Just This: Prompts and Practices for Contemplation

by Richard Rohr

We stop believing our little binary mind (which strips things down to two choices and then usually identifies with one of them) and begin to recognize the inadequacy of that limited way of knowing reality. In fact, a binary mind is a recipe for superficiality, if not silliness. Only the contemplative, or the deeply intuitive, can start venturing out into much broader and more open-ended horizons. This is probably why Einstein said that “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”1

The spiritual journey is a constant interplay between moments of awe followed by a general process of surrender to that moment. We must first allow ourselves to be captured by the goodness, truth, or beauty of something beyond and outside ourselves. Then we universalize from that moment to the goodness, truth, and beauty of the rest of reality, until our realization eventually ricochets back to include ourselves!

The way to any universal idea is to proceed through a concrete encounter. There are a number of ways to say the same thing: The one is the way to the many, the specific is the way to the spacious, the now is the way to the always, the here is the way to the everywhere, the material is the way to the spiritual, the visible is the way to the invisible. When we see contemplatively, we know that we live in a fully sacramental universe, where everything is a pointer and an epiphany. Walter Brueggemann, my favorite Hebrew Scripture scholar, calls this concrete-to-universal principle “the scandal of the particular” and points out how it is the pattern of the entire Biblical narrative. The trouble is that most people stay with arguing about and focusing on the particular (the exact opposite of awe!) and never make the wondrous journey toward the universal, the always, and the everywhere. They substitute relative truth for absolute truth, so much so that our postmodern world denies the very existence of any absolutes. We tend to worship the mediator of the message instead of following the message itself, the finger pointing to the moon instead of standing in stunned silence before the moon itself. While philosophers tend toward the universals and poets love the particulars, it is the mystics who teach us how to encompass both.

Here is the mistake we all make in our encounters with reality—both good and bad. We do not realize that it was not the person or event right in front of us that made us angry or fearful—or excited and energized. At best, that is only partly true. If you let that beautiful hot air balloon in the sky make you happy, it was because you were already predisposed to happiness. The hot air balloon just occasioned it—and almost anything else would have done the same. How we see will largely determine what we see and whether it can give us joy or make us pull back with an emotionally stingy and resistant response. Without denying an objective outer reality, what we are able to see, and are predisposed to see, in the outer world is a mirror reflection of our own inner world and state of consciousness at that time. Most of the time, we just do not see at all, but rather operate on cruise control.

We ourselves create a substantial part of the image and meaning that we see—by our own expectations, needs, hurts, compulsions, infatuations, desires, and agendas. Psychology sometimes calls these blinding and binding patterns “projections” or “reaction formations”; in their negative forms, they may even be called delusion, fantasy, or obsession. Without some awareness of our common habit of projection, most relationships will not last, but become serial infatuations or create entirely unnecessary enemies. Without maturity in seeing, we never really meet or accept the other—as other—but live out of our own inner states, over and over again, like a dog chasing its tail. This is the final narcissism and instability of any non-self-reflective culture or person. We must be aware—almost hour by hour—of what our reservoir is holding, or we will never feel the need to fill it with a new kind of positive flow—or recognize the brackish and even poisonous waters from which we are drawing.

prayer is not changing God’s mind about us or anything else, but allowing God to change our mind about the reality right in front of us—which we are usually avoiding or distorting. “Leave your offering there before the altar, go first and be reconciled to your neighbor, and then come back and offer your gift,” Jesus says (see Matthew 5:24). Brilliant! Too many of us try to do an end-run toward godly prayer while still carrying a reservoir of stagnant water within us. Nothing new or good can happen in that old swamp.

It is shocking for Catholics and Orthodox Christians to recognize that many of the early hermits and monks might have only prayed the Eucharistic Prayer or chanted psalms together on very special occasions, rather than daily. The daily warfare that demanded much more of them—and also does of us—is the “shedding of thoughts” about distractions and the constant seeking of inner quiet from our own dramas.

it takes real spiritual and emotional maturity to recognize that our response always and finally comes from us, even if it is much easier to put the responsibility and shame elsewhere instead of finding our own inner freedom. Projecting our dark reservoir elsewhere relieves us of a huge burden. If our egos are still in charge, we will almost certainly resort to this common survival technique. All of life is pulled inside of me as the central reference point, and that is far too small a world. As Jesus would put it, such people have not lost themselves, so they cannot find themselves either. Read that twice.

We are all temporarily inflated inside of any wonderful anything and become impatient, and even harsh, when anything gets in our path. Think of people on overstimulating vacations or the bored, irritated looks of people in line for food, entertainment, or an airplane flight. The search for “full fun” is its own form of dualistic entrapment. Such “pleasure cruises” can be even more dangerous than funks, precisely because we are not prepared to spot them as problematic. They are not, of course, bad or sinful in and of themselves, just dangerous in the way they create the need for “more of a good thing,” which is how we get subtly fooled and set out on a wrong track. I guess that is why fortitude, temperance, prudence, and patience were called the four “cardinal virtues.” Cardo, the root of cardinal, means hinge in Latin, and even faith, hope, and love are not effective or healing unless they are hinged onto fortitude, temperance, prudence, and patience. Again, the ancients were wiser than modern psychology might have assumed.

The real gift is to be happy and content, even while we are just sitting on the front porch, looking at a rock; or when we are doing the “nothingness” of prayer or benevolently gazing at anything in its ordinariness; or when we can see and accept and say that every single act of creation is “just this” and thus allow it to work its wonder on us. This is the ultimate and real recovery movement. Authentic recovery is not actually about mere sobriety as much as it is about simple and ever-deeper connection with what is. Deep connection is our goal, and it frees us from all loneliness, separateness, and boredom, and is far beyond just stopping the addictive behavior. That’s just cleaning up, or maybe even growing up, but we are about waking up!

a long, loving look Non-dual consciousness is about receiving and being present to the moment and to the Now, exactly as it is, without splitting or dividing it, without judgment, analysis, negative critique, mental commentary, liking, or disliking; without resistance; and even without registering your preferences. In other words, your mind, heart, soul, and senses are open and receptive to the moment, just as it is. That allows you to say, “Just this,” and love things in themselves, as themselves, and by themselves, regardless of how they benefit or make demands on you. Is there any other way to love anything? You gradually learn to hold everything—attractive and non-attractive alike—together in one accepting gaze. This is divine seeing. Contemplation has been well-described as “a long, loving look at the Real.” Note that it is a deep looking more than a kneejerk thinking (which is not really thinking at all, but usually narcissistic reacting). Contemplata in Latin means to gaze at something eagerly or with intense interest. It does not mean to think about it! The non-dual, contemplative mind is a whole new mind! (See Romans 12:2 and Ephesians 4:23.) It is truly an entirely different “software and processing system” and, at this point in history, it must be taught, as our culture no longer practices it naturally.

Each creature is thus not merely one member of a genus and species, but a unique aspect of the infinite Mystery of God. God is continuously choosing each created thing specifically to exist, moment by moment. This teaching alone made Scotus a favorite of mystics and poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Merton, who considered themselves “Scotists”—as I do too. You cannot know something spiritually by saying it is a not-that; you can only know it by meeting it in its precise and irreplaceable thisness and honoring it there. Each individual act of creation is a once-ineternity choice on God’s part. The direct implication of this truth is that love must precede all true knowledge. Spiritual knowledge is to know things subject to subject (I-Thou), whereas rational knowing is to know things subject to object (I-it). There is, of course, a place for both; but most have never been told about how to know things center to center and subject to subject, instead of just subject to object.

the sacrament of the present moment The great task of religion is to keep you fully awake, alert, and conscious. Then you will know whatever it is that you need to know. When you are present, you will know the Presence. It is that simple and that hard. Too much religion has encouraged you to be unconscious, but God respects you too much for that. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the last words Jesus spoke to his apostles were, “Stay awake.” In fact, he says it twice (see Matthew 26:38–41). The Buddha offered the same wisdom; “Buddha,” in fact, means “I am awake.” Staying awake comes not from willpower but from a wholehearted surrender to the moment—as it is. If you can be present, you will experience what most of us mean by God, and you do not even need to call it God. It’s largely a matter of letting go of resistance to what the moment offers or of clinging to a past moment. It is an acceptance of the full reality of what is right here and now. It will be the task of your whole lifetime. You cannot get there by any method whatsoever; you can only be there. The purest form of spirituality is to find God in what is right in front of you—the ability to accept what the French Jesuit and mystic Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675–1751) called the sacrament of the present moment.

pure presence Whenever your heart space, your mind space, and your body space are all present and accounted for at the same time, you can experience pure presence, a moment of deep inner connection with the pure, gratuitous Being of anything and everything. It will often be experienced as a quiet leap of joy in the heart. Contemplation is an exercise in openness, in keeping all three spaces open long enough for you to notice other hidden material. When

The supreme work of spirituality, which makes presence possible, is keeping the heart space open (which is the result of conscious love), keeping in a “right mind” (which is the work of contemplation or meditation), and keeping the body alive with contentment and without attachment to its past woundings (which is often the work of healing). In that state, you are neither resisting nor clinging, and you can experience something genuinely new. Those who can keep all three spaces open at the same time will know the Presence they need to know. That’s the only prerequisite. People who can be simply present will know the Presence that connects everything to everything. It has little to do with belonging to a particular denomination or religion.4

Your thoughts are always hopping around, always making commentaries on everything. Buddhists rightly refer to this as “the monkey mind.” Once you give your thoughts too much certainty and centrality, they will almost immediately grab onto a legitimating emotion—tightly and righteously. Once emotion reinforces thought, or vice versa, it triples its power over you. The things you’re agitated about right now, you will not be in a few hours or days, so they cannot be that “real.” Once you know that, you can choose not to give them such power and control over you to begin with. The soul is much more spacious, constant, and settled than your thoughts and feelings can ever be.

In Mark 13:33–35, Jesus tells his disciples, “Be awake. Be alert. . . . You do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cock crow, or in the morning.” Most of us probably hear such a passage as if it were threatening or punitive, as if Jesus is saying, “You’d better do it right, or I’m going to get you.” But Jesus is not talking about a judgment. He’s not threatening us or talking about death. He’s talking about the forever coming of Christ, the eternal coming of Christ . . . now . . . and now . . . and now. Best of all, God’s judgment is actually redemption, but we must first know that at the soul level. Christ is always coming; God is always present. It’s we who aren’t! Jesus tells us to always be ready, to be awake, to be fully conscious and expectant. It’s the key to all spirituality, because we usually aren’t. Most of us just repeat the same routines every day, and we’re upset if there are any interruptions to our patterns. Yet God is invariably and ironically found in the interruptions, the discontinuities, the exceptions, the surprises—and seldom in the patterns. God has to catch us literally “off guard”! I often say to myself, “Just this!” even amidst the things I don’t want, I don’t expect, and sometimes don’t like—“in the evening, or at midnight, or at cock crow, or in the morning.”9

In contemplative practice, you refuse to identify with any one side, while still maintaining your intelligence. You hold the creative tension of every seeming conflict and go beyond words to pure, open-ended experience, which has the potential to unify many seeming contradictions. Notice how wordy political and academic discourse is, and how quiet monks and hermits are. You cannot know God the way you know anything else; you only know God subject to subject, by a process of mirroring. This is the “mind of Christ” (see 1 Corinthians 2:16). It really is a different way of knowing, and you can tell it by its gratuity, its open-endedness, its compassion, and by the way it is so creative and energizing in those who allow it.10 Truly great thinkers and cultural creatives take for granted that they have access to a different and larger mind. They recognize that a Divine Flow is already happening and that everyone can plug into it. In all cases, it is a participative kind of knowing, a being known through and not an autonomous knowing. The most common and traditional word for this change of consciousness was historically “prayer,” but we trivialized the precious word by making it functional, transactional, and supposedly about problemsolving. The only problem that prayer solves is you! And that is a big problem indeed.

no problem to solve If you watch your mind, you will see you live most of your life in the past or in the future. The present always seems boring and not enough. So, to get yourself engaged, you will often “create a problem” to resolve, and then another, and another. The only way many people know how to motivate themselves is to create problems or to need to “fix” something. If you can’t be positively present right now, without creating a problem, nothing new is ever going to happen to you. You will only experience what you already agree with and what does not threaten you—and you will never experience the unexpected depth and contentment that is always being offered to you. Notice that the Scriptures present God as a thief, or a master who returns before being expected (see Matthew 24:42–46), who even “puts on an apron, sits them at table and waits on them” (see Luke 12:35–38)! Do you realize what an extraordinary notion of God Jesus must have had to talk that way? God waiting on us! No problem to solve; just an immediate intimacy to enjoy. It is just such a moment that can elicit both awe and surrender from you: awe before the utterly undeserved and unexpected—and some sweet surrender to the fact that it might just be true.

what you resist persists When I first entered the Franciscan novitiate in 1961, part of our training was to learn to avoid, resist, and oppose all distractions. But it was a fruitless and futile effort because, if you start with negative energy, a “don’t,” you will not get very far (see Romans 7:7–11). There is always inner pushback. You know the old shibboleth, “Don’t think of an elephant.” If you try not to, that dang elephant will invariably sneak back into your mind! Just wait. To actively oppose something is actually to engage with it and to give it energy. That’s why good spiritual teachers say, “What you resist persists.” If you’re honest, that’s why trying to “resist distractions and think of God” is largely impossible. It has, in fact, led many to conclude that they can never learn how to pray! Many of my fellow friars left over the years, thinking they were inherently unspiritual because they could not think of God all day. (How do you “think” of God, anyway?) You can, however, think positively, gratefully, and with wonder and praise.13 Your first energy has to be “yes” energy, and from there you can move, build, and proceed. You must choose the positive and rest there for a minimum of fifteen conscious seconds—it takes that long for positivity to imprint in the neurons, I am told.

neither clinging nor opposing If I had told my novice master in 1961 that I wasn’t going to fight my distractions, he would have said, “So you’re going to entertain lustful or hateful thoughts?” But that would have largely missed the point. The real learning curve happens when you can admit that you’re having a thought or feeling and see that it’s empty, passing, and part of your own fantasy world that has no final reality except as a lesson. Listen honestly to yourself. Listen to whatever thought or feeling arises. Listen long enough to ask, “Why am I thinking this? What is this saying about me that I need to entertain this negative, accusatory, or lustful thought?” You don’t have to hate yourself or condemn yourself for a thought or feeling, but you do have to let it yield its wisdom. Then you will see it is the wounded or needy part of you that wants these unhealthy thoughts. The Whole You, your True Self, does not need them, and will not identify with them. If you can allow your thoughts and feelings to pass through you, neither clinging to them nor opposing them—and without ever expecting perfect success—I promise that you will come to a deeper, wider, and wiser place. Believe it or not, even your inability to fully succeed is, in itself, another wonderful lesson.