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Friday, April 23rd, 2021

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Sixteen: The Contemplative Call to Nature

The Work That Reconnects

A few years ago, some members of our CAC community and I were blessed to be able to spend a week at Ghost Ranch with Joanna Macy. Joanna is a brilliant Buddhist teacher, a systems thinker, deep ecologist, and activist for peace, justice, and a healthy environment, and she led us in what she calls the Work That Reconnects. Joanna (now in her 90s) is a true elder, a woman who has dedicated her life to what she and others call The Great Turning from an Industrial Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Society. She sees us in the middle of The Great Unraveling, what I might call an “unveiling,” which “draws attention to the disasters that Business As Usual has caused and continues to create.” [1] Ecologist Stephan Harding writes:

The Work That Reconnects is conceptualized as a spiral that maps the journey to Gaian consciousness [or deep connection with the living Earth] in four stages. The first is gratitude, in which we experience our love for life. Next is honoring our pain, in which we learn how to suffer the pain of the world with others and with the world itself. Then, in seeing with new eyes, we experience our connection with life in all its forms through all the ages. Finally, in the last stage we go forth into action in the world as open human beings, aware of our mutual belonging in the web of life, learning through feedback in our social and ecological domains. [2]

Richard here: In their book Coming Back to Life, Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown describe powerful experiential practices that take groups through each stage. I can vouch for their effectiveness! By the end of the week at Ghost Ranch many of us had made discoveries similar to those described here:

What then can we expect to take with us, as we go forth into the world and our individual lives?

[1] Joanna Macy and Molly Brown, Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to The Work That Reconnects (New Society Publishers: 2014), 5.

[2] Stephan Harding, “Gaia Consciousness in the Great Turning,” in A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time, ed. Stephanie Kaza (Shambhala: 2020), 15–16.

[3] Macy and Brown, Coming Back to Life, 192.

Image credit: Belinda Rain, California—San Francisco Bay Area (detail), 1972, photograph, public domain.

Image inspiration: Our siblings abound: Bird, Berry, Trout, Tree. May we honor the sacred in every being.

Prayer For Our Community

Loving God, you fill all things with a fullness and hope that we can never comprehend. Thank you for leading us into a time where more of reality is being unveiled for us all to see. We pray that you will take away our natural temptation for cynicism, denial, fear and despair. Help us have the courage to awaken to greater truth, greater humility, and greater care for one another. May we place our hope in what matters and what lasts, trusting in your eternal presence and love. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our suffering world. Please add your own intentions . . . Knowing, good God, you are hearing us better than we are speaking, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God. Amen.
Listen to Father Richard pray this prayer aloud.

Story From Our Community

I love how Fr. Richard’s musings link with what is unfolding now. His appreciation of nature and her heart-opening divinity is so nurturing. There is surely evidence of the interwoven cosmos in us and all around us now. Richard coaxes us toward an awareness of how we might mirror that in our daily acts, first in awareness, then perhaps in kindness—making the invisible visible together.
—Allie M.
Share your own story with us.

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Explore Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations archive at cac.org.

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