Christianity: A Living Tradition: Weekly Summary
Sunday
We are part of a living tradition of action and contemplation, people who have gone beyond the theoretical and are living out this wisdom in their daily lives. Truly, it will take a movement of such people to create a world where everything belongs.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Contemplation, then, is not a separate path or a unique calling. It is Christianity itself, lived with depth and honesty. It is the heart of the Christian tradition, stretching from Jesus to the desert to today.
—Adam Bucko
Tuesday
Renewal is not a one-time event, something implemented and completed. Renewal is an ongoing practice. It is the reality of being a living tradition.
—Katie Gordon
Wednesday
Black contemplative preaching unites the head and the heart, the personal and the communal, and spiritual formation and social transformation as it bears witness to the liberating and life-giving gospel of Jesus Christ.
—E. Trey Clark
Thursday
The contemplative path must grow in order for us to continue on, in order for us to be alive in the living, growing, and breathing tradition.
—Cassidy Hall
Friday
As we rejoice in this growing, life-giving, living tradition, we face important questions: How will we help our tradition to grow, mature, and expand its influence for good? How will we enrich and improve the tradition as it stands?
—Brian McLaren
Week Forty-Three Practice
Practices of Contemplative Activism
This week our meditations feature excerpts from the CAC’s latest journal issue ONEING: A Living Tradition. Social justice movement lawyer Alison McCrary offers ten practices to create a contemplative foundation that supports the work for justice:
As we work for this [more just] future as people on a spiritual journey, engaging in action for liberation in accordance with our Christian tradition, we are called to cultivate a contemplative life. “Contemplative activism” can be embodied through these ten practices:
- Ground ourselves in spiritual practices. Know our practices. Cultivate an inner life.
- Decolonize our lives and the systems that perpetuate colonized behaviors and mentalities.
- Listen deeply to others, especially those on the margins of the margins.
- Have a willingness to challenge power and build collective power.
- Follow the leadership of those closest to the pain or the problem.
- Build genuine relationships with those you are working with and advocating for.
- Cultivate community and care.
- Maintain an ever-evolving and deepening political analysis, values, and language.
- Take risks.
- Hold onto radical hope.
Each of the above practices also calls us to cultivate a practice of presence: to the divine, within our bodies, with our feelings (grief, joy, despair, hope), to and with another person, in the face of a person or institution causing harm, with nature, and to what is wanting to be revealed and created….
Being present, living into the ten practices of a contemplative activist, and staying grounded in our contemplative practices can awaken us to a new awareness of the divine dwelling within and among us as we work for good and move Martin Luther King Jr.’s “arc of justice” toward liberation.
As we do so, our own being and the divine being become more and more mysteriously interwoven. Contemplative activism is for everyone, not just a select few. We are called to reflect on the suffering of the world, our role in it, and what we are called to do in light of it. Contemplation invites us into the direct experience of God, and we can respond and act from a grounded and rooted space.
Reference:
Alison McCrary, “Modern Mystics in the Movements: Incarnating Holy Resistance, Radical Hope, and Contemplative Activism,” ONEING 13, no. 2, A Living Tradition (2025): 123–124. Available in print and PDF download.
Image credit and inspiration: Jesús Boscán, untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Venezuela, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Movement, like blood through our veins, carries us deeper into the mystery of God—ever flowing, expanding, and reshaping our understanding as we learn and embody the teachings—just like a living Christianity.
