CAC’s Eight Core Principles: Weekly Summary

Sunday
Without the assurance of Jesus’ teaching and example, I would not have the courage or confidence to say what I have said throughout my years of teaching.
—Richard Rohr

Monday
Only the second gaze sees fully and truthfully. It sees itself, the other, and even God with God’s own compassionate eyes. It is from this place true action must spring.
—Richard Rohr

Tuesday
When we live on the edge of anything, with respect and honor, we are in an auspicious and advantageous position. When we are both inside and outside, we are an ultimate challenge, possible reformers, and lasting invitations to a much larger world.
—Richard Rohr

Wednesday
Most of history has been content with cultural truth, denominational truth, national truth, scientific truth, rational truth, factual truth, personal truth, etc. These are all needed and helpful, but true religion affirms the Big Truth beyond any of these smaller truths.
—Richard Rohr

Thursday
The depth and mystery of God leaves all of us as perpetual searchers and seekers, always novices and beginners. It is the narrow and dark way of faith.
—Richard Rohr

Friday
Few Christians have ever been seriously taught about their inherent union with God and will find all kinds of self-hating reasons to deny it. Only the True Self can dare to believe the gospel’s Good News.
—Richard Rohr

Living Ourselves into a New Way of Thinking

The Eighth Core Principle of the CAC: We do not think ourselves into a new way of living; we live ourselves into a new way of thinking. This final principle is a fruit of Richard’s decades of companioning with others on the spiritual journey. He writes:

The form of learning which most changes people in lasting ways has to touch them at a broader and deeper level than the thinking mind. The Dalai Lama said it well: “An open heart is an open mind. A change of heart is a change of mind.” [1] This is the urgently needed work of mature spirituality and the vision of our work here at the Center. This probably seems strange coming from someone who writes and talks as much as I have, but it is actually my experience as a teacher that has led me to this conclusion.

Many folks over the years, even very good-willed people, have read and listened to my presentations of the gospel, yet have actually done very little in terms of lifestyle changes, economic or political rearrangements, or church reform. My preaching has remained in the realm of “good ideas.” After all, isn’t that what many think church is all about—attending services and believing ideas to be true or false? For most of us, if we’re honest, our lives rarely make space for any new practices or changed patterns or habits to emerge. In contrast, transformative education does not ask us to believe or disbelieve any doctrines or dogmas. It says, “Try this!” Then we will know something to be true or false for ourselves.

Here at the CAC we will continue to say: Try this, go here, change sides, move outside your comfort zone, make new friendships with people of a different race or class, let go of your usual role and attractive self-image, walk, pedal, or roll instead of drive, skip the tourist visits and spend time in local neighborhoods, go to the jail or to the border, help at a food pantry or literacy center, attend another church for a while, and so on. Then we can live ourselves into new ways of thinking, and we will wonder how we could have ever thought in any other way! Before new experience, new thinking is difficult and dangerous. Afterward, new thinking is natural and even necessary.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

References:

[1] Dalai Lama [Tenzin Gyatso], An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life, ed. Nicholas Vreeland (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2001), 84.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Orthopraxy Leads to Real Orthodoxy,” Radical Grace 25, no. 4, The Eight Core Principles (Fall 2012): 43–45.

Explore Further. . .

Read Brian McLaren on church as a school of love.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Claudia Retter, The Villa Stairwell (detail), used with permission. Claudia Retter, Via Galuzza (detail), photograph, used with permission. Arthur Allen, Untitled 1 (detail), 2022, photograph, France, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

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

Image inspiration: Stairs and buildings provide structure for our movement and safety. The CAC’s eight core principles guide us in exploring the context and substance of our lived experiences.

Prayer for our community:

God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality every thing and every one is connected, and nothing stands alone. To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do. Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire: as Jesus prayed, that all may be one. We offer our prayer together with all the holy names of God, we offer our prayer together with Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Listen to the prayer.

True Religion and the True Self

The Seventh Core Principle of the CAC: True religion leads us to an experience of our True Self and undermines our false self. Father Richard teaches:

The True Self is who you are because of divine indwelling, the Holy Spirit within you (Romans 8:9). We are all tabernacles of God, says Paul (1 Corinthians 3:16). What happened in Christ, the Anointed One, is an announcement of what is happening in all of us, too. We are children of heaven and earth, both at the same time. Much of the work of enlightenment is bringing those two identities together, just as Jesus did.

Putting the human and the divine together is what it means to be “the Christ” (Colossians 1:17–20), and what it means for us to be “the new Adam and Eve” (1 Corinthians 15:45–49). Ephesians could not make it much clearer: “You too have been stamped with the seal of the Holy Spirit that was promised—this is the pledge of your inheritance” (1:13–14). Few Christians have ever been seriously taught about their inherent union with God and will find all kinds of self-hating reasons to deny it. Only the True Self can dare to believe the gospel’s Good News.

The false self, or smaller self, is characterized by separateness. Jewish and Christian traditions call this state of disconnectedness “sin.” When we’re separated from our deepest Being, we are in the state of sin. When we are disconnected from our True Self in God, we look for various false and addictive ways to fill our emptiness. The small or false self is who we think we are, but our thinking does not make it so. It is our identity created through culture, education, class, race, friends, gender, clothes, and money. That’s all that Adam and Eve had once they left the Garden where they walked with God. But let’s not feel too bad for them or even guilty ourselves. It seems that we have to leave the Garden. We have to create a false self to get started; the trouble is that we take it far too seriously. It is always passing away—in stages and then all at once at death. Only the True Self is eternal. We all suffer from a terrible case of mistaken identity.

The True Self is characterized by communion and deep contentment. It’s okay, right here, right now. The True Self is the realigned self; religion’s main purpose is to lead us to experience this Self, which is who we are in God and who God is in us. It has to do with participating in a Universal Being that is beyond our being. Ultimately, our lives are not about us. We are about life! That doesn’t mean we stay in the True Self twenty-four hours a day. Life is three steps forward and two steps backward. Yet once we know the big picture, we will never be satisfied with the little picture.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “True Self, False Self,” Radical Grace 25, no. 4, The Eight Core Principles (Fall 2012): 39–42.

Explore Further. . .

Read Joyce Rupp on the true self and the “temple within.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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

Story from Our Community:

I was moved by CAC’s daily postings concerning the Quest for the Holy Grail and the emphasis of having the right questions rather than having the right answers. . . I have lingering and enduring questions for the last 5 years as to why our daughter decided to end her life after just turning 18 years old and not yet out of high school. I used to search for answers like abandonment issues due to her being adopted, she may have been high on drugs, she was bullied. . . As I hold these questions over time, I am accepting the simple truth that I just will never have the answer and it is one of the personal mysteries of my life, and hers. I pray that she had the time to explore the many facets of her questions and knows her present soul to understand the mystery of her life and the future life ahead for her. —Brian L.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

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Discovering the Right Questions

The Sixth Core Principle of the CAC: Life is about discovering the right questions more than having the right answers. Father Richard expands on this counterintuitive wisdom:

This principle keeps us on the path of ongoing discernment, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:10). The key concept here is the contrast between the words “discovering” and “having.” A discerning and inquiring spirit will make us discoverers in touch with our hidden unconscious and the deeper truth. A glib “I have the answers” spirit makes us into protectors of clichés. Answers are wonderful when they are true and keep us on the human and spiritual path. But answers are not wonderful when they become something we hold as an ego possession, allowing us to be arrogant, falsely self-assured, and closed down individuals.

“My thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways. . . . As high as the heavens are from the earth so are my thoughts above your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9). The depth and mystery of God leaves all of us as perpetual searchers and seekers, always novices and beginners. It is the narrow and dark way of faith. “Search and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you,” says Jesus (Luke 11:9). There is something inherently valuable about an attitude of spiritual curiosity and persistent “knocking.”

The ego is formed by contraction; the soul is formed by expansion. The ego pulls into itself by comparing, competing, and separating itself from others: “I am not like that,” it says. The soul, however, does exactly the opposite: “I am that.” (Tat Tvam Asi, as the Hindus say). It sees itself in God, the other, flowers and trees, animals, and even the enemy: similarity instead of separateness. It participates in the human dilemma instead of placing itself above and beyond all tensions. The long journey of transformation leads us to ask new questions about our own goodness, and where goodness really lies; to recognize our own complicity with evil, and where evil really lies. It is humiliating.

Only those led by the Spirit into ever deeper seeing, hearing, and surrendering—spiritual seekers and self-questioners—will fall into the hands of the living God. This will always be “a narrow gate and a hard road” that “only a few will walk” (Matthew 7:14).

We want to encourage those few and invite many more on a journey of seeking God. In the sixth century, St. Benedict said the only requirement for a monk’s admission is that they “truly seek God.” [1] Not security or status, not education, not roles and titles, not a portfolio of answers, but simply and humbly seeking God. Spiritual seeking will make a person be a perpetual and humble student instead of a contented careerist, a quester rather than a settler, an always impatient, yearning, and desirous lover. I will bet on such spiritual seekers any day. They are on the real and only quest.

References:

[1] The Rule of St. Benedict, chap. 58.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Questions versus Answers,” Radical Grace 25, no. 4, The Eight Core Principles (Fall 2012): 33–36.

Explore Further. . .

Read Brian McLaren on doubt and a new kind of faith.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Affirming the Big Truth

The Fifth Core Principle of the CAC: We will support true authority, the ability to “author” life in others, regardless of the group. Richard grounds this principle in both Scripture and Tradition:

St. Vincent of Lérins (died c. 450) in the year 434 was the first to define the word “catholic.” Scholars used his definition for much of the first millennium of Christianity to discern the true belief of the Church. Vincent’s in-house principle was amazingly simple and clear and yet also shocking and seemingly impossible: “In the Catholic Church itself, every care should be taken to hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” [1] That is truly and properly ‘catholic,’ as expressed by the very force and meaning of the word, which comprehends everything almost universally. In other words, if it is true, then it has to be true everywhere and all the time, or it is not true!

Most of history has been content with cultural truth, denominational truth, national truth, scientific truth, rational truth, factual truth, personal truth, etc. These are all needed and helpful, but true religion affirms the Big Truth beyond any of these limited truths. This is what makes authentic religion inherently subversive and threatening to all systems of power and control. It always says, “Yes, and!”

Such recognition of “authority” beyond our own group is structurally demanded of Christians by the fact that our Bible includes the Hebrew Bible! Inclusivity is valued from the start. Every Christian liturgy reads authoritative texts from the Torah, the Jewish Prophets, and the Wisdom Writings. We listen to Abraham, Moses, and Elijah, all of whom never knew Jesus. The implications should be clear: we have been taught by non-Christian authorities from the beginning! The door is opened and must remain open or we become insular Christians instead of catholic ones.

The pattern continues with John’s Gospel using the concept of the Logos (John 1:1), which was first used by Heraclitus and Greek Stoic philosophers. Paul is willing to quote non-Jewish sources and worldviews to the Athenians (Acts 17:26–29) in order to preach a more universal message. We also have centuries of reliance by many first millennium Fathers of the Church upon the “pagan” categories of Plato and Aristotle—to make their Christian points! This clear pattern with Aristotle kept Thomas Aquinas from being recognized and canonized for some time. Augustine and Bonaventure did much the same with Plato. Certainly, Catholic scientists and theologians have significant overlapping discussions today. This is our heritage: using universal wisdom to teach Christian truth.

If it is the Perennial Tradition, it will somehow keep recurring at different levels and in different forms from different voices and disciplines. In Vincent of Lérins’s daunting phrase, it will have “been believed everywhere, always, and by all,” which is still the best argument for Great Truth. No single group will ever encompass the magnificent and always mysterious Reign of God.

References:

[1] Vincent of Lérins, The Commonitories, chap. 2, trans. Rudolph E. Morris, in The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 7 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1949, 1970), 270. Emphasis added.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “If It Is True, Then It Has to Be True Everywhere,” Radical Grace 25, no. 4, The Eight Core Principles (Fall 2012): 27–31.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on how unity is not uniformity.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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

Story from Our Community:

When I awaken in the middle of the night, I often turn to the Daily Meditations to center myself. I experienced overwhelming loss in my 50s, including the deaths of many of those close to me and the launching of my three children into the world. The Daily Meditations help steady and nourish me as I lean on God for direction and comfort. My midnight musings remind me of the love, care, and support that comes from a worldwide contemplative community reading and sharing these reflections each day in our own homes. —Patricia M.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

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The Edge of the Inside

The Third Core Principle of the CAC: The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. For a week of Daily Meditations on this principle, see here.

The Fourth Core Principle of the CAC: Practical truth is more likely found at the bottom and the edges than at the top or center of most groups, institutions, and cultures. Father Richard explores the power of this prophetic position:

The edge of things is a liminal space—a holy place or, as the Celts called it, “a thin place.” Most of us have to be taught how to live there. To function on the spiritual edge of things is to learn how to move safely in and out, back and forth, across and return. It is a prophetic position, not a rebellious or antisocial one. When we are at the center of something, we easily confuse essentials with nonessentials, getting tied down by trivia, loyalty tests, and job security. Not much truth can happen there. When we live on the edge of anything, with respect and honor (and this is crucial!), we are in an auspicious and advantageous position.

In the Gospels, Jesus sends his first disciples on the road to preach to “all the nations” (Matthew 28:19; Luke 24:47) and to “all creation” (Mark 16:15). I’m convinced he was training them to risk leaving their own security systems and yet, paradoxically, to be gatekeepers for them. He told them to leave their home base and connect with other worlds. This becomes even clearer in his instruction for them “not to take any baggage” (Mark 6:8) and to submit to the hospitality and even the hostility of others (Mark 6:10–11). Jesus says the same of himself in John’s Gospel (10:7) where he calls himself “the gate” where people “will go freely in and out” (10:9). What amazing permission! He sees himself more as a place of entrance and exit than a place of settlement.

The unique and rare position of a biblical prophet is always on the edge of the inside. The prophet is not an outsider throwing rocks or an insider comfortably defending the status quo. Instead, the prophet lives precariously with two perspectives held tightly together. In this position, one is not ensconced safely inside, nor situated so far outside as to lose compassion or understanding. Prophets must hold these perspectives in a loving and necessary creative tension. It is a unique kind of seeing and living, which will largely leave the prophet with “nowhere to lay his head” (Luke 9:58) and easily attracting the “hatred of all”—who have invariably taken sides in opposing groups (Luke 21:16–17). The prophet speaks for God, and almost no one else, it seems.

When we are both inside and outside, we are an ultimate challenge, possible reformers, and lasting invitations to a much larger world.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “On the Edge of the Inside: The Prophetic Position,” Radical Grace 25, no. 4, The Eight Core Principles (Fall 2012): 23–26.

Explore Further. . .

Read theologian Kelly Brown Douglas on Martin Luther King, Jr. and prophetic, moral imagination.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

A Second Gaze

The Second Core Principle of the CAC: We need a contemplative mind in order to do compassionate action. Richard shares how contemplation has transformed his view of reality through a “second gaze”:

The first gaze is seldom compassionate. It’s too busy weighing and feeling itself: “How will this affect me?” or “What reaction does my self-image demand now?” or “How can I regain control of this situation?” Let’s admit that we all start there. Only after God has taught us how to live “undefended” can we immediately stand with and for others, and for the moment.

It has taken me much of my life to begin to have the second gaze. By nature I have a critical mind and a demanding heart, and I am so impatient. These are both my gifts and my curses, yet it seems I cannot have one without the other. They are both good teachers. A life of solitude and silence allows them both, and invariably leads me to the second gaze. The gaze of compassion, looking out at life from the place of Divine Intimacy, is really all I have, and all I have to give, although I don’t always do it.

I named my little hermitage “East of Eden” because of its significance in the life of Cain, after he killed his brother Abel. God sent Cain to this place after he had failed and sinned. Yet ironically God gave him a loving and protective mark: “So YHWH put a mark on Cain so that no one would do him harm. He sent him to wander in the land of Nod, East of Eden” (Genesis 4:15–16). I have always felt God’s mark and protection.

By my late 50s I had plenty of opportunities to see my own failures, shadow, and sin. The first gaze at myself was critical, negative, and demanding, not at all helpful to me or to others. I am convinced that such guilt and shame are never from God. They are merely protestations of the false self when shocked by its own poverty. God leads by compassion, never by condemnation. God offers us the grace to weep over our sins more than to perfectly overcome them, to humbly recognize our littleness rather than to become big. This kind of weeping and wandering keeps us both askew and awake at the same time.

My later life call is to “wander in the land of Nod,” enjoying God’s so-often-proven love and protection. I look back at my life, and everybody’s life, the One-and-Only-Life, marked happily and gratefully with the sign of Cain. Contemplation and compassion are finally coming together. This is my second gaze. It is well worth waiting for, because only the second gaze sees fully and truthfully. It sees itself, the other, and even God with God’s own compassionate eyes. True action must spring from this place. Otherwise, most of our action is merely reaction, and cannot bear “fruit that will last” (John 15:16).

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Contemplation and Compassion: The Second Gaze,” Radical Grace 25, no. 4, The Eight Core Principles (Fall 2012): 13–17.

Explore Further. . .

Read Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh on “looking with the eyes of compassion.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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

Story from Our Community:

When I started dating again after 5 years, I thought it would be impossible to find someone who had similar spiritual points of view. The Universe stepped in to prove me wrong. Within a few months, my wife and I went on our first date, and during our wonderful conversation, she mentioned that she read the Daily Meditations from the CAC. She shared that day’s meditation with me, which was coincidentally on the topic of Love. I remembered thinking, “I love this heart-driven attention to a spiritual way of living and thinking. I want to explore more about this and the wonderful woman sitting next to me…” We were married a year later. We continue to read the Daily Meditations every day. They enrich our relationship to God and to each other. What a difference the CAC has made in our lives! —Kim M.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Jesus Is Our Central Reference Point

This week we will share the Eight Core Principles that are the foundation of the CAC’s work. The First Core Principle: The teaching of Jesus is our central reference point. Father Richard Rohr writes:

Without the assurance of Jesus’ teaching and example, I would not have the courage or confidence to say what I have said throughout my years of teaching. How can I trust that values like nonviolence, the path of descent, simplicity of life, forgiveness and healing, preference for the poor, and radical grace itself are as important as they are, unless Jesus also said so?

Jesus consistently stands with the excluded, the outsider, the sinner, and the poor. That is his place of freedom, his unique way of critiquing self-serving cultures, and his way of being in union with the suffering of the world—all at the same time. That is his form of universal healing. It also puts him outside any establishment thinking.

It is rather obvious that Jesus spends most of his ministry alongside the marginalized and people at the bottom of society’s hierarchies. His primary social program and main form of justice work is solidarity with suffering itself, wherever it is. Jesus stands with the demonized until the demonizing stops. This is the core meaning of his crucifixion, and why the cross is our unique agent for salvation and liberation (see 1 Corinthians 1:17–18).

Jesus’ agenda has led us at the CAC to our central emphasis on contemplation and spiritual conversion. Our work is the work of human and divine transformation. The experience of universal kinship and solidarity with God, ourselves, and the rest of the world is a grounded runway for significant peacemaking, justice work, social reform, and civil and human rights. Such work flows from a positive place, even a unitive place, where “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). We want people to bear much fruit in the world “and fruit that will endure” (John 15:5, 16).

True spiritual action (as opposed to reaction) demands our own ongoing and radical transformation. It often requires us to change sides so we can be where pain is. It even requires a new identity, as Jesus exemplified in his great self-emptying (see Philippians 2:6–8). Instead of accusing others of sin, Jesus “became sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). He stood in solidarity with the problem itself, hardly ever with specific “answers” for peoples’ problems. His solidarity and compassion were themselves the healing. This was his strategy and therefore it is ours. It feels like weakness, but it finally changes things in very creative, patient, and humble ways. Such solidarity is learned and expressed in two special places—contemplation (nondual or unitive consciousness) and specific actions of communion with human suffering.

This is our formal name and our task, and both come from watching Jesus.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Standing with Jesus,” Radical Grace 25, no. 4, The Eight Core Principles (Fall 2012): 9–12.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on Jesus’ social program.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

CAC’s Eight Core Principles: Weekly Summary

True Religion and the True Self

Discovering the Right Questions

Affirming the Big Truth

The Edge of the Inside

A Second Gaze

Jesus Is Our Central Reference Point

Category Archive

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CAC’s Eight Core Principles: Weekly Summary

True Religion and the True Self

Discovering the Right Questions

Affirming the Big Truth

The Edge of the Inside

A Second Gaze

Jesus Is Our Central Reference Point

Category Archive

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