Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

by Richard Rohr

We were saved, the liturgy says, by a “happy mistake.” Jesus reminded Julian that his crucifixion was the worst thing that happened in human history and God made the best out of it to take away all of our excuses. As they were for Jesus, “our wounds become honors.” The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God not by doing it right but by doing it wrong!

It is much easier to belong to a group than it is to know that you belong to God. Those who firm up their own edges and identity too quickly without finding their center in God and in themselves will normally be the enemies of ecumenism, forgiveness, vulnerability, and basic human dialogue. Their identity is too insecure to allow any movement in or out and their “Christ” tends to be very small, tribal, and “just like them.” If your prayer is not enticing you outside your comfort zones, if your Christ is not an occasional “threat,” you probably need to do some growing up and learning to love.

Too often, young adults full of Yeats’s “passionate intensity” about doctrine and dogma and which group is going to heaven use God to shore up their nonselves. Such traditionalism is actually avoiding the Tradition of transformation through death and rebirth.

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

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. All spiritual disciplines have one purpose: to get rid of illusions so we can be present.

The Christian vision is that the world is a temple, and buying and selling in the temple is the one thing that drove Jesus to anger and violence. It destroys inherent value and replaces it with an utterly false seeing: market value, the world of meritocracy and exchange rates. It destroys the soul. It had to be driven out or there would be no temple. There is no temple if you live merely in the world of buying and selling — the so-called bottom line. In that world everything is weighed.

I use this prayer to try to draw myself and others into a contemplative frame of mind: Be still and know that I am God. Be still and know that I am. Be still and know. Be still. Be.

I’m not against vegetarianism, but if it’s used as our new way to be in control and morally superior, we are not enlightened. While crunching organic carrots, some assure their egos bite by bite, “I am right.” Health can become the new name of salvation. I suppose the religion of health is as close as a materialist culture can come to salvation. We start with a preoccupation with the body, so physical health is as close as we can come to a full life. I’m all for health, but dieting, exercising, health food, and elaborate spas can be just a materialist definition of salvation. You can usually tell if your pursuit of health is an ego control game if it becomes obsessive and is not balanced with the work of mind, heart, spirit, and soul. How can we be fully present to another human being if all we see is their eating habits so we can judge them accordingly?

The private self is clearly an illusion largely created by thinking. My life is not about me. I am about life! That’s why the Bible is a social history. We’re part of a much larger mystery. Don’t take this private thing so seriously. 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.

Jesus says that if you walk around with hatred all day, you’re just as much the killer as the one who pulls out the gun. We can’t live that way and not be destroyed. Some Christians have thought, for some reason, they could. The evil and genocide of World War II was the final result of much negative and paranoid thinking among good German Christians.

When “the way” becomes an end in itself, it becomes idolatry. In idolatry the religious concern is “Who is on my way?” and “Who is saying it my way?” The ones who say it my way are good; the others are bad. Jesus faced this same issue with his Jewish compatriots and told them, “Produce the appropriate fruits instead of telling yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father’ ” (Luke 3:8).

I don’t know how much contemplation our national political leaders do. They probably don’t know about it. But it is dangerous to have public officials who have no inner life. They’ll operate out of illusion, self-interest, power, and fear, especially fear of not being reelected. We don’t have anything positive to believe in, anything that is enlightened or rich or deep. Negative identity, shallow as it is, comes more easily than dedicated choice. It is frankly much easier to be against than to be for.

In mature religion, the secular becomes sacred. There are no longer two worlds. We no longer have to leave the secular world to find sacred space because they’ve come together.

it. The cross is not the price that Jesus had to pay to talk God into loving us. It is simply where love will lead us. Jesus names the agenda. If we love, if we give ourselves to feel the pain of the world, it will crucify us. (This understanding of the crucifixion is much better than thinking of Jesus as paying some debt to an alienated God, who needs to be talked into loving us.)

Institutional religion is a humanly necessary but also immature manifestation of this “hidden mystery” by which God is saving the world. History seems to make both the necessity and the immaturity of religion glaringly apparent, which upsets both progressives and conservatives. Institutional religion is never an end in itself, but merely a wondrous and “uncertain trumpet” of the message.