The desert Fathers and Mothers were honestly not referred to that much, because they just told little stories. These stories seemed like harmless anecdotes, and we wanted to go ahead with serious religion. But in the last 30 years, there’s been a rediscovery of the absolute simplicity of their message and the fact that it isn’t concerned about the issues that we’ve been concerned about in recent centuries. In fact, they’re usually concerned about the ego (though they didn’t call it that), or our attempts to make ourselves more important than we are. It is this undercutting of egocentricity, this surrendering of everything in the search for God that makes them newly attractive. While it certainly won’t be a major course, I’d like to be able to bring them into our teaching in a regular way.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Fr. Richard’s Teachings on His Lineage, 2012
The Patristic Period is referring to the teachers that emerged largely in the second to fifth centuries of Christianity. Since they would have been closer to the source, we can somehow trust their witness and their testimony. It’s amazing when you go back to the “fathers of the church” (and they were largely men, it seems, because they were the only ones who got educated) we find a version of the Gospels that in many ways is more focused, and yet more broad, than the church we have now. It’s very surprising.
I can see why many patristic scholars have said we’ve got to return to the sources. I’d like that to be a regular part of our school, with particular emphasis upon the fathers of the Eastern Church, because we didn’t realize that Roman Catholics and Protestants didn’t pay much attention to the fathers in general, or the Eastern fathers in particular. They have a lot to say about transformation (theosis) and contemplation.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Fr. Richard’s Teachings on His Lineage, 2012
“Contemplation,” or meditation as it is called by some, became more popular in contemporary times through the writings of Thomas Merton. The word most Christians were more familiar with was simply “prayer.”
Unfortunately, in the West prayer became something functional; something you did to achieve a desired effect—which puts you back in charge. As soon as you make prayer a way to get something, you’re not moving into a new state of consciousness. It’s the same old consciousness. “How can I get God to do what I want God to do?” It’s the egocentric self still deciding what it needs, but now often trying to manipulate God too.
This is one reason religion is in such desperate straits today. It really isn’t transforming people, but leaving them in their separated and egocentric state. It pulls God inside of my agenda instead of letting God pull me inside of his. This is still the small old self at work. What the Gospel is talking about is the emergence of “a whole new creation” and a “new mind,” as Paul variously calls it.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Gospel Call to Compassionate Action and Contemplative Prayer (CD)
