our kneejerk reactivity

 

 

 

 

 

The next time you are offended, consider it a “teachable moment.”

Ask yourself what part of you is actually upset. It’s normally the false or smaller self.

 If we can move back to the big picture of who we are in God, our True Self,

 we’ll find that what upset us usually doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in objective reality!

 But we can waste a whole day (or longer) feeding that hurt until it seems to have a life

 of its own and, in fact, “possesses” us. At that point, it becomes what Eckhart Tolle

 rightly calls our “pain-body.”

Tolle defines this “accumulated pain” as “a negative energy field that occupies

 your body and mind.”  In this space, we seem to have a kneejerk, self-protective

 reaction to everything—and everyone—around us. I emphasize the word reaction

 here because there’s no clear, conscious decision to think or act in this way.

 It just happens and we are seemingly powerless to stop it. By doing healing work

 and by practicing meditation, we learn to stop identifying with the pain

 and instead calmly relate to it in a compassionate way.

For example, in centering prayer, we observe the hurt as it arises 

in our stream of consciousness, but we don’t jump on the boat and give it energy. 

Instead, we name it (“resentment toward my spouse”), then we let go of it,

 and let the boat float down the river. We have the power to say, “That’s not me.

 I don’t need that today. I have no need to feed this resentment. 

I know who I am without it.” This is the beginning of emotional sobriety.

 

If we’ve been eating a regular meal of resentment toward our spouse, our boss,

 our parents, or “the world,” the boat’s going to come back around

 in the next minute because it’s accustomed to us filling our plate.

 But we must be able to ask and to discover, “Who was I before I resented my spouse?

 And even before that?” This is the primary way we learn to live in our True Self,

 where we are led by a foundational “yes,” not by the petty push backs of “no.”

 

 

 

 

~ Richard Rohr 

from Emotional Sobriety:

 Rewiring Our Programs for ‘Happiness’

 

~ Eckhart Tolle 

from The Power of Now:

 A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

 

 

 

fear, contraction and control

 

 

 

It is not diversity that divides us; it is not our ethnicity or religion or culture that divides us.

 

~ Nelson Mandela

Fear unites the disparate parts of our false selves very quickly. 

The ego moves forward by contraction, self-protection, and refusal, by saying no.

 Contraction gives us focus, purpose, direction, superiority, and a strange kind of security. 

It takes our aimless anxiety, covers it up, and tries to turn it into purposefulness

 and urgency, which results in a kind of drivenness.

 But this drive is not peaceful or happy.

 It is filled with fear and locates all its problems as

 “out there,” never “in here.”

The soul or the True Self does not proceed by contraction but by expansion.

 It moves forward, not by exclusion, but by inclusion. It sees things deeply

 and broadly not by saying no but by saying yes, at least on some level,

 to whatever comes its way. Can you distinguish between those two

 very different movements within yourself?

Fear and contraction allow us to eliminate other people, write them off, 

exclude them, and somehow expel them, at least in our minds. 

This immediately gives us a sense of being in control 

and having a secure set of boundaries... 

But in controlling we are usually afraid of losing something.

 If we go deeper into ourselves, we will see that there is both a rebel

 and a dictator in all of us, two different ends of the same spectrum.

 It is almost always fear that justifies our knee-jerk rebellion

 or our need to dominate—a fear that is hardly ever recognized as such

 because we are acting out and trying to control the situation. 

 

 

 

~ Richard Rohr

from  Dancing Standing Still

 

 

 

 

brokenness and vulnerability

 

 

 

  brokenness and weakness 

also mysteriously pull us out of ourselves. 

We feel them both together.

Only vulnerability forces us beyond ourselves. 

Whenever we see true pain, most of us are drawn out

 of our own preoccupations and want to take away the pain. 

 

For example, when we rush toward a hurting child, 

 we want to take the suffering in our arms. 

That’s why so many saints wanted to get near suffering—

because as they said again and again, 

 it “saved” them from their smaller untrue self.(1)



I think grief puts us in touch with our vulnerabilities.

 I think the feeling of grief lets us know the power of wounds

 to shape our stories. I think it lets us know how capable we are

 of having our hearts broken and our feelings hurt. 

 

I think it lets us know the link that we each have because we’re human.

 Because we’re human, we hurt. Because we’re human, we have tears to cry.

 Because we’re human, our hearts are broken. Because we’re human,

 we understand that loss is a universal language. Everybody grieves.

 All of humanity grieves. All of us have setbacks, broken dreams.

 All of us have broken relationships or unrealized possibilities. 

All of us have bodies that just don’t do what they used to do.

 Though grief is personal, every person grieves.(2)

 

 

 

 

 ~ Richard Rohr(1) 

and Dr. Jacqui Lewis(2)

 

 

 

scapegoating?

 

 

 

 

The word “scapegoating”

 originated from an ingenious ritual described in Leviticus 16.

 According to Jewish law, on the Day of Atonement,

 the high priest laid hands on an “escaping” goat, 

placing all the sins of the Jewish people from the previous year onto the animal.

 

 Then the goat was beaten with reeds and thorns,

 driven out into the desert, and the people went home rejoicing. 

 

Violence towards the innocent victim was apparently quite effective

 at temporarily relieving the group’s guilt and shame. 

 

The same scapegoating dynamic was at play when European Christians

 burned supposed heretics at the stake, and when white Americans

 lynched Black Americans. In fact, the pattern is identical

 and totally non-rational.

Whenever the “sinner” is excluded, our collective 

ego is delighted and feels relieved and safe.

 It works, but only for a while, because it is merely an illusion.

 Repeatedly believing the lie, that this time we have the true culprit, 

we become more catatonic, habitually ignorant, and culpable

—because, of course, scapegoating never really eliminates evil in the first place.

 

 As Russian philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote,

 “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, 

and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.

 But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

 

” As long as the evil is “over there,” we can change or expel

 someone else as the contaminating element. 

We then feel purified and at peace. 

...we think our own violence is necessary and even good.

 But there is no such thing as redemptive violence. 

 

Violence doesn’t save; 

 it only destroys all parties in both the short and long term. 

 

 

 

 

~ Richard Rohr

adapted from CONSPIRE 2016: Everything Belongs

 

 

 

 

 

outside the court of religious and civic opinion

 

 

 

 

 

The greatest prophet of the Jewish tradition, Moses, 

had the prescience and courage to move the place of hearing God outside

 and at a distance from the court of common religious and civic opinion—

 

this was the original genius that inspired the entire Jewish prophetic tradition.

 It is quite different than mere liberal and conservative positions, 

and often even at odds with them. 

 

Prophecy and Gospel are rooted in a contemplative

 and non-dual way of knowing—

a way of being in the world that is utterly free

 and grounded in the compassion of God.

how we might maintain that same sense of prophetic freedom

 outside the contemporary political and religious “encampments” of our day.

 

 For those of us who are sincerely and devotedly trying to camp elsewhere

 than in any political party or religious denomination, 

we know full well that we must now avoid the temptation

 to become our own defended camp.

it means that we can

 “safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves” 

as Etty Hillesum describes it.

 

 

 

 

~ Richard Rohr

excerpt from his Daily Meditation

 photo by Dorothea Lange

 

 

it's compassion

In contemplative practice, you refuse to identify with any one side, 

while still maintaining your intelligence.  

 
You hold the creative tension of every seeming conflict and 
go beyond words to pure, open-ended experience, 
which has the potential to unify many seeming contradictions.

 
 Notice how wordy political and academic discourse is, 
and how quiet monks and hermits are.

It really is a different way of knowing,
 and you can tell it by its gratuity,
 its open-endedness, its compassion...

 

 

Fr. Richard Rohr

photo: Dr. and Mrs. King singing in the rain on a march 1965

by Moneta Sleet Jr.

 

 

 

stillness - and our thinking mind

~ Richard Rohr

from the deeper source

When you pray,try to stay beneath your thoughts, neither fighting them nor thinking them.  Everything that comes also goes, so don't take any of it too seriously. Hold yourself at a more profound level, perhaps in your chest, solar plexus, or deep breath, but stay in your body-self somehow.  Do not rise to the mind, because the mind is endlessly repetitive commentary. Just rest in what I call your animal contentment.  You will feel exactly like nothing, like emptiness. Stay crouched there, at the cellular level, without shame or fear, long enough for the Deeper Source to reveal itself.  Universal love flows through you from that Deeper Source as a vital energy much more than an idea.

Because most people still think of God as an object separate from themselves, they naturally try to please God or inform God or even use God.  You cannot "think" God.  God is never an object, like any other object of consciousness.  In fact, God refuses to be objectified, which is why there are so many atheists and agnostics, who basically try too hard.

God is always and forever the subject, knowing in you, through you, with you, and, yes, as you!

You can only know God subject to subject and center to center, and the initiative is always from God's side. There is no other why to know God or to be known by God!

 ~ Richard Rohr

from just this : prompts and practices for contemplation 

art by  Noha Nayel

teachings

~  Richard Rohr

irreplaceable "thisness"

Franciscan philosopher-theologian John Duns Scotus (1266-1303) taught extensively on the absolute uniqueness of each act of creation.  His doctrine of haecceity is derived from haec, the Latin word for "this." Duns Scotus said the absolute freedom of God allows God to create, or not to create, each creature. Its existence means God has positively chosen to create that creature, precisely as it is.

Each creature is thus not merely one member of a genus and species, but a unique aspect of the infinite Mystery of God.  God is continuously choosing each created thing specifically to exist, moment by moment. This teaching alone made Scotus a favorite of mystics and poets like  Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Merton, who considered themselves "Scotists" - as I do too.

 ~ Richard Rohr

from just this

 

Christianity and Unknowing

~ Richard Rohr