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Embodied Wisdom: Weekly Summary

Sunday
Deep knowing and presence do not happen with our thinking minds. To truly know something, our whole being must be open, awake, and present. —Richard Rohr

Monday
When Christianity is in any way anti-body, it is not authentic Christianity. The incarnation tells us that body and spirit must fully operate and be respected as one.
—Richard Rohr

Tuesday
Ours is a God who sneezed and rubbed His eyes when He was sleepy. Ours is a God who knew longing, heartbreak, excitement, frustration—the full range of what it means to be human. A God who knows what it means to live in a body. —Kate Bowler

Wednesday
The soul is not simply within the body, hidden somewhere within its recesses. The truth is rather the converse. Your body is in the soul, and the soul suffuses you completely.
—John O’Donohue

Thursday
The chasm between the spiritual and the physical is no greater than that between a thought and a word. They cannot be disconnected. And it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins, perhaps because there is no such place. —Cole Arthur Riley

Friday
In terms of the spiritual journey, trying to find faith with the intellectual center is something like trying to play a violin with a saw: it’s simply the wrong tool for the job. This is one reason why all religious traditions have universally insisted that religious life cannot be done with the mind alone; that is the biggest single impediment to spiritual becoming. —Cynthia Bourgeault

Dancing with the Breath

Spiritual guide and author Christine Valters Paintner has found spiritual healing by moving her body regularly with gentle yoga and dance. In this practice, she invites us to meditate with our bodies to music: 

Your invitation is to enter into movement through the breath. Put on a piece of flute music, which is music of the breath. . . .

I invite you to integrate softening, stability, and statio [1] into this movement. Begin with several long, slow breaths. Play the flute music, but don’t start moving right away. Pause first, practicing this monastic statio, aware that you are on the threshold between stillness and moving.

As you feel the impulse to move arising in your body, follow it. It may be as simple as raising your arms on the inhale and lowering them on the exhale. Let the movement be very slow and mindful so that you remain present to the experience. Let this be a time of exploring the vow of stability by staying fully with yourself; whenever your attention drifts, simply bring it back to this moment. Feel free to pause whenever you need to.

Notice places in your body that feel tight with tension, and bring your breath there. Perhaps make some slow circles to open the space there.

After several minutes of moving meditation, staying present to yourself, and listening as well as you can to your body’s impulses and following them, pause again. Notice the energy moving through your body and any shifts from when you first began.

Reflection Questions

  • Where are you breathing only as much as necessary and calling it fully living?
  • How is the breath calling you into deeper intimacy with your body and the divine presence that sustains you?
  • How does the breath invite you into a journey of yielding to grace?
  • Check in with yourself: How are you doing? Are you being gentle with yourself? If not, can you return ever so gently to the place of witnessing, tending, and discovering?

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

References:

[1] Statio is a monastic practice of taking a brief pause between one activity, movement, or space and another.

Christine Valters Paintner, The Wisdom of the Body: A Contemplative Journey to Wholeness for Women (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2017), 49–50.

Explore Further. . .

Image credit: Kazuo Ota, Untitled (detail), 2020, photograph, Unsplash. Nick Moore, Untitled (detail), 2018, photograph, Richmond, Unsplash. Jordan Whitt, Cataloochee river (detail), 2016, Cataloochee, photograph, Unsplash. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

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: There is knowledge in our muscles and bones. When our body encounters the world, a door into deeper understanding can be opened.

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.

 

Embodied Faith

Episcopal priest and CAC teacher emerita Cynthia Bourgeault shares a story about the body’s integral role in sustaining our faith:

In many spiritual traditions of the world, the body is viewed with fear and suspicion, considered to be the seat of desire and at best a dumb beast that must be trained and brought into submission to the personal will. But what is missed here—and it is of crucial importance—is that the moving center [1] also carries unique perceptive gifts, the most important of which is the capacity to understand the language of faith encoded in sacred gesture.

There is a famous story attributed to Russian Orthodox archbishop Anthony Bloom [1914–2003] . . . that makes this point quite strikingly. A young man came to him for spiritual consultation, angry and distressed because he couldn’t make any sense out of his Christianity. The dogma and theology seemed like so much bunk, and the creeds frequently made him furious. He yearned for a life of faith. . . . What did Father Anthony suggest?

The archbishop listened intently and then made a rather surprising suggestion: that the young man simply go home and make one hundred full prostrations a day for a month.

Now in Orthodox practice a full prostration is not a simple bob-and-curtsy, as genuflection tends to be in the West. One goes flat out on the floor, face down, with arms outstretched; holds the position for at least a good long in-and-out breath; and then slowly rises to one’s feet. . . . When he returned a month later, [the young man’s] eyes were glowing with faith, and the creeds no longer made him angry. The reason, as the archbishop knew full well, is that through the deep, rhythmic gestures of bowing and emptying himself, the man came to understand something that could not be found by the mind. It lived in his body. In connecting with his body, he reconnected with the wellsprings of his faith.

According to Bourgeault, our bodies and their natural movements can offer us spiritual insights in a way that the intellectual mind simply cannot:

It’s amazing how those learning experiences invariably wind up among our most vivid childhood memories. From learning to ride a bicycle when I was seven, I came to know something about interior balance, getting the hang of something from the inside out. From learning to float, I discovered that trust means relaxing and letting something else hold you up. From ecstatic lovemaking, I learned not to fear dissolving into oneness. The language of spiritual transformation is already written deeply within our bodies. . . .

In terms of the spiritual journey, trying to find faith with the intellectual center is something like trying to play a violin with a saw: it’s simply the wrong tool for the job. This is one reason why all religious traditions have universally insisted that religious life cannot be done with the mind alone; that is the biggest single impediment to spiritual becoming.

References:

[1] “The moving center basically is about intelligence through movement. It’s the way that our body is able to put its tentacles out and explore and gain information from the world. It’s that whole realm of things that we don’t do directly with our intellectual rational brain but that deeply engage us. We drive a car, ski down a hill, sail a boat. It gets in our bodies. That kind of intelligence, which we mostly underuse, is a huge reservoir of connectivity and information with the world.”

Adapted from Cynthia Bourgeault, Introductory Wisdom School Transcript (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2021), 17. Available through the CAC’s online course, Introductory Wisdom School.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2003) 28–29, 30–31.

Explore Further. . .

Image credit: Kazuo Ota, Untitled (detail), 2020, photograph, Unsplash. Nick Moore, Untitled (detail), 2018, photograph, Richmond, Unsplash. Jordan Whitt, Cataloochee river (detail), 2016, Cataloochee, photograph, Unsplash. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

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: There is knowledge in our muscles and bones. When our body encounters the world, a door into deeper understanding can be opened.

Story from Our Community:

The more I embody Spirit and trust my True Self, the more life guides me in the right direction. One of the most challenging — and rewarding — parts was forgiving the unconscious acts of violence that “I” and “us” have both endured and created. I am personally responsible for the world and I have the power to change this with compassion, forgiveness, and understanding. I finally feel a sense of belonging on all levels. We are part of this collective consciousness, and still have work to do.
—Nienke J.

Share your own story with us.

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.

 

Sacred Bodies

Feast of St. Clare of Assisi

Through her incarnational understanding of Mary and Jesus, writer Cole Arthur Riley honors her own embodied reality more deeply:

For me, the story of God becoming body is only matched by God’s submission to the body of a woman. That the creator of the cosmos would choose to rely on an embodied creation. To be grown, fed, delivered—God put faith in a body. In Mary’s muscles and hormones, bowels and breasts. And when Christ’s body is broken and blood shed, we should hold in mystery that first a woman’s body was broken, her blood shed, in order to deliver the hope of the world into the world. . . .

I believe that the spiritual realm is so enmeshed with the physical that it is imperceptible. I believe in the mysterious nearness of my ancestors, but I believe they are located at the site of my own blood and bone.

The chasm between the spiritual and the physical is not greater than that between a thought and a word. They cannot be disconnected. And it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins, perhaps because there is no such place.

We were never meant to dismember our selfhoods. My face is my soul is my blood is my glory. When we neglect the physical, it inevitably suffocates the image of a God who ate, slept, cried, bled, grew, and healed. . . .

I want a faith that loves the whole of me. And if I make it to the table of God, I hope it has cornbread stuffing and comfortable chairs. I mean no offense to the desert mothers and fathers eating locusts and honey . . . but I hope God knows how my cousin’s baked mac and cheese tastes. I hope he puts ham hocks in his greens and feels no shame. [1]

Scholar and activist Christena Cleveland studied Black Madonnas around the world and describes how their diverse and inclusive bodies encouraged generous acceptance of her own body:

The Sacred Black Feminine . . . helped me choose to embrace my body despite what society said about it. As I began to turn to images of the Black Madonna to guide me, I noticed they are not small women. They look like they have never fasted a day in their life. They look like they eat more than my boarding school staples of plain bagels, honeydew melon, and nonfat cottage cheese. They proudly take up space. . . .

The four-hundred-fifty plus Black Madonnas around the world encompass a wide range of skin colors, hair textures, body sizes, and ages. Some are pregnant. Some are breastfeeding with proudly exposed breasts. Some are gender nonconforming. The one thing they all have in common is that they are Black and they are holy. Seeing these diverse liberating images of the Sacred Black Feminine helped me relax into my body because I was able to relax into Her diverse and inclusive body. [2]

References:

[1] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us (New York: Convergent Books, 2022), 57, 60.

[2] Christena Cleveland, God Is a Black Woman (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2022), 154–155.

Explore Further. . .

Image credit: Kazuo Ota, Untitled (detail), 2020, photograph, Unsplash. Nick Moore, Untitled (detail), 2018, photograph, Richmond, Unsplash. Jordan Whitt, Cataloochee river (detail), 2016, Cataloochee, photograph, Unsplash. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

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: There is knowledge in our muscles and bones. When our body encounters the world, a door into deeper understanding can be opened.

Story from Our Community:

The more I embody Spirit and trust my True Self, the more life guides me in the right direction. One of the most challenging — and rewarding — parts was forgiving the unconscious acts of violence that “I” and “us” have both endured and created. I am personally responsible for the world and I have the power to change this with compassion, forgiveness, and understanding. I finally feel a sense of belonging on all levels. We are part of this collective consciousness, and still have work to do.
—Nienke J.

Share your own story with us.

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.

 

A Source of Vital Information

Father Richard reminds us of the importance of listening to our body’s wisdom:

Though we begin our lives immersed in unitive, kinesthetic knowing, we learn quickly to see distinctions and divisions in the world. As a toddler, I learned: “I am not my mother. My mother is not me.” The developing ego sees by differentiation and negation—who we are not. While such an ego structure is a natural, necessary part of growing up, it always gets in the way of the soul’s holistic, nondual consciousness. My identity—intelligence, moral sense, wealth, and social class—is unfortunately gained in contrast, comparison, and competition to the person next to me. 

My still center, my True Self, does not need to oppose, differentiate, or compare itself. It just is and is content. This must be “the pearl of great price.” To the extent that our soul is alive and connected, we are satisfied with the “enoughness” of who we are and the present moment. (In our consumeristic, competitive, and increasingly online world, I fear this is becoming harder and harder to experience.) 

Living solely out of our ego splits us off from our body and our soul. Western Christianity and culture have largely surrendered to the dualistic split of body vs. soul. Christians even speak of “saving their soul” instead of also saving their body. We often repress emotions and physical sensations for the sake of efficiency and success. There are appropriate times to let our thinking mind lead instead of immediately following our body’s instincts. But we must do so with awareness and appreciation for our body, rather than pushing feelings away and moving ahead with what we have to do in the next hour. Repressing feelings and sensations relegate them to our unconscious “shadow” self. They don’t go away. They come out in unexpected and often painful ways.

We need to understand kinesthetic, bodily knowing. We must learn to recognize our physical responses—be they fear, arousal, pleasure, or pain—because they reveal additional and important information. It may take a few minutes of intentional focus to become aware of tension in our shoulders, churning in our gut, a pounding heart, or goosebumps.

Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (1956–2008) says this well

Your mind can deceive you and put all kinds of barriers between you and your nature; but your body does not lie. Your body tells you, if you attend to it, how your life is and whether you are living from your soul or from the labyrinths of your negativity. . . . The human body is the most complex, refined, and harmonious totality. . . .

Your body is, in essence, a crowd of different members who work in harmony to make your belonging in the world possible. . . . The soul is not simply within the body, hidden somewhere within its recesses. The truth is rather the converse. Your body is in the soul, and the soul suffuses you completely. [1] 

References: 

[1] John O’Donohue, Anam Ċara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (New York: Cliff Street Books, 1997), 48, 49. 

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1999, 2003), 72–73, 138, 113. 

Explore Further. . .

Image credit: Kazuo Ota, Untitled (detail), 2020, photograph, Unsplash. Nick Moore, Untitled (detail), 2018, photograph, Richmond, Unsplash. Jordan Whitt, Cataloochee river (detail), 2016, Cataloochee, photograph, Unsplash. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

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: There is knowledge in our muscles and bones. When our body encounters the world, a door into deeper understanding can be opened.

Story from Our Community:

Fake it ’till you make it — this piece of advice is common in AA. Even when sobriety doesn’t feel right, you should not give up as the program will make sense with time. But is not the same as simply being optimistic. It asks you to embody intention with actions.
—Moon M.

Share your own story with us.

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.

 

Knowing and Loving Our Bodies

After being diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, theologian and author Kate Bowler worked intensively to know and love her body and its ways of both serving and failing her. As part of her spiritual practice, she wrote this letter: 

Dear Body,

Sometimes, I hate you. You ache. You get tired sooner than I’d like to admit. You wake me in the night for no good reason. Your cells duplicate at unpredictable rates. New gray hairs and fine lines and silver stretch marks show up out of nowhere. You let me down just when I need you the most. . . .

Sometimes, I want a break from living with you. I’d prefer to trade you in for a newer model. A model that isn’t in constant pain, that fits better in that pair of jeans, that has more energy. With you, I am limited—bound by skin and bone and thinning hair.

With you, I am fragile. . . .

But God knows what it’s like to live in flesh. . . . If God too lived in a body, then God knows the ache of growing pains and the feeling of goosebumps on a brisk day and the comfort of a warm embrace. He felt the gurgle of a hungry stomach and the annoying prick of a splinter after a day of hard work. He wept over the death of a friend. Ours is a God who sneezed and rubbed His eyes when He was sleepy. Ours is a God who knew longing, heartbreak, excitement, frustration—the full range of what it means to be human . . . [and] live in a body.

So when my own body drags me down, when my muscles ache, when my worries keep me up at night, when my fear for the future leaves me motionless, when I feel lonely and exhausted and burdened, I do not worship a God who is far off.

This is a God who knows my humanity inside and out. God has counted every hair on my head (Matthew 10:30) and bottled up every tear I have shed (Psalm 56:8). Not simply because the Word formed us (Genesis 1:27), knit us together in our mothers’ wombs (Psalm 139:13), was there from the very beginning . . . but because God wore our skin.

By embracing the wisdom of the incarnation, Bowler learned to listen to her body’s messages and be kind to herself:

Dear, dear body, I get it. Or at least I am starting to. You do not have an unlimited supply. You run out, and I need to listen. Maybe I really should go to bed a little earlier or let you off the hook for craving those extra salty chips. I need to sense when you are struggling, and gently acknowledge that you are actually changing. That time and love and grief and life have worn themselves into my skin. Day by day. This is the beautiful, terrible evidence that we have lived.

Reference:

Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie, Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection (Colorado Springs, CO: Convergent Books, 2022), 156, 157–158.

Explore Further. . .

Image credit: Kazuo Ota, Untitled (detail), 2020, photograph, Unsplash. Nick Moore, Untitled (detail), 2018, photograph, Richmond, Unsplash. Jordan Whitt, Cataloochee river (detail), 2016, Cataloochee, photograph, Unsplash. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

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: There is knowledge in our muscles and bones. When our body encounters the world, a door into deeper understanding can be opened.

Story from Our Community:

Fake it ’till you make it — this piece of advice is common in AA. Even when sobriety doesn’t feel right, you should not give up as the program will make sense with time. But is not the same as simply being optimistic. It asks you to embody intention with actions.
—Moon M.

Share your own story with us.

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.

 

Body and Spirit as One

Father Richard describes how Christianity’s distrust of the body originates not from the Bible, but from Greek philosophy:

I think my brilliant Franciscan history and liturgy professor, Father Larry Landini (1935–2005), may have given the best explanation for why so many Christians seem to be ashamed and afraid of the body. In 1969, after four years studying church history, Father Larry offered these final words to us: “Just remember, on the practical level, the Christian Church was much more influenced by Plato than it was by Jesus.” He left us laughing, but also stunned and sad, because four years of honest church history had told us how true this actually was.

For Plato, body and soul were incompatible enemies; matter and spirit were at deep odds with one another. Yet for Jesus, there is no animosity between body and soul. In fact, this is the heart of Jesus’ healing message and of the incarnation itself. Jesus, in whom “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14), was fully human, even as he was fully divine, with both body and spirit operating as one.

In the Apostles’ Creed, which goes back to the second century, we say, “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” The creed doesn’t say we believe in the resurrection of the spirit or the soul—but so many people hear it this way! And, of course, it doesn’t say that because the soul cannot die. Instead, we profess in the creed that human embodiment has an eternal character to it. (Read all of 1 Corinthians 15 where Paul tries to communicate this in endlessly mysterious ways.)

Christianity makes a daring and broad claim: God is redeeming matter and spirit, the whole of creation. The Bible speaks of the “new heaven and the new earth” and the descent of the “new Jerusalem from heaven” to “live among us” (Revelation 21:1–3). This physical universe and our own physicality are somehow going to share in the Eternal Mystery. Your body participates in the very mystery of salvation. In fact, it is the new and lasting temple (1 Corinthians 6:19–20 and throughout Paul’s letters).

Many Christians falsely assumed that if they could “die” to their body, their spirit would for some reason miraculously arise. Often the opposite was the case. After centuries of body rejection, and the lack of any positive body theology, the West is now trapped in substance addiction, obesity, anorexia, bulimia, plastic surgery, and an obsession with appearance and preserving these bodies. Our poor bodies, which Jesus affirmed, have become the receptacles of so much negativity and obsession.

The pendulum has now swung in the opposite direction, and the fervor for gyms and salons makes one think these are the new cathedrals of worship. The body is rightly reasserting its goodness and importance. Can we somehow honor both body and spirit together? When Christianity is in any way anti-body, it is not authentic Christianity. The incarnation tells us that body and spirit must fully operate and be respected as one.

References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That Which I Am Seeking (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2012). Available as CD and MP3 download; and

Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013), 38–39.

Explore Further. . .

Image credit: Kazuo Ota, Untitled (detail), 2020, photograph, Unsplash. Nick Moore, Untitled (detail), 2018, photograph, Richmond, Unsplash. Jordan Whitt, Cataloochee river (detail), 2016, Cataloochee, photograph, Unsplash. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

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: There is knowledge in our muscles and bones. When our body encounters the world, a door into deeper understanding can be opened.

Story from Our Community:

Hearing the Silence of God / It says: Nothing. / Simply embraces me like a warm lover’s breath blowing over my body. / In it I feel again the taste of hot apple cider my mother would hand me as I stamped the snow from my little child’s leggings and came to the warmth of her morning fire. / Or taste the sweetness of that last sip of coffee rich with sugar at the bottom of the cup. / Or see the secret smile my mother’s eyes could flash in the airless rooms of my father’s anger. / Like all of these, like none of these. . . / there is where God lives: / In the deepest, wordless silence inside of us. / In the spaces between the words of our prayers.
—Francis G.

Share your own story with us.

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.

 

Knowing with Our Whole Being

Father Richard Rohr affirms that true “knowing” occurs within our bodies, not just our minds:

Deep knowing and presence do not happen with our thinking minds. To truly know something, our whole being must be open, awake, and present. We intuitively knew how to be present as babies. The psychologist D. W. Winnicott (1896–1971) once said “There is no such thing as a baby.” [1] There’s only an infant/caregiver. In the first several months, from the infant’s perspective, they are one and the same. Infants see themselves entirely mirrored in their family’s eyes; they soon believe and become this vision. Contemplative prayer offers a similar mirroring as we receive and return the divine gaze.

In his book Coming to Our Senses, historian Morris Berman makes the point that our first experience of being alive is not through the visual or auditory experience of knowing ourselves through other people’s responses; it is primarily felt in the body. He calls this kinesthetic knowing. We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us, skin to skin. This early encounter is not so much heard, seen, or thought. It’s felt. That’s the original knowing. [2]

Psychologists say that when we begin to move outside of that first kinesthetic knowing, we hold onto things like teddy bears and dolls. My little sister, Alana, had the classic security blanket as a baby. She dragged it everywhere until it was dirty and ragged, but we could not take it away from her. Children do such things to reassure themselves that they are still connected and one. We all begin to doubt this primal union as the subject/object split of a divided world slowly takes over. Body/mind/world/self all start getting split apart. The basic fault lines in the world become real to us—and the rest of life will be spent trying to put it all back together again. True spirituality is always bringing us back to this original, embodied knowing that is unitive experience.

When primal knowing is wounded or missing, an immense doubt is often created about our own and God’s foundational goodness. Many people live with this doubt, and religious experience only comes to them with great difficulty. Most people don’t know how to surrender to God. How can we surrender unless we believe there is Someone trustworthy out there to surrender to?

Hopefully, our caregivers’ early gaze told us we were foundationally beloved. But when we inevitably begin to see ourselves through eyes that compare, judge, and dismiss, then we need spirituality to help heal the brokenness of our identity and our world. The gift of true religion is that it parts the veil and tells us that our primal experience was trustworthy. It tells us that we are beloved, whether we received that mirroring gaze or not. It reassures us that we live in a benevolent universe, and it is on our side. The universe, it assures us, is radical grace.

References:
[1] D. W. Winnicott, “Anxiety Associated with Insecurity,” in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 99.

[2] See Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point Books and Media, 1989, 2015), chapter 1.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1999, 2003), 66–69.

Explore Further. . .

Image credit: Kazuo Ota, Untitled (detail), 2020, photograph, Unsplash. Nick Moore, Untitled (detail), 2018, photograph, Richmond, Unsplash. Jordan Whitt, Cataloochee river (detail), 2016, Cataloochee, photograph, Unsplash. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

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: There is knowledge in our muscles and bones. When our body encounters the world, a door into deeper understanding can be opened.

Story from Our Community:

Hearing the Silence of God / It says: Nothing. / Simply embraces me like a warm lover’s breath blowing over my body. / In it I feel again the taste of hot apple cider my mother would hand me as I stamped the snow from my little child’s leggings and came to the warmth of her morning fire. / Or taste the sweetness of that last sip of coffee rich with sugar at the bottom of the cup. / Or see the secret smile my mother’s eyes could flash in the airless rooms of my father’s anger. / Like all of these, like none of these. . . / there is where God lives: / In the deepest, wordless silence inside of us. / In the spaces between the words of our prayers.
—Francis G.

Share your own story with us.

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.

 

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In a world of fault lines and fractures, how do we expand our sense of self to include love, healing, and forgiveness—not just for ourselves or those like us, but for all? This monthly email features wisdom and stories from the emerging Christian contemplative movement. Join spiritual seekers from around the world and discover your place in the Great Story Line connecting us all in the One Great Life. Conspirare. Breathe with us.