Remembering this...

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things are passing away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things
Whoever has God lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.
-- St. Teresa of Avila
 

Rebuilding from the Bottom Up: A Reflection following the Election

Friday, November 11, 2016
Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM

Beside the streams of Babylon, we sat and wept, trying to remember Mount Zion. —Psalm 137:1

Every four years a significant portion of the United States is disappointed with the outcome of our national election. Still, this election has felt different. There was a palpable fear and anger leading up to Election Day, and for many it has grown even stronger.

This fear is felt deeply by those who are most vulnerable in our country. As a follower of both Jesus and Francis, my primary moral viewpoint is not based in the wellbeing of those who are on top but first in those who are at the bottom.

For the vulnerable who have now been rendered more vulnerable, I lament and pray and promise to stand with you.

A time of national introspection must begin with self-introspection. Without our own inner searching, any of our quests for solutions and policy fixes will be based in shifting sands.

I suspect that we get the leaders who mirror what we have become as a nation. They are our shadow self for all to see. That is what the Jewish prophets told Israel both before and during their painful and long Exile (596-538 BC).

Yet Exile was the very time when the Jewish people went deep and discovered their prophetic voices—Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others—speaking truth to power, calling for justice. Their experience laid the solid foundation for Jesus’ teaching and solidarity with the poor and the outcast.

Maybe some of us naively thought that we could or should place our loyalty in any political agenda or party. Remember, Yahweh told Israel that they should never put their trust in “princes, horses, or chariots” (Psalms 20:7, 33:16-17), but only in the love of God. We must not imagine that political or programmatic changes—of themselves—will ever bring about the goodness, charity, or transformation that the Gospel offers the world.

Do not be afraid to allow conventional wisdom to fail and disappoint you, which is often the only path to wisdom. Imperial thinking focuses on judging who is worthy and who is unworthy, who is in and who is out. We who know about universal belonging and identity in God have a different form of power: Love (even of enemies) is our habitat, not the kingdoms of this world.

Our message is not primarily political, it is much more pre-political and post-political—with huge socio-political implications. We thus need to rebuild from the bottom up!

This election has solidified in us an urgent commitment to CAC’s work of action and contemplation, which now seems needed more than ever before. Grounding social action in contemplative consciousness is not a luxury for a few, but surely a cultural necessity. Both the Christian religion and American psyche now need deep cleansing and healing, and I do not say that lightly.

Only a contemplative mind can hold our fear, confusion, vulnerability, and anger and guide us toward love. Let’s use this milestone moment to begin again with confidence and true inner freedom and to move out into the world with compassion.

May God grant us both courage and peace!



A Prayer
All vulnerable and merciful God,
We do not know what is ours to do.
We feel scared and alone today.
We are tired of taking sides.
We cannot hold any more fear or anger or rejection.
And yet we know so many of our friends feel unheard and unwanted.
Help us trust that no feeling is final,
And that YOU will have the full and final word.
If You are indeed a Suffering God, may we hold this suffering with You for those who voted for Hillary Clinton, for those who voted for President-elect Donald Trump, and for the many who have felt excluded by our politics in the many ways that we do indeed exclude.
We offer ourselves as best we can to hold this Love outward and open toward all, just as You never cease to do toward us.
We believe You are praying this prayer through us.
Amen

Wisdom’s Hour: A Reflection following the Election

Friday, November 11, 2016
Cynthia Bourgeault

As of November 9, we are all in a new ball field: there is great grief, fear, consternation, lack of understanding, and heartbreak. In many ways it feels like the “back of the hand” to all the things that we as growing spiritual seekers look for, such as love, charity, compassion, and respect for the otherness of others. Now that the shake-up has occurred, it is our calling to use our heads and hearts in a broader, Teilhardian sort of way, to look at what is needed now and how we might collaborate with it to creating new possibilities in our world.

From Teilhard we have the reassurance that evolutionary change flows over deep time. Events which, viewed at the wrong scale (i.e., too close up), look like devastating upheavals may actually prove to be relatively minor systemic adjustments. Beneath the surface ripples and rapids, the river itself is still flowing smoothly in its channel.

The vision of a single, unified humanity burns as strongly as ever as these tectonic plates of consciousness and culture grind up against each other. I sense very clearly that my own work calls me strongly to continue with the task of strengthening and deepening the international and interspiritual aspects of my teaching. It was very meaningful to be in the UK on election night, to meditate with a group of nearly 300 seekers in Bristol, and to reaffirm palpably the power and presence of that quietly unstoppable Christ-Omega, drawing us along to that fullness of love that has been the trajectory—the sole trajectory—throughout these fourteen billion years. That is the corner of this vineyard in which I feel personally the most impelled to work.

Back on our home turf, am I totally off base in my intuition that the missing, underlying third force has something to do with safety? Viewed from a slightly longer range and slightly out-of-left field perspective, I keep seeing that this election of Donald Trump in a way completes an octave that began on September 11, 2001. In the last fifteen years our country has struggled under a pervasive and growing sense of vulnerability, impotence, helplessness, of having been subjected to a collective rape which still paralyzes the resolve, the gout de vivre, as Teilhard calls it. It expresses itself across the board: in the obsession with guns and gun violence, the very real threats to life and wellbeing in marginalized communities, and in the more privileged classes with the almost hysteria around food, security, and child safety. I really believe that at a subliminal level, Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” speaks to that sense of releasing the paralyzed, hang-dog fear which is the only America we have come to know. It’s not really about economics. It’s about something way deeper. . . .
At least a basis on which to begin: If we could quit calling each other idiots and “deplorables” and begin to deal with the deep terror, the desperation and helplessness which is felt across the board, we might begin to sense the ways to draw together.

What will be required of us all working in this particular wisdom bandwidth, I believe, is that old quality metis, which Peter Kingsley described so well in his book Reality. It really means an alert, supple shrewdness—like Jesus, when cornered by the question, “Must we pay taxes to Caesar?” It’s an ability to be present in our bodies in our hearts, to live beyond fear and judgment, and because of this non-identification, to be able to use the materials immediately at hand in the moment to see what must be done—again, immediately in the moment.

If anything has been the victim of this election, it’s pluralistic consciousness: the sense of sanctimony, moral rectitude, urgency, and judgmentalism that has infected so much of the liberal progressive culture where so many of us have tried, with the very best of intentions, to do our work. Weighed in the balance, alas, and found wanting. We have to learn to work from a more skillful place, reading the signs of the times, trust love, find our voices once again to “speak truth to power.”
Yes, a lot of sacred cows are about to be slaughtered, I fear. We will see social and environmental benchmarks we have worked for decades summarily undone. (I don’t need to enumerate; way too depressing.) We must understand this in advance and not let every defeat become an armageddon, a reason for falling on our swords. The earth has a will, and the one body of humanity has coalesced too far to be deconstructed. They will be our partners. They have intelligence and resilience we can draw on, if we can only not lose the way in fear and despair.

And so, Contemplatives, “Allons!” Let us go forward. There is work to be done; prayer, joy, courage, and strength are deeply needed. And we do know the way there. This is Wisdom’s hour.

Re-Grounding in Love: A Reflection following the ElectionWednesday, November 16, 2016
James Finley

https://cac.org/re-grounding-love-reflection-following-election/