Today I pause Cynthia Bourgeault’s reflections and offer
a few words about the essential role of contemplation in the lives of honest
spiritual seekers like Thomas Keating and Cynthia herself.
To
many people, contemplation is an old-fashioned word, but it simply means the deliberate seeking of God by an inner dialogue. The soul grows closer to
God through our willingness to detach from the passing self, the tyranny of
feelings, the addiction to self-image, and the false promises of culture. It is
a journey into the nothingness of true faith, where the ordinary rules of
thinking, managing, explaining, and fixing up the smaller self do not apply.
Contemplation shouldn’t be used to spiritually bypass what is real, harmful, or
unjust in our lives or the world around us. However, with steady practice it
will eventually give us the ability to
stay present to what is, and meet it with wisdom, compassion, and courage. All the major world
religions at their more mature stages recognize the necessity of contemplative
practice in some form and under different names.
I’m
not sure that most people in the Western world have ever really met the person
who they themselves really are. Most of us have lived our lives with a steady
stream of ideas, images, and feelings that we cling to—thinking they are our
very essence. But in reality, at that level, I don’t have the idea; the idea has me. I don’t have the
feeling; the feeling has me. We have to
discover who this “I” really is. Who are we at the deepest level—behind our
thoughts and feelings or others’ thoughts and feelings about us?
At
every moment, all our life long, we identify ourselves either with our
thoughts, our self-image, or our feelings. We have to find a way to get beyond
those things to discover our “original face,” the one we already had before we
were born. Even with great practice, most of us will only glimpse or abide in
our True Self for moments at a time while we are alive. Mystics seem to finally
and fully abide there, which I hope encourages us to keep going.
We yearn for
“breach menders” who can “restore our ruined houses,” as Isaiah says (58:12).
We long for great-souled people who can hold the chaos together within
themselves—and give us the courage to do the same. I pray all of us know such
people in our lives and that we be granted such people on the world stage. And
I am confident such people have gone before and paved the way for us—the
mystics and saints of all genders, cultures, and faith traditions, those both
known and unknown.
But now he is fading, fading. And I am alone . . .
—Thomas Keating, “Loneliness in the Night”
I don’t think anyone can get to my (Richard’s) age without deeply empathizing with the sense of loss and grief—personal and spiritual—that Thomas Keating articulates in this poem. Cynthia Bourgeault does an excellent job of describing the spiritual dark nights that both Thomas and John of the Cross (1542–1591) put so beautifully into poetry. Cynthia writes:
The sense of joyful, flowing oneness that so marks the final years of Thomas Keating’s life didn’t “just happen.” For most of us—including for Thomas himself—it comes at the end of a painful season of stripping and purification that has classically been called “the Dark Night of the Spirit.”
The name itself comes from the 16th-century Carmelite mystic St. John of the Cross, who up until this point has been the unquestioned authority on this excruciating passage. In this series of poems, Thomas Keating presses boldly into this forbidding terrain.
John’s classic spiritual roadmap actually specifies two dark nights. The first, called “the Dark Night of Sense,” typically comes fairly early in the journey. John saw its purpose chiefly as strengthening our capacity to endure temptation and weaning us from our dependency on spiritual consolations (the sweetness and even sensuous pleasure that often accompanies those early days of conversion). In Thomas’ contemporary psychological rendition, this first dark night relentlessly exposes our “emotional programs for happiness,” the hidden agendas and compensatory needs that drive our “false self system.” It thus accomplishes the first stage in the dismantling of the false self.
The second dark night comes much later in the journey and entails a much more radical and painful stripping that cuts to the very roots of the “false self system,” overturning the fundamental psychological and neurological hardwiring that drives the illusion of a separate selfhood. Its painful cost is that everything goes dark—“for the duration”—as we become increasingly unable to steer by the old binary operating system in our brains that always wound up turning God into an object (albeit a holy object) and in fact prioritized our experience of God over direct, unmediated union. Until the new operating system fills in, we are rather helpless, like chickens in molt, unable either to fly or lay eggs.
Believe it or not, this poem comes from a time far earlier in Thomas’ life. He once joked to me that he hadn’t written a poem since grade school. This is the poem! Even then, he was able to name the experience of the loss of tangible presence and withstand his solitude.
Something at first so concretely, robustly present is suddenly “fading, fading.” The substantial becomes insubstantial, presence fades to absence, and loneliness and longing dominate the emotional color palette. He is already intuiting, even as a young teenager, that the release from the loneliness and longing will not come from fulfillment of the original desire, but rather, through a mysterious inner alchemy that draws apparent opposites into an inner symbiotic unity. These are indeed the classic dark night waypoints, which Thomas returns to again and again—fundamental insights first glimpsed when he was still hardly more than a child.
Story from Our Community: As I read today’s message [on Celtic Spirituality], I was transported back in time and distance to the cliffs of Tintagel [England], where I stood many years ago, looking westward. . . Reading today’s offering, I wept—it was so familiar and I haven’t heard it in so long! Reclaiming my role as a mystic, at 82, after a lifetime of “being in the world” with what that involves, I’ve always been drawn to the spiritual dimension of life. Now thanks to the most recent CAC meditations, I am closer to Home than I’ve ever been before in this lifetime. —Sarah K.
Before being
born into the world of time,
The silence of pre-existence
was all absorbing.
The transition
from eternity to time
Is full of sufferings, fears,
and little deaths.
But, in the
transition from death
To eternal life,
The silence of
pre-existence
Bursts into boundless joy.
All that can be
manifested emerges
From the endless creativity of
That Which Is.
But
The Secret Embrace
Of
The Source of all creation
With
Infinite Transcendence
Can
Never be revealed.
—Thomas Keating, “The Secret Embrace”
Today we include
the title poem, “The
Secret Embrace,” in its
entirety. Cynthia Bourgeault comments on one aspect of it in particular:
It
is remarkable to trace how Thomas’ understanding of God evolved over the last
three decades of his life. In the 1980s, when his first books and videos were
beginning to appear, God was still very much framed within the classic Western
model with God as “he”—a father figure. Thomas’ initial focus during the early
years of his teaching was to shift that image away from a fearsome father, the
wrathful God who has caused so much misery and woundedness for Western seekers,
to a “divine therapist”: supportive, trustworthy, and a hundred percent behind
us in our journey of transformation.
But
by the end of his life, Thomas is in a very different place. God co-inheres and
interpenetrates everything, the ocean-in-drop and drop-in-ocean, constantly
exchanging in a dance of endless fecundity. God is not the “author” of
creation, removed and overarching; the whole thing is God. There is not a
single place in all creation where God is not, because God is creation itself,
endlessly outpouring, endlessly receiving itself back. From top to bottom, we
live and move and have our being in a participative reality, every fractal
joined to every other fractal in a symphony of divine becoming pouring forth
from that infinite wellspring.
In
fact, with one singular exception, Thomas does not actually use the word “God”
in this entire collection of poems. It is always “the Divine,” “I AM,” or “the
Source.” He clearly did not want what he was trying to say here co-opted back
into conceptions of a distant, male-gendered Being sitting up there in the
heavens. He wanted us to keep our eyes on the big picture.
But
more important, he wanted us to swim in the ocean.
Some may say
that Thomas took a turn late in life toward a more “Buddhist” approach to
divinity, but I believe this is not really accurate. We are not talking about a
theology here, but a level of consciousness, universal across all the religions
and accessed primarily through the consistent practice of meditation. To see
oneness, it is necessary to see from oneness, with the eye of the heart, not the
binary skew of the mind. From his decades and decades of faithful Centering
Prayer, along with some very courageous and painful inner work, the rewiring of
brain and heart that supports this seeing was gradually accomplished within
him. These poems are its joyful fruit. They are tiny cameos of what non-duality
looks like when approached from a uniquely Western and Christian perspective.
One of Thomas Keating’s greatest legacies will surely be his development and teaching of Centering Prayer, a Christian form of silent meditation. It has been my (Richard’s) preferred method of prayer for decades and I recommend it to anyone seeking to enter more deeply into the mystery of God. In today’s meditation, Cynthia Bourgeault explores a profound teaching on silence found within Keating’s poem “Out of a Stone,” excerpted above.
A theme that continues in all the poems contained in The Secret Embrace is that silence is not absence, but presence. It is a “something,” not a nothing. It has substantiality, heft, force. You can lean into it, and it leans back. It meets you; it holds you up.
That’s hardly how it’s understood in our culture at large, of course, where silence is typically seen as “vacant space,” waiting to be filled up with content. We try to cram every “empty” moment full. Even when we begin a meditation practice, this preference for content remains, and we will often approach silence as a kind of inner desert, a place of inner uncovering, which we enter to hear “messages from God.” It’s the messages that most grab us at the start; we’re all ears for whatever new insight emerges out of the silence.
Gradually, as we progress in Centering Prayer—or in any meditation practice, for that matter—we begin to reorient. Centering Prayer’s instructions to let go of all thoughts, regardless of content, directs us back to the silence itself, and we gradually learn the shape of the new terrain. As we stop grabbing for content, we gradually discover that silence does indeed have depth, presence, shape, even sound. As we mature in Centering Prayer, the perception that the emptiness is in fact the presence becomes more and more palpable. Thomas Keating encourages us that this “sound of silence” keeps right on growing. By his own later stage in the journey, it has become “thunderous.”
In fact—says Thomas—this “thunderous” silence is actually the most intense, concentrated “dosage” of divine presence we can bear face-to-face. In a paradoxical way, the dance of creation, beautiful and enchanting as it is, is like a veil over the face of the naked presence of God—like the veil that hides the Holy of Holies in the temple. These two faces of God—veiled and unveiled—live in symbiotic unity, and out of that unity everything pours into existence in a cascade of sheer delight.
For Thomas, creativity is “the diffuse shining of God” (to borrow a striking image from that other celebrated contemporary Thomas, Thomas Merton). [1] It’s what allows us to know our Creator not only in the “thunderous” silence of [God’s] direct presence, but in the dance of life itself. Either or both ways are fine, for they spill unceasingly into one another. From this “veiled embrace” between pure silence and joyful creativity at the very heart of all creation, flows life in all its beauty, goodness, fluidity, and magical wonder.
Can the Creator of all lure poetry
out of a stone?
Or cause a stirring of Divine Love in a human heart?
All is possible for the Creator of all,
Who loves to manifest the impossible
In endless configurations.
—Thomas Keating, “Out of a
Stone”
Cynthia
Bourgeault was a close friend and colleague of Father Thomas Keating. Over the
past year, she has devoted much time to studying and praying with the eight
poems offered in The
Secret Embrace. She calls this
volume of poetry written in the last months of his life “his final gift to the
world.” Today Cynthia describes why she believes the poems are so important:
First,
these poems offer an intimate window into the last stage of Thomas’ own
spiritual journey, as he emerged fully into what he liked to call “unity
consciousness.” Others might call it “non-dual realization,” “the unitive
state,” or oneness. Basically, it means seeing the world as whole, seamlessly
interwoven, dynamic, coherent, radiant, precious, creative, and compassionate;
knowing yourself as belonging to and suffused in this oneness. This state is well
known in all the great spiritual traditions, and he stands on the shoulders of
John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Genoa, and others. Thomas’
version gives us a beautiful glimpse of non-dual realization shimmering through
a contemporary Western lens.
Second,
and more movingly, he allows us to glimpse the costly road that must be
travelled in order to arrive at this state. It does not fall like a ripe fruit
from a tree or open itself like a lotus blossom. It comes at the end of a
fierce struggle, a journey of deepening self-knowledge brought through
deepening dying to self. In Christian teaching, this final passage has
traditionally been known as “the Dark Night of the Spirit,” and it is a
wilderness journey indeed, overturning not only most of our familiar reference
points, but even the structures of consciousness through which they are
maintained. “Dying to self” proves itself to be something like an onion skin,
peeled back to reveal still further layers of dying—until finally there is nothing
left except the All.
Many
of us on the Centering Prayer path know a fair bit about that first layer of
peeling back the onion—the dying to false self, perhaps courtesy of Thomas
himself. His early and most influential teaching was all about “dismantling the
false self.” But what is the false self? As Thomas voyaged bravely through his
last three decades of life, his answer to this riddle shifted steadily toward
the non-dual.
Third and
finally, Thomas draws on the metaphor of journeying into the unknown, which has
pressing relevance for our own world just now. In this season of planetary
upheaval, Thomas’ courageous spiritual work has deep wisdom to offer us as we
begin to wrap our collective hearts around what is required next. However far
any one of us is destined to travel on this wilderness journey, learning to
lean into the diminishment, to live with paradox and unknowing, and to
celebrate the creativity without dissociating from the pain are all vital
survival skills as we humans collectively feel our way into the new beginning.
Thomas Keating: The Secret Embrace Part One
A
Christian Contemplative
Sunday, October 18, 2020
I first met Father Thomas Keating (1923–2018) in 2002
when he came to Albuquerque to speak at a conference on Centering Prayer [1]
with me. I knew of his work and of Contemplative Outreach, the organization he
had founded, but our paths had never crossed. As a Trappist monk, Keating had a
life more circumscribed than my own as a friar. While Franciscans are called to
be “in the world,” the Benedictines, Trappists, and other cloistered orders
have vowed to be “not of it.” Our emphases balanced one another; Thomas was
more inclined to “contemplation” while I gravitate, by temperament, more toward
“action.” As the name of the Center for Action and Contemplation implies, both
of our vocations are integral parts of the Christian contemplative tradition.
I
had the pleasure of going to St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado for
retreat a few times, even in the last years of Thomas’ life. Each time I was
impressed with his deep spirituality and his commitment to living “on the edge
of the inside” of his own tradition within the Catholic Church. His passion for
sharing the practice of contemplative prayer with a wider audience of
Christians was truly admirable. He knew what was his to do and he did it,
despite the criticism that he must have received from many of his peers who
were more used to their quiet, secluded existence.
Thomas
Keating made his religious vows well before Vatican II, a full generation
before I did. I believe he showed great courage in heeding the call of the
Second Vatican Council, “opening the windows” of the monastery, and offering
Centering Prayer to the world. Prior to that, contemplative prayer was the
exclusive “gift” of the monastic orders, and some may have preferred to keep it
that way. He made the ancient practice of contemplation an accessible,
relevant, and transformative method of prayer for thousands of Christians by
using everyday language and his own brand of humor. At the same time, he also
validated the practice with modern believers by integrating modern psychology
and the teachings of the 12-Step Programs.
For the next two
weeks, guided by the wise mind and open heart of CAC faculty member Cynthia
Bourgeault, the Daily Meditations will focus on Father Thomas Keating’s final
publication, The Secret
Embrace, a short
collection of poems written and gathered almost entirely in the last few months
of his life. Thomas was a longtime teacher, colleague, and friend to Cynthia;
her insights and skill will help us understand the deeply spiritual and deeply
human themes of these poems and the contemplative journey itself.
Corporate
Evil and Corporate Good
Friday, October 16, 2020
Both Jesus and Paul radically reframe the human situation
and invite us to live a vulnerable human life in communal solidarity with both
sin and salvation.
Neither sin nor salvation
could ever be exclusively mine, but both of
them are collectively ours!
Universal solidarity is the
important lesson, not private salvation.
We all hold responsibility
for all instead of blaming one or the other.
Human solidarity is the
goal, not “my” moral superiority or perfection.
I
know that does not, at first, feel like a strategy for successful living, and
it is certainly not one that will ever appeal to the upwardly mobile or the
pure idealists. It first feels like capitulation, but that is not Jesus’ or
Paul’s intention at all—quite the opposite. Paul believes he has found a new
kind of victory and freedom. He himself calls it “folly” or “foolishness” (1
Corinthians 1:21, 25, 27; 4:10), as it is for most people to this day. He often
calls it a “hidden mystery” that only the wise discover. Paul believes there is
a hidden, cruciform shape to reality, even revealed in the geometry of the
cross (see Ephesians 2:13–22). The world is filled with contradictions, false
alternatives, zero-sum games, paradoxes, and unresolvable evils. It is
foundationally unjust, yet we must work for justice in order to find our own
freedom and create it for others.
Paul
is an utter realist about life on this planet. We must fully recognize and
surrender to this foundational reality before we try to think we can repair the
world (tikkun olam in Hebrew) with freedom and
love. For Paul, his insight is symbolized in the scandalous image of a man on
the cross, the Crucified God who fully accepts and transforms this tragic human
situation through love. If this is the reality to which even God must submit,
then surely we must and can do the same.
By
giving ourselves to this primary human absurdity, which shows itself in
patience, love, and forgiveness toward all things, we find a positive and
faith-filled way through “the world, the flesh, and the devil.” This is not by
really resolving it or thinking we can ever fully change it, but by recognizing
that we are all complicit in this mixed moral universe. This is perhaps the
humility that Christians need in their campaigns for social reform. This is “carrying
the cross” with Jesus.
Humans
often end up doing evil by thinking they can and must eliminate all evil,
instead of holding it, suffering it themselves, and learning from it, as Jesus
does on the cross. This ironically gives us the active compassion we need to
work for social change. My acceptance of a cruciform world mirrors my ability
to accept a cruciform me.
God has created
a world where there is no technique or magical method for purity or perfection.
Forgiving love is the only way out and the only final answer is God’s infinite
Love and our ability to endlessly draw upon it.
Jesus does not directly attack the religious and institutional sin systems of his time until his final action against the money changers in the temple (see Matthew 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–17; Luke 19:45–46). Because of this, Jesus’ primary social justice critique and action are often a disappointment to most radicals and social activists. Jesus’ social program, as far as I can see, is a quiet refusal to participate in almost all external power structures or domination systems. His primary action is a very simple lifestyle, which kept him from being constantly co-opted by those very structures, which I (and Paul) would call the “sin system.”
Jesus seems to have avoided the monetary system as much as possible by using “a common purse” (John 12:6; 13:29). His three-year ministry, in effect, offers free healing and healthcare for any who want them. He consistently treats women with a dignity and equality that is almost unknown in an entirely patriarchal culture. At the end of his life, he surrenders to the punitive systems of both empire and religion by letting them judge, torture, and murder him. He is finally a full victim of the systems that he refused to worship.
Jesus knew the destructive power of what Walter Wink wisely called the “domination system.” [2] These systems usually wield power over the poor, the defenseless, and the outsider in every culture. When he does take on the temple system directly (Mark 11:15–18), Jesus is killed within a week. Contrary to history’s interpretation of Jesus’ practice, he did not concentrate on personal, “flesh” sins nearly as much as the sins of “the world” and “the devil,” but few of us were taught to see him that way.
In fact, Jesus is always forgiving individual sinners, which was a problem for the righteous from the beginning (Luke 7:34). In contrast, I do not once see him “forgiving” the sins of systems and empires. Instead, he just makes them show themselves (Mark 5:8) and name themselves (Mark 5:9)—as did Desmond Tutu in South Africa and Martin Luther King, Jr. in America.
Significantly, Jesus says “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!” (Matthew 11:21) and “Alas for you [cultures of the] lawyers, scribes, and Pharisees” (most of Matthew 23 and Luke 11:37‒54). He didn’t warn Bill from Bethsaida, Cathy from Chorazin, or Simon the Pharisee, with whom he engages and eats (Luke 7:36–47). He laments over “Jerusalem, Jerusalem” (Luke 13:34‒35) instead of attacking Jerry from Jerusalem. Today we would call that making an “unfair generalization”; but if what I am saying here has any truth to it, maybe it is a much more truthful and fair diagnosis of the problem. It is Bethsaida and Jerusalem that should fear judgment more than Bill and Jerry! It is “Capernaum” that is to be cast into hell (Matthew 11:23), not necessarily Corey from Capernaum. How did we miss that? It is crucial in our understanding of evil as being, first of all, a social agreement.
The world (or “system” as we use the word now) is a hiding place for unconsciousness or “deadness” in the words of Paul. Both Thomas Aquinas and C. S. Lewis taught that the triumph of evil depends entirely on disguise. [1] [2] Our egos must see it as some form of goodness and virtue so that we can buy into it.
If evil depends on a “good” disguise, cultural virtue and religion are the very best covers of all. The leaders of both religion and empire colluded in the killing of Jesus (Matthew 27:1–2). In Luke’s Gospel, Herod and Pilate just passed him back and forth and affirmed whatever the other one said (Luke 23:12). Christians were forewarned that the highest levels of power can and probably will be co-opted by evil.
Is there a culture in this world that does not operate out of this recipe for delusion? This is what Paul means when he names “the world,” or what I call “the system,” as one of the sources of evil. What Paul already recognized, at least intuitively, is that it is almost impossible for any social grouping to be corporately or consistently selfless. It has to maintain and promote itself first at virtually any cost—sacrificing even its own stated ethics and morality. If we cannot see this, it might reveal the depth of the disguise of institutionalized evil.
Consider the religious rationale for the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which justified the conquest of the Americas and the African slave-trade. Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah write:
The doctrine [of Discovery] emerged from a series of fifteenth-century papal bulls, which are official decrees by the pope that carry the full weight of his ecclesial office. . . . On May 4, 1493, the year after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Inter Caetera . . . and offered a spiritual validation for European conquest, “that in our times especially the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread. . . .” It gave theological permission for the European body and mind to view themselves as superior to the non-European bodies and minds. The doctrine created . . . an identity for African bodies as inferior and only worthy of subjugation; it also relegated the identity of the original inhabitants of the land “discovered” to become outsiders, now unwelcome in their own land. [3]
Evil finds its almost perfect camouflage in the silent agreements of the group when it appears personally advantageous. Such unconscious “deadness,” will continue to show itself in every age, I believe. This is why I can’t throw the word “sin” out entirely. If we do not see the true shape of evil or recognize how we are fully complicit in it, it will fully control us, while not looking the least like sin. Would “agreed-upon delusion” be a better description? We cannot recognize it or overcome it as isolated individuals, mostly because it is held together by the group consensus.
Story from Our Community: As Covid continued to shut everything down this Spring, I became increasingly closed off from my “normal” spiritual practices. . . These daily meditations have been a life-line for me during this period where a conflagration of world and national events have left many of us struggling. My morning practice [now] involves lighting incense, reading Richard Rohr’s words of wisdom, praying with him and then heading to my Zabutan [cushion] for a brief meditation-session. —Maia B.
One reason we lost interest in the concept of sin is
because we usually heard it being used to judge, shame, exclude, or control
others or ourselves. Seldom was the concept of sin used to bring discernment or
deeper understanding, much less compassion or forgiveness, to the human
situation. My conviction is that sin became a less useful idea for many of us
because we needed to
move around in a different field to regain our notion of the deadly nature of
true evil. If we are
honest and perceptive, we surely see that actual evil often seems to “dominate
the very air” and is much more the norm than the exception.
I’m
convinced the apostle Paul’s teaching about the nature of sin reveals his
spiritual genius. For him, sin is not primarily individual fault, but the
negative matrix out of which both evil and enlightenment
arise. Paul (or the school of Paul) wrote in Ephesians: “You were dead through
the crimes and sins that used to make up your way of life, when you were living
by the principles of this world, thus obeying the ruler who dominates the very
air” (2:1‒2). This compact sentence seems to be pointing to at
least three sources of evil, which would eventually be called the flesh, the
world, and the devil in early Catholic moral theology:
1) The Flesh: “the crimes and
sins that used to make up your way of life” (our personal participation in an
already criminal and sinful culture);
2) The World: “living by the
principles of this world” (since most cultures are based on false or
superficial agreements about value, dignity, and success). By world, Paul is
not referring to creation or nature, but rather what we might call the system;
3) The Devil: “the ruler who
dominates the very air” (the illusions and deceits which so totally control the
field of consciousness that most of us cannot see them; it is the very air we
breathe).
Up to now, most
Christians have placed almost all of our attention on the level of the “flesh,”
policing sexuality and various “unclean” acts rather than addressing the more
serious and pervasive forms of corporate injustice and evil. We have had almost
no education in or recognition of what Paul meant by “the principles of the
world” and even less on what he meant by “the ruler who dominates the very
air.” When we imagine the devil as a caricature of a red, horned figure, we are
not taking evil seriously. The implications have been massive, blinding, and
hugely destructive, both for the individual and for society.
What Do We Do with Evil?
The
Nature of Evil
Sunday, October 11, 2020
Over the years, it has become increasingly clear to me
that we are confused about the nature of evil. We don’t seem to understand what
evil is, how it operates, or what we can do, personally or collectively, to
reduce its power over us and its impact on our world. We really must face these
questions, even if they are difficult and unpleasant to think about. Our
planet’s life-sustaining systems are disintegrating. Authoritarianism is
emerging all over the world. Since the pandemic began, the physical and mental
health of millions has been deteriorating. Evil is clearly at work in our
world, but what can we do about it?
I
do not pretend to have the answers to such a big question, but what I can offer
is the wisdom of the Christian tradition. For the first thousand years of
Catholic Christianity, it was assumed that there were three sources of evil:
the world, the flesh, and the devil. I will unpack the meaning of these three
sources of evil this week.
Over
centuries, we became very used to equating evil with individual “sins” and we
lost a sense of its collective nature. The word “sin” often serves as a label
applied to various cultural taboos and expectations, frequently having to do
with purity codes. That seems very different from the real evils destroying the
world! Of course, moral development and impulse control are important
individual disciplines, but the conflation of personal sin with the source of
evil is a terrible misunderstanding which has led to tragic consequences.
Perhaps so many of us stopped using the word “sin” because we located it inside
of our own small, cultural categories, with little awareness of the true
subtlety, depth, and importance of the much more devious concept.
When
small, easily forgivable transgressions are labeled “sins” and equated with
evil, we trivialize the very real notion of evil and divert our attention from
the real thing. Before it becomes personal and shameable, evil is often
culturally agreed-upon, admired, and deemed necessary.The apostle Paul already had
the prescient genius to recognize this, and I believe he taught that both sin and salvation are, first of all, corporate and
social realities.
In fact, this recognition could and should be acknowledged as one of his major
contributions to history. I believe it still will be.
We
largely missed that essential point, and thus found ourselves in the tight grip
of monstrous social evils in Christian nations, all the way down to the modern
era. Thus we also lost out on the benefit of a corporate notion of salvation
that far exceeded anyone’s individual worthiness or unworthiness.
We are all
guilty with one another’s sin and not just our own.
We are all good
with one another’s goodness and not just our own.
The
Soft Prophecy of Francis
Friday, October 9, 2020
At its core, Franciscan prophecy is “soft prophecy”—which
is often the hardest of all! It is a way of life that is counter to the ways of
the world. I personally have found that few of us can offer “hard
prophecy”—direct and challenging words—from a truly clean heart and humble
spirit. “Hard prophecy” often has more to do with our own self-image as strong,
smart, zealous, or committed than with actual service or caring for others. The
present culture of angry partisan politics that exists on both the Left and the
Right is far more effective at making us feel morally superior than it is at
changing anyone’s mind. We should first seek to “clean the inside of our own
dish,” as Matthew puts it (23:26), before we try to clean other people’s
dishes, but that is less visible or heroic and, therefore, less common.
The
Franciscan teaching of soft prophecy became a primary reason why we founded the
Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987. The teaching and seeking of the
nondual mind through solid contemplative practice seems to be the only
effective way to integrate the inner with the outer journey. The result is
summed up in one of our eight core principles: “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the
better.” [1] This approach guards against the most common
criticisms of religion in general and social-justice work in particular, which,
frankly, has tended to produce many negative, oppositional, and judgmental
people. It has given Christianity a very bad name in much of the world, and
seldom looks or feels like love. Integral Theory calls such people on the Left
“mean greens”!
Soft
prophecy, a change in lifestyle, moves all religion from any kind of elitism to
the most egalitarian worldview of all. The broadest and biggest viewpoint
possible is the harmony of
goodness itself, where goodness is its own inherent reward. This is always beautiful
in people and yet also demands a basic change in attitude. For some reason,
“doing charity” to get a reward later became much more common among Christians.
Such service and “good works,” however, are often not so beautiful or healing
for those who receive it.
We
lost our unique and prophetic way when we turned Brother Francis into “Saint
Francis.” It was no longer considered “foolish” to say that we followed either
Jesus or Francis and were living on the “edge of the inside.” In fact, it
became fashionable, tame, sweet, and safe to do so. A truly prophetic lifestyle
is never fashionable or safe.
That is why we
must move to the laboratory where all such radical change can occur—inside of
our very mind, heart, and the cells of our body. I call it the laboratory of
contemplative practice, which rewires our inner life and actually confirms in
the soul a kind of “emotional sobriety.” [2] It gives us an inner sense of
divine union so we can do the needed works of justice with peace, enduring
passion, and insofar as possible, personal invisibility.
This CO2- (Church Of 2) is where two guys meet each day to tighten up our Connections with Jesus. We start by placing the daily “My Utmost For His Highest” in this WordPress blog. Then we prayerfully select some matching worship music and usually pick out a few lyrics that fit especially well. Then we just start praying and editing and Bolding and adding comments and see where the Spirit takes us.
It’s been a blessing for both of us.
If you’d like to start a CO2, we’d be glad to help you and your partner get started. Also click the link below to see how others are doing CO2.Odds Monkey
Steve Harvey Introduces Jesus To A Secular Audience
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