Just This: Prompts and Practices for Contemplation

by Richard Rohr

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.