It was truth in the inward parts, it was the good heart, the mother of good deeds, He cherished…. It was good men He cared about, not notions of good things, or even good actions, save as the outcome of life, save as the bodies in which the primary live actions of love and will in the soul took shape and came forth.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 29-30). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.