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Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Summary: Week Twenty-four

Inner and Outer Freedom

June 14 - June 19, 2020

The wise ones recognize that without a certain degree of inner freedom, you cannot and will not truly love. Spirituality is about finding that freedom. (Sunday)

Our deepest freedom rests not in our freedom to do what we want to do but rather in our freedom to become who God wills us to be. —James Finley (Monday)

There is a love which has the power to free the human heart. —Paula D’Arcy (Tuesday)

Let’s use the word emancipation to describe a deeper, bigger, and scarier level of freedom: inner, outer, personal, economic, structural, and spiritual—all at once. Surely this is the task of our entire lifetime. (Wednesday)

Francis and Clare of Assisi found both their inner and outer freedom by structurally living on the edge of the inside of church and society. (Thursday)

May I exercise the precious gift of choice and the power to change as that which makes me uniquely human and is the only true path to liberation. —Rev. angel Kyodo williams (Friday)

Practice: Deepening Our Freedom

Dr. Joan Borysenko, PhD, is a cancer cell biologist, licensed psychologist, and author living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She offers us practices that support our contemplative journey to deepen inner and outer freedom in her book 7 Paths to God: The Ways of the Mystic. I invite you to spend some time with these precepts over the next few days. Which one seems most able to lead you to greater freedom and perhaps even emancipation?

[1] Books on comparative religion such as Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions (HarperOne: 2009, ©1991) or Kristin Johnston Largen’s Finding God Among Our Neighbors: An Interfaith Systematic Theology (Fortress Press: 2013) could offer good starting points.

Joan Borysenko, 7 Paths to God: The Ways of the Mystic (Hay House, Inc.: 1997), 83–86.

Image credit: Sun in an Empty Room (detail), Edward Hopper, 1963, private collection.

For Further Study:

“Emancipation,” Oneing, vol. 3, no. 1 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2015)

James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere: A Search for God through Awareness of the True Self (Ave Maria Press: 1978)

Richard Rohr, The Art of Letting Go: Living the Wisdom of Saint Francis, disc 1 (Sounds True: 2010), CD.

Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,(Jossey-Bass: 2011)

Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens with Jasmine Syedullah, PhD, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation (North Atlantic Books: 2016).

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News from the CAC

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Read free selections from ONEING: Liminal Space

In her essay Transition, life coach and former pastor Felicia Murrell writes, “Heavily laden with years and years of collective racial anger, misuse, and abuse, we lumber into liminality with all these feelings, these shackles of oppression… We cry the tears our ancestors could not. We feel the fatigue they were not allowed to feel. We give in to the vulnerability that would have cost them their lives — not blaming, not finger-pointing, but honest truth-telling of our dehumanizing, painful history.” Explore free selections from the newest issue of ONEING.

Action & Contemplation

2020 Daily Meditations Theme

What does God ask of us? To act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. —Micah 6:8

Franciscan Richard Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987 because he saw a deep need for the integration of both action and contemplation. If we pray but don’t act justly, our faith won’t bear fruit. And without contemplation, activists burn out and even well-intended actions can cause more harm than good. In today’s religious, environmental, and political climate our compassionate engagement is urgent and vital.

In this year’s Daily Meditations, Father Richard helps us learn the dance of action and contemplation. Each week builds on previous topics, but you can join at any time! Click the video to learn more about the theme and to find reflections you may have missed.

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Inspiration for this week's banner image: Only when we are able to “let go” of everything within us, all desire to see, to know, to taste and to experience the presence of God, do we truly become able to experience that presence with the overwhelming conviction and reality that revolutionize our entire inner life. —Thomas Merton