CONSPIRE Teacher Talks #5
Our Story
How do you find pathways to God’s truth and beauty when our story includes heartbreaking tales of suffering and oppression?
In this fifth email of our CONSPIRE Teacher Talks series we will explore the depth of sacredness that is always there. As the Alternative Orthodoxy shows us, God is our Ground of Being, whose loving and benevolent presence permeates all Reality.
In this time of global disruption and crisis, institutions, ideologies, and religion feel increasingly out of sync with the needs of the world. Grounding ourselves in a larger story of faith, hope and love can give us the courage to examine our shadows and do the work of healing.
Examining Our Individual Shadow
Every story—and every person, institution, system and community in it—has a shadow. What happens when we ignore it, deny it, or forbid analysis? Fr. Richard Rohr often says that anything above criticism will soon become demonic. It was after learning the Enneagram that he came face to face with his own shadow:
I was driving—I can still almost picture the place on the street where it hit me: My God, I am a One! It was like a Damascus Road experience where the scales fell from my eyes, and I saw that what I had thought were my virtues were also my worst traps. It was my earliest direct teaching of non-dual thinking, even though we didn’t use that word then. The Enneagram shows us that our gift is our sin, and our sin is our gift, and you can’t have one without the other.
—RICHARD ROHR
Examining Our Collective Shadow
In this clip from CONSPIRE 2018, Fr. Richard and fellow CAC teacher and CONSPIRE presenter Rev. Dr. Barbara Holmes discuss the trepidation many people feel when addressing the shadows of communal stories.
Instead of blaming others, we can reflect on our own complicity and support of systems that abandoned the poor, warehoused our children in failing schools, and failed to provide adequate health care, even under normal circumstances. Can we be honest now about what is not working? Can we re-envision new options? I believe that we can, if we want to.
—Barbara Holmes
Watch Fr. Richard and Dr. Holmes explore how contemplation can help us gently open a healing rhetoric to address our collective shadow.
Awaken to Abundant Grace
In her podcast Love. Period, CONSPIRE presenter Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis talks about discovering a deeper understanding of “love thy neighbor” during research for her forthcoming book, Fierce Love. “Maybe the problem is we are loving our neighbors as ourselves,” Rev. Jacqui says, “which is to say we don’t love ourselves.”
Love is at the heart of restoration, as. Rev. Jacqui reminds us. Love is the thread that connects our story to God’s Great Story. Love is an invitation to come home.
Watch this clip from the 2019 Universal Christ Conference where Rev. Jacqui invites us to awaken in the abundant life of God.
The themes of Richard Rohr’s Alternative Orthodoxy reveal how our story is connected to One Reality—in which everything belongs. No one needs to be punished, scapegoated, or excluded. If we honestly examine our collective shadow, we can lovingly critique our story to, as Fr. Richard often says, stand in solidarity “on the edge of the inside.”
Practicing Sacredness
Please join us in a simple practice of experiencing God present in and all around us, sustaining us in sacredness.
Can you remember a time that you felt loved, forgiven, seen or where you offered love, forgiveness, attentiveness to another?
Extend an invitation to The Sacred to deepen you, teach you, show you, and love you as you reflect on this memory. Breathe in the memory of love, forgiveness, and seeing; breathe out slowly resting your thinking mind.
Close your eyes and breathe in what you remember.
Breathe out slowly, resting your thinking mind.
Now rest in this stance of sacredness.
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