Twentieth-Century Contemplative Exemplars: Weekly Summary
Sunday
The most important word in our Center’s name is not Action nor is it Contemplation; it’s the word and. We need both compassionate action and contemplative practice for the spiritual journey.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Mother Teresa felt that if she took sides, or played the firebrand, that she could not be what Jesus had told her to be—love to and for all. She said that if she started correcting and pointing out “sinners” she could no longer be an instrument of love and reconciliation for them.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
The contemplative life is not, and cannot be, a mere withdrawal, a pure negation, a turning of one’s back on the world with its sufferings, its crises, its confusions and its errors.
—Thomas Merton
Wednesday
Howard Thurman spoke of spiritual disciplines as those practices by which we remove the barriers to our “inner altar”—our place of communion with God. And through this definition, he included activism as a spiritual discipline.
—Liza J. Rankow
Thursday
Why is there a war? Because I and my neighbor and everyone else do not have enough love. Yet we could fight war and all its excrescences by releasing, each day, the love that is shackled inside us, and giving it a chance to live.
—Etty Hillesum
Friday
Cosmic spirituality means we come together, bring our gifts, bringing our histories, bringing our experience, bringing our positives and negatives, our arts, our skills, our teaching, all that we have and all that we hold.
—Thea Bowman
Week Twenty-Nine Practice
Who Makes You Want to Believe?
Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren urges readers to find support in the people and communities of faith who surround them:
A question I keep returning to, a question I hold on to to keep going in the Christian life, is: Who are the believers that make you want to believe?
Whose faithfulness makes you want to be faithful? Surround yourself with these people. Immerse yourself in a church, in a Christian community, whose (albeit imperfect) lives help you learn, see, and seek what is most true, good, and beautiful. Immerse yourself in thinkers throughout time who have asked the questions your soul is shouting and offered you new ones as well. Immerse yourself in the prayers of those who teach you to pray and the songs of those who dare you to sing. Immerse yourself in the stories of saints and works of art that help you to glimpse the wild dance of God in the world.
After I spend time with certain friends and mentors, I’ll catch myself longing to know God like they do. Because the God they follow is kind and gentle, but never a pushover. They live as people who have known agony and ecstasy. They have been disappointed and have failed and failed and failed, yet still know themselves as beloved. To me, they are a walking, breathing apologetic. They make me want to believe….
Those who make me want to believe may not make it any less arduous to do so. They do not offer me a faith that costs little or assure me that God affirms whatever it is I already think. But they urge me to persist and to go deep, to seek a life of truth and beauty, to not give up.
They are around me each Sunday in the pews. I show up, maybe feeling angry, impatient, sorry for myself, distracted, or faithless. Yet they are there, still singing and speaking truth over me, praying for me, asking how I’m doing. We stand together and say the creed, and their voices carry my own. After the scripture is read, they say, “Thanks be to God,” and their gratitude stands in for my reluctance. They offer me bread and wine and tell me that this is the presence of God, even if it seems God is nowhere to be found. Their faithfulness makes me want to be faithful. And maybe next week, I’ll do the same for them.
Reference:
Tish Harrison Warren, What Grows in Weary Lands: On Christian Resilience (Convergent Books, 2026), 135–136.
Image credit and inspiration: John Mccann, untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The path of contemplation is lined with the great exemplar trees—those who have gone before—practicing contemplation and action in unique and interconnected ways.
