Category: Main blog

This subject is top of mind right now. The blog post I will share below comes from Fr Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations Blog and is asking about the future of Christianity, but all of the quotes and practices I’ll share could be (and probably should be) applied to my own Sufi Ruhaniat community and, I suspect, many other spiritual organizations!

May we all be blessed and challenged to find our way toward the “…paschal mystery, the dying and rising of all things.” in our organizations, our communities and our individual lives.

Let me know what you think in the comments section.

******************

“For centuries, Christianity has presented itself as an “organized religion”—a change-averse institution that protects and promotes a timeless system of beliefs that were handed down fully formed in the past. Yet Christianity’s actual history is a story of change and adaptation.” —Brian McLaren

“Jesus never told us to put our trust in the larger institutions of culture or even the church. We must recognize that they are also subject to the paschal mystery, the dying and the rising of all things.” —Richard Rohr

“There are all these gifted people around but they didn’t have any power within church structures, which made people like me realize that the real power was not in the structure of the church, but in the living church. The gifted prophets in our midst.” —Barbara Holmes

Practice – Allowing Ourselves Not to Know

Before beginning to discuss the future of the church and Christianity, Brian McLaren invited the more than three thousand attendees of The Future of Christianity webcast to a fifteen-minute period of silence and contemplation. We share his invitation at the end of this week’s meditations, hoping it brings a spirit of openness to your faithful reflection this week:    

This is a delicate moment to address deep issues in the Christian faith. If we come in with a set of unchallenged assumptions, we can pretty much predict how the outcomes will be in our thinking. That’s why we’d like to take a few moments now, as we begin this time of reflection together, to invite you to settle into a silence. And in that silence, to be willing to say, “I have a lot of ideas. I have a lot of opinions. But I am not my ideas and opinions, and if I allow myself to be captive to my current ideas and opinions, my horizons will be really limited.”

As we sink into this silence, we’ll hear the chatter of our own thoughts, the debates and questions of our own thoughts, and in a sense when we see those arising, we can say, “Oh yes, those are my own existing assumptions.” Maybe I can just let them be, and in humility open my heart to wisdom beyond my own. Wisdom that might come to us through the faculty, through our interaction, through the discussion that will happen, but also wisdom that may just come to you. May we dare to hope that our hearts, open to the Spirit of God, could not only receive answers to our questions about the future of Christianity, but that our hearts could be so changed in this time together, our minds and hearts and desires opened, clarified, maybe even purified. So that the future can be different.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Adapted from Brian McLaren, introduction to The Future of Christianity: A Virtual Summit, Center for Action and Contemplation, recorded live on August 23, 2022. Note: This segment is not included on the YouTube video cited in other meditations this week.  

New mystic poetry from a new (to me) favorite mystical poet, Chelan Harkin.

The worst thing we ever did
was put God in the sky
out of reach pulling the divinity
from the leaf,
sifting out the holy from our bones,
insisting God isn’t bursting dazzlement
through everything we’ve made
a hard commitment to see as ordinary,
stripping the sacred from everywhere
to put in a cloud man elsewhere,
prying closeness from your heart.

The worst thing we ever did
was take the dance and the song
out of prayer
made it sit up straight
and cross its legs
removed it of rejoicing
wiped clean its hip sway,
its questions,
its ecstatic yowl,
its tears.

The worst thing we ever did is pretend
God isn’t the easiest thing
in this Universe
available to every soul
in every breath.

—
Chelan Harkin

Image credit: Vlad Gradobyk

In our Sufi and Dances of Universal Peace communities we certainly believe in and practice singing and moving together as a core spiritual connection.

This was published in a recent blog post from Fr Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, and does a wonderful job of illustrating the value and beauty of this practice.

Singing Together

Faith-rooted organizers Alexia Salvatierra and Peter Heltzel have participated in many movements for social transformation. They recommend singing together as a simple but profound practice that has sustained many movements of the past and can nourish our efforts of love and justice today:

We all have a song to sing, and for the movement for justice to grow and be successful, everyone needs to sing their song. Music came to life in the protests and picket lines, uniting activists in one common spirit. Learning the music of the movement is thus an important way of sustaining the struggle, as music encapsulates a creative and prophetic spirituality. . .

The church is, in a way, a repository of these spiritual songs that feed our soul. Every week when we go to church we bring the pains and promises, hurts and hopes of the week into the service, but there is something about singing that goes to the heart of the matter and to the depths of the soul. The physical act of singing together, with its healing vibrations through our body, actually comforts our bodies. And the texts we sing are amplified in our hearts and minds by the melodies the composers have offered us. It is no wonder that singing played such a profound role in the civil rights movement; it offers physical, mental and spiritual comfort in a communal setting, sustaining the weary and encouraging the worn.

We invite you to sing a familiar song out loud today; it may be spiritual in nature, comforting or enlivening. If possible, sing with companions and sense the energy that flows between and around your voices. Here is a short video from the Smithsonian of civil rights mass meeting participants in Danville, Virginia, 1963, singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”

Alexia Salvatierra and Peter Heltzel, Faith-Rooted Organizing: Mobilizing the Church in Service to the World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 177.

This closing blessing was at the end of an article by Cynthia Bailey Manns in the current issue of ‘Presence’, the international Journal of Spiritual Direction and Companionship.

Remember that you are Water.

CRY, CLEANSE, FLOW, LET GO.

Remember that you are Fire.

BURN, TAME, ADAPT, IGNITE.

Remember that you are Air.

OBSERVE, BREATHE, FOCUS, DECIDE.

Reminder that you are Earth.

GROUND, GIVE, BUILD, HEAL.

Remember that you are Spirit.

CONNECT, LISTEN, KNOW, BE STILL.

~ by Cynthia Bailey Manns

A SEEMING STILLNESS

Breathe then, as if breathing for the first time,
as if remembering with what difficulty
you came into the world, what strength it took
to make that first impossible in-breath,
into a cry to be heard by the world.

Your essence has always been
that first vulnerability of being found,
of being heard and of being seen,
and from the very beginning,
the one who has always needed,
and been given, so much invisible help.

This is how you were when you first came
into the world, this how you were when you took your
first breath in this world, this is how you are now,
all unawares, in your new body and your new life,
this is the raw vulnerability of your
every day, and this is how you will want to be,
and be remembered, when you leave the world.

…

From ‘A Seeming Stillness’
David Whyte : Essentials
© Many Rivers Press and David Whyte
Jan 2020

With gratitude to sister Amina for posting this in her Love, Harmony, and Beauty blog #104

Wake up early Get out of your way Don’t lock your doors Share what you have Don’t try to put the world back to the way it was Ask for help Complain less, love more Stay steady Trade, don’t steal Do what is obvious Take zoo animals back to their homes Tear down tall buildings Don’t be rich Don’t follow orders Make music without electricity Play without keeping score Get your hands dirty Work next to children Protect libraries Live lean Don’t worry about dying Pretend the air is God Feed the ground Pray into moving water Build temples in forests In the evenings tell good stories Give America back to the Indians Pay reparations, never enough Don’t make gunpowder Don’t be smug Love anyone you want Make things beautiful this time Add to this list ~ Pir Elias Amidon

As I move through what Fr Richard Rohr has called the third half of life, I am deeply humbled and honored by my beloveds who call on me to hold the space and presence of the elder.

The most important lesson in that space is to remember we know nothing and to be open to new learnings with each breath and to hold each lesson, whether exciting or challenging, with deep gratitude.

The following quotes and practice from Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations blog speak to that ripening.

“Old age, as such, is almost a complete changing of gears and engines from the first half of our lives, and does not happen without many slow realizations, inner calmings, lots of inner resistance and denials, and eventual surrenders. All of them by God’s grace work with our ever-deepening sense of what we really desire and who we really are.” —Richard Rohr

“]What looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world, where the soul finds its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the Big Picture.” —Richard Rohr

“There is no more noble way to spend these years than to become an elder, to bear witness to the world as placeholders for peace, love, wisdom, and fearlessness.” —Kathleen Dowling Singh

“As we grow old we realize that, in all we have been through, Love has been using us for its own purposes. And for this we feel immensely grateful.”
—James Finley

“The soul of the “grand” parent is large enough to embrace the death of the ego and to affirm the life of God in itself and others, despite all imperfections. Its spaciousness accepts all the opposites in life”. —Richard Rohr

Practice

I Will Sing a New Song

We invite readers to join theologian and mystic Howard Thurman (1900–1981) as he prays for the courage and ability to stay renewed over the course of his life:

The old song of my spirit has wearied itself out. It has long ago been learned by heart so that now it repeats itself over and over, bringing no added joy to my days or lift to my spirit. It is a good song, measured to a rhythm to which I am bound by ties of habit and timidity of mind. The words belong to old experiences which once sprang fresh as water from a mountain crevice fed by melting snows. But my life has passed beyond to other levels where the old song is meaningless. I demand of the old song that it meet the need of present urgencies. Also, I know that the work of the old song, perfect in its place, is not for the new demand!

I will sing a new song. As difficult as it is, I must learn the new song that is capable of meeting the new need. I must fashion new words born of all the new growth of my life, my mind and my spirit. I must prepare for new melodies that have never been mine before, that all that is within me may lift my voice unto God. How I love the old familiarity of the wearied melody—how I shrink from the harsh discords of the new untried harmonies.

Teach me, my Father, that I might learn with the abandonment and enthusiasm of Jesus, the fresh new accent, the untried melody, to meet the need of the untried morrow. Thus, I may rejoice with each new day and delight my spirit in each fresh unfolding.

I will sing, this day, a new song unto Thee, O God.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound. https://email.cac.org/t/d-l-fudlydy-tlkrkjjdhy-u/

Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1953, 1994), 206–207.

by Frederica Helmiere

My wife keeps finding new books about relationships with bees. That’s what first drew me to this article. And his spiritual connection to bees is moving and profound. But I found much more to love and recommend you take the time to read it all.

For instance: “…

What I have seen is if you don’t follow your heart, you will regret it, because your mind is a coyote. It thinks it knows what it’s looking at, but it’s all smoke and mirrors. Even though the coyote tells a great story, he has no concern whether the story is true or not. He tells a good one, so we listen to it. But your heart is an eagle, and it operates on a whole different level. Eagles never experience the storm. They’re always flying above it. The storm is like a foreign concept to an eagle; it doesn’t worry about what’s happening down there. The eagle in our heart is not a good storyteller, but it always tells the truth. The truth is often simple, so the eagle doesn’t really talk much. 

We spend a lot of time fretting over the past or imagining the future, and maybe we imagine to the point where we become anxious about it. Like, I got this appointment tomorrow, or I should have said something yesterday and I feel so bad. We live in the past or we’re thinking about the future, but what the rewilding part loves is this particular moment in time.”

It was behind a pay wall so I copied it in its entirety into a Google doc for all of you, my beloveds. However please don’t share it except with a small group of your own beloveds.

Enjoy.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zxjvVLYvh4tb1lO6pTLonkNlz3NbHs-EsZ1uJUCIiB8/edit?usp=drivesdk

Gratitude to sister Amina for sharing this on her most recent blog, “Love, Harmony, & Beauty #102”

**********

We need a new religion around here

with words unstained by blood and institutions,

and ways to lift our heads and sing

without a male god listening. 

We need a scripture written by trees

and the sounds of water in the running brooks,

a faith revealed by the light of dawn

and prayers to say in the evening mist. 

Come, let’s drag enormous rocks 

and upend them in a circle, and learn there 

to move again in time to sacred rhythms.

–       Pir Elias Amidon

Maybe it’s just me, but this question posed by the inimitable Sufi poet, Rumi, truly resonates. And his poetic insights are spot on as we muddle through this “prison for drunkards.” As my teacher often quotes, “we’re all just bozos on this bus.” Enjoy.

************

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
~Rumi