Nothing Stands Alone: Weekly Summary

Sunday
As our 2022 theme puts it: Nothing Stands Alone. And it’s true! We are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in an absolute relatedness. We call this love. —Richard Rohr

Monday
Standing before one, accepting God literally allows us to be composed and gathered in one place. We can be in one place; we can be here, now. —Richard Rohr

Tuesday
When we carry our small suffering in solidarity with the one universal longing of all humanity, it helps keep us from self-pity or self-preoccupation. We know that we are all in this together, and it is just as hard for everybody else. —Richard Rohr

Wednesday
The very nature of our lifestyle and our church teaching must say from the beginning what the goal is—the communion of saints, a shared life together as family, the trinitarian life of God, the kingdom—here! —Richard Rohr

Thursday
Whether it is our parents, our teachers, mentors, friends, churches, or neighbors, people have been pouring into us. We are standing on a foundation. It should come as an incredible relief. Our only job is to build on what we’ve been given. —Kate Bowler

Friday
We simply must open our eyes, look across the room, the street, the division, the border—and reach out to that neighbor, offering our hand, our compassion, and our heart. —Jacqui Lewis

Gazing with Love on Another

In Monday’s meditation, Father Richard wrote about finding ourselves in relationship with God by receiving God’s loving gaze. Today, we share a practice from contemplative writer and artist Christine Valters Paintner that allows us to pass that loving gaze on to others.

How often do we really see another person as the beautiful gift they are? Perhaps this happens sometimes with those we love, where we are caught in a moment of grace and see them in all their wondrousness and feel full of gratitude for their presence in our lives.

Maybe you have a moment where your eyes meet, and you hold each other’s gaze for a few breaths as an act of seeing each other with love. . . .

We can intentionally bring this gaze of love to others. You can practice this with a beloved one or a very dear and close friend. You might try setting a timer for one minute and just sit together, eyes softly receiving each other while breathing together and praying quietly in your hearts.

Breathe in: I see you with love

Breathe out: gifted, cherished.

Breathe in: Grateful

Breathe out: for who you are.

This can be a very intimate and vulnerable moment because we so rarely spend this kind of time simply looking at another person with love and care.

We can also bring this practice out into the world. How often do we really see another person beneath their role, under our expectations? What if we paused at the grocery store and for a moment brought eyes of love to the stock clerk or the cashier. They don’t have to know what you’re doing. You don’t have to stare, just take in their image, then close your eyes for a moment, breathe, and bathe them with love. Pause and see the other person as beloved and beautiful as they indeed truly are.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Reference:
Christine Valters Paintner, Breath Prayer: An Ancient Practice for the Everyday Sacred (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2021), 165–166.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard and James Finley on the mirroring gaze, and about Jesuit Gregory Boyle’s ministry creating a community of kinship.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 1-3 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

The creative team at CAC sent a single-use camera to Brian McLaren as part of an exploration into contemplative photography. His photos are featured here in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image Inspiration: In this triptych, we begin by seeing just one fruit. Moving to the center photo, we see the whole tree. When we look at the third photo, we bring with us the knowledge that there is more to this tree, an abundance of fruit. It’s not alone. Nothing stands alone.

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.

Love Crosses Boundaries

CAC friend Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis explores how the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37) reveals God’s desire that no one be allowed to “stand alone” in their hour of need.

Rabbi Jesus is talking to a religious leader—a lawyer—about what it means to be faithful. Together, they review the Jewish scriptures: The way to live right is to love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself. Looking for a loophole, the lawyer wants to know who qualifies as a neighbor. Jesus answers by telling a story about a man who was robbed, beaten, and left for dead by a marauding gang. A priest and another religious man walked by and, seeing the man on the ground, they did nothing. . . . But a Samaritan—a mixed-race person considered in ancient times to be an impure enemy of the Jewish people—did not cross the street. Instead, he tended to the wounded man. . . . The moral of Jesus’s story is that the despised Samaritan is the good neighbor.

In using this story to answer his companion’s question about the definition of neighbor, Rabbi Jesus was getting to what he considered to be the essential laws—love God with all you have and love your neighbor as yourself. He tells the story to make the point: What you think is outside, God has put inside. The Samaritan is more inside the boundaries of what is good/pure/loving than the passersby (religious leaders no less!) who did not stop to help the bleeding, beaten man on the street. In telling this story about a hated, mixed-race Samaritan doing a good deed, Jesus is disrupting the idea of borders and boundaries. If you want to know what love looks like, Rabbi Jesus is saying, here it is: Love crosses borders and boundaries; it makes new cultural rules; it cares for the stranger. Love turns strangers into friends. Fierce love is rule-breaking, border-crossing, ferocious, and extravagant kindness that increases our tribe. . . .

In any relationship, fierce love causes us to cross boundaries and borders to discover one another, to support one another, to heal one another. When we do this, when we go crazy with affection, and offer wild kindness to our neighbor across the street or across the globe, we make a new kind of space between us. We make space for discovery and curiosity, for learning and growing. We make space for sharing stories and being changed by what we share. This is the space of the border, of mestizaje [mixed race], of both/and. . . . We can learn to see the world not only through our own stories, through our own eyes, but also through the stories and worldview of the so-called other. . . . We simply must open our eyes, look across the room, the street, the division, the border—and reach out to that neighbor, offering our hand, our compassion, and our heart.

Reference:
Jacqui Lewis, Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World (New York: Harmony Books, 2021), 103–104, 109–110.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to Brian McLaren, Jacqui Lewis, and Richard Rohr on bias and “Seeing as a Social Act.”
Read Brian McLaren on Christianity as a school for love.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 1-3 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

One morning after receiving Communion, I realized this Sacrament was not my own treasured and personal connection with Christ, but that my neighbors were also my Communion. I saw that “personal holiness” is a contradiction of terms, for there is no holiness separate from others, but only in solidarity with others in Christ.
—Rosalie K.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

A Solid Foundation

Theologian and author Kate Bowler counters our cultural desire to proclaim we are “self-made” with a reminder of our foundational communal reality.

I am self-made. Didn’t anyone tell you? I brought myself into the world when I decided to be born on a bright Monday morning. Then I figured out how cells replicate to grow my own arms and legs and head to a reasonable height and size. Then I filled my own mind from kindergarten to graduation with information I gleaned from the great works of literature. . . .

I’m joking, but sometimes it feels like the pressure we are under. An entire self-help and wellness industry made sure that we got the memo: we are supposed to articulate our lives as a solitary story of realization and progress. Work. Learn. Fix. Change. Every exciting action sounds like it is designed for an individual who needs to learn how to conquer a world of their own making.

It’s hard to remember a deeper, comforting truth: we are built on a foundation not our own. We were born because two other people created a combination of biological matter. We went to schools where dozens and dozens of people crafted ideas and activities to construct categories in our minds. We learned skills honed by generations of craftspeople. We pray and worship with spiritual ideas refined by centuries of tradition. Almost nothing about us is original. Thank God.

It reminds me of the account of creation in Genesis. . . . God breathes oxygen into lungs in an instance of divine CPR. I love picturing that God, the only One who can create out of nothing—ex nihilo. God, who set the cornerstone of our lives and our faith, laid the first brick. The Master Builder whose carefully poured foundation is what we build on top of now. It certainly feels like a template for the rest of our experience.

Kate was a young mother when she was first diagnosed with Stage Four cancer:

When I was really sick and worried about dying too young, I kept trying to picture how much my son would remember. . . .

I thought about him all the time. When do children develop long-term memory? How much am I in there . . . his mischievous mind, his evil laugh. Then one day, my psychologist said something wonderful. He said: “Kate, you’re in there. The foundation is the part that doesn’t show.” Whether it is our parents, our teachers, mentors, friends, churches, or neighbors, people have been pouring into us. We are standing on a foundation. It should come as an incredible relief. Our only job is to build on what we’ve been given, and, even then, even our gifts we can trace back to the creativity, generosity, and foresight of others. Thank God we are a group project.

Reference:
Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie, Good Enough: 40ish Devotionals for a Life of Imperfection (New York: Convergent Books, 2022), 51–53. To be published in February 2022 by Convergent Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

Explore Further. . .

Read Barbara Holmes on ancestors and the communion of saints.
Read Richard on our ongoing participation in creation.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 1-3 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Creating a People

The Body of Christ is inherently a collective reality. Father Richard emphasizes that to live the gospel, we need each other:

The Body of Christ, the spiritual family, is God’s strategy. It is both medium and message. It is both beginning and end: “May they all be one . . . so that the world may believe it was you who sent me . . . that they may be one as we are one, with me in them and you in me” (John 17:21–23).

There is no other form for the Christian life except a common one. This may even be a matter of culture, if culture refers to something which is shared and passed on. In this sense, I am wondering if there is any other kind of Christianity except “cultural Christianity,” for better and for worse.

Until and unless Christ is someone happening between people, the gospel remains largely an abstraction. Until Jesus Christ is passed on personally through faithfulness and forgiveness, through bonds of union, I doubt whether he is passed on at all.

We are now paying the price for centuries in which the Church was narrowed from a full vision of peoplehood to an almost total preoccupation with private persons and their devotional needs. But history has shown that individuals who are confirmed in their individualism by the very character of our evangelism will never create church, except after the model of a service station: they will use it as a commodity like everything else. This is far cry from our “original participation” (Owen Barfield [1898–1997]) in the Body of Christ from the moment of our conception.

Certainly, we must deal with individuals. But the very nature of our lifestyle and our church teaching must say from the beginning what the goal is—the communion of saints, a shared life together as family, the trinitarian life of God, the kingdom—here!

The prophet Haggai criticizes the Jews after the exile for dwelling comfortably in their “paneled houses” while the common walls of the temple lie in ruins (see Haggai 1:4, 9). His prophetic call is now and forever. We still think that we can work with the world’s agenda, where career and individual fulfillment are the basic building blocks of society. And we believe that we can build church from those well-educated and well-saved blocks. But God needs “living stones making a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5).

For Jesus, such teachings as forgiveness, healing, and justice are not just a spiritual test or obstacle course. They are quite simply the necessary requirements for a basic shared life. Peacemaking and reconciliation are not some kind of box seat tickets to heaven. They are the price of peoplehood. They express the truth in the heart of God, the truth that has been shared with us in the Holy Spirit, the union in Jesus the Christ who is reconciling all people to God (see 2 Corinthians 5:18–19).

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 50–51.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on how you are the body of Christ and community as alternative consciousness.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 1-3 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

I’ve spent my life trying to help ensure fair housing choices and full voting rights for all. If all Christians valued diversity and worked for inclusion and equity in every aspect of life, we would have a different country, with justice for all.
—Carol W.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

It Can’t Be Carried Alone

Father Richard teaches that we are transformed by our suffering—not by bearing it apart and alone, but by recognizing our universal connectedness with each other and God:

I am no masochist, and I surely have no martyr complex, but I do believe that the only way out of deep sadness is to go with it and through it. Sometimes I wonder if this is what we priests mean when we lift up bread and wine at the Eucharist or communion and say, “Through him, and with him, and in him.” I wonder if the only way to spiritually hold suffering—and not let it destroy us—is to recognize that we cannot do it alone. When I try to heroically do it alone, I slip into distractions, denials, and pretending—and I do not learn suffering’s softening lessons. But when I can find a shared meaning for something, especially if it allows me to love God and others in the same action, God can get me through it. I begin to trust the ambiguous process of life.

When we carry our small suffering in solidarity with the one universal longing of all humanity, it helps keep us from self-pity or self-preoccupation. We know that we are all in this together, and it is just as hard for everybody else. Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don’t know it. When we can make the shift to realize this, it softens the space around our overly defended hearts. It makes it hard to be cruel to anyone. Shared struggle somehow makes us one—in a way that easy comfort and entertainment never can.

Some mystics even go so far as to say that individual suffering doesn’t exist at all—and that there is only one suffering, it is all the same, and it is all the suffering of God. The image of Jesus on the cross somehow communicates that to the willing soul. A Crucified God is the dramatic symbol of the one suffering that God fully enters into with us—much more than just for us, as we were mostly trained to think.

If suffering, even unjust suffering (and all suffering is unjust on some level), is part of one Great Mystery, then I am willing—and even happy, sometimes—to carry my little portion. But I must trust that it is somehow helping someone or something, and that it matters in the great scheme of things. Etty Hillesum (1914–1943), a young Jewish woman who died at Auschwitz, truly believed her suffering was also the suffering of God. She even expressed a deep desire to “help God” carry some of it. [1] Such freedom and such generosity of spirit are almost unimaginable to me. Colossians 1:24 offers a similarly daring statement in the New Testament. What creates such larger-than-life people? Their altruism is hard to understand by almost any psychological definition of the human person. I believe such people have built their lives on the reality of union with God, Reality, or What Finally Is.

References:
[1] An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943, trans. Arno Pomerans (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 151.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (New York: Convergent Books, 2019), 161–162.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to this homily from Richard on “One Body, One Suffering, One Happiness”; read Richard and others on solidarity.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 1-3 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

A Mutually Loving Gaze

Our Daily Meditations theme this year reflects the reality that nothing stands alone. Father Richard describes the intimate relationship we experience when we allow ourselves to be loved, seen, and “gazed upon” by God:

I believe that we do not have real access to who we fully are except in God. Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, and much more than we think we are, “warts and all.” (Make sure you need to be forgiven for something or you will never know this!) It’s only when we find ourselves in God, and live and see through God’s eyes that “everything belongs.” All other systems exclude, expel, punish, and protect to find identity for their members in some kind of ideological perfection or separate superiority. Most think “the contaminating element” must be searched out, isolated, and often punished. This wasted effort keeps us from the centrally important task of love and union.

To have naked interface with the Ultimate Other is to know one’s self in one’s truest and deepest being. When we allow ourselves to be perfectly received, totally gazed upon by the One who knows everything and receives everything, we are indestructible.

If we can learn how to receive the perfect gaze of the Other, and to be mirrored by the Other, then the voices of the human crowd, even negative ones, have little power to hurt us. Best of all, as Meister Eckhart (1260–1327) has been quoted, “The eye with which you will look back at God will be the same eye with which God first looked at you.” [1]

Standing humbly before God’s gaze not only unites the psyche but it does the very thing that I know when I teach contemplative prayer. It unifies desire. It frees us from what Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) called the “vertigo of the imagination.” [2] It’s the whirlpool of imagination, looking here, there, and everywhere. Standing before one, accepting God literally allows us to be composed and gathered in one place. We can be in one place; we can be here, now. We can stop always looking over there for tomorrow’s happiness. As the apostle Paul wrote, “now is the favorable time, today is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2).

We see that Paul understands this in a most beautiful paragraph from his Second Letter to the Corinthians. He says, “We with our unveiled faces will gradually reflect like mirrors the brightness of the Lord. All will grow brighter and brighter as we are gradually turned into the image that we reflect” (3:18). That’s it!

It doesn’t have to do with being perfect. It has to do with being in relationship, holding onto union as tightly as God holds onto us, staying in there. The one who knows all and receives all, as a mirror does, has no trouble forgiving all. It’s not a matter of being correct, but of being connected.

References:
[1] Meister Eckhart, Qui Audit Me Non Confundetur (Whoever Hears Me Is Not Ashamed), Sermon on Sirach 24:30. Eckhart used the Latin Vulgate Bible; this verse is Sirach 24:22 in later translations. This apocryphal text is in Catholic but not Protestant Bibles.

[2] Henri de Lubac, The Discovery of God, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1960), 45.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 94; and

Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2008), 65, 67.

Explore Further. . .

Read more about God’s mirroring gaze and mirroring the divine image.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 1-3 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

How can I have compassion for another if I cannot have compassion for myself? How can I feel empathy for another if I cannot feel empathy for myself? The common denominator of inclusiveness, of a sense of shared humanity and of our human solidarity, is that to be human is first and foremost to be a person on the way.
—Brad M.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

We Are Made for Love

Feast of the Epiphany

Today we begin another year’s journey of Daily Meditations together. Our 2022 theme is “Nothing Stands Alone”—because the very nature of God and reality is relationship! Father Richard reflects:

The Christian belief in the Trinity says that God is absolute relatedness. God is our word for the ultimate ecosystem that holds all things in positive relationship (see Colossians 1:17). As long as we’re in honest and loving relationship with what is right in front of us, the Spirit can keep working in us and through us and for us.

Jesus comes as a naked, vulnerable baby, totally dependent upon relationship with others. Naked vulnerability means that we are going to let otherness influence and change us. When we don’t give other people any power over our lives, when we block them by thinking we can stand alone, or that otherness can’t change us or teach us anything, we are spiritually dead. As our 2022 theme puts it: Nothing Stands Alone. And it’s true! We are intrinsically like the Trinity, living in an absolute relatedness. We call this love.

We really were made for love, and outside of love we die very quickly. If we are going to start with Trinity, then loving relationship is the pattern, the very nature of being for us. But when we start with a philosophical concept of being and then try to convince everyone that this being is, in fact, love, we don’t have a lot of success. I’ve been a priest for almost fifty-two years and can say that most Christians seem to be afraid of God. We Christians aren’t more loving than anyone else; sometimes, we’re even less loving than other people! In some ways, that’s inevitable if we’re basically relating to God out of fear, and we haven’t been drawn into the love between the Father and the Son by the Spirit.

Jesus says the Spirit is always the hardest to describe, because “the Spirit blows where it will” (see John 3:8). Jesus’ message to us is clear: don’t ever try to control the Spirit and say where it comes from, where it goes, or who has it. It’s called group narcissism whenever we say our group is the only one that has the Spirit or the Truth. Every group at less mature levels will try to put God in their own pocket and say God only loves their group. Such a belief has nothing to do with the love of God. It isn’t a search for Truth or Holy Mystery, but a search for control. It’s the search for the small self, the search to make myself feel superior and to stand alone. I’m not in control or in charge of this Holy Mystery. I don’t presume to understand. All I know is I’m forever being drawn—through everything—each manifestation (epiphany) calling for surrender, communion, and intimacy.

Symbolic of all of us, the “three wise men” traveled long distances from their native religion and country to fittingly bow down before such an unknown Holy Mystery. It always leads to another Epiphany.

Reference:
Richard Rohr and Cynthia Bourgeault, The Shape of God: Deepening the Mystery of the Trinity, disc 2(Albuquerque: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2004), DVD, CD, MP3 download.

Explore Further. . .

Read more about the Trinity as God-in-relationship; listen to this Epiphany sermon from Father Richard.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 1-3 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Nothing Stands Alone: Weekly Summary

Love Crosses Boundaries

A Solid Foundation

Creating a People

It Can’t Be Carried Alone

A Mutually Loving Gaze

We Are Made for Love

Category Archive

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Stay connected

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Nothing Stands Alone: Weekly Summary

Love Crosses Boundaries

A Solid Foundation

Creating a People

It Can’t Be Carried Alone

A Mutually Loving Gaze

We Are Made for Love

Category Archive

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