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Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Week Fifty-two
Contemplation and Action
Summary
The Politics of Prayer
Monday, December 28, 2020
I’ve often said that we founded the Center for Action and Contemplation to be a place of integration between action and contemplation. I envisioned a place where we could teach activists in social movements to pray—and encourage people who pray to live lives of solidarity and justice. As we explained in our Center’s Radical Grace publication in 1999:
We believed that action and contemplation, once thought of as mutually exclusive, must be brought together or neither one would make sense. We wanted to be radical in both senses of the word, simultaneously rooted in Tradition and boldly experimental. We believed . . . that the power to be truly radical comes from trusting entirely in God’s grace and that such trust is the most radical action possible. [1]
To pray is to practice that posture of radical trust in God’s grace—and to participate in perhaps the most radical movement of all, which is the movement of God’s Love.
Contemplative prayer allows us to build our own house. To pray is to discover that Someone else is within our house and to recognize that it is not our house at all. To keeping praying is to have no house to protect because there is only One House. And that One House is Everybody’s Home. In other words, those who pray from the heart actually live in a very different world. I like to say it’s a Christ-soaked world, a world where matter is inspirited and spirit is embodied. In this world, everything is sacred; and the word “Real” takes on a new meaning. The world is wary of such house builders, for our loyalties will lie in very different directions. We will be very different kinds of citizens, and the state will not so easily depend on our salute. That is the politics of prayer. And that is probably why truly spiritual people are always a threat to politicians of any sort. They want our allegiance, and we can no longer give it. Our house is too big.
If religion and religious people are to have any moral credibility in the face of the massive death-dealing and denial of this era, we need to move with great haste toward lives of political holiness. This is my theology and my politics:
It appears that God loves life—the creating never stops.
We will love and create and maintain life.
It appears that God is love—an enduring, patient kind.
We will seek and trust love in all its humanizing (and therefore divinizing forms.
It appears that God loves the variety of multiple features, faces, and forms.
We will not be afraid of the other, the not-me, the stranger at the gate.
It appears that God loves—is—beauty: Look at this world!
Those who pray already know this. Their passion will be for beauty.
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:
In the late 1980s, [I became] a volunteer at Mother Teresa’s Gift of Love [hospice] in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. The twenty men being cared for there were suffering from AIDS. . . Always feeling like an outsider myself, with no medical experience I was now living among men who had been rejected by society. This difficult confrontation with illness, dying and death gave me a totally new perspective on the value of life. —Harvey V.
[1] Richard Rohr, from Radical Grace, anniversary edition (December 1999).
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Prayer as Political Activity,” Radical Grace, vol. 2, no. 2 (March–April 1989).
Image credit: Going to Church (detail), William H. Johnson, 1940‒1941, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
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News from the CAC
ONEING: Order, Disorder, Reorder
As we turn the page to a new year, and a new Daily Meditation theme— “A Time of Unveiling”— Richard Rohr and the faculty at CAC invite us to explore the necessity of disorder and discover your role in reorder. The fall issue of ONEING: Order, Disorder, Reorder is a must-read for these tumultuous and troubled times.
A Two-Minute Meditation for Grounding
Have you taken the time to connect with your deeper self during this busy holiday season? Join us for a 2-minute video practice of contemplation, or “centering” yourself—which is, in essence, the practice of reconnecting with God as our center. We invite you to return to this practice anytime in the coming weeks or months when you feel stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed.
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: When we experience the reality of our oneness with God, others, and Creation, actions of justice and healing naturally follow. —Richard Rohr
