Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Three Summary

Prophetic Truth

January 15–January 20, 2023

Sunday
Prophets always talk about the untalkable and open a huge new area of “talkability.” It helps us see what we didn’t know how to see until they helped us to see it. That's how we begin to recognize a prophet—there is this widening of seeing, this deepening of a truth that was always there. —Richard Rohr

Monday
What is a prophet? One who names the situation truthfully and in its largest context. —Richard Rohr

Tuesday
However prophets may prophesy, their integrity is shown by the way in which they give up their very lives as testimony and witness as they side with the forgotten and the lost ones and loudly proclaim that God, who is aware of their pain and feels their suffering as [God’s] own, will not allow that pain and suffering to continue. —Megan McKenna

Wednesday
Anger is a source of my creativity. It’s a vaccination against apathy and complacency. It’s a gift that can be abused—or wisely used. Yes, it’s a temptation, but it’s also a resource and an opportunity, as unavoidable and necessary as pain. It’s part of the gift of being human and being alive.
—Brian McLaren

Thursday
I believe truth is revolutionary; it’s part of the work of fierce love. Truth makes a personal, spiritual, ethical, and moral demand upon us. It wants to be said, known, told. It hurts and it’s inconvenient, but it’s essential to our well-being.  —Jacqui Lewis

Friday
Prophets believe that they have somehow entered into the experience of God. They have entered into the heart of God. So when the prophet sees non-compassion, when they see a hard heart in the hearts of the people, the prophet says: “I know for certain that you do not know God, because the heart of God is compassion.” —Richard Rohr

Week Three Practice

Honoring Advocacy

Author, poet, and spiritual teacher Pixie Lighthorse is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. With her prayer, we ask the Divine to give us all that we need to advocate for others:

Help me to speak out for justice with a special desire fueled by a power greater than surface comforts and outdated systems.

Let me be a troublemaker to champion those I love and care for, and for those I don’t know intimately who need my help. Hire me to be a powerful voice for the change that heals, reconciles, forgives, and improves. Help me create time and space to lend support where it is needed. Transmit to me the passion to be bothered by violations of another’s rights to life, liberty, happiness, and their voice. Find me faithful and in service, riding shotgun to heart-led movements, and leading the charge when it is up to me to do so. Remove my feelings of hopelessness in what I perceive to be the opposition. Align me with action and channel my energy for others.

Bind me to the medicine of love. Let me affect the transformation that leads to needed change. Light the torch of revolution in my heart. Stand me upright on a foundation of faith while I take the next steps. Build my voice as an instrument for defending freedoms which provide equality. Keep my motivations clean. Grant me the tools to see near and far, and find me adjusting the lens often.

Help me to give a leg up to the underdog: to root for the one who doesn’t stand a chance. Help me to accept being unliked or misunderstood for positioning myself behind what I believe in.

Bolster my confidence and give me the understanding and empathy required for sustainable existence. Make tolerance my priority and give me the words and actions to fight violence with the sword of peace.

Orient me to inclusivity. Help me to stop putting individuals into dualistic opposition, rather focus me on repairing broken systems, and my participation in them. Dissolve my tendencies for cliques, partisanship, judgement, righteousness, bandwagons and the damning or idolizing of those I perceive to have more than me.

Help me to do my part to clang the bells of freedom.

When ten thousand are whispering, make me one who is listening.

Pixie Lighthorse, Prayers of Honoring Voice (Redmond, OR: Lighthorse Publishing, 2017), 37. Used with permission. For more from this author, visit www.pixielighthorse.com or follow her on instagram.com/pixielighthorse

Image credit: A path from one week to the next—Benjamin Yazza, Untitled 10, 8, and 13. Used with permission. Click here to enlarge image.

Prophetic truth catalyzes us to stop avoiding uncomfortable truths.

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