Humanity Is a Community: Weekly Summary

Sunday
“Reality as communion” is the template and pattern for our entire universe, from atoms to galaxies, and certainly in human community. —Richard Rohr

Monday
Those who fall into the safety net of silence find that it is not at all a fall into individualism. True prayer or contemplation is instead a leap into commonality and community. —Richard Rohr

Tuesday
We are here to become community. We are on an odyssey with potentiality, and we know it. We have been foreordained to make humanity more humane. —Joan Chittister

Wednesday
Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. —Robin Wall Kimmerer

Thursday
We are essentially social beings, and I am only one part of the reflection of the great mystery of God. We are each of us simply one fingerprint or footprint of God. We are essentially connected with one another. The pattern of the universe is that we are one. —Richard Rohr

Friday
And you know your lives are as intricately interwoven as nerve cells in the mind of a great being. . . . Out of that vast net you cannot fall. . . . No stupidity or failure or cowardice can ever sever you from that living web. —Joanna Macy

Gathering as Community

Father Richard offers several practical ways to experience community and discover a bigger reality beyond ourselves:

Our Western culture leans toward self-sufficiency and independence, and we often need to be reminded that we are part of a greater whole and that we are not alone in our longings and efforts for peace, justice, and healing. This is one of the great gifts of what we usually mean by “church”—a gathering of people in solidarity of purpose, praying and seeking God’s presence together.

Find some way in which you can join in the life that is greater than your own. Participate in a vigil, sharing the grief and hope of your neighborhood or world. March with others to bring visibility and voice to an important issue. Make a pilgrimage to a sacred or violated site to connect your small place in time with a history and a broader meaning.

Rest in the knowledge that God’s Spirit weaves your participation as a single thread within a life-renewing pattern. You are connected to the source of Life!

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (Albuquerque NM: CAC Publishing, 2016), 294.

Explore Further. . .

Read Barbara Holmes on contemplation and beloved community.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image Credit: Perry Riddle, Lunch Hour in the Sun (detail), 1976, photograph, Illinois, public domain. Dick Rowan, California – Southern California Big Sur Coastal Area (detail), 1972, photograph, California. Flip Schulke, Inexpensive Retirement Hotels (detail), 1973, photograph, Florida, public domain. Jenna Keiper, 2022, triptych art, United States.

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: Humanity – we find ways to connect with each other across location, age, and space.

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.

Part of a Living Web

Buddhist activist and teacher Joanna Macy invites us to meditate on our intimate coexistence:

You know your lives are as intricately interwoven as nerve cells in the mind of a great being. . . . Out of that vast net you cannot fall. . . . No stupidity or failure or cowardice can ever sever you from that living web. For that is what you are . . . rest in that knowing. Rest in the Great Peace. . . . Out of it we can act, we can dare anything . . . and let every encounter be a homecoming to our true nature. . . .

In doing this practice, we realize that we do not have to be particularly noble or saint-like in order to wake up to the power of our connection with other beings. In our time, that simple awakening is the gift the global crises hold for us. For all its horror and delusion, nuclear war, like the toxins that our factories spew into our world, is also the manifestation of an awesome spiritual truth—the truth about the hell we create for ourselves when we cease to learn how to love. Saints, mystics, and prophets throughout the ages saw that law; now all can see it and none can escape its consequences. So we are caught now in a narrow place where we realize that Lao-tzu, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, and our own hearts were right all along; and we are as scared and frantic as a cornered rat—and as dangerous. But if we let it, that narrow cul-de-sac can turn into a birth canal, pressing and pushing us through the darkness of pain, until we are delivered into . . . what? Love seems too weak a word. It is, as Paul said to the Romans, “the glory to be revealed in us” [8:18]. It stirs in us now.

Macy particularly challenges people of faith to act on the teachings of our spiritual founders:

For us to regard the threat of climate catastrophe, nuclear war, the dying seas, or the poisoned air as a monstrous injustice suggests that we never took seriously the injunction to love. Perhaps we all thought that Gautama [the Buddha] and Jesus were kidding or that their teachings were meant only for saints. But now comes the daunting revelation, that we are all called to be saints—not good necessarily, or pious, or devout—but saints in the sense of just caring for one another. One wonders what terrors this knowledge must hold that we fight it so and flee from it in such pain. Can our present capacity to extinguish all life tell us this? Can it force us to face the terrors of love? Can it be the occasion of our birth?

In that possibility we take heart. Even in confusion and fear, with all our weariness and petty faults, we can let that awareness work in and through our lives.

Reference:
Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Planetary Awakening, 30th anniv. ed. (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1991, 2007, 2021), 234–235. Note: ellipses in text are from Macy.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to The Cosmic We hosts Barbara Holmes and Donny Bryant speak with activist and author Belvie Rooks on “growing a global heart.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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: Humanity – we find ways to connect with each other across location, age, and space.

Story from Our Community:

The teaching that sin and salvation are collective really resonates with me. For some time, I have believed that my every thought, word, and behavior affects the entire Cosmos in some way. What a responsibility that belief gives to me. At the same time, I am heartened and grateful that ALL are healed. I am all the more motivated to live out of love in the midst of my own weakness. —Paula M.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Embodiment of God

Father Richard reflects on the apostle Paul’s interconnected understanding of the Body of Christ:

During the apostle Paul’s lifetime, the church was not yet an institution or structural grouping of common practices and beliefs. The church was a living organism that communicated the gospel through relationships.

Paul’s brilliant metaphor for this living, organic, concrete embodiment is the Body of Christ: “For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us exercise them” (Romans 12:4–6). At the heart of this body, providing the energy that enlivens the community is “the love of God that has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5).

This Spirit is itself the foundational energy of the universe, the Ground of all Being. Union is not just pious rambling or pretty poetry, but the concrete work of God in loving us. Paul writes, “Now you in your togetherness are Christ’s Body” (1 Corinthians 12:27). In our connectedness with this luminous web, this vibrational state of love, we are participating in the embodiment of God.

For Jesus, such teachings as forgiveness, healing, and justice are the clear evidence of such a shared life. When we do not see this happening, religion is “all in the head.” Peacemaking, forgiveness, and reconciliation are not some kind of ticket to heaven later. They are the price of peoplehood—the signature of heaven—now.

We are essentially social beings, and I am only one part of the reflection of the great mystery of God. We are each of us simply one fingerprint or footprint of God. We are essentially connected with one another. The foundation for community has to come out of Reality and What Is. The best way we can do that in community is to repattern our lifestyles on what is. And the pattern of the universe is that we are one. It’s a benevolent universe, it’s radically okay, and God is on our side. We can be at rest. We don’t have to live competitively. We don’t have to climb or succeed because there’s nothing “up there” that isn’t “right here.”

Contemplative theologian Beatrice Bruteau (1930–2014) affirms Reality as community, based in the nature of the Trinitarian God:

Being made in the “image of God” means in the image of Trinitarian “community” life. And this in turn comes about because of the nature of God, which is self-giving love. It is because of the nature of love and the nature of personhood and the nature of freedom that community has the central position it has as the very root of reality. Community is how being, even Absolute Being, and therefore all being fundamentally is. It is not something optionally added afterwards. It belongs to the essence. [1]

References:
[1] Beatrice Bruteau, Radical Optimism: Practical Spirituality in an Uncertain World (Boulder, CO: Sentient Publications, 1993, 2002), 104–105.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 103–104; and

Creating Christian Community (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 1994). Available as MP3 download.

Explore Further. . .

Read Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries on kinship and community.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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: Humanity – we find ways to connect with each other across location, age, and space.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

In Communion with All

Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer shares insight into the Thanksgiving Address [1], an invocation from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy to honor the communal nature of all life on earth:

Today we have gathered and when we look upon the faces around us we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now let us bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one. . . .

We are thankful to our Mother the Earth, for she gives us everything that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she still continues to care for us, just as she has from the beginning of time. To our Mother, we send thanksgiving, love, and respect. Now our minds are one. . . .

We now turn our thoughts to the Creator, or Great Spirit, and send greetings and thanks for all the gifts of Creation. Everything we need to live a good life is here on Mother Earth. For all the love that is still around us, we gather our minds together as one and send our choicest words of greetings and thanks to the Creator. Now our minds are one. [2]

Kimmerer considers the vision of connectedness that the Thanksgiving Address affirms:

What would it be like to be raised on gratitude, to speak to the natural world as a member of the democracy of species, to raise a pledge of interdependence? No declarations of political loyalty are required, just a response to a repeated question: “Can we agree to be grateful for all that is given?” In the Thanksgiving Address, I hear respect toward all our nonhuman relatives, not one political entity, but to all of life. What happens to nationalism, to political boundaries, when allegiance lies with winds and waters that know no boundaries, that cannot be bought or sold? . . .

The words are simple, but in the art of their joining, they become a statement of sovereignty, a political structure, a Bill of Responsibilities, an educational model, a family tree, and a scientific inventory of ecosystem services. It is a powerful political document, a social contract, a way of being—all in one piece. But first and foremost, it is the credo for a culture of gratitude.

Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them. [3]

References:
[1] The actual wording of the Thanksgiving Address varies with the speaker. This text is the widely publicized version of John Stokes and Kanawahientun, 1993. It may be read in full here.

[2] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 107, 108, 115.

[3] Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 112, 115.

Explore Further. . .

Read Christine Valters Paintner on creation and connectedness.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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: Humanity – we find ways to connect with each other across location, age, and space.

Story from Our Community:

I’m part of a growing “Catholic Parish” not confined by geopolitical boundaries. I experience Eucharist with strangers in daily encounters, from different backgrounds and traditions, and are excluded from Catholic parishes for their sexual orientation. The most important part of my Catholic upbringing was and still is — we find the kingdom of God in our hearts, not in a building where exclusion and man-made hierarchy are the norms. —Janet E.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Communal Paradox

Benedictine sister Joan Chittister writes of humanity’s inherent attraction to both community and individuality:

Life, we learn young, is one long, unending game of push and pull. One part of us pushes us always toward wholeness, toward a sense of connection with the universe which, in the very act of engagement with the human community, brings us a sense of peace. We are not here as isolates, we realize. We are here to become community. We are on an odyssey with potentiality, and we know it. We have been foreordained to make humanity more humane.

The other part of us, however, pulls us back into ourselves. It separates us from the universe around us and leaves us feeling distant and out of sync. We lack the sense of kinship that the human family is a family. It deprives us of the universal concern that drives us beyond ourselves to the center of humankind. . . .

And yet, it is this very paradox of life that stretches us not only to grow but to contribute to the growth of the rest of the universe around us.

We say we seek unity, yes. But lurking within every human act is the gnawing need to be independent, to think of ourselves as distinct from the rest of life. [1]

Thomas Merton recognized this same paradox at the heart of what we think of as “salvation”:

We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others, yet at the same time before we can go out to others we must first find ourselves. We must forget ourselves in order to become truly conscious of who we are. The best way to love ourselves is to love others, yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves since it is written, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” [Mark 12:31]. But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. . . .

The only effective answer to the problem of salvation must therefore reach out to embrace both extremes of a contradiction. . . .

Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and “one body,” will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives. My successes are not my own. The way to them was prepared by others. The fruit of my labors is not my own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. . . .

Every other human is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of humankind. . . . What I do is also done for them and with them and by them. What they do is done in me and by me and for me. But each one of us remains responsible for our own share in the life of the whole body. [2]

References:

[1] Joan Chittister, We Are All One: Reflections on Unity, Community and Commitment to Each Other (New London, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 2018), 1–2.

[2] Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1955, 1967), 13, 16–17. Note: minor edits made for inclusive language.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to The Cosmic We hosts Barbara Holmes and Donny Bryant interview Brian Swimme on the relational heart of the cosmos.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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: Humanity – we find ways to connect with each other across location, age, and space.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

From Me to We

Independence Day in the U.S.

Father Richard makes a distinction between first-half-of-life and second-half-of-life spirituality:

Most cultures are first-half-of-life cultures, and even sadder, most organized religions almost necessarily sell a first-half-of-life spirituality. In the first half of life, it is all about me: How can I be important? How can I be safe? How can I make money? How can I look attractive? And, in the Christian scenario, how can I think well of myself and go to heaven? How can I be on moral high ground? These are all ego questions; they are not the questions of the soul. It is still well-disguised narcissism, or even sanctified narcissism, which is surely the worst kind.

I’m sad to say, I think many Christians have never moved beyond these survival and security questions. Even “wanting to go to heaven” is language for securing my future, not a shared future, or a common future for humanity; religion becomes a private insurance plan for that future. It’s still all about me, but piously disguised. It’s not really about love at all!

Any sense of being part of a cosmos, a historical sweep, or that God is doing something bigger and better than simply saving individual souls (my soul in particular), is largely of no interest. This becomes apparent in the common disinterest of so many when it comes to Earth care, building real community, simple living, and almost all peace and justice issues. For many Christians—stuck in the first half of life—all that is important is their private moral superiority and spiritual “safety,” which is somehow supposed to “save” them. It creates what I am now calling a “cult of innocence,” not any real human or divine solidarity. [1]

Once God and grace move us to the second half of life, religion becomes much more a mystical matter rather than a moral matter. Then it’s about union with all and participation in and with God. Indeed, this is the work of true religion: to help us transition from stage to stage, toward ever-deeper union with God and all things.

Those who fall into the safety net of silence find that it is not at all a fall into individualism. True prayer or contemplation is instead a leap into commonality and community. We know that what we are experiencing can only be held by the Whole and we are not alone anymore. We are merely a part, and as such a very grateful and totally satisfied part. This is “the peace the world cannot give” (see John 14:27).

Real silence moves us from knowing things to perceiving a Presence that imbues all things. Could this be God? When we begin to experience a mutuality between ourselves and all things, we have begun to understand the nature of Spirit. God refuses to be known as any kind of object, but only as a mutuality.

Reference:

[1] The phrase “cult of innocence” was coined in a tweet by author and pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, and is explored in depth in Brian McLaren’s new book Do I Stay Christian?

Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2016), 87–88, 208.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on contemplation, action, and community.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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: Humanity – we find ways to connect with each other across location, age, and space.

Story from Our Community:

As a black Christian pastor in South Carolina, I have felt the pressure to deny my own emotional pain and spiritual struggle. My refusal wasn’t because of cowardice, but because I’ve seen scapegoating when black people go public in white spaces about structural and systemic racism. Some of my white brothers and sisters would rather pray and disengage than sit with the dehumanization that white supremacy has thrust upon black people living in America. Several weeks ago I decided to be vulnerable by sharing, in public, our need for truth-telling, confession, and reconciliation. It hasn’t been easy and some have responded in the typical way of deflecting, scapegoating, and making it about individuals versus systems and structures. And yet, I’ve seen people come together for meaningful conversations that can go toward truly seeking justice. —John L.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Reality as Communion

Father Richard views community and connectedness as central to the Christian life and intrinsic to Reality itself:

In the beginning God says, “Let us make humanity in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves” (Genesis 1:26). The use of the plural pronoun here seems to be an amazing, deep-time intuition of what Christians would later call the Trinity, which is the revelation of the nature of God as community, as relationship itself, a Mystery of perfect giving and perfect receiving. The Body of Christ is another metaphor for this bonding. “Reality as communion” is the template and pattern for our entire universe, from atoms to galaxies, and certainly in human community.

We come to know who God is through exchanges of mutual knowing and loving. God’s basic method of communicating God’s self is not the “saved” individual, the rightly informed believer, or even a person with a career in ministry. God communicates primarily through the journey and bonding process that God initiates in community: in marriages, friendships, families, tribes, nations, schools, organizations, and churches who are seeking to participate in God’s love, maybe without even consciously knowing it.

Thomas Merton wrote, “The Christian is not merely ‘alone with the Alone’ in the Neoplatonic sense, but [is] One with all ‘brothers and sisters in Christ.’ The Christian’s inner self is, in fact, inseparable from Christ and hence it is in a mysterious and unique way inseparable from all the other ‘I’s’ who live in Christ, so that they all form one ‘Mystical Person,’ which is ‘Christ.’” [1]

Until and unless Christ is experienced as a living relationship between people, the gospel remains largely an abstraction. Until Christ is passed on personally through faithfulness and forgiveness toward another, through concrete bonds of union, I doubt whether he is passed on by words, sermons, institutions, or ideas.

Living in community means living in such a way that others can access me and influence my life. It means that I can get “out of myself” and serve the lives of others. Community is a world where kinship with each other is possible. By community I don’t mean primarily a special kind of structure, but a network of relationships. Sadly, on the whole, we live in a society that’s built on competition, not on community and cooperation.

If the Trinity reveals that God is relationship itself, then the goal of the spiritual journey is to discover and move toward connectedness on ever new levels. The contemplative mind enjoys union on all levels. We may begin by making little connections with nature and animals, and then grow into deeper connectedness with people. Finally, we can experience full connectedness as union with God and frankly everything.

Without connectedness and communion, we don’t exist fully as our truest selves. Becoming who we really are is a matter of learning how to become more and more deeply connected. No one can possibly go to heaven alone—or it would not be heaven when they got there.

References:

[1] Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation, ed. William H. Shannon (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), 22. Note: minor edits made for inclusive language.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 65, 102–103, 104–105; and

Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1991, 2003), 65.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on the reign of God as community.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

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: Humanity – we find ways to connect with each other across location, age, and space.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Humanity Is a Community: Weekly Summary

Part of a Living Web

The Embodiment of God

In Communion with All

The Communal Paradox

From Me to We

Reality as Communion

Category Archive

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Humanity Is a Community: Weekly Summary

Part of a Living Web

The Embodiment of God￼

In Communion with All￼

The Communal Paradox

From Me to We

Reality as Communion

Category Archive

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