Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer

by Richard Rohr

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.