Paul: The Misunderstood Mystic: Weekly Summary

Sunday
Paul is probably one of the most misunderstood and disliked teachers in the Church. I think this is largely because we have tried to understand a nondual mystic with our simplistic, dualistic minds. —Richard Rohr

Monday
Paul is the first clear successor to Jesus as a nondual teacher. He creates the mystical foundations for Christianity. It’s a mystery of participation in Christ. It’s not something that we achieve by performance. It’s something that we are already participating in, and often we just don’t know it. —Richard Rohr

Tuesday
Paul recognizes that the greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order. —Richard Rohr

Wednesday
Paul sings the praises of active love, of charity, inspired by the fire of divine love and outlines a vision of the cosmic Christ, the Christ who “is all, and is in all.”  —Ursula King

Thursday
People like Jesus and Paul were not executed for saying, “Love one another.” They were killed because their understanding of love meant standing against the domination systems that ruled their world, and collaborating with the Spirit in the creation of a new way of life. —Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan

Friday
Without the resurrection to enliven his experience of suffering, Paul would have been both afflicted and crushed, perplexed and driven to despair, struck down and destroyed. But he is not. The Risen Christ illumines everything. —Julia Gatta

The Mind of Christ

We encourage you to create some space this week for intentional silence and stillness, using Father Richard’s description of contemplation and “the mind of Christ” as an entry into prayer:

In contemplative practice, we refuse to identify with any one side, while still maintaining our intelligence. We hold the creative tension of every seeming conflict and go beyond words to pure, open-ended experience, which has the potential to unify many seeming contradictions. We cannot know God the way we know anything else; we only know God subject to subject, by a process of mirroring. This is the “mind of Christ” (see 1 Corinthians 2:16). It really is a different way of knowing, and you can tell it by its gratuity, its open-endedness, its compassion, and by the way it is so creative and energizing in those who allow it.

Truly great thinkers and cultural creatives take for granted that they have access to a different and larger mind. They recognize that a Divine Flow is already happening and that everyone can plug into it. In all cases, it is a participative kind of knowing, a being known through and not an autonomous knowing. The most common and traditional word for this change of consciousness was historically “prayer,” but we trivialized that precious word by making it functional, transactional, and supposedly about problem solving. The only problem that prayer solves is us!

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Just This (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2017), 38–39.

Explore Further. . .

• Listen to James Finley speak with Kirsten Oates about the contemplative path on Turning to the Mystics.
• Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.  
• Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Jenna Keiper, Trash Can Study I (detail), 2020, photograph, New Mexico, used with permission. Dorothea Lange, “Bum blockade.” (detail), 1936, photograph, public domain. Jenna Keiper, Trash Can Study II (detail), 2020, photograph, New Mexico, used with permission. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States.

This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story. 

Image Inspiration: The images on the left and right may not be immediately clear upon first glance. Perhaps there is room for our questions to stay with us gently, taking their time, until understanding slowly emerges as we walk along.