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Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Twenty-four

Inner and Outer Freedom

Freedom to Love
Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Everything is a manifestation of divine radiance. Love rushes everywhere, in everyone, in everything. —Paula D’Arcy

My friend Paula D’Arcy leads and attends retreats where people from many different backgrounds come to face their deepest grief, insecurities, and anger to find the freedom that lies on the other side. She shares one of her own experiences here:

There is a love which itself has the power to free the human heart. Many remarkable people live in testament to this love, even though they are held in jail cells and prisons, or suffer the harsh conditions imposed by poverty, [racism,] adversity, war, and occupation. The truth of this love is that, if we can be uprooted from our daily preoccupations and taken by direct experience into its presence, then a profound transformation is possible. Whoever arrives at this place looks at the world differently. The distinctions on the surface no longer exist. Here it is possible to suspend our certainties and touch something greater: the Spirit within us.

In January 2014, I met the fire of that inner heart. The outer circumstances were the ten days I spent at a retreat center in California with thirty other men and women. . . . We were Americans, Mexicans, Israelis, Bedouins, and Palestinians. . . . We all expressed a longing for freedom, while having little idea what that meant, or might demand. We were about to touch the fire of Spirit, embedded not only deep within our own [bodies], but in all life. I recorded our journey through those days, and this telling is excerpted from my journal. . . .

I don’t want to see that how I participate in the world is often less than love, and that the environment in which we all live is the result of our sense of entitlement and greed. I don’t want to know what freedom demands and what dedication to love and peace may require. Words from the poet Rumi haunt my thoughts: his saying that, in order to live in this world, you have to be truly and completely in love. . . .

Love does not come as theory. It moves in bodies, in nature, in the ground beneath us and the space between. True Love is not emotional. It is a different nature, waiting in us like a secret seed. The illusion is thinking that, by changing a system, an ideology, or our external circumstances, things will change. No; freedom is . . . realizing that this Love is not a symbol or an ideal; it is a living power. . . .

And I understood what it could mean if we met the outer world with our inner world. . . .

There is a living love that exceeds our circumstances and our conditioning. That’s the truth we all must find. The profound problems of hatred, judgment, [racism,] and revenge, our jealousies and our violence, will be solved by love, and love alone.

Gateway to Action & Contemplation:
What word or phrase resonates with or challenges me? What sensations do I notice in my body? What is mine to do?

Prayer for Our Community:
O Great Love, thank you for living and loving in us and through us. May all that we do flow from our deep connection with you and all beings. Help us become a community that vulnerably shares each other’s burdens and the weight of glory. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our world. [Please add your own intentions.] . . . Knowing you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God, amen.

Listen to Fr. Richard read the prayer.

Story from Our Community:
I work in India and during this . . . time we have seen about 40 million [people] become very poor over night as India went into a complete “lockdown.” Our teams have been giving out food all over the country. Reading your daily devotions of God’s love and care for the poor has been so encouraging. —Elisabeth C.

Share your own story with us.

Paula D’Arcy, “The Freedom of the Greater Heart,” “Emancipation,” Oneing, vol. 3, no. 1 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2015), 53–54, 56, 57, 58.

Epigraph: “The Freedom of the Greater Heart,” 57.

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News from the CAC

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In her essay Transition, life coach and former pastor Felicia Murrell writes, “Heavily laden with years and years of collective racial anger, misuse, and abuse, we lumber into liminality with all these feelings, these shackles of oppression… We cry the tears our ancestors could not. We feel the fatigue they were not allowed to feel. We give in to the vulnerability that would have cost them their lives — not blaming, not finger-pointing, but honest truth-telling of our dehumanizing, painful history.” Explore free selections from the newest issue of ONEING.

Action & Contemplation

2020 Daily Meditations Theme

What does God ask of us? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. —Micah 6:8

Franciscan Richard Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987 because he saw a deep need for the integration of both action and contemplation. If we pray but don’t act justly, our faith won’t bear fruit. And without contemplation, activists burn out and even well-intended actions can cause more harm than good. In today’s religious, environmental, and political climate our compassionate engagement is urgent and vital.

In this year’s Daily Meditations, Father Richard helps us learn the dance of action and contemplation. Each week builds on previous topics, but you can join at any time! Click the video to learn more about the theme and to find reflections you may have missed.

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Inspiration for this week's banner image: Only when we are able to “let go” of everything within us, all desire to see, to know, to taste and to experience the presence of God, do we truly become able to experience that presence with the overwhelming conviction and reality that revolutionize our entire inner life. —Thomas Merton