Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Prophets, by their very nature, cannot be at the center of any social structure. Rather, they are “on the edge of the inside.” They cannot be full insiders, but they cannot throw rocks from outside either. A true prophet must be educated inside the system, knowing and living the rules, before they can critique what is non-essential or not so important. Jesus did this masterfully (see Matthew 5:17-48). This is what Martin Luther King, Jr. taught the United States, what Gandhi taught British-occupied India, and what Nelson Mandela taught apartheid South Africa.

Only with great respect for and understanding of the rules can a prophet know how to properly break those very same rules—for the sake of a greater purpose and value. A prophet critiques a system by quoting its own documents, constitutions, heroes, and Scriptures against its present practice. This is their secret: systems are best unlocked from inside, and not by negative or angry people.

Holding the tension of opposites is the necessary education of the prophet, yet Christianity has given little energy to what Paul says is the second most important charism for building the church (1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 4:11). Prophets must be skilled in nondual thinking, but churches have primarily trained people in the simplistic choosing of one idealized alternative while denigrating the other. This has gotten us nowhere.

After Christianity became the established religion of the Empire in the fourth century, the priestly mentality pretty much took over in both East and West, and prophets almost disappeared. When the Church held so much power, prophets were too threatening to the status quo. The clergy were at the top of the hierarchy in the full company of their patrons—kings and princes—and even began to dress like them. Emperors convened and presided over the first seven Councils of the Church. What does this tell us?

For the next 1700 or so years, most of the preaching and interpretation of Scripture was from the perspective of power, from primarily European, educated, quite comfortable, and presumably celibate males. I am one myself, and we are not all bad. But we are not all—by a long shot! Where are the voices of women, people of color, LGBTQ folk, the poor, and differently abled? How would they read the Gospel? Without these voices included, even central, I see little future for Christianity.

My spiritual father, St. Francis of Assisi, saw this problem in the thirteenth century and called people to live on the edge—of the Church, of the dominant economy which always protects the top, of patriarchy, of the “system”—through universal solidarity and chosen simplicity. Pope Francis is evoking the same Gospel spirit, and I pray for his success and protection. What a surprise that the ultimate establishment figure took the name of such a radical saint. It shocked the world because we do not expect prophecy from popes. There is hope!

Prophets: Part Two

Liberation
Monday July 8, 2019

A prophet is one who keeps God free for people and who keeps people free for God. Both of these are much needed and vital tasks. Without the educated gift of prophecy, God almost always becomes imprisoned and made inaccessible, and far too many people have been shamed and taught guilt to keep us clergy in business. We saw our job as “sin management.”  That is not just being clever. I believe we religious leaders actually thought that. Sadly, the laity fully bought into this negative story line. That is what happens when priests are not informed by prophets.

The priestly class invariably makes God less accessible instead of more so, “neither entering yourselves nor letting others enter in,” as Jesus says (Matthew 23:13). For the sake of our own job security, the priestly message is often: “You can only come to God through us, by doing the right rituals, obeying the rules, and believing the right doctrines.” This is like telling God who God is allowed to love! The clergy and religious leaders, unintentionally perhaps, teach their disciples “learned helplessness.”

The prophets spend much of their time destroying and dismissing these barriers and trying to create “a straight highway to God” (Matthew 3:3). Both John the Baptist and Jesus tried to free God for the people, and it got them killed. The other half of the prophet’s job is to keep people free for God. We get trapped in chains of guilt and legalism, focusing on our imperfect church attendance and inability to live up to the law’s standard; as if the goal of religion is “attendance” at an occasional ritual instead of constant participation in an Eternal Mystery! Prophets turn our ideas of success and belonging on their head, emphasizing God’s unconditional and unmerited love in response to our continual shortcomings. God is always breaking the approved “rules of God” by forgiving sinners, choosing the outsider or the weak, and showing up in secular places. Please check the Bible if you doubt me!

Our job is to love others the way God has loved us. In my life, I’ve experienced God’s unearned love again and again. God has persistently broken the rules to love me at the level I needed, could receive, and was able to understand throughout my life. The magnanimous nature of divine love keeps liberating me at deeper levels, and then I think that newly discovered level of love is the deepest. But it’s a journey that never stops giving. Why wouldn’t everybody want that? But many actually fight it.

Prophets: Part Two

Justice in the Scriptures
Sunday, July 7, 2019

Let me expand on our secular and limited definition of justice which for most Westerners is merely retributive justice. When people on the news say, “We want justice!” they normally mean that bad deeds should be punished or that they want vengeance. Our judicial, legal, and penal systems are almost entirely based on this idea of retributive justice. This much bad deserves this much punishment; this much good deserves this much reward. The rational, logical, tit for tat, quid pro quo system makes sense to most of us. It does appear to be holding civil society together at some level, and seems to be the best our dualistic world can do.

I certainly recognize there are many early passages in the Bible that present God as punitive and retributive, but we must stay with the text—and observe how we gradually let God “grow up.” God does not change as much as human knowledge of God evolves. A sole focus on divine retribution leads to an ego-satisfying and eventually unworkable image of God which situates us inside of a very unsafe and dangerous universe. Both Jesus and Paul observed the human tendency toward retribution and spoke strongly about the limitations of the law (see the Sermon on the Mount, Romans, and Galatians).

The biblical notion of justice, beginning in the Hebrew Scriptures with the Jewish prophets—especially Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea—is quite different. If we read carefully and honestly, we will see that God’s justice is actually restorative. In each case, after the prophet chastises the Israelites for their transgressions against YHWH, the prophet continues by saying, in effect, “And here’s what YHWH will do for you: God will now love you more than ever! God will love you into wholeness. God will pour upon you a gratuitous, unbelievable, unaccountable, irrefutable love that you will finally be unable to resist.”

God “punishes” us by loving us more! How else could divine love be supreme and victorious? Check out this theme for yourself: read such passages as Isaiah 29:13-24, Hosea 6:1-6, Ezekiel 16 (especially verses 59-63), and so many of the Psalms. God’s justice is fully successful when God can legitimate and validate human beings in their original and total identity! God wins by making sure we win—just as any loving human parent does. The little “time outs” and discipline along the way are simply to keep us awake and growing.

As Isaiah says of God, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8). Yet I am afraid we often pull God down into “our thoughts.” We naively and erroneously think fear, anger, intimidation, threat, and punishment are going to lead people to love. Show me where that has worked. We cannot lead people to the highest level of motivation by teaching them the lowest. God always and forever models the highest—love—and our task is always to “imitate God” (Ephesians 5:1).

Prophet: Part One

Consumed with Love
Friday, July 5, 2019

Today, Sister Joan Chittister continues exploring the relationship between prophetic witness and contemplation:

A spiritual path that does not lead to a living commitment to . . . the Kingdom of God within and around us everywhere for everyone, is no path at all. . . . It is a dead end on the way to God. . . .

Contemplation, you see, is a change in consciousness. It brings us to see the big picture. It brings us to see beyond our own boundaries, beyond our own denominations, beyond even our own doctrines and dogmas and institutional self-interest, straight into the face of a mothering God from whose womb has come all the life that is.

To claim to be aware of the oneness of life and not to regard all of it as sacred trust is a violation of the very purpose of contemplation, which is an immersion in the God of life. To talk about the oneness of life and not to know oneness with all of life . . . is not contemplation. . . . Transformed from within then, the contemplative becomes a new kind of presence in the world who signals another way of being. . . . The contemplative can never again be a complacent, non-participant in an oppressive system. . . . From contemplation comes not only the consciousness of the universal connectedness of life, but the courage to model it as well.

Those who have no flame in their hearts for justice, no consciousness of personal responsibility for the reign of God, no raging commitment to human community may, indeed, be seeking God; but make no mistake, God is still, at best, only an idea to them not a living reality. Indeed, contemplation is a very dangerous activity. It not only brings us face to face with God, it brings us, as well, face to face with the world, and then it brings us face to face with the self; and then, of course, something must be done. Something must be filled up, added to, freed from, begun again, ended at once, changed, or created or healed, because nothing stays the same once we have found the God within. . . . We become connected to everything, to everyone. We carry the whole world in our hearts, the oppression of all peoples, the suffering of our friends, the burdens of our enemies, the raping of the earth, the hunger of the starving, the joyous expectation every laughing child has a right to. Then, the zeal for justice consumes us. Then, action and prayer are one.

. . . To be contemplative, we must have zeal for the God of love in whom all things have their beginning and their end. Fortunately, you will know when that happens to you, because you will find yourselves consumed with love not only for God but for everything and everyone God has created and who lives and is shaping this world right now. There is no clearer sign of real contemplation.

Prophets: Part One

Civil Rights and Obligations
Thursday, July 4, 2019

Sister Simone Campbell, SSS—known as “the nun on the bus”—is someone I consider a modern prophet. She is the Executive Director of NETWORK, an organization that lobbies for socially just federal policies. On this “Independence Day” (in the United States), reflect on Sr. Simone’s invitation to co-create our collective freedom.

In the last half of the twentieth century, thankfully, our society began to engage in a serious process of trying to atone for the sin of slavery, and in doing so much emphasis was placed on promoting civil rights. An unintended consequence of this important movement was a heightened focus on individuals and individual exercise of the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. The civil rights movement came out of community, but the legal expression focused on individuals’ capacity to exercise their freedoms. Some fearful Americans—largely white men who professed a conservative version of Christianity—felt threatened, as if there were not enough rights to go around. They sought to create their own “movement.” This reaction in part fueled the rise of the tea party movement. . . .

But a democracy cannot survive if various groups and individuals only pull away in different directions. Such separation will not guarantee that all are allowed the opportunity for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” All people must be recognized for their inherent dignity and gifts regardless of the color of their skin, their religious beliefs, or their place of origin. And all these gifts need to be shared in order to build up the whole.

So I have begun to wonder if the new task of the first half of the twenty-first century should be a commitment to civil obligations as a balance to the focus on civil rights.

Civil obligations call each of us to participate out of a concern and commitment for the whole. Civil obligations call us to vote, to inform ourselves about the issues of the day, to engage in serious conversation about our nation’s future and learn to listen to various perspectives. To live our civil obligations means that everyone needs to be involved and that there needs to be room for everyone to exercise this involvement. This is the other side of civil rights. We all need our civil rights so that we can all exercise our civil obligations.

The mandate to exercise our civil obligations means that we can’t be bystanders who scoff at the process of politics while taking no responsibility. We all need to be involved. Civil obligations mean that we must hold our elected officials accountable for their actions, and we must advocate for those who are struggling to exercise their obligations. The 100 percent needs the efforts of all of us to create a true community.

It is an unpatriotic lie that we as a nation are based in individualism. The Constitution underscores the fact that we are rooted and raised in a communal society and that we each have a responsibility to build up the whole. The Preamble to the Constitution could not be any clearer: “We the People” are called to “form a more perfect Union.”

Wednesday, July 3, 2019

Sister Joan Chittister, OSB is a theologian, author, and speaker. Her latest book is The Time is Now: A Call to Uncommon Courage—I hope you’ll read it! We recently met and talked at Oprah’s house, as we were both filming Super Soul Sunday on the same day. When I tried to pay my restaurant bill, I found out Joan had already paid for it—Benedictine hospitality! Today enjoy an excerpt from a talk she gave many years ago:

The Sufis tell a story of the Holy One who said to his disciples, “What’s better, do you think? Is it contemplation, or is it action?” . . . They said, “Why, Holy One, it’s action, of course. What good is contemplation in a suffering world?” And the Sufi said, “Ah, yes, but what good is action that proceeds from an unenlightened heart?”

The danger in the contemplative life is that it may become only one half of the spiritual life. . . . Contemplation is not for its own sake. . . . The contemplative life is not spiritual escapism.

Contemplation is immersion in the God who created this world for all of us. And the mystics of every major religion . . . remind us of that. Hinduism tells us that within the cave of the heart, God dwells, not just in the forest. And the Buddhists say, “Buddha is present in all places, in all beings, in all things, in all lands, not just in the monastery.”  “Where can I go to flee from your presence?” the Jewish Psalmist says [Psalm 139:7]. “Whithersoever you turn, there is the face of God,” Islam teaches. And Christianity reminds us always: “Ever since the creation of the world, God’s invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” [Romans 1:20]. . . .

God is not contained in any one people, in any one kind of place, or in any one tradition. . . . God wills the care of the poor as well as the reward of the rich. . . . God wills the end of oppressors who stand with the heel on the neck of the weak. . . . God wills the liberation . . . dignity and full development of all. . . . God takes the side of the defenseless. And, thus, therefore, must the true contemplative, otherwise that contemplation is not real. . . . The true contemplative, the truly spiritual person, then, must do justice, speak justice, insist on justice. . . . 

Thomas Merton spoke out from a cloister in Kentucky against the Vietnam War. Catherine of Siena walked the streets of the city feeding the poor. . . . Hildegard of Bingen preached the word of justice to emperors and to popes. Charles de Foucauld lived among the Arab poor as a sign of their goodness . . . and God’s love for them in the face of the enmity around them. Benedict of Nursia . . . came out of his solitude to shelter strangers and educate peasants in the fifth century. And so must we do whatever justice must be done in our own time if we’re going to claim to be serious about really sinking into the heart of God.

Prophets: Part One

Struggling with Shadow
Tuesday, July 2, 2019

The Hebrew prophets are in a category all their own. Within the canonical, sacred Scriptures of other world religions we do not find major texts that are largely critical of that very religion. Prophets can deeply love their tradition and profoundly criticize it at the same time, which is a very rare art form. In fact, it is their love of its depths that forces them to criticize their own religion. This is almost the hallmark of a prophet. Their deepest motivation is not negative but profoundly positive.

The dualistic mind presumes that if you criticize something, you don’t love it. Wise prophets would say the opposite. Institutions prefer loyalists and “company men” to prophets. We’re uncomfortable with people who point out our shadow or imperfections. It is no accident that prophets and priests are usually in opposition to one another (e.g., Amos 5:21-6:7, 7:10-17). Yet Paul says the prophetic gift is the second most important charism (1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 4:11). Prophets are not popular people. Note how the Gospels say it was “the priests, elders, and teachers of the law” who condemned Jesus.

Human consciousness does not emerge at any depth except through struggling with our shadow. It is in facing our own contradictions that we grow. It is in the struggle with our shadow self, with failure, or with wounding that we break into higher levels of consciousness. People who learn to expose, name, and still thrive inside contradictions are what I would call prophets.

One of the most common complaints I hear from some Catholics is, “You criticize the Church too much.” But criticizing the Church is just being faithful to the very clear pattern set by the prophets and Jesus (just read Matthew 23). I would not bother criticizing organized Christianity if I did not also love it. There is a negative criticism that is nothing but complaining and projecting. But there is a positive criticism that is all about hope and development. This is no small point, and such a difference must be taught. The charism of prophecy must be called forth.

The United States and many other nations need courageous prophets as today’s world leaders show little or no ability to criticize their own duplicitous power games. I suspect that we get the leaders who mirror what we have become as nations. They are our shadow self for all to see, which is what the Hebrew prophets told Israel both before and during their painfully long exile (596–538 BCE). Yet, this was the very time when the Jewish people went deep enough to discover their prophetic voices—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others—speaking truth to power, calling for justice. There is every indication that the U.S. and much of the world are in a period of exile now.

The prophetic message is not directly about partisan politics (which is far too dualistic); it is much more pre-political and post-political and has huge socio-political implications that challenge every side. Those who allow themselves to be challenged and changed will be the new creative leaders of the next period of history after this purifying exile.

God Interrupting
Thursday, June 27, 2019

Brie Stoner shares her experience in the Living School as a mother of young children:

I was sitting in the women’s bathroom between sessions and had exactly thirteen minutes before the next talk to pump and dump my breast milk. [1] Every woman walking by me would smile and exclaim how sweet it was that I was there, ask how old my baby was, and offer some kind of encouragement for the Herculean effort of simply being a mother.

I was so excited to have been admitted to the first class of the Living School and determined to somehow make it work even with a toddler and a nine-month-old at home. But as each day proceeded, the more uncertain I became: sure, I could have uninterrupted prayer sits here . . . here where the meals were provided for me and the dishes were picked up and cleaned by not-me. Here where I slept in a hotel bed (a whole bed to myself . . . just for me, with no one needing me, ever). Here where I had access to these wisdom teachers and a peaceful path through the Cottonwood bosque with a view of the Sandia mountains.

Finally, during one of James Finley’s sessions I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Jim, can we talk about how much harder all of this is when I’m back home? Because I get up sometimes at 5:00 a.m., desperate to have one prayer sit, and it’s like my kids have radar and inevitably one of them wakes up ten minutes later. I mean, where is the icon of the mystic with one baby on the hip, a toddler crying at their feet, cooking dinner with one hand, trying to finish work on a laptop with the other? Because that’s my real life.”

Jim said, “Ok, you be you and I’ll be God. And since I’m God, I’m watching you get up exhausted every morning, and I’m so touched that you want to spend this time with me. Really, I am! It just means the world to me. The thing is, I just can’t bear how much I love you. It’s too much! And so at a certain point I rush into the bodies of your children and wake them up because. . . .”

Jim paused. “Because I want to know what it feels like to be held by you.”

Yes, the interruption is the presence of God that I was so desperately trying to access in moments of stillness and silence. With or without the luxury of stillness and silence, God comes to us disguised as our very lives (as Paula D’Arcy has said). In my case, Jim helped me to discover how my path as an exhausted young parent was the monastery of my own transformation. If I learned to let my heart open enough, I just might begin to recognize each cry, each diaper change, every choo-choo play time request . . . all of it, as the startlingly stunning, diaphanous infusion of infinite love colliding into the small shape of my very finite and ordinary reality. There, at the intersection of everything, is God with us . . . wanting to be touched, noticed, nurtured . . . held by us. All we have to do is behold.

Conscious Parenting

Many Paths to Contemplation
Tuesday, June 25, 2019

After recently visiting Mexico and some of the refugee centers along the Texas border and seeing so many children and babies with their parents, I was reminded that contemplative Christianity’s rather monastic, solitary, silent approach just can’t be adequate to describe contemplation for most people. It can’t be, or many of God’s children could never know God. Contemplation is simply openness to God’s loving presence in “what is” right in front of you—which is what I saw these parents do. This presence to Presence can be cultivated in many ways that don’t require sitting on a mat for twenty minutes.

Experiences of great love and great suffering can and will lead anyone to union. Every time you let your kids pull love out of you or when you let a relationship pull suffering out of you, you are present and surrendering to the flow. I think Catholics have also over-emphasized the celibate path which is a “luxury,” it seems to me. I know I enjoy that luxury—the Franciscans provide for all my needs, but most people I know have a mortgage or rent to pay and food to put on the table. So, I think it is really important that we broaden the definition of contemplation to a Trinitarian understanding of God—God as flow—and learning how to allow and participate in the flow. It’s not really about detachment but healthy and unitive attachment.

If we expect the same disciplined practice of twenty minutes of silence twice a day of everyone—for example, busy parents of young children—I think we’re setting ourselves up for delusion. When you keep allowing love to flow toward you and toward others, that is a contemplative life. It is not as easy as it seems. Many laypeople are far more mature in the spiritual life than those of us who have all the accoutrements of celibacy, quiet, and protected solitude.

Those who have a long-term object of love, like a spouse or children, grow through their commitment. I don’t have an object of love like that. Now, I had Venus, my black Labrador, for fifteen years, and then she passed. I do have a wonderful staff who I think love me. I surely love them, but, I don’t have to love them. I can go home and shut the door. But if you are a parent or a partner, you can’t go home and shut the door to your loved ones. For all of us—whether we live alone or with others—the invitation is to open ourselves to the needs and suffering around us.

Hidden away in the middle of Parker Palmer’s recent book, On the Brink of Everything, is a wonderful, simple definition of contemplation: “Contemplation is any way one has of penetrating illusion and touching reality.” [1] I think that’s brilliant. There are things that force you toward a contemplative mind (for example, your mother’s death), because they force you to face reality, and that can free you from lot of illusions. I’m still grateful to the monastic and Buddhist teachers. But sitting in silence isn’t the whole enchilada. Life is the whole enchilada.

Conscious Parenting

Giving Ourselves
Monday, June 24, 2019

Can you let others convert you to the Love that you truly are? Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, in her book Nurture the Wow, asks:

What is love, anyway? And what does it mean to love? . . .

The feminist theorist bell hooks . . . claims [that love is] the “will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” [1] “The will to extend yourself”: to push past your comfort level; to . . . work really hard. That means doing things you never thought you’d do, and may not particularly want to. But you do them. You stretch and extend, because someone needs you to, so that they can grow. . . .

Extending the self is about the moment when the tantrum is going down right as you need to be getting somewhere and you realize you have to slow down and pull, from underneath your annoyance and your desire to just physically force the child out the door, some compassion to help dial down her out-of-control feeling. It’s about the willingness to get out of bed at two a.m. to be with the child who’s totally shaken by a nightmare. . . . It’s about enabling our beloveds to feel secure, enabling them to be able to do the work they need to do. It’s about enabling them to feel the warm rays of our attention on their skin, even when we kind of actually want to just zone out. . . .

Fred Rogers, the Presbyterian minister behind the TV show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, said once that “to love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.” [2] . . .

That moment when we say, I accept you—even though being with you is awfully hard right now—that’s love. It doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences—we don’t have to accept terrible behavior. But part of how we love our children is in choosing, again and again, to take the whole child. . . .

If all our spiritual efforts are aimed at loving these people better—well, that alone is and should be enough. And, as it happens, if we’re able to go deep into that specific, aching love for these particular people, with these smiles and that laugh and that sweet face—something else might happen as a natural consequence of it. Maybe, as our hearts overflow, we find that love can, naturally of its own accord, extend wider, until it encompasses caring for all things, and connection to everything—until our love becomes Love itself, the very flow and force of the universe. [This is what I mean by accessing the universal through the particular. —Richard]

Conscious Love

The Heart of the Universe
Friday, June 21, 2019
Summer Solstice

John Welwood (1943–2019) was an American clinical psychologist known for integrating Eastern and Western psychology and spirituality. In his books Love and Awakening and Journey of the Heart, he wrote about the lifelong challenge and gift of conscious, committed love, drawing insights from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955):

If the bad news is that we can know another, and be known, only as deeply as we know ourselves—and coming to know ourselves can be a long and arduous journey—the good news is that love helps and inspires us to develop this deeper self-knowledge. . . . For this reason, relationships can help us face and understand ourselves more rapidly and profoundly than any other aspect of worldly life. Seen in this light, love becomes a path of awakening—rousing us from the sleep of old, unconscious patterns into the freshness and immediacy of living more fully in the present, in accord with who we really are. This is the source of a deeper kind of happiness, which goes far beyond pleasure and comfort, and the only real basis for healthy and satisfying relationships. [1]

In its final outreach, conscious love leads two lovers beyond themselves toward a greater connectedness with the whole of life. Indeed, two people’s love will have no room to grow unless it develops this larger focus beyond themselves. The larger arc of a couple’s love reaches out toward a feeling of kinship with all of life, what Teilhard de Chardin calls “a love of the universe.” Only in this way can love, as he puts it, “develop in boundless light and power.” [2]

So the path of love expands in ever-widening circles. It begins at home—by first finding our seat, making friends with ourselves, and discovering the intrinsic richness of our being, underneath all our ego-centered confusion and delusion. As we come to appreciate this basic wholesomeness within us, we find that we have more to give to an intimate partner.

Further, as a [couple] become[s] devoted to the growth of awareness and spirit in each other, they will naturally want to share their love with others. The new qualities they give birth to—generosity, courage, compassion, wisdom—can extend beyond the circle of their own relationship. These qualities are a couple’s “spiritual child”—what their coming together gives to the world. . . .

From there, a couple’s love can expand still further, as Teilhard suggests. The more deeply and passionately two people love each other, the more concern they will feel for the state of the world in which they live. They will feel their connection with the earth and a dedication to care for this world. . . . Radiating out to the whole of creation is the farthest reach of love and its fullest expression, which grounds and enriches the life of the couple. This is the great love and the great way, which leads to the heart of the universe. [3]