Seventh Theme: Reality is paradoxical and complementary. Non-dual thinking is the highest level of consciousness. Divine union, not private perfection, is the goal of all religion (Goal).
You Must Start With Yes
Meditation 5 of 52
By teaching “Do not judge” (Matthew 7:1), the great teachers are saying that you cannot start seeing or understanding anything if you start with “no.” You have to start with a “yes” of basic acceptance, which means not too quickly labeling, analyzing, or categorizing things as in or out, good or bad, up or down. You have to leave the field open, a field in which God and grace can move. Ego leads with “no” whereas soul leads with “yes.”
The ego seems to strengthen itself by constriction, by being against things; and it feels loss or fear when it opens up. “No” always comes easier than “yes,” and a deep, conscious “yes” is the work of freedom and grace. So the soul lives by expansion instead of constriction. Spiritual teachers want you to live by positive action, an open field, and studied understanding, and not by resistance, knee-jerk reactions, or defensiveness, and so they always say something like “Do not judge,” as judging is merely a control mechanism.
Words and thoughts are invariably dualistic, but pure experience is always non-dualistic. You cannot really experience reality with the judgmental mind, because you are dividing the moment before you give yourself to it. The judgmental mind prevents you from being present to the full moment by trying to “divide and conquer.” Instead, you end up dividing yourself and being conquered.
The Daily Meditations for 2013 are now available in Fr. Richard’s new book Yes, And . . . .
4. Prayer
Abba Father, the giver and sustainer of life. How bountiful is your mercy and rich your compassion. I approach you humbly today asking you to deliver me from a critical and judgmental spirit. Lord, I am reminded that I am not beyond the reach of temptation, hardships, troubles, or even making mistakes. May I never take this for granted, that I too can be in the same position as the people toward whom I am expressing judgment and criticism. Your Word reminds me that I am saved by your grace and not by my good works, so I have no reason to boast or be high-minded. Lord, I repent for being quick to pass judgement both in speech and thought. For every time my words or actions of judgment and condemnation have hurt someone, Father, I repent.
Lord, I pray that I will not focus on the faults or shortcomings of others. Help me to see others through the eyes of grace. Please help me to not judge people based on their outward appearance. I am reminded of the story when you sent Samuel to anoint one of Jesse’s sons to be king, and you told Samuel that “man looks at the outward appearance but you look at the heart”. I pray that I will not reject or condemn others because they don’t conform to my idea of holiness or meet my standards. Lord, please set me free from religiosity and may I focus on teaching people the truth of Jesus Christ rather than man made rules and requirements. Lord, I ask you to create in me a clean heart, renew a right spirit within me, deliver me from pride and self-righteousness, clothe me with humility, and fill me with love. In Jesus Name, Amen!
Psalm 103:8, Ephesians 2:8-9, 1 John 1:9, John 15:12, 1 Samuel 16:7, Colossians 2:20-23, Psalm 51:10, Luke 18:9-14
The fifth message of the common wonderful: It is true that you are going to die, and it is also true that “Neither death nor life, nothing that exists, nothing still to come, not any power, not any height nor depth, nor any created thing can ever come between us and the love of God”(Romans 8:38-39).
It seems that we are born with a longing, desire, and deep hope that this thing called life could somehow last forever. It is a premonition from Something Eternal that is already within us. Some would call it the soul. Believers would call it the indwelling presence of God. It is God in us that makes us desire God. It is an eternal life already within us that makes us imagine eternal life. It is the Spirit of God that allows us to seriously hope for what we first only intuit. Thus Paul loves to variously call the Spirit “the first fruits, “the promise,” “the pledge,” “the guarantee,” or, as it were, the first installment of what is, in fact, the full and final situation. All spiritual cognition is actually recognition: The Spirit within you knows the truth, you slowly intuit the truth, and faith allows you to finally and fully grasp this truth—which cannot be proven but only experienced.
God, by every religion’s best definition, is love (1 John 4:16). What follows, of course, is that if we are God’s creatures, then love is what we are too, at our deepest core and final identity. When we live consciously within this love, we will not be afraid to die, because love is eternal, and that core self is indestructible. “Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13:8). You already know that intuitively
Blessed Lord, who caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant us so to hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The Lord is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and rich in
compassion.
O God, strength and
friend of the forsaken, we praise you in Jesus who bore the burden of our sins
with a forgiving heart. Help us to walk
in his spirit. We know a world of pain
and anger that dots our history with war and division. Teach us how to respect our differences and
to forgive as we have been forgiven.
Give us the grace to realize the unity for which Jesus prayed. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen
With your wisdom O God, teach us to love and
be loved.
God open my ears to hear.
In You we live and move and have our being,
You are all in all.
The mushrooms give these burgers a great umami taste. The black beans that is part of the burger play another role; its liquid or aqua fava act as the egg replacement!
1/2 can black beans, drain saving its liquid or aqua fava
1 cup panko crumbs
1/4 cup saved black bean liquid or aqua fava
2 tsp Worcestershire sauce, vegan or soy sauce
1/2 tsp salt (optional)
Directions
Place onion, garlic, mushroom, and chopped walnut in a blender or food processor. Pulse till mixture is coarsely chopped but not pasty.
Transfer mixture in a bowl.
Place beans in a blender or food processor till they are coarsely chopped.
Add the chopped beans, Panko crumbs, Worcestershire sauce and saved black bean juice or aqua fava into the mushroom mixture and mix till well blended. Refrigerate the burger mixture for 20 minutes.
St. Francis of Assisi stepped out into a world being recast by the emerging market economy. He lived amid a decaying old order in which his father was greedily buying up the small farms of debtors and moving quickly into the new entrepreneurial class. Francis stepped into a church that seems to have been largely out of touch with the masses. He trusted a deeper voice and a bigger truth. He sought one clear center and moved out from there.
His one clear centerpiece was the Incarnate Jesus. Francis understood everything else from that personalized reference point. Like Archimedes, Francis had found his one firm spot on which to stand and from which he could move his world. He did this in at least three clear ways.
First, Francis walked into the prayer-depths of his own tradition, as opposed to mere religious repetition of old formulas. Second, he sought direction in the mirror of creation itself, as opposed to mental and fabricated ideas or ideals. Third, and most radically, he looked to the underside of his society, to the community of those who had suffered, for an understanding of how God transforms us. In other words, he found depth and breadth—and a process to keep us there.
The depth was an inner life where all shadow, mystery, and paradox were confronted, accepted, and forgiven. Here, he believed God could be met in fullness and truth. The breadth was the actual world itself, a sacramental universe. It was not the ideal, the churchy, or the mental, but the right-in-front-of-us-and-everywhere—the actual as opposed to the ideal.
Francis also showed us the process for staying there—the daring entrance into the world of human powerlessness. His chosen lens was what he called “poverty” and, of course, he was only imitating Jesus. He set out to read reality through the eyes and authority of those who have suffered and been rejected—and come out resurrected.
This is apparently the privileged seeing that allows us to know something that we can know in no other way. It is the unique baptism with which Jesus says we must all be baptized (see Mark 10:39). My assumption is that this is the baptism that transforms. It is larger than any religion or denomination. It is taught by the Spirit in and through reality itself.
We can argue doctrinally about many aspects of Jesus’s life and teaching, but we cannot say he was not a poor man, or that he did not favor the perspective from the bottom as a privileged viewpoint. All other heady arguments about Jesus must deal with this overwhelming fact. Francis did. This perspective became his litmus test for all orthodoxy and for ongoing transformation into God.
For Francis, the true “I” had, first of all, to be discovered and realigned (the prayer journey into the True Self). Then he had to experience himself situated inside of a meaning-filled cosmos (a sacramental universe). Finally, he had to be poor (to be able to read reality from the side of powerlessness).
Francis taught us, therefore, that the antidote to confusion and paralysis is always a return to simplicity, to what is actually right in front of us, to the nakedly obvious. Somehow, he had the genius to reveal what was hidden in plain sight.
4. Prayer
Lord, help me to put you first…
and not myself, things, or even others…
but YOU alone.
Lord, help me to get rid of distractions…
remembering You alone are my hope…my peace…my eternity…
Lord, help me live more simply…so that Your ways are most clear…
and mine are not above Yours…
Lord, help me to simplify my mind and my things…
so that I trust in You.
Lord, help me to cling to you from sunrise ’til sunset…
Many scholars have pointed out that what is usually translated in Paul’s letters as “faith in Christ” would be more accurately translated as “the faith of Christ.” It’s more than a change of prepositions. It means we are all participating—with varying degrees of resistance and consent—in the faith journey that Jesus has already walked. We are forever carried inside of the “Corporate Personality” that Jesus Christ always is for Paul (citations too numerous to count!). That’s a very different understanding of faith than most Christians enjoy.
Most people think having faith means “to believe in Jesus.” But, “to share in the faith of Jesus” is a much richer concept. It is not so much an invitation as it is a cosmic declaration about the very shape of reality. By myself, I don’t know how to have faith in God, but once we know that Jesus is the corporate stand in for everybody, we know we have already been taken on the ride through death and back to life. All we can do now is make what is objectively true fully conscious for us.
Remember, it’s God in you that loves God. You, on your own, don’t really know how to love God. It’s Christ in you that recognizes Christ. It’s the Holy Spirit, whose temple you are (see 1 Corinthians 3:16), that responds to the Holy Spirit. Like recognizes like. That’s why all true cognition is really recognition (“re-cognition” or knowing something again). Only so far as you have surrendered to Christ and allowed the Christ in you to come to fullness can you love Christ. It’s Christ in you that recognizes and loves Christ.
“Faith” is not an affirmation of a creed, an intellectual acceptance of God, or believing certain doctrines to be true or orthodox (although those things might well be good). Such intellectual assent does not usually change your heart or your lifestyle. I’m convinced that much modern atheism is a result of such a heady and really ineffective definition of faith.
Both Jesus’ and Paul’s notion of faith is much better translated as foundational confidence ortrust that God cares about what is happening right now. This is clearly the quality that Jesus fully represents and then praises in other people.
God refuses to be known intellectually. God can only be loved and known in the act of love; God can only be experienced in communion. This is why Jesus “commands” us to move toward love and fully abide there. Love is like a living organism, an active force-field upon which we can rely, from which we can draw, and which we can allow to pass through us. I am afraid you can believe doctrines (e.g., virgin birth, biblical inerrancy, Real Presence in bread and wine, etc.) to be true and not enjoy such a radical confidence in love or God at all.
Gateway to Silence: Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. —Proverbs 3:5
Reference: Adapted from Richard Rohr, Great Themes of Paul: Life as Participation, disc 9 (Franciscan Media: 2002), CD.
4. Prayer
Father God, open my eyes, not to see the world more clearly, but to see You. Open my eyes to see you working around me and in me. Nothing happens by accident. You orchestrate every day of my life. Allow me to see your hand in the mundane and the fantastic. Help me to trust in what I cannot see, and believe in Your invisible presence.
The human instinct is to block suffering and pain. This is especially true in the West where we have been influenced by the “rationalism” of the Enlightenment. As anyone who has experienced grief can attest, it isn’t rational. We really don’t know how to hurt! We simply do not know what to do with our pain.
The great wisdom traditions are trying to teach us that grief isn’t something from which to run. It’s a liminal space, a time of transformation. In fact, we can’t risk getting rid of the pain until we’ve learned what it has to teach us and it—grief, suffering, loss, pain—always has something to teach us! Unfortunately, most of us, men especially, have been taught that grief and sadness are something to repress, deny, or avoid. We would much rather be angry than sad.
Perhaps the simplest and most inclusive definition of grief is “unfinished hurt.” It feels like a demon spinning around inside of us and it hurts too much, so we immediately look for someone else to blame. We have to learn to remain open to our grief, to wait in patient expectation for what it has to teach us. When we close in too tightly around our sadness or our grief, when we try to fix it, control it, or understand it, we only deny ourselves its lessons.
Saint Ephrem the Syrian (303–373), a Doctor of the Church, considered tears to be sacramental signs of divine mercy. He instructs: “Give God weeping, and increase the tears in your eyes; through your tears and [God’s] goodness the soul which has been dead will be restored.” [1] What a different kind of human being than most of us! In the charismatic circles in which I participated in my early years of ministry, holy tears were a common experience. Saints Francis and Clare of Assisi reportedly wept all the time—for days on end!
The “weeping mode” really is a different way of being in the world. It’s different than the fixing, explaining, or controlling mode. We are finally free to feel the tragedy of things, the sadness of things. Tears cleanse the lens of the eyes so we can begin to see more clearly. Sometimes we have to cry for a very long time because our eyes are so dirty that we’re not seeing truthfully or well at all. Tears only come when we realize we can’t fix it and we can’t change it. The situation is absurd, it’s unjust, it’s wrong, it’s impossible. She should not have died; he should not have died. How could this happen? Only when we are led to the edges of our own resources are we finally free to move to the weeping mode.
The way we can tell our tears have cleansed us is that afterwards we don’t need to blame anybody, even ourselves. It’s an utter transformation and cleansing of the soul, and we know it came from God. It is what it is, and somehow God is in it.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Beloved Sons Series: Men and Grief (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2005), CD, MP3 audio.
Story from Our Community: In March 2019, my 40-year-old daughter passed away suddenly. It felt as though I had been flung over a rocky cliff and fell headlong into a dark abyss of grief. Then came the realization that all attempts at controlling this temporal life are fallacy. Slowly too, came the sense of being held by both death and resurrection, that which is unknowable but still somehow known, and awakened to the eternality of God, whom I call the Present Now of all Love. —Linda C.
4. Prayer
When life brings me to tears, LORD Jesus, restore my hope in Your promised joy. While I take these next steps broken with tears streaming down my face, LORD, I trust in You to heal my heart. Today, LORD, I ask that You grant me the courage to say, “Tears, I feel you, but today I choose Life
