A Place To Stand: Liberation and Action

Contemplation, Liberation, and Action

Sunday

God offers us quiet, contemplative eyes; God also calls us to prophetic and critical involvement in the pain and sufferings of our world—both at the same time. —Richard Rohr

Monday

To live oppositionally is to be holding some degree of resentment or unhealed negative energy that we have not brought to the divine presence for transformation. —Richard Rohr

Tuesday

What do you do with Christianity when it has become enmeshed with authoritarian politics and corrupted by violence?

—Carmen Acevedo Butcher

Wednesday

Stay. But stay awake. Stay rooted. Stay practiced in humility and courage. Stay shaped by love more than by fear. The goal is never escape. The goal is freedom—the kind that lets you remain fully human when systems forget how.

–Cameron Trimble

Thursday

Two men, Benedict and Boethius, were called to two completely different paths to live out their Christian faith. One stayed in the center of power and tried to influence it, holding fast to his faith.

The other left the centers of power and went to the margins to build an alternative community where they could keep the way of Christ alive. —Brian McLaren

Friday

Instead of helping nostalgic people inhabit bubbles of the past, religious communities can help people go forward on this inward migration toward sovereignty of mind;

where in defiance of a rising level of ugliness, people cultivate beauty… seeing it, creating it, savoring it. —Brian McLaren

Week Fifteen Practice

Contemplation and Loving Action

Father Richard writes:

At the Center for Action and Contemplation, we seek to ground compassionate action in contemplative, nondual consciousness.

When we experience the reality of our oneness with God, others, and creation, actions of justice and healing naturally follow. If we’re working to create a more whole world, contemplation will give our actions nonviolent, loving power for the long haul.

The civil rights leader John Lewis (1940–2020) has been an inspiration to many of us. How did this saintly public man avoid deeper recognition for so long? His words read like a prayer for contemplative action:

Study the path of others to make your way easier and more abundant. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates.

Know that the truth always leads to love and the perpetuation of peace. Its products are never bitterness and strife. Clothe yourself in the work of love, in the revolutionary work of nonviolent resistance against evil.

Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul and embed this planet with goodness. Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won.

Choose confrontation wisely, but when it is your time don’t be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice.

And if you follow your truth down the road to peace and the affirmation of love, if you shine like a beacon for all to see, then the poetry of all the great dreamers and philosophers is yours to manifest in a nation, a world community, and a Beloved Community that is finally at peace with itself. [1]

Father Richard offers encouragement:

Some form of contemplative practice is the only way (apart from great love and great suffering) to rewire people’s minds and hearts.

It is the only form of prayer that dips into the unconscious and changes people at deep levels—where all of the wounds, angers, and recognition lie hidden.

Only some form of prayer of quiet changes people for good and for others in any long-term way. It sustains and deepens the short-term wisdom we learn in great love and great suffering. [2]