Less of Me, More of God
Father Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation has created a place where those who value the social justice tradition can merge their activism with a contemplative model of faith.
In my own rendering of this, I’ve described the pattern of our lives to be “the gentle movement from experience to reflection, back and forth as a cycle of life we need to attend to.” I’ve contended that we move back and forth from work/action/event to our need to reflect upon those things we learn from experience. Back and forth we rock, adding understanding to our experiences in life. We process and integrate what we learn from the events that occur in our lives.
There’s a great paradox to that movement we must take into account as we are persons trained for action and pushed away from the need to reflect. We must do something, we think, rather than making a place for us to think about what’s happened and to sit with the need to make sense of it. “What does this mean?” is a powerful question for us to consider. “How does this add to my life or take away from it and what must I do to integrate what I’ve learned?” are versions of this kind of reflective thinking.
I receive a daily meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation taken from some of Richard Rohr’s previously published books. Today, Fr. Rohr draws upon Meister Eckhart the notion that “the spiritual life has more to do with subtraction than with addition.” He points out that our western tradition has suggested falsely to us that in order to climb higher on the spiritual ladder of success, we must necessarily be in the process of adding. We consider subtraction as a negative experience that is a sign of loss and regression.
“What we should do,” he adds, “is get ourselves out of the way! Then God will be evident. Then we can easily welcome Christ.”
The contradiction of subtraction as a means to being fully alive to God gives us manna to think upon in light of how we’ve been raised. It breaks through the hard-packed crust of ground worn smooth by our need to be work and strive for more which form the resistance we put up to God. For more of Father Rohr’s insights or to receive his free daily meditation, contact: www.cacradicalgrace.org]