CONSPIRE Teacher Talks #3
My Story
How do you sustain your lived connection to God’s Great Story—especially when reality is often filled with challenge, heartbreak, and loss? In this third email in our CONSPIRE Teacher Talks series, we learn how Scripture can validate our experiences, so that we might know loving presence beyond the limits of our small selves.
Shifting the Focus
When situating yourself in God’s Great Story, it’s natural to start with a focus on my story—the story of my trauma, my pain, my loss. We long for meaning, compassion, to feel safe and sustained.
Contemplation helps us to see my story is never outside of God’s sustaining love. As CAC teacher James Finley explains in his podcast Turning to the Mystics, contemplation invites us to experience God as fully present with us in both the mundane moments as well as the depths of suffering.
Listen to this clip from the webcast Dark Night of the Soul, where James Finley explores how contemplation connects us to Divine presence in suffering.
How Do You Show Up in the World?
Fr. Richard Rohr founded the CAC in 1987 on the belief that action and contemplation are inseparable. When we experience the reality of our oneness with God, others, and Creation, actions of justice and healing naturally follow.
Love is the key to this oneness. CONSPIRE presenter and mystic scholar Mirabai Starr says that when we show up in the world with Love first, even as we navigate the new realities our individual pain and trauma create, we can widen our circles. We can hold not only our own pain, but the pain of others as well.
Watch this CONSPIRE 2018 clip where Mirabai Starr explores what contemplative acceptance really means.
When asked how he learned to love, Fr. Richard replied “Well, I don’t know that I have.” That’s where he feels the gift of contemplative practice comes into play. Contemplation teaches us how to open so that God can teach us how to love: how to love God, ourselves, and each other—center to center.
As these teachings weave throughout Fr. Richard’s seven themes of the Alternative Orthodoxy, we see how our individual experiences can grow and evolve the ways we relate to Scripture. This can, much like Finley says, help us look beyond the illusion of separate self and embrace my story as a doorway into the Great Story Line that connects us all.
Practicing Heart Calibration
Please join us in a simple practice of calibrating our hearts to a greater awareness of God’s ever-present love for you and in you.
“We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
Take a moment to look back over your life and notice a moment when you knew that God loved you. If you cannot recall an experience like this, focus your memory on a moment where you felt a deep love towards someone or something.
Close your eyes and take a moment to return to the memory of that experience.
What do you see?
What do you feel?
What is open in you?
After reflecting on the experience in your mind and heart, create a drawing or write down some words that express some of what you experienced.
We pray that the final CONSPIRE conference will draw us into deeper connection—between the head and the heart, between belief and practice, between my story and God’s Great Story.
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