Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

by Richard Rohr

This is why St. Bonaventure and others said that a poor uneducated person might well know and love God more than a great theologian or ecclesiastic. You do not resolve the God question in your head — or even in the perfection of moral response. It is resolved in you, when you agree to bear the mystery of God: God’s suffering for the world and God’s ecstasy in the world.

are often infected by what some call “affluenza,” a toxic and blinding disease which makes it even more difficult for us to break through to the center. Our skin-encapsulated egos are the only self that most of us know, and this is where we usually get trapped. It is fair to say that the traps of mind and ideology are as toxic and as blinding as the so-called “hot sins” of drunkards and prostitutes, though they are harder to recognize. Most of us have to be taught how to see; true seeing is the heart of spirituality today.

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

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. You have to develop an ego before you can let go of it. Maybe that is why Jesus just lived thirty years before he started talking.

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.

To become aware of God’s presence in our lives, we have to accept what is often difficult, particularly for people in what appears to be a successful culture. We have to accept that human culture is in a mass hypnotic trance. We’re sleep-walkers.

All spiritual disciplines have one purpose: to get rid of illusions so we can be present. These disciplines exist so that we can see what is, see who we are, and see what is happening. On the contrary, our mass cultural trance is like scales over our eyes. We see only with the material eye.

Try to say that: “I don’t know anything.” We used to call it tabula rasa in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don’t need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner’s mind. We need to say with the blind man, “I want to see.”

You don’t need to push the river, because you are in it. The life is lived within us, and we learn how to say yes to that life.

Religion has tended to create people who think they have God in their pockets, people with quick, easy, glib answers.

Normally we let God in the way we let everything else in. We meet God at our present level of relational maturity: preoccupied, closed, stuck, or ready. Most spiritual work is readying the student. Both soil and soul have to be a bit unsettled and loosened up a bit. As long as we’re too comfortable, too opinionated, too sure we have the whole truth, we’re just rock and thorns. Anybody throwing us seed is just wasting time.

In our culture, we suffer from, among other things, a glut of words, a glut of experiences, and, yes, a glut of tapes, books, and ideas. When we have too many words, we tend not to value them, even if they might contain life for us. We find it hard to be a disciple with a beginner’s mind because we’ve heard it all before, from many directions. We can’t absorb it all.

We desperately need some disciplines to help us know how to see and what is worth seeing, and what we don’t need to see.

The point is not to obey the law as much as to find the purpose of the law. What is it for? In the West people don’t understand spiritual discernment. We get moralistic about the law as an end in itself. But the law does not give life; only the Spirit gives life, as Paul details in Romans and Galatians. When Jesus teaches the law, it’s for the sake of its purpose being achieved. It is never an end in itself, as he makes very clear when he defends his disciples who were picking grain on the Sabbath (Luke 6:1–5).

But we are a mixture of weed and wheat and we always will be. As Luther put it, simul justus et peccator. His whole tradition said we are simultaneously saint and sinner. That’s the mystery of holding weed and wheat together in our one field of life. It takes a lot more patience, compassion, forgiveness, and love than aiming for some illusory perfection that is usually blind to its own faults. The only true perfection available to us is the honest acceptance of our imperfection. If we must have perfection to be happy with ourselves, we have only two choices. We can either blind ourselves to our own evil (and deny the weeds) or we can give up in discouragement (and deny the wheat). But if we put aside perfection and face the tension of having both, then we can hear the good news with open hearts. It takes uncommon humility to carry the dark side of things. It takes a kind of courage to carry the good side, too. Archetypically, “the crucified one” always hangs between these two thieves — paying the price within himself just as we must do. (See Luke 23:32–34; note Jesus forgives both thieves.)

13). In the thirteenth chapter of Matthew, he says, “This is what a scribe of the kingdom is like.” Scholars think he is describing himself. He continues, “He throws out the dragnet and pulls in things both old and new.” In other words, he preserves the best of what we call conservative and the best of what we call progressive. This is always a rare vocation, because it pleases hardly anybody, especially our own ego need to have the “whole truth.”

Beginner’s mind is a posture of eagerness, of spiritual hunger. The beginner’s mind knows it needs something. This is a rare feeling in today’s treacherously seductive culture, however. Because it is so immediately satisfying, it is hard to remain spiritually hungry. We give answers too quickly, take away pain too easily, and too quickly stimulate. We are at a symbolic disadvantage as a wealthy culture. Jesus said that the rich man or woman will find it hard to understand what he is talking about. The rich can satisfy their loneliness and longing in false ways, in quick fixes that avoid the necessary learning. In terms of soul work, we dare not get rid of the pain before we have learned what it has to teach us. That’s why the poor have a head start. They can’t resort to an instant fix to any problem: aspirin, a trip, or some entertainment. They remain empty whether they want to or not.

The paschal mystery is the pattern of transformation. We are transformed through death and rising, probably many times. There seems to be no other cauldron of growth and transformation.

Fixing something doesn’t usually transform us. We try to change events in order to avoid changing ourselves. We must learn to stay with the pain of life, without answers, without conclusions, and some days without meaning. That is the path, the perilous dark path of true prayer.

Simone Weil said, “It is grace that forms the void inside of us and it is grace alone that can fill the void.”

Historic cultures saw grief as a time of incubation, transformation, and necessary hibernation. Yet this sacred space is the very space we avoid. When we avoid darkness, we avoid tension, spiritual creativity, and finally transformation. We avoid God, who works in the darkness — where we are not in control! Maybe that is the secret: relinquishing control.

The boy would naturally want to ascend, and religion had to teach him the language of descent. He had to learn the way of tears and how to learn to let go.

When we first have a liminal experience, it’s very inflating. People are often a bit obnoxious after their “born again” experience, their baptism in the Spirit, or their first religious retreat — at least for a few days. You can’t blame them. It’s so exciting to finally see the truth. But if they don’t have humility and honesty at that point, it’s really dangerous. They use the language of descent for an ascent. Unfortunately, it is rather common today among all groups, especially if people have wasted many years on “drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” God becomes a way for the humiliated ego to reascend.

Too often, however, we do not allow the events and experiences of life to teach us the habit of grace. What we have instead, and mass produced in our society, are what I call “liminoid” experiences. Our society has mass produced these as substitutes for liminal experiences. They look like a movement out of our cozy space, but aren’t. “I have to get away from it. I’m going to the beach for two weeks,” people say. When we see people come back, they’re not refreshed at all. They have the same old agenda, the same old fears, the same old anger. They let go of nothing at the beach. Their way of looking hasn’t changed, so neither has their agenda. Their way of feeling and responding to reality is exactly the same. Maybe they got some good sleep, and that’s good for a while, but three days after the vacation they’ll be just like they were before. Then they’ll need another vacation.

Real sexual encounter can be liminal. But if the counseling I’m doing and the relationships I have touched upon are any indication, most sexual encounters are liminoid. They avoid the great letting go, the scary intimacy, and the great breaking through.

Drinking and drugs and anything that lowers our consciousness do not lead to liminal experience. I’m sure alcoholics could confirm that. Alcohol and drugs do not provide an entrance into deeper consciousness. Instead, they lessen our consciousness and awareness.

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. We say, “Let’s see, she gave me a gift worth $25 so I have to…no, it didn’t cost that much, probably only about $16 or $17… —that kind of talk. Who cares? That kind of thinking is a dead end. Preoccupation with exchange value and market value tends to blind us almost totally to inherent value. Prayer, though, reconnects us with inherent value. Everything becomes priceless if it is sacred. And everything is sacred if the world is a temple.

You cannot not live in the presence of God. You are totally surrounded by God as you read this. St. Patrick said, God beneath you, God in front of you, God behind you, God above you, God within you. You cannot earn this God. You cannot prove yourself worthy of this God. Feeling God’s presence is simply a matter of awareness. Of enjoying the now. Deepening one’s presence.

Can you see the image of Christ in the least of your brothers and sisters? He uses that as his only description of the final judgment. Nothing about commandments, nothing about church attendance, nothing about papal infallibility: simply a matter of our ability to see. Can we see Christ in the least of our brothers and sisters? “They smell. They’re a nuisance. They’re on welfare. They are a drain on our tax money,” we say. 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. Finally, Jesus says we have to love and recognize the divine image even in our enemies. He teaches what many thought a leader could never demand of his followers: love of the enemy. Logically that makes no sense. But soulfully it makes absolute sense, because in terms of the soul, it really is all or nothing. Either we see the divine image in all created things, or we don’t see it at all. Once we see it, we’re trapped. We see it once and the circle keeps moving out. If we still try to exclude some (sick people, blacks, people on welfare, gays, or whomever we’ve decided to hate), we’re not there. We don’t yet understand. If the world is a temple, then our enemies are sacred, too. The ability to respect the outsider is probably the litmus test of true seeing. It doesn’t even stop with human beings and enemies and the least of the brothers and sisters. It moves to f...

The contemplative secret is to learn to live in the now. The now is not as empty as it might appear to be or that we fear it may be. Try to realize that everything is right here, right now. When we’re doing life right, it means nothing more than it is right now, because God is in this moment in a nonblaming way. When we are able to experience that, taste it and enjoy it, we don’t need to hold on to it. The next moment will have its own taste and enjoyment.

None of us are completely present. So don’t feel guilty. This is the ideal, the enlightened moments that come now and then. But we do know that when we are manipulating, changing, controlling, and fixing, we are not there yet. The calculating mind is the opposite of the contemplative mind. The first is thought by the system, the second by the Spirit.

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.

The nature of the ego is that it tries to fix, name, control, and insure everything for itself. We want predictability. But that fixes us in the past. What was, is, so we are trapped in repeating it and nothing new happens.

If producing and consuming are the only games we play, they harden into our reality. Yes, it is a false reality, but it can grow more real to us as we grow older. It’s consequently harder to convert as we grow older. If we still believe that the system of producing and consuming is the real world, the only world, by the time we’re fifty, there’s almost no way out. It requires a major transformation of consciousness to learn how to let go of this false reality if we’ve lived a life of comparing, differentiating, judging, and controlling. Win/lose is the only game most of us understand. We have a constant unspoken need for domination and actually find no enjoyment in win/win situations. Love and freedom cannot grow in such self-preoccupied and calculating minds. When we live out of ego, we impose our demands on reality. But when we live in God’s presence, we await reality’s demands on us.

If we are not tasting the fullness of the now, we will play the games of power to fill the emptiness. If we’re playing the domination game, we can be as trapped on the left as on the right. Our great disillusionment with so much of even contemporary progressive thinking is that it is still playing the power game. It’s playing it on the left side, the liberal side, but the game’s the same. Even while being politically correct, we are still looking for control and righteousness. That demon has not yet been exorcised.

Jesus’ notion of the kingdom of God will not come from political correctness because it is the same game on the other side of the playing field. The ego has just found another way to be right: with vegetarianism, for example! 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 present moment has no competition; it is not judged in comparison to any other. It has never happened before and will not happen again. But when I’m in competition, I’m not in love.

The gift of true religion is that it parts the veil, returns us to the garden and tells us our primal experience was trustworthy. It reassures us that we live in a benevolent universe, and it is on our side. The universe, it reassures us, is radical grace. Therefore, we do not need to be afraid. Scarcity is not the primary experience, but abundance. Knowing this, we can relax and let go.

As Mary Anne Williamson says in her book Return to Love, the “fear” worldview and the “love” worldview do not know one another. What I’m calling the fear worldview is what John calls “the world.” It is “the system.” Our culture teaches us that everything out there is hostile. We have to compare, dominate, control, and insure. In brief, we have to be in charge. That need to be in charge moves us deeper and deeper into a world of anxiety. As with our attachment to the system of producing and consuming, this anxiety gets worse as we get older.

In Coming to Our Senses, Bernham points out that around the year 1500, there was a mass proliferation of a new invention: the mirror. After that watershed event in history, we see an increasing split within the self. People start to live almost entirely outside of themselves. America has made an art form out of it through Hollywood and Madison Avenue. We really don’t live inside anymore, but we live through others’ eyes. “Am I color-coordinated today?” “Am I attractive?” “Do I have a small enough waistline?” We don’t live in our bodies, where we can feel our own feelings and trust our own experience. Instead, through commercials and advertisements and jingles we live in images and appearances. We let the media and passing material objects define success. The self, therefore, is always outside, and we live in constant dissatisfaction. What a tortured way to live! We suffer, quite frankly, from a lack of contact with reality; we lack what philosophers call ontological mooring. Contemplation provides that mooring, that contact; it is an appreciation of and response to what is real right here and now. Until we break the material world’s hold on us and reestablish contact with reality, we will never be happy. We will live our lives through these beautiful models that we can’t live up to, with their perfect bodies, trim waistlines, even teeth, and zit-free faces! What a terrible tragedy that people should be seduced into imitating and desiring what we are not and can never be. W...

We’ve paid a price for our technologies. The price is our soul. The soul doesn’t know itself by comparison and differentiation. The soul just is. The soul knows itself through what is now and everything that is, both the dark and the light. The soul triumphs over nothing and therefore cannot be defeated because it is not in the game of succeeding or failing. It does not need to separate the dark from the light. Everything belongs.

The ego is the dualist inside of us. “It is the habit,” James Carse says, “of seeing ourselves over and against someone else.” That’s exactly what the ego wants to do. To my ego, my wealth, my intelligence, my moral goodness, and my social class are what they are only in contrast to the person next to me. But the still center, my true self, does not need to oppose, differentiate, or compare itself.

When leftists take over, they become as power-seeking and controlling and dominating as their oppressors because the demon of power has never been exorcised. We’ve seen this in social reforms and in many grassroots and feminist movements. You want to support them and you agree with many of their ideas, but too often they disappoint.

The lie always comes in a new form that looks like enlightenment. We all say, “This is it,” and we jump on the bandwagon, the new politically correct agenda. And then we discover it’s run by unenlightened people who in fact do not love God but love themselves. They do not love the truth, but love control. The need to be in power, to have control, and to say someone else is wrong is not enlightenment. Such unenlightened leaders do not love true freedom for everybody but freedom for their system. That’s been my great disappointment with liberals. Liberals often lack the ability to sacrifice the self or create foundations that last. They can’t let go of their own need for change and control and stand still in a patient, humble way as people of faith often can.

To discover the answer, we have to wait and observe. That’s what happens in the early stages of contemplation. We wait in silence. In silence all our usual patterns assault us. Our patterns of control, addiction, negativity, tension, anger, and fear assert themselves. That’s why most people give up rather quickly. When Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, the first things that show up are wild beasts (Mark 1:13). Contemplation is not first of all consoling. It’s only real. But go into the closet, as Jesus says, and shut the door (Matt. 6:6). Only then, when you stop the parade of new voices and ideas, will you see the underlying and ever-recurring patterns. It is a humiliating experience. The first voices we hear are normally negative. They are paranoid and obsessive voices. They are agenda-driven and insecure voices. They are lustful and lazy voices. You will want to run, I assure you.

We attempt to heal this sense of disappointment with ourselves by identifying with a positive visual image or intellectual idea of ourselves. “I am smart,” or “I am good looking,” or, in this country, “I am successful.” “I’ve made this much money,” “I have this degree or title.” In terms of the Lord’s Prayer, those are the debts and debtors that must be forgiven. We need to let go of these false self-images. They do not serve us well. They are debts that hang over us because we ourselves are both the creditor and the debtor, and enough is never enough. Most people spend their entire lives living up to these mental self-images instead of living in the primal “I” that is already good in God’s eyes.

But being nothing has a glorious tradition. When we are nothing, we are in a fine position to receive everything from God. If we look at all the great religious traditions, we see they use those words.

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.

Don’t harbor hateful anger or call people names in your heart like “fool” or “worthless person” (Matt. 5:22). If you’re walking around all day saying in your heart, “What an idiot he is,” you’re living out of death, not life. If that’s what you think and feel, that’s what you will be, death energy instead of life force. Apparently, we cannot afford even inner disconnection from love.