Everything Belongs: Week 2
Summary: Sunday, December 4-Friday, December 9, 2016
God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting our always too small boxes. (Sunday)
Learning how to love—which is our life’s project—is quite simply learning to accept our messy reality. If you love anyone, then you have learned to accept them despite their faults. (Monday)
“First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God.” —Julian of Norwich (Tuesday)
God is not threatened by differences, as we see in the three persons of the Trinity. It’s we who are. (Wednesday)
As long as your ego is in charge, you will demand a retributive God; you’ll insist that hell is necessary. But if you have been transformed by love, hell will no longer make sense to you because you know that God has always loved you in your sinfulness. (Thursday)
God is to be found in all things, even and most especially in the painful, tragic, and sinful things, exactly where we do not want to look for God. (Friday)
Practice: Praying Unceasingly
For Jesus, prayer seems to be a matter of waiting in love, returning to love, and trusting that love is the bottom stream of reality. Prayer isn’t primarily words; it’s a place, an attitude, a stance. That’s why Paul could say, “Pray always” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). We can pray unceasingly if we find the stream and know how to wade in the waters. The stream will flow through us, and all we have to do is consciously stay there. Paul says, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:26-27).
Of course the ego resists such surrender and emptiness. So we need a little practice. In contemplative prayer we consciously open ourselves to being prayed through. Again and again we are humbled, observing our incessant and scattered stream of consciousness. Simply watching our thoughts helps us detach from them rather than be identified with them. Again and again we have the opportunity to let go, to sink into the deeper stream of Presence. For a moment or two we are “praying unceasingly.” It takes a lifetime of practice to remain in this flow more and more.
Gateway to Silence:
All things work together for good. —Romans 8:28
References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003), 82; and
How Do We Get Everything to Belong? disc 2 (CAC: 2004), CD, MP3 download.
For Further Study:
Richard Rohr, CONSPIRE 2016: Everything Belongs (CAC: 2016), MP4 download
Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2003)
Richard Rohr, How Do We Get Everything to Belong? (CAC: 2004), CD, MP3 download
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