Sunday
God offers us quiet, contemplative eyes; God also calls us to prophetic and critical involvement in the pain and sufferings of our world—both at the same time.
—Richard Rohr

Monday
To live oppositionally is to be holding some degree of resentment or unhealed negative energy that we have not brought to the divine presence for transformation.   
—Richard Rohr

Tuesday
What do you do with Christianity when it has become enmeshed with authoritarian politics and corrupted by violence?
—Carmen Acevedo Butcher

Wednesday
Stay. But stay awake. Stay rooted. Stay practiced in humility and courage. Stay shaped by love more than by fear. The goal is never escape. The goal is freedom—the kind that lets you remain fully human when systems forget how.
–Cameron Trimble

Thursday
Two men, Benedict and Boethius, were called to two completely different paths to live out their Christian faith. One stayed in the center of power and tried to influence it, holding fast to his faith. The other left the centers of power and went to the margins to build an alternative community where they could keep the way of Christ alive.
—Brian McLaren

Friday
Instead of helping nostalgic people inhabit bubbles of the past, religious communities can help people go forward on this inward migration toward sovereignty of mind, where in defiance of a rising level of ugliness, people cultivate beauty… seeing it, creating it, savoring it.
—Brian McLaren

Week Fifteen Practice

Contemplation and Loving Action

Father Richard writes:

At the Center for Action and Contemplation, we seek to ground compassionate action in contemplative, nondual consciousness. When we experience the reality of our oneness with God, others, and creation, actions of justice and healing naturally follow. If we’re working to create a more whole world, contemplation will give our actions nonviolent, loving power for the long haul.

The civil rights leader John Lewis (1940–2020) has been an inspiration to many of us. How did this saintly public man avoid deeper recognition for so long? His words read like a prayer for contemplative action:

Study the path of others to make your way easier and more abundant. Lean toward the whispers of your own heart, discover the universal truth, and follow its dictates. Know that the truth always leads to love and the perpetuation of peace. Its products are never bitterness and strife. Clothe yourself in the work of love, in the revolutionary work of nonviolent resistance against evil. Anchor the eternity of love in your own soul and embed this planet with goodness. Release the need to hate, to harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Release all bitterness. Hold only love, only peace in your heart, knowing that the battle of good to overcome evil is already won. Choose confrontation wisely, but when it is your time don’t be afraid to stand up, speak up, and speak out against injustice. And if you follow your truth down the road to peace and the affirmation of love, if you shine like a beacon for all to see, then the poetry of all the great dreamers and philosophers is yours to manifest in a nation, a world community, and a Beloved Community that is finally at peace with itself. [1]

Father Richard offers encouragement: 

Some form of contemplative practice is the only way (apart from great love and great suffering) to rewire people’s minds and hearts. It is the only form of prayer that dips into the unconscious and changes people at deep levels—where all of the wounds, angers, and recognitions lie hidden. Only some form of prayer of quiet changes people for good and for others in any long-term way. It sustains and deepens the short-term wisdom we learn in great love and great suffering. [2]

At the Fall 2025 ReVision Conference, Brian McLaren highlighted the contemplative witness of the philosopher Boethius (d. 524), a contemporary of Benedict of Nursia: 

Boethius was orphaned at a young age and was raised by a very wealthy aristocrat, which brought him enormous benefits. Because of his privilege he was given an education in the Greek and Roman classics. By the age of twenty-five, he was brought into the government of the violent and unstable King Theodoric, becoming a counselor and advisor to the king at thirty-three. This young Christian man had a great position of privilege. So what did he do with it?

Boethius uses his brilliance to do what he believes needs to be done, seeking to integrate Christian theology and Greek philosophy. He also does some important political work in Theodoric’s kingdom. In the year 520 he takes a dangerous stand, borne of his own integrity and faith, for Christian unity between the East and the West, and he pays for it. In 524, he is imprisoned by King Theodoric for defending one of the king’s critics.

In prison, Boethius is removed from public life, like Benedict in his cave. And like Benedict, people come to see him. He uses his remaining months in prison to teach, and eventually to write a text, The Consolation of Philosophy, that is still studied today as the last great work of the Roman classical period and the first great work of medieval literature.

In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius describes how he is met in his suffering by a female figure who offers him wisdom:

While I was quietly thinking these thoughts over to myself and giving vent to my sorrow with the help of my pen, I became aware of a woman standing over me. She was of awe-inspiring appearance, her eyes burning and keen beyond the usual power of men. She was so full of years that I could hardly think of her as of my own generation, and yet she possessed a vivid color and undiminished vigor. It was difficult to be sure of her height, for sometimes she was of average human size, while at other times she seemed to touch the very sky with the top of her head, and when she lifted herself even higher, she pierced it and was lost to human sight. [1]

Sophia, the feminine figure of wisdom, offers him calm, helps him recenter, and guides him into contemplation you might say. The writing of this book becomes a contemplative practice for him that influences generations of people across the following centuries, through and beyond the decay and complete collapse of the Roman Empire.

Shortly after finishing The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius is brutally tortured and executed. The government in which Boethius worked and strived to do good turns on him and executes him.

These two men, Benedict and Boethius, were called to two completely different paths to live out their Christian faith. [Read about Benedict here.] One stayed in the center of power and tried to influence it, holding fast to his faith. The other left the centers of power and went to the margins to build an alternative community where they could keep the way of Christ alive and maintain some sort of wisdom in a world that was obsessed not with truth, but with power and wealth, violence and weapons.

Rev. Cameron Trimble connects the monastic wisdom of Saint Benedict with the desert ammas and abbas who were his spiritual ancestors:

St. Benedict told his communities to stay: to root themselves in place, in relationship, in shared life. Stability, he taught, is how love survives collapse. You do not run every time the world shakes. You commit. You tend. You remain.

But long before Benedict organized communities that stayed, another stream of elders stepped away for a time—the Desert Mothers and Fathers—because they wanted to learn how to live in the world without becoming shaped by its distortions.

At first glance, these look like opposite instructions: Go versus stay. Leave versus root. Desert versus monastery.

But underneath, they answer the same spiritual problem: How do you remain faithful when the surrounding culture is losing its moral center?

The desert elders left noise to recover clarity. Benedictine communities built structure to protect clarity. Both traditions understood that without intentional spiritual formation and maturity, power, fear, and spectacle will train the soul faster than truth will.

The desert was never the final destination. It was a training ground for perception.

One elder taught that the first task of spiritual life is learning to see your own reactions clearly: how quickly anger justifies itself, how easily fear pretends to be wisdom, how often ego disguises itself as courage. Silence exposed all of that, not to shame people, but to free them.

Benedict took the next step. He asked: Once you learn to see clearly, how do you live faithfully in community over the long haul? His answer was not intensity but rhythm—prayer, work, shared meals, mutual care, accountability, humility, repair.

So the question for us is not whether to leave or stay. Most of us are not called to geographic withdrawal. We are called to interior non-cooperation with corruption while remaining deeply committed to one another.

You can stay without surrendering your soul. But it takes practice.

It takes boundaries around attention. It takes rhythms that interrupt outrage. It takes communities that tell the truth to one another gently and directly. It takes prayer, or silence, or honest reflection that clears emotional distortion before it hardens into identity.

Right now many people feel spiritually flooded, saturated with alarm, analysis, reaction, and dread. The nervous system never powers down. The moral imagination never gets quiet enough to hear wisdom instead of impulse.

The elders would recognize this immediately.

They would not tell you to disappear. They would tell you to build inner ground. They would tell you to create small deserts of clarity inside daily life—spaces where truth can speak without competition—so that when you act, you act from depth instead of reactivity.

Benedict would agree. Stay. But stay awake. Stay rooted. Stay practiced in humility and courage. Stay shaped by love more than by fear.

The goal is never escape.

The goal is freedom—the kind that lets you remain fully human when systems forget how.

Story From Our Community

Following the end of a thirty-year marriage, I arrived in the desert of New Mexico, directionless and in despair. Something called me here to heal. It was as if I had been “exiled” from life to discover a new reality. I also faced major health challenges along the way. The expansiveness and the ever-present sun of the desert have opened me to a sense of buoyancy I never thought possible as I went through this major transformation of my life. I am grateful!
—Dave A.

Share your own story with us.

Father Richard considers how Jesus calls us to be liberated from the agendas of our inflated egos:  

What was Jesus liberating us from? This probably won’t seem too different from what we would now call the ego or the false self. As Jesus put it, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). Buddhists tend to describe this process with much greater clarity, but Jesus didn’t have access to psychological language. He just spoke in a straightforward way that his contemporaries could understand.  

Scholarship today is discovering a much more radical and demanding Jesus than either Catholicism or Protestantism was ever ready for. We distorted the message so it wasn’t primarily about a transformation of the ego but freedom from the body self. We largely transferred everybody’s guilt concerns toward the body. We concentrated on repressing and punishing the body, not giving the body too much pleasure, freedom, or delight. It’s not that there aren’t  issues there, but the ego, in my opinion, has gotten away scot-free in the Western church. We allowed egos to get out of control while being quite anxious to appear chaste, self-disciplined, and not too greedy. 

Christianity has largely paid little attention to the real things Jesus talked about. Instead, we tend to be preoccupied with things that Jesus never talked about. But who can reform Christianity except Jesus?

Understanding Jesus’s teachings on power is the key to reforming Christianity and other power structures:

Jesus tells his followers that they should never have what we would call dominative power. He calls it “lording it over others”: “You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them … but not so with you” (Matthew 20:25–26). How did so many Christians come to believe that exercising power over others is what religion is all about? There’s no indication that Jesus ever intended there to be a head church office somewhere, with upper, middle, and lower management. As a priest, I’m lower management—and even we expected the laity, the people in the pews, to be passive followers. This is so contrary to what Jesus taught and expected. He clearly gives power to people by giving them an inner authority.  

Liberation from the ego self is liberation from the world of forms and images. Jesus’s word for that was mammon: “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). If we’re playing the game of appearance and power, prestige, and possessions, Jesus says we cannot know God. That’s pretty absolute! There’s a correlation between our preoccupation with image and how much—or how little—we’ve experienced the inner life.  

Jesus also liberates us from the ego self by his constant warnings against negativity and oppositional thinking. In general, his word for that liberation is forgiveness. Two thirds of Jesus’s teaching is directly or indirectly about forgiveness. To live oppositionally is to be holding some degree of resentment or unhealed negative energy that we have not brought to the divine presence for transformation.   

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Jesus as Liberator,” ONEING 13, no. 2, A Living Tradition (CAC Publishing, 2025), 54–55. Available in print or PDF download.

Give me a place to stand, and I will move the whole earth with a lever.
—Archimedes

Father Richard Rohr uses the images of a lever and a place to stand to explain why social transformation needs both action and contemplation:

Archimedes, a third-century BCE Greek philosopher and mathematician, noticed that a lever balanced in the correct place, on the correct fulcrum, could move proportionally much greater weights than the force actually applied. He calculated that if the lever stretched far enough and the fulcrum point remained fixed close to Earth, even a small weight at one end would be able to move the world at the other.

The fixed point is our place to stand. It is a contemplative stance: steady, centered, poised, and rooted. To be contemplative, we have to have a slight distance from the world to allow time for withdrawal from business as usual, for contemplation, for going into what Jesus calls our “private room” (Matthew 6:6). However, we have to remain quite close to the world at the same time, loving it, feeling its pain and its joy as our pain and our joy. Otherwise, our distance can become a form of escapism.

True contemplation, the great teachers say, is really quite down to earth and practical, and doesn’t require life in a monastery. It is, however, an utterly different way of receiving the moment, and therefore all of life. In order to have the capacity to “move the world,” we need some distancing and detachment from the diversionary nature and delusions of mass culture and the false self. Contemplation builds on the hard bottom of reality as it is without ideology, denial, or fantasy.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t have a fixed place to stand, a fulcrum of critical distance, and thus we cannot find our levers, or true “delivery systems,” as Bill Plotkin calls them [1], by which to move our world. We do not have the steadiness of spiritual practice to keep our sight keen and alive. Those who have plenty of opportunities for spiritual practice—for example, those in monasteries—often don’t have an access point beyond religion itself from which to speak or to serve much of our world. We need a delivery system in the world to provide the capacity for building bridges and connecting the dots of life.

Some degree of inner experience is necessary for true spiritual authority, but we need some form of outer validation, too. We need to be taken seriously as competent and committed individuals and not just “inner” people. Could this perhaps be what Jesus means by being both “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16)? God offers us quiet, contemplative eyes; God also calls us to prophetic and critical involvement in the pain and sufferings of our world—both at the same time. This is so obvious in the life and ministry of Jesus that I wonder why it has not been taught as an essential part of Christianity.