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Center for Action and Contemplation
The Path of the Prophet
The Path of the Prophet

The Prophet-Mystic

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

In an essay for ONEING: The Path of the Prophet, Mirabai Starr describes grief as the thread which draws together the work of prophets and mystics:  

Our religious conditioning has carved a gulf between the prophet and the mystic, just as we have between action and contemplation and between transcendence and immanence. It’s easy to buy into the illusion that these two spiritual orientations are fundamentally and mutually exclusive. But you can, of course, be both a prophet and a mystic. You can be, and probably are, a prophet-mystic. 

Fr. Richard Rohr has often declared that the most important word in the title of the organization he founded, the Center for Action and Contemplation, is “and.” We are activists and contemplatives. We are prophets and mystics. We access momentary nondual states, especially in silence, and we carry the fruits we harvest in such moments back into the world to nourish ourselves and feed the hungry. 

The key to living as a prophet-mystic is showing up for what is, no matter how heartbreaking or laborious, how fraught with seemingly intractable conflict and how tempting it might be to meditate or pray our way out of the pain. Contemplative practices train us to befriend reality, to become intimate with all things by offering them our complete attention. In this way, the prophet and the mystic occupy the same broken-open space. The nexus is grief. The mystic has tasted the grace of direct experience of the sacred and then seemingly lost the connection. She feels the pain of separation from the divine and longs for union. The prophet has perceived the brokenness of the world and is incapable of unseeing it. He feels the pain of injustice and cannot help but protest. But the mystic cannot jump to union without spending time in the emptiness of longing. The prophet must sit in helplessness before stepping up and speaking out. 

Many years ago, my friend [Fr.] William Hart McNichols (quoting the wild woman theologian Adrienne von Speyr) told me that “the prophets are inconsolable.” I will never forget that. At the time, I still harbored a dualistic sense of political versus spiritual and fancied myself more a contemplative than an activist, even though I grew up in a family that was passionately engaged in protesting the Vietnam War. In our secular Jewish family, the Berrigan brothers, radical Catholic priests dedicated to peace and justice, were revered as heroes, on the same level as Abraham Joshua Heschel or Angela Davis. While I was never at home in the political arena, with its absolute judgments of right and wrong and fixed delineations between victims and perpetrators, I was proud of my parents’ social conscience. But it all felt somewhat disconnected from the heart. Then, years later, Fr. Bill built that bridge for me. The prophets, like the mystics, responded from the holy ground of the broken heart.  

Reference:  
Mirabai Starr, “Inconsolable: The Path of the Prophet-Mystic,” ONEING 12, no. 2, The Path of the Prophet (2024): 49–50. Available in print or PDF download

Image credit and inspiration: Eddie Kopp, Untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Prophets break things down in order to make room to create something new. 

Story from Our Community:  

Years ago, I remember watching unaffiliated athletes compete on TV. If they didn’t represent any specific team, they were referred to as “running unattached.” This perfectly describes my relationship with organized religion. Even though I do not participate in the rites and rituals that once held great meaning for me, I am still “running the race.” This is in no small part due to the gift of the Daily Meditations, which keep me connected to the Trinity through walking a prophetic and contemplative path. 
—Robert O. 

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