Rising In Sublime Faith, Surrender To A Love Not Knowing
"When Western civilisation set out on its many paths of winning, accomplishment, and conquest, the contemplative mind seemed uninteresting and even counterproductive to our egoic purposes.
We must remember that Faith in its maturity is supremely love-centered, not information– or knowledge-centered.
Such knowing does not contradict the rational, but it’s much more holistic and inclusive.
Adapted from Richard Rohr
The contemplative mind got in the way of definable goals for progress, science, and development, which were very good and necessary in their own way—but not for soul knowledge.
We lost almost any notion of paradox, mystery, or the wisdom of unsayability—which are the open-ended qualities that make faith so dynamic, creative, and nonviolent.
Instead, we insisted on “knowing,” and even certain knowing all the time and every step of the way!
This is no longer the enlightening path but a rather late and utterly inadequate form of religion, which is probably why so many individuals, especially in the West, now say they are “spiritual but not religious.” I cannot fault them for that, though it sounds like the dualistic mind speaking.
We must remember that Faith in its maturity is supremely love-centered, not information– or knowledge-centered.
"The primacy of love allows our knowing to be much humbler and more patient and helps us to recognise that other traditions and other people have much to teach us, and there is also much we can share with them." ~ Richard Rohr
This stance of honest self-knowledge and deeper interiority, with the head (Scripture), the heart (Experience), and the body (Tradition) operating as one, is helping many to be more integrated and truthful about their own actual experience of God.
Contemplation allows us to see things in their wholeness and thus with respect (re–spect means to see a second time).
Contemplation allows us to see things in their wholeness and thus with respect (re–spect means to see a second time).
Until Richard recognizes and somehow compensates for his prejudicial way of seeing the moment, all Richard will tend to see is his own emotional life and agenda in every new situation.
This is the essential letting–go lesson (kenosis) of Contemplation 101, but such self–emptying does not yet feel much like “prayer” to the average person, which is probably why many give up too soon and frankly never truly meet otherness, much less the Other. They just keep meeting themselves over and over again.
- Only at a deeper level of contemplation do we begin to see the correlation between how we do anything and how we do everything else.
- We take the moment in front of us much more seriously and respectfully.
- We catch ourselves out of the corner of our eye, as it were, and our ego games are exposed and diminished.
Such knowing does not contradict the rational, but it’s much more holistic and inclusive.
It might be called trans-rational although many think it is pre-rational.
It goes where the rational mind cannot go, but then comes back to honour the rational, too.
In Living School, we call this “contemplative epistemology” a contemplative theory of how we know what we know.
Contemplation is really the change that changes
everything, especially, first of all, the seer.
Clearing Up, Coast of Sicily
Andreas Achenbach, one of Düsseldorf's most influential painters
in the mid-19th century, specialised in the "sublime"
mode of landscape painting, in which man is dwarfed
by nature's might and power.
Adapted from Richard Rohr
