Sunday
In and with God, we can love everything and everyone—even my enemies. Alone and by myself, my willpower and intellect will seldom be able to love in difficult situations over time.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Christian morality at its best seeks “a harmony of goodness.” We harmonize and balance necessary self-care with a constant expansion beyond ourselves to loving others.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
What would it mean to build a society in which every person is treated as an image of the Divine? How would this affect our relationships with our neighbors, our coworkers, the stranger lying beneath the stained blankets and trash outside Starbucks?
—Rabbi Sharon Brous
Wednesday
For the better part of my life, I have looked upon the broken Christ, the Christ of the persecuted, the Christ bound to us in our desolation. Now my deepest yearning is to see the healing of their wounds, the binding up of what was broken, the wiping away of every tear, the “making all things well.”
—Carl Siciliano
Thursday
In my mind, pity isn’t even analogous to compassion. Pity is just the paternalistic cousin of contempt. Pity keeps the other person at a distance and me in a rarified state of satisfaction. Compassion, on the other hand, draws us close.
—Nadia Bolz-Weber
Friday
Jesus taught that it’s all about love, and in the end, that’s all we’re all going to be judged for. Did we love? Did we love life? Did we love ourselves? Did we love God, and did we love our neighbor?
—Richard Rohr
Week Twenty-Two Practice
Love Upwelling
Father Richard offers this contemplative practice of receiving God’s love so it can flow through us to others.
Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Matthew 22:39). We are to love our neighbor in the same way we love ourselves. “We love because God has first loved us” (1 John 4:19). When we accept the unconditional love and undeserved mercy that God offers us—knowing we are not worthy of it—then we can allow God to love others through us in the same way. It’s God in you loving you, warts and all, and God in you loving others as they are. This is why the love we have available to give away is limitless.
The following exercise is based on a teaching from Friar Francisco de Osuna, OFM (died c. 1540), whose spiritual writings deeply inspired Teresa of Ávila. Here, in my words, is what he taught his students:
- Dam up the fountain of your soul, where love is always springing forth.
- It will be forced to rise.
- Yet it will remain quiet and at rest within you; wait for that quiet.
- You will see the image of God reflected in your own clear waters, more resplendent than in any other thing—provided the disturbing turmoil of thoughts dies down. [1]
Try to stay beneath your thoughts, neither fighting them nor thinking them. Hold yourself at a deeper level than your mind, perhaps in your chest, solar plexus, or breath; stay in your body self. Resist any desire to repress or express, just allow animal contentment. It will feel like nothing or darkness. Stay “crouched” there at the cellular level without shame, long enough for Another Source to begin to flow and well up as light or joy. From this place the love flows through you from the Source as an energy more than as an idea. God in you and through you recognizes and loves God—in yourself and in others, too.
References:
[1] See Francisco de Osuna, The Third Spiritual Alphabet, trans. Mary E. Giles (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1981), 566.
Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring Within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2016), 367–368.
Image credit and inspiration: Cynthia Magana, untitled (detail), 2016, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. In order to care for each other, we must also take care of ourselves.
