Read an Excerpt by Adam Bucko from ONEING: A Living Tradition
Our Fall 2025 issue of ONEING: A Living Tradition features essays and poems that point the way towards living water for parched wanderers. If you seek transformation in your spiritual life, this new issue of ONEING features the voices of diverse authors who offer you wisdom and hope.
We hope you enjoy this excerpt from ONEING: A Living Tradition.
Adam Bucko “Contemplation is the Marrow”
Adam Bucko is an Episcopal priest and teacher of contemplative spirituality. He is the author most recently of Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation. He serves as the Director of the Center for Spiritual Imagination and is a vowed member of the new monastic Community of the Incarnation. In “Contemplation is the Marrow,” he writes:
Our life is also shaped by three accountabilities. First, we hold ourselves accountable to God and to each other through the spiritual disciplines of the Twelve Steps — a path of honesty, vulnerability, and ongoing conversion of life. Second, we are accountable to the earth, embracing an earth-centered spirituality that sees the natural world as a sacred text, a place of divine presence, not just raw material. And third, we are accountable to the poor, guided by liberation theology and liberation spirituality — hearing and responding to the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth — not as separate, but as one cry.
This, for us, is contemplation lived. It’s not about disappearing into mystical experiences. It’s about being formed into people who can show up — fully, truthfully, lovingly — in a suffering world.
We’re not alone in drawing from such contemporary tools. The contemplative tradition is a living tradition. Each generation is called to renew it — not by making it up from scratch, but by entering a deep and honest conversation with it, allowing it to speak into the longings and wounds of the present moment, and letting those contemporary questions reshape how the tradition lives. In that spirit, we find ourselves responding to the urgent needs of our time — reforming some of the life-denying tendencies of Western spirituality that disconnect soul from body, contemplation from action, and religion from justice. In an age of ecological crisis, systemic injustice, and deep loneliness, we need a spirituality that engages the world, not escapes it.
About ONEING
Established in 2013, ONEING is a journal of the Center for Action and Contemplation. Renowned for its diverse and deep exploration of mysticism and culture, ONEING is grounded in Richard Rohr’s teachings and wisdom lineage. Each issue features a themed collection of thoughtfully curated essays and critical perspectives from spiritual teachers, activists, modern mystics, and prophets of all religions.