Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

by Richard Rohr

The path of prayer and love and the path of suffering seem to be the two Great Paths of transformation. Suffering seems to get our attention; love and prayer seem to get our heart and our passion.

In God’s reign “everything belongs,” even the broken and poor parts.

We do not find our own center; it finds us. Our own mind will not be able to figure it out.

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God not by doing it right but by doing it wrong!

God is always bigger than the boxes we build for God, so we should not waste too much time protecting the boxes.

We cannot attain the presence of God because we’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness. Little do we realize that God is maintaining us in existence with every breath we take. As we take another it means that God is choosing us now and now and now. We have nothing to attain or even learn. We do, however, need to unlearn some things.

Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It’s a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence. The full contemplative is not just aware of the Presence, but trusts, allows, and delights in it.

God can most easily be lost by being thought found.

Prayer, though, reconnects us with inherent value. Everything becomes priceless if it is sacred. And everything is sacred if the world is a temple.

God’s life is living itself in me. I am aware of life living itself in me.

God beneath you, God in front of you, God behind you, God above you, God within you.

Can we see Christ in the people, the nobodies who can’t play our game of success? When we can see the image of God where we don’t want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own.

The ability to respect the outsider is probably the litmus test of true seeing.

Be still and know that I am God. Be still and know that I am. Be still and know. Be still. Be.

As soon as we are in a judging mode (higher/lower, superior/inferior), we can’t love.

As Mary Anne Williamson says in her book Return to Love, the “fear” worldview and the “love” worldview do not know one another.

The primary philosophical and spiritual problem in the West is the lie of individualism. Individualism makes church almost impossible. It makes community almost impossible. It makes compassion almost impossible. We’ve overdone this notion of the private self; it has become the only game in town when it’s not the game at all. I need to recognize that I’m in a river that is bigger than I am. The foundation and the flow of that river is love. Life is not about me; it is about God, and God is about love. When we don’t know love, when we don’t experience love, when we experience only the insecurity and fragility of the small self, we become restless.

We don’t have any real access to who we are except through God, and we don’t have any real access to God except through forgiving and rejoicing in our own humanity.

God likes you before you do the rituals. God doesn’t need them, but we need them to tenderly express our childlike devotion and desire — and to get in touch with that desire.