Make my joy complete by being of a single mind, one in love, one in heart and one in mind. Nothing is to be done out of jealousy or vanity; instead, out of humility of mind everyone should give preference to others, everyone pursuing not selfish interests but those of others. Make your own the mind of Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped. But he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are; and being in every way like a human being, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.
–Philippians 2:3-8, Jerusalem Bible
Jesus consistently asks people to “come after me” or to “follow me.” Eventually, he leads us to the cross. Victory is not the avoidance of suffering or death, but precisely death transformed. This is what God does with people who say “yes” to the process.
In the passage above, Paul uses the Greek word kenosis to describe Jesus’ act of self-emptying and surrender. Contemplative prayer is a practice of self-emptying. At its most basic, contemplation is letting go–of our habitual thoughts, preferences, judgments, and feelings. Though life itself is often our most powerful teacher through great love and suffering, contemplation is a daily, small death to false self and ego. It makes space for True Self to reappear, to rise from the ashes of our partial and protected self.
Contemplation teaches us to live in an undefended way. Little by little we can let go of the need to prove ourselves right or superior. Contemplation retrains our brains to understand the bias from the bottom, to know with true humility and love.
If you do not already have a regular contemplative or meditative practice, I encourage you to begin with a few minutes of silence every day, emptying your mind of patterned–mostly negative–thoughts to simply be present to Presence.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Path of Descent (CAC: 2003), CD, MP3 download.
The template of all reality is Trinity: “Let us create [humanity] in our own image,” the creation story says (Genesis 1:26). God is essentially shared life, life in relationship. In the beginning is relationship, we might say. Within the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit perfectly love and are perfectly loved. We come to know who God is through exchanges of mutual knowing and loving. [1]
God’s basic method of communicating God’s self is not the “saved” individual, the rightly informed believer, or even personal careers in ministry, but the journey and bonding process that God initiates in community: in marriages, families, tribes, nations, events, scientists, and churches who are seeking to participate in God’s love, maybe without even consciously knowing it.
The body of Christ is our Christian metaphor for this bonding. It seems to be God’s strategy and God’s leaven inside the dough of creation. It is both the medium and the message. It is both the beginning and the goal: “May they all be one . . . so 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” (see John 17:21, 23).
Thomas Merton writes, “The Christian is not merely ‘alone with the Alone’ in the Neoplatonic sense, but he is One with all his ‘brothers [and sisters] in Christ.’ His 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.'” [2]
There is no other form for the Christian life except a common one. 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, through concrete bonds of union, I doubt whether he is passed on by words, sermons, institutions, or ideas.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Near Occasions of Grace (Orbis Books: 1993), 49-51.
References:
[1] This will be the subject of my next book, The Divine Dance, on the mystery of Trinity, coming later this year.
[2] Thomas Merton, The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation (Harper San Francisco: 2003), 22.
