Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Seventeen Summary

Detachment

 April 23 – April 28, 2023

Sunday 
All great spirituality is about letting go. It trains us in both detachment and attachment: detachment from the passing so we can attach to the substantial. —Richard Rohr 

Monday
Every time we catch ourselves getting reactive, every time we catch ourselves acting as if the outcome of the situation has the authority to name who we are, we are to take a deep breath and remind ourself that it’s not true.
—James Finley 

Tuesday
Desert ascetics called this process of moving toward inner freedom detachment. Detachment allows for greater direct experience of the Divine Presence as the seeker is attached to fewer distractions. —Laura Swan 

Wednesday
We have to be very careful not to become attached to the goal of becoming detached! We have to take a deep breath, and roll with the waves of the unfoldings of ourselves.  
—James Finley 

Thursday
To any of us comfortable people, detachment sounds like losing, but it is actually about accessing a deeper, broader sense of the self, which is already whole, already content, already filled with abundant life.
—Richard Rohr 

Friday
Letting go means simply releasing the thoughts and ideas that our minds get in the habit of attaching themselves to, including the ideas of yesterday and tomorrow. Letting go is not hard or harsh. We should let it be easy and gradual. —angel Kyodo williams 

Week Seventeen Practice

Let Go and Return

Writer and spiritual director Caroline Oakes perceives contemplative practice at the heart of Jesus’ rhythm of ministry. His example teaches us to detach from our judgments and expectations so that we can return to Divine presence:  

Gospel accounts show us that Jesus himself lived this contemplative, prayer-beyond-words, “inner room” practice as he often ventures out alone … sometimes being in prayer through the night…. 

The gospel writers’ first-century audience would immediately understand that Jesus was intentionally and consistently making time to be “in” the powerful and formative Divine Presence as a way to become aware of, and attune to, the movement of the Divine within and all around.… 

When we notice Jesus’ times of spiritual renewal interspersed as they are throughout the arc of his ministry—from his teaching, healing, and feeding of the four and five thousand followers, to his last words at the Last Supper, in Gethsemane, and on the cross—we begin to notice the definitive pattern in Jesus’ practice as a kind of flowing back-and-forth rhythm.  

There is a continual pausing to let go (what scholars call kenosis, or emptying) of egoic attachments, fear, judgment, or expectations and then a returning to the Divine Presence again and again.  

Let go.  

Return.  

Let go.  
Return.  

And the Divine is the one-pointed focus to which Jesus returns ceaselessly in this prayer rhythm of pause and release and return. This is Jesus’ formula for waking up—his formula for himself and for his followers.… It is Jesus’ practice for deepening the soul’s awareness of and attunement with our innermost essence, the Divine within.  

Caroline Oakes, Practice the Pause: Jesus’ Contemplative Practice, New Brain Science, and What It Means to Be Fully Human (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2023), 33, 34. 

Image credit: A path from one week to the next—Margi Ahearn, Exercise on Grief and Lamentation. McEl Chevrier, Untitled. CAC Staff, Untitled. Used with permission. Click here to enlarge image. 

On retreat, the CAC staff used watercolors to connect to our collective grief. This is one of the watercolor paintings that came from that exercise. 

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