My Story, Our Story, Other Stories, The Story CAC Publishing
Center for Action and Contemplation cac.org
“Oneing” is an old English word that was used by Lady Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) to describe the encounter between God and the soul. The Center for Action and Contemplation proudly borrows the word to express the divine unity that stands behind all of the divisions, dichotomies, and dualisms in the world. We pray and publish with Jesus’ words, “that all may be one” (John 17:21).
The biannual literary journal of the Center for Action and Contemplation.
The Perennial Tradition, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 2013
Ripening, Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 2013
Transgression, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 2014
Evidence, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 2014
Emancipation, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2015
Innocence, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 2015
Perfection, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2016
Evolutionary Thinking, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2016
Transformation, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 2017
Politics and Religion, Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 2017
Anger, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 2018
Unity and Diversity, Vol. 6, No. 2, Fall 2018
The Universal Christ, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 2019
The Future of Christianity, Vol. 7, No. 2, Fall 2019
Liminal Space, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 2020
Order, Disorder, Reorder, Vol. 8, No. 2, Fall 2020
Trauma, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2021
Oneing is a limited-edition publication; therefore, some editions are no longer in print. To order available editions of Oneing, please visit https://store.cac.org/.
LISA E. POWELL
As Richard Rohr notes in his Introduction to this edition of Oneing, it was approximately thirty years ago that he first discovered the image of several ovals or “domes” of meaning, which for him came to form what he calls the Cosmic Egg: “My Story,” “Our Story,” “Other Stories,” and “The Story.” Like a silver thread, Rohr’s teaching is woven through many of his recordings, books, conferences, and most recently the curriculum of the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Living School.
When this edition of Oneing was being planned and contributors considered, it made most sense to focus primarily on CAC’s Living School participants. Many of these students have spent significant time with Rohr’s teaching on the Cosmic Egg. In addition, included are a powerful poem by CAC board member Drew Jackson and an article by emerita core faculty member Cynthia Bourgeault that essentially moves beyond everything written before it. (Do save her article for last!)
I strongly recommend that the articles be read in the order in which they appear, because careful consideration has gone into their placement. Some of the stories are emotionally provocative and others are more intellectual in their approach, but they all address the meaning of the Cosmic Egg in brilliant, unique ways.
I am truly honored to call these gifted contributors my friends and colleagues!
Vanessa Guerin Editor, Oneing
Richard Rohr, OFM is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and the Founding Director of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. An internationally recognized author and spiritual leader, Fr. Richard teaches primarily on incarnational mysticism, non-dual consciousness, and contemplation, with a particular emphasis on how these affect the social justice issues of our time. Along with many recorded conferences, he is the author of numerous books, including The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe and The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder. To learn more about Fr. Richard Rohr and the CAC, visit https://cac.org/richard-rohr/ richard-rohr-ofm/.
Drew E. Jackson is the lead pastor of Lower Manhattan’s Hope East Village and serves as the president of Pax, a peacemaking organization that he cofounded. He joined the CAC Board of Directors in 2019, where he serves as the board secretary and is on the contemplative governance and mission and strategy committees. Drew considers writing to be one of his deepest connections to the Divine. His book of poetry, God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming, was published in 2021 and another book is in the works. When not leading his faith community in New York, Drew enjoys playing board games with his wife, Genay, and their twin daughters. To learn more about Drew E. Jackson, visit https://www. djacksonpoetics.com/.
Paul Swanson is a Senior Program Designer at the CAC, where he supports the creation and curation of podcasts, online courses, and the Living School. He is a graduate of North Park University (BA) and Creighton University (MA), where he studied scripture, theology, and spirituality. He is a jackleg Mennonite and member of Our Lady of the Tall Trees. Paul and his wife, Laura, have two feral and beloved children. Learn more about
Paul’s work kindling the examined life for contemplatives in the world at https://contemplify.com/
Alison (Ali) Kirkpatrick is a spiritual director, writer, freelance editor, and independent contractor who serves on the editorial team for Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations. She has a long history in Catholic education, graduating from the University of San Diego and Loyola Marymount University, and is a 2016 sendee of the CAC’s Living School. The positive, holistic vision at the heart of the Franciscan tradition has allowed Ali to continue in the Christian faith, championing inclusive language, evolutionary thinking, and radical love for all, especially those in the LGBTQIA+ community. You may contact her regarding spiritual direction, editing, or writing projects at Alikirks@gmail.com.
Dan O’Connor is a CAC staff member who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico and serves as a financial analyst on the finance team. Dan has a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s in international relations. He is a Living School sendee from the 2017 cohort. Dan serves as treasurer on the local boards of the Trinity House Catholic Worker and Illuman New Mexico. He facilitates the Trinity House Catholic Worker Monday evening group, which reads Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations in deep reflective discussion around what it means to live in a Christian contemplative movement. You may contact Dan O’Connor at doconnor@cac.org
Barbara C. Otero-López lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico and wears many hats. She is an engineer by trade but her passion for learning and nurturing education for others has allowed her to work for the past twentyfive years as a program manager, curriculum developer, instructional designer, and teacher. Barbara has studied Learning Science as a PhD student at the University of New Mexico and now works as an independent consultant for the Center for Action and Contemplation. She is a CAC Living School student in the 2022 cohort and a wife and mother of two amazing daughters. If you wish to contact Barbara Otero-López, her email address is boterolopez.nm@gmail.com.
Mark Longhurst is the Managing Editor of Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations and also a sendee of the CAC’s inaugural Living School 2015 cohort. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School, worked in Boston-based social justice nonprofits for ten years, and pastored churches in the United Church of Christ a decade more. In his personal life, he is committed to a new monastic rule of life, enjoys writing occasionally through his Ordinary Mystic newsletter (https://ordinarymystic.substack.
com/), and is a passionate fan of contemporary art. He lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts with his wife, Faith, and two young boys.
Leslye Colvin is a writer, contemplative activist, and social commentator. Inspired by the Roman Catholic social justice tradition, she is passionate about encouraging diversity of thought, especially as it relates to those often marginalized within the community. Leslye has been interviewed by America, U.S. Catholic, South Africa’s Radio Veritas, and Vatican Radio on the construct of race. A sendee of the CAC’s Living School and a student of the Haden Institute, Leslye serves on the boards of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice and Catholic Democrats. To learn more about Leslye Colvin, visit her blog, Leslye’s Labyrinth (https://www.leslyecolvin. me/leslyeslabyrinth1), which features writings from her African American Catholic heart.
Cindy Kroll joined the CAC in 2019 as the Managing Director of Finance and Business Analytics. She envisions a world where financial decisions don’t have to conflict with Jesus’ teachings of humility, simplicity, and love, and works tirelessly to align the CAC’s financial model with its contemplative tradition and Richard Rohr’s teachings. Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward steered her path toward CAC, first as part of the Living School 2019 cohort and then as a member of the board of directors’ finance committee. Cindy is a Certified Public Accountant, has a master’s degree in software systems, and earned a business coach certification. When she’s not leading the finance team, you can find her on a meditative nature walk, journaling, writing poetry, or with her two children, Kaitlyn and Evan.
Lisa E. Powell earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of New Mexico and is a sendee of the CAC’s Living School. An online teaching facilitator for the CAC, Lisa is also the founder of Fulcrum-8, a nonprofit organization and online ministry supporting subtle saints, momentary mystics, and spiritual seekers who are committed to evolutionary change in a revolutionary time. She lives in Albuquerque with her two rescue dogs, Nito and L.G., who teach her daily about unconditional love. You may contact Lisa Powell at fulcrum8www@gmail.com.
Peter Levenstrong is an Episcopal priest at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, California. A recent graduate of Yale Divinity School, he is grateful to now be doing ministry back home in the Bay Area. In his early twenties, Peter went through multiple conversions: first to the Christian faith and then to the work of social justice. He finds his ministerial vocation to be walking with others in the continual process of
conversion to which Christ invites every one of us. Peter is a sendee of the CAC’s Living School. To learn more about Peter Levenstrong, visit https:// www.saintgregorys.org/sermons---peter-levenstrong.html.
Felicia Murrell is a certified master life coach with over twenty years of church leadership experience. She also serves the publishing industry as a freelance copy editor and proofreader and is the author of Truth Encounters A student of the CAC’s Living School in the 2022 cohort, Felicia resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico with her husband, Doug. Together, they have four adult children. You can connect with Felicia on Instagram @hellofelicia_ murrell or read more of her writing at http://feliciamurrell.blogspot.com/
The Rev. Dr. Michael Petrow, a CAC staff member, holds degrees in religious studies, mythology, and psychology. He has worked as a teacher, spiritual director, theater chaplain, and counselor with at-risk youth. Michael is a graduate of the Guild for Spiritual Guidance and a sendee of the CAC’s Living School. He started his education at Moravian College and received his doctorate from Pacifica Graduate Institute. After exploring how transformation occurs within sacred traditions the world over, Michael’s dissertation focused on the complementary theories of C.G. Jung and Origen of Alexandria, which teach us to read sacred texts mythically and mystically.
Brie Stoner is the founder and host of Unknowing, a podcast and online learning community platform exploring the spiritual path of creative possibility. She is also a recording artist, musician, and composer. Her music has been featured in national and international campaigns, including the NOOMA series, featuring Rob Bell. Brie’s previous projects include being co-host for the CAC podcast Another Name for Every Thing with Richard Rohr, and the Chief Spiritual Officer to UNITE, an initiative at the intersection of spirituality, society, and politics in Washington, DC. A sendee of the CAC’s Living School, she currently lives in Michigan with her two boys, splitting her time between her podcast and music and painting. To learn more about Brie Stoner, visit http://briestoner.com/.
Cynthia Bourgeault is a modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer, and internationally known retreat leader. She divides her time between solitude in her seaside hermitage in Maine and spreading the recovery of the Christian contemplative and Wisdom paths. Her roots are firmly planted in the Benedictine monastic tradition while her wings soar in the Christian mystical lineage, and her wisdom is tempered by daily mindfulness and embodiment practice learned through more than thirty years of participation in the Gurdjieff Work. A CAC emerita core faculty member, she has been
honored as one of the 100 most spiritually influential living people in 2021.To learn more about Cynthia Bourgeault, visit https://cynthiabourgeault.org/.
Lee Staman, MLIS is the Library Director at the CAC. His work focuses on cataloging, preserving, and making accessible all Fr. Richard Rohr’s work. Lee earned degrees in philosophy and theology before studying library science at the University of Washington. While there, his in-depth study of a nineteenth-century Torah from the Arabian Peninsula ignited a passion for the further study of Judaism along with the beliefs and practices of smaller religious communities. His interests include Wendell Berry, the Premier League, biblical studies, and books about books. Lee resides in Seattle, Washington with his wife and children, to whom he still reads the Patristics to put them to sleep. Lee Staman may be contacted at lstaman@ cac.org.
It was probably thirty years ago that I first discovered a rather plain image of several ovals or “domes” of meaning, which for me form the Cosmic Egg: “My Story,” “Our Story,” “Other Stories” (which I recently added), and “The Story.” The image has proven helpful through many years of teaching. There were certain retreats or conferences where I could tell that people, perhaps visual learners, “got” my message and direction only after seeing this diagram. It became a geometric imprint which helped the viewer comprehend the general shape of all wholeness, mental and emotional health, and good philosophy and theology too. One advantage of the image is that we do not have to be highly educated to understand it. Some academic types might consider it even too simplistic, but I do not think it is.
Medieval Franciscan William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) coined a principle that other philosophers either loved or hated: “Do not multiply entities that are not necessary.” Because it amounted to a shaving-down process, it has long been referred to as Ockham’s Razor! My simple paraphrase of his formal Scholastic philosophical principle is this: Always trust and move forward with the simpler answer. This diagram is a clever result of Ockham’s Razor at work and I might simplify it even a bit more in my “clean shave” explanation here!
Very few periods of history and a small minority of cultures and individuals have ever honored all four domes of meaning at the same time. Usually one was dominant, while a second, third, and fourth were neglected. Some, at least, got two, but missed out on the wholeness that would have been offered by the others. Here are some examples of the different honoring of all four domes of meaning, always remembering that each must include the others!
In most ancient religions and medieval Catholicism too, The Story and its “spiritual speak” were so dominant that Other Stories, Our Story, and My Story were largely deemed unreal or of little regard. The Jewish people did have the honesty to include much of their history (Our Story) in Sacred Scripture, and many stories of individuals like Abraham and David (My Story), but always as a part of the larger tribal story. There was not yet much appreciation for Other Stories, which is the gift of our modern age.
For most eras, My Story was completely lost as irrelevant or meaningless. The concept of the substantial human individual had not yet been developed (Buddhism would influence that shift toward individual recognition for Hinduism and Protestantism would do the same for Catholicism). My Story was largely of no concern—a few biblical characters and Augustine’s Confessions being early exceptions. There were some few individuals—those we would often call “great” or “Blessed” in every age—who could represent and somehow hold together all four domes of meaning at the same time. However, they still did so at their own cultural level of development, which explains perhaps how some saints could still be anti-Semitic, believe in fables, or, like St. Joan of Arc (d. 1431), lead her country of France in a violent war against the English.
Then there are those who have no real understanding of Other Stories, The Story, or My Story and live entirely inside the world of the comparisons, competitions, and violent rivalries which result from
living only in Our Story. Much of Chinese history, most of Feudal Europe, and tribal Africa might be included here. “My group and its leaders, its ‘god,’ and its needs,” are their limited and limiting frame of reference.
Only recently have I felt it necessary to add a fourth dome of meaning to the Cosmic Egg, which shows, I believe, an evolution in human consciousness. The term Other Stories illustrates the painful recognition that my frame is not the only frame, not likely the most important frame, and maybe even a frame with a lot of shadow and blind spots when compared to other stories. This is the great advantage of studying history, literature beyond our own language, anthropology, world cultures, and, frankly, experiencing some world travel, if one is so privileged.
This expansion of perspective has only become widely possible in the last hundred years or so and reaction is showing itself in the worldwide “identity politics” which is leading people—with no evidence—to declare that Our Story is the measure of all things, and all Other Stories are evil, pagan, inferior, ignorant, or superstitious. As we encounter more and more of the world’s Other Stories, many are broadening their wisdom while others are broadening their fear. It looks like it will take us some time (centuries?) to resolve this drive to exclude, to scapegoat, to judge, and to dismiss other peoples’ stories. There is only one thing more dangerous than the individual ego and that is the group ego. Only non-dual, “second tier” folks, mystics, and not even all saints seem capable of such universal capacity. Yet this viewpoint is increasing quite rapidly worldwide, moved ahead by things like the United Nations, Doctors without Borders, many lifelong missionaries, emerging Christianity, and seekers and philosophers of universal truth.
Still, only a minority will venture into a universal and inclusive frame of reference (The Story), while others limit themselves to journeys into their own private soul and woundedness (My Story). These cannot give us any liberation from or even understanding of the tyrannies of tribe, family, and culture (Our Story). With no deep experience of actual transcendence, and with little self-knowledge, Our Story folks are highly open to massification, groupthink, and conformity passing for real knowledge. They generally use entertainment, sporting events, consumerism, or war itself as a substitute for true worship and true community or friendships. I personally believe
much of USA culture is at this level—and trapped here because it is convinced that its story and culture are The Story. In fact, most groups participate in such group narcissism.
Finally, we either have people who live inside The Story or think they live inside The Story. Those who truly live there have embraced and integrated their personality, shadow, woundedness, family issues, culture, and contextualizing life experiences under The One. Those who think they live there (but do not) are those we would call fundamentalists, zealots, or people who use religion to disguise their real belief system (money, power, politics, classism, or security needs being the most common). They think they have the final “text,” but they just use it to hide from any real context that would expose them. Some call this “spiritual bypassing.” Jesus’ metaphors for this group are “Pharisees” and “teachers of the Law,” or just “the Rich Man.”
What makes the Bible so unique as a work of literature is that—surely without knowing it—it honors all four domes of meaning to some degree: the importance of the individual and personal responsibility (the foundational meaning being preoccupation with “sin”), the history and context of one individual religion (the “scandal of the particular”), Israel’s early confrontation and then Jesus’ specific confrontation with cultures other than Judaism, while their One God (YHWH) oversees, loves, liberates, and includes the whole process and every level.
This is a truly integral spirituality, a truly catholic worldview, and the unrecognized goal of all monotheistic religions. These, like Jesus, “have nowhere to rest their head” except in the One Love. These will “save” the world, because they can honor and include every part of history/herstory and no longer consider themselves the center of anything except as the beneficiary of a personal and amazing grace.
—Richard Rohr
A Rude Awakening
Luke 4:24–27
when you are finally roused out of the dream world in which God is only for you and yours it will be a rude awakening
when you come to the realization that God has always been for them whoever them is you will hear the sound of chains breaking
— Drew E. Jackson1
The Ecotones of the Cosmic Egg of Meaning
By Paul Swanson
Die and Become. Until you have learned this, you are but a dull guest on this dark planet. 1
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Ilive inside a Western culture that roars at the sight of mythic, self-made men rocketing into orbit. While these rocketmen were on their recent space excursions, the blue planet they left behind reached record high temperatures and the ocean rolled her dead onto the shores. A person can only take the myth of Western individualism seriously for so long before its excesses reveal its shadow.
The “individual life” is a tempting oxymoron. It turns out that individuals want to be distracted from the collective climate cacophony created by a throwaway culture—even if that distraction contributes to said cacophony. Individualism created its own worst enemy, a disassociated collection of self-obsessed individuals. Individualism is the match that lights the fuse of global self-destruction.
Am I pushing the hyperbolic edges to make a point? That depends on your perspective. The land that I love and within which I reside is fragmented by the myth of American individualism. This myth plays a key role in beshitting on the land and people that I love. Yet I dare to hope. I see the myth of individualism crumbling. Emerging from the cracks of that foundation is a longing unfeigned.
I am getting ahead of myself. Allow me to back up to move forward. Myths are frameworks and stories that strive to make sense of humanity’s place within culture and cosmos. Religions were first drafted by gregarious mythmakers in cahoots with a Mystery so large it was deemed Divine. They wrote poetry, enacted rituals, and told stories in praise for all they knew and did not know. With this definition in mind, it is fair to say that many religious folks throughout the ages swapped their poetry pens for matches.
And yet I have hope. I have hope because human myths evolve. They evolve alongside the species that crafted them. I have hope that a grand metanoia can occur in our gorgeous, yet mangy bipedal species—that humans can take their rightful place in the world without demanding a severance package that will sink it.
Without the great patterns that are always true, we get lost in choosing between tiny patterns. 2
—Richard Rohr, OFM
In service to this grand metanoia, I am suggesting an experimental approach to the myths, religions, and stories that shape us. I am advocating that we play in their craggy reef edges, that we swim out beyond the blurry boundaries, where seas of meaning meet, in full expectation that the “oceanic oneness”3 will turn us over and bring us to new shores of being. It is time for humanity to risk a radically new embodied relationship with one another and the stories that shape us. Together we can breathe new understandings into old myths.
The elasticity of Fr. Richard Rohr’s Cosmic Egg of Meaning provides a starting space for this playful exploration. In healthy tension with the myths that have guided us thus far, he upends the fallacy of Western individualism through the celebration of layers that inhabit the framework. This visual framework simplifies the curvy multivocality of the interconnected narrative of being. To put it plainly, it can be difficult to hold the vastness of meanings in one’s psyche, so the Cosmic Egg breaks it down neatly. There are four major “Stories” of the Cosmic Egg: My Story, Our Story, Other Stories, and The Story. They are presented separately but operate in relationship with one another.4 Their interdependence is a subtle concomitance. A spirit of energetic exchange takes place across the interstitial Stories, converging to create a textured whole. The beauty, truth, and goodness of the Cosmic Egg is felt and found in the exchanges at the edges. This is a spirited exploration of those textured exchanges.
We exist because we exchange.5
—Susan Griffin
Lifegiving exchange happens when physical bodies with porous boundaries mingle. This is called an ecotone. 6 An ecotone is “the transition from one ecosystem to another,”7 a place of tension and integration, a point of exchange. There is a sensuality to this ecological term, for an ecotone occurs “at edges and physical boundaries, where fresh water meets salt water and water meets land, where tides roll up and down coasts, where woodlands become pastures and the fir trees of taiga forests give way to the lichen and grass of tundra.”8 Even the etymological roots of ecotone are instructive for this exploration of the Cosmic Egg of Meaning. An ecotone is the combination of “house/dwelling” and “tension.”
The ecotones that form across the four Stories of the Cosmic Egg have the potential to transform stagnant myths in new, communally edifying directions. When My Story hobnobs with Other Stories, Our Story is impacted, which enhances my understanding of The Story. Now, my entire relationship to reality must expand. This energetic exchange is more than a ripple effect that pulsates out to its natural dissipation. Healthy exchange between two or more Stories builds respect for, and responsibility to, one another, while each changes
in service to the emerging whole. This is the heightened transfer of energy that occurs in an ecotone. At this level of exchange, vulnerability and risk-taking into parts unknown are requirements for being a conscious part of a Storied membership. To me, this is the incarnate adventure of a lifetime. For if this is truly a Christ-soaked world, then it is in the ecotones where I can fully participate in Christic exchanges. One might even dare call this exchange, this work of love, the Mystical Body of Christ.
I am a man mostly ignorant of the things that are most important to me. 9
—Wendell Berry
My own expeditions across the ecotones of the Cosmic Egg of Meaning have been paramount for my evolving participation in the Mystical Body of Christ. Having defined the terms of exploration, I now want to introduce four contemplative movements that have aided this conscious participation in the ecotones of the Cosmic Egg of Meaning: gratitude, humility, ignorance, and inquiry. Playing at the edges of boundaries does not need to be without thoughtful preparation.
Life is a miracle and Mystery has a gratuitous nature.10 Before any existential walkabout, one should rest under the shade of gratitude. Gratitude is a posture of acceptance toward the givenness of life. Even in small doses, gratitude alters the relationship between the explorer, the map, and uncharted terrain. It gives the explorer breathing room, space to humble themself before all that they have not yet encountered. Humility is exposure to the elements. Humility sleeps out under the infinite stars to feel the tingle of the distant intimacy of night. It does not build walls to keep out the unknown or unforeseen. Humility embraces the hospitality of strangers. It becomes one continual bow before Mystery.
Humility leads to the undefended way of ignorance. This type of ignorance is not a frozen weakness of immovable views, but a kenotic movement toward a ready and curious position. It transforms the explorer into a pilgrim.
This ignorance readies the pilgrim for respectful inquiry. Unspoken questions rest on the pilgrim’s tongue as they now see that “the
Before any existential walkabout, one should rest under the shade of gratitude.
true contemplative is not the one who prepares his mind for a particular message that he wants or expects to hear, but who remains empty because he knows that he can never expect or anticipate the word that will transform his darkness into light.”11
These four contemplative movements are practices on the pilgrimage across the ecotones in the Cosmic Egg, practices in becoming and discerning the vectors of possibilities in Stories unknown. Authentic exchange occurs in these partially defined places, in the rub of tension without the pursuit of dominion. When you meet these courageous pilgrims, greet them with a kiss, for your salvation may be in that exchange.
There is . . . no safe position when it comes to engaging fundamental questions of religious and spiritual meaning; one must be prepared to risk everything. 12
—Douglas E. Christie
There is a risk to this pilgrimage. A pilgrim does not begin this journey as a blank slate. The Stories they received in childhood might be dated or lead to destructive ends. What was once mapped out as safe passage may now be speckled with barbwire trappings. Those who received their Stories from a position of dominance are often unable to question the stories’ prevalence in their formation. They are not able to explore in the spirit of exchange. Instead, ecotones are seen as spaces to seize or conquer.
Those who have found their My Story and Our Story to be marginalized and muted by Other Stories (experienced as Dominant Stories) are not always able to meet in an ecotone. The boundaries of mutual exchange have been violated too many times. The continual breach and invasion from dominant Other Stories harms both sides,
but particularly those living under its occupation. The imperative is on those (like me) who embody the history and authorship of the dominant paradigm to practice the contemplative movements of unknowing. One practices the movements so as to walk with less dependency on ego-serving Stories to shift the direction of myth.
Exchange is rarely clean. Even with the most graceful movements of unknowing, wounding is likely. I wear enough scars to know that the risk of wounding is present whenever love is possible. We risk and we wound. We risk wounding the Stories that sustained us up to a point. We risk injuring the people who have loved us. We risk harming those whose voices have been covered by the hands of history. Exchange requires stepping into naked reality. Transformation only happens in an ecotone, in mutual vulnerability, without a prescribed outcome. There are no waivers to sign at the entrance of an ecotone. We risk it all to birth new stories and expand old ones. One seasoned pilgrim named the risk best: “Traveler, there is no road. The road is made by walking.”13
Life is a presence which always precedes us.14 —Pierre Hadot
The givenness of my life belongs to The Story. I received My Story without question and lived into the pressing questions of Our Story. As curiosity grew, I began to feel for the edges of these Stories. The versions of the Stories I was living suddenly burst. Mystery overflowed and its allurement beckoned me. I rebelled, stretched, deconstructed, and ultimately made amends with the Stories that shaped me. Slowly, I learned that the way is not forward or backward, but awkward.15 The Stories that once comforted me no longer did. My explorations veered off center. Contemplative movements became my practice as I ventured out into the unknown. I can still hear the pleas of the risk-averse know-it-alls demanding that I come back to the center this very second.
As I explore the ecotones, silence is my preferred language. It helps me keep my ears open. In the ecotones of Other Stories, I discover my own foreign assumptions. I hear songs of the heart ring out in dialects untranslatable. My eyes bear witness to wounds that cannot be dressed by individual efforts. I double over in laughter at jokes
supposedly at my expense. I am a vagabond of the ecotones with no place to lay my head. I ain’t lost; look, I just found a dropped pack of Mary Oliver’s cigarettes. I must be on the right path.
My center has shifted to the edges of My Story, Our Story, and Other Stories. I now wonder if the center of The Story is nowhere and everywhere. I have come to see the Mystical Body of Christ as the exchanges between the material and the mystical. To lose sight of these vivified exchanges—these ecotones—is to lessen the whole body, the individual part, and emergences in between.
In the exchange between miracle and membership, I am reminded that “Life is a presence which always precedes us.” There is a salty texture to that line that remains on my lips. It reminds me of words Athanasius gave me. I recite them to myself. I set up camp in a nearby ecotone. My pockets are empty, and I am holding on to nothing but a frayed thread to guide the way. I believe it to be a tether of The Story. My hunch is that it runs across the fabric of all our Stories. It connects me to you, us to them—them and those beyond, and then back to us all over again. We are knitted together in a cosmic membership that breathes anew into the myths that shape us. The Story glimmers through the brush of this exchange. ·
Honoring All Four Domes of Meaning
By Alison Kirkpatrick
In his reflection on the Cosmic Egg, Fr. Richard Rohr laments that few people or places “have ever honored all four domes of meaning at the same time.” I feel fortunate to be one of the lucky few exposed to such a worldview. I was raised in a Franciscan parish in the early 1970s, just after the Second Vatican Council. The brownrobed friars, with their Birkenstocks and beards, embraced the spirit of the Council wholeheartedly. Where a crucified Jesus normally hung behind the altar, we had a risen Christ—holding his cross in one hand and making a sign of peace with the other. If I had to sum it up, The Story told through the Franciscan lens was Christ is risen. We shall too. Alleluia. The message didn’t negate the existence of suffering or diminish the importance of morality or justice, but it did put them in context with the mercy, forgiveness, love, and ultimate triumph of God and goodness. In that Franciscan parish, I sensed the domes of meaning nested together. I was God’s beloved (My Story), and I was part of a beloved
tradition and church (Our Story), but in the spirit of St. Francis, that love wasn’t exclusive. It belonged to everyone and everything (Other Stories). While that last theme was underdeveloped, I believed from my earliest days that there was no one, no thing, and no where that God wasn’t actively “in love” and seeking to bring new life. To this day, it remains the truest story I know.
It’s as if, at each juncture of my life, each turning point and challenge, the Universe seems to be asking me, Do you think this can be excluded? or I seem to be asking God, Do you love even this? and Can you help me to love this too?
There are so many ways that we get trapped in thinking that there is a perfect story or that the way our family, our religion, or our nation tells Our Story is, in fact, The Story. While this might comfort us or keep us in line for a while, it limits our imagination, our potential, and even more insidiously, it limits our ability to love ourselves and others as God loves us. In fact, I have learned over and over throughout my life that Other Stories—those that are shared with us or when we have felt “othered” ourselves—offer us the greatest opportunity for growth and transformation.
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When I was nineteen, I got pregnant by a man I hardly knew and would not marry. Although my upbringing was progressive in many ways, every story I had heard growing up from family, church, and culture communicated quite clearly that I was “damaged goods,” unworthy and possibly even unlovable. I had two choices—abortion or adoption. While the former offered me some immediate relief and protection, I chose the latter, trusting that it had a greater chance of bringing “new life” in a literal and figurative way. I wanted to love my child as best as I could, and I believed that meant letting her go to be raised in a two-parent home with everything I wanted for her and could not give her myself. Beyond that, whether my parents’ love for me would be diminished in some permanent way, or whether I would ever be loved by anyone else, I trusted that God loved me and that I could still love myself. I believed that this “other story,” told in faith and love, belonged to The Story.
I wasn’t wrong. Although I moved away to “protect” my and my family’s reputations, I met my husband in that new town when I
was seven months pregnant. The story I wanted to hide became the love story of my life. He was there when I went into labor and when I signed the adoption papers forty-eight hours later. Along with my parents and siblings, he was there for the weeks and months of overwhelming grief, trusting that I did the right thing while also healing from it. He has been there every day since and we have raised three children of our own who are young adults now. The daughter I gave up for adoption turns thirty this fall, and I feel privileged to be a part of her story, though it is not mine to tell.
For a while after my daughter’s adoption, I felt some frustration toward my parents and the church for the story they told me about a woman’s value, particularly as it related to her sexuality, but by the time I had teenagers of my own, I had fallen into the same trap. While I had jettisoned certain stories, I was guilty of repeating other wellworn tropes of church and culture that were in many ways just as damaging. As Richard Rohr often says, I had confused the container with the contents.
I wanted my children to find their True Selves, health, happiness, and an open-hearted love for themselves, others, and the world. What I communicated to them was a prescribed set of expectations that I thought would get them those things, which included church attendance, serious academics, athletics, work, and appropriate friendships. It worked well enough when they were young, but by the time they became teenagers it was costing all of us something precious—authentic and open relationships. Even with the best of intentions and my own experience of loss, I had succumbed to the overwhelming pressure to let Our Story stand in for The Story.
With the help of a transformative book, The Conscious Parent, and a good therapist, I set about trying to make it right by making space for our children’s individual stories to flourish. I started listening instead of suggesting, affirming instead of critiquing, trusting instead of hovering, hugging instead of pushing, being instead of doing. It was a contemplative practice all day, every day to release what I thought I knew and to trust that Love would do the rest.
Like most contemplative practices, it felt simultaneously like doing nothing and like the hardest thing in the world to “be still and know”1 I was not in control. And like any consistent contemplative practice, it eventually gave birth to greater compassion for everyone, including myself. In the words of Thomas Merton (1915–1968), “The beginning
There are so many ways that we get trapped in thinking that there is a perfect story.
of this love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.” 2 I had loved my children to the best of my ability, which is to say, not nearly enough. I surrendered my desire to perfect their stories, and I came to know on a deeper level that each and every story is lovingly held in The Story. Everyone participates in the cosmic pattern of life, death, and resurrection; it is simply my privilege to witness the journey and to mirror the beauty of their story back to them. The listening practice that began at my kitchen table turned out to be the training ground for my future work as a spiritual director.
There is one more story I’d like to tell. Our oldest daughter came out when she was sixteen years old. I’d like to think she wasn’t afraid of how we would react, but I don’t think that is entirely true. While we had been attending a welcoming church for a few years already, I cringed at how many sermons she had heard growing up that railed against gay marriage and promoted homophobia. I wept when I thought of any insensitive or ignorant comments we might have made. We immediately affirmed her in the fullness of her identity, and she has rewarded us over the last eight years by trusting us with more of her story. Even more significantly, she’s invited her friends to our home to share their lives and stories with us.
Sadly, some of the Other Stories that have been largely excluded by Christian churches, including much of the Roman Catholic Church, are those of the LGBTQIA+ community. Many of our daughter’s friends have been rejected by their family and friends. Churches that once welcomed them and called them beloved children of God
told them in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that The Story no longer includes them. This is especially true for her trans and nonbinary friends whom I have been privileged to know. My heart breaks when their new names and pronouns are ignored by those who are supposed to love them the most. While I can understand the need to grieve who we thought our children were (which is true of any child—straight, gay, or trans), I cannot understand the wholesale rejection of who our children have discovered themselves to be. This is part of their story, so, as a family, it is part of Our Story, and it is certainly part of the evolving Story God is telling in and through creation. Ultimately, the cross reveals that love is the only story that matters, so I love their stories.
Paula D’Arcy has a succinct line often shared by Richard Rohr: “God comes to us disguised as our lives.” After twenty-plus years of Catholic education and a lifetime of seeking, that line pretty much sums up my operative theology. If it is in my life, then I know that God is speaking to me through it. I may feel blessed and nourished by it; I may find it confusing, challenging, and even downright unpleasant sometimes; but trusting in the Cosmic Egg leads me to greater wisdom and a more Christ-like love for the world. ·
My Story
By Dan O’Connor
I’ve always been a kind, quiet, and gentle soul wandering about. If there were a wanderer job, I’d be very well suited. My therapist told me I’d been a warrior in a prior life. That made a lot of sense and must explain where I find myself now.
Growing up, and as a closeted gay man until my thirties, I’d succumbed to the conditioned belief that I didn’t belong in this world and certainly not to the culture of rugged individualism. This cultural characteristic dramatically sets Americans apart from the rest of the world and, in my opinion, is our greatest national and cultural weakness. Even today, our LGBTQIA+ youth continue to suffer from the misunderstanding that everything indeed belongs, since the war on poor people, the trans community, and BIPOC—well, American Realism is hardly that!
It seems like so long ago: those days of suffering from the deep anxiety of not recognizing my authentic self. Looking back, my upbringing in an Irish Catholic environment was a loving experience, but also conditioned—as I’ve learned through the CAC’s Race, Equity,
and Belonging (REB) staff training—by my ancestral trauma that is still with me today.
Attending Roman Catholic elementary school in the Chicago suburbs and going to Mass every day gave me a good foundation for the tradition early on, but eventually I came to see that the pious behavior of those who attended church did not resonate with their actions outside it. That became very confusing for me, and I became cynical about the church because of the hypocrisy I sensed in myself and others. Yet, I’ve never forgotten what I learned in those early days and consciously do my best to be kind in my daily social interactions. It’s not hard to do for an Enneagram Nine, as that’s our nature. But it’s just as vital we do it for ourselves too.
My family moved around quite a bit during my adolescent and high school years. So, sadly, learning who and what to trust became a growing issue for me. I discovered that it’s not easy for an introvert to make friends. As a freshman at Bishop Kelly High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I was bullied a lot. That same year, I smoked my first joint and saw my first concert: ZZ Top and Three Dog Night. The bullying experience left me confounded as to how to respond. After one day of being mostly psychologically bullied, I began plotting my revenge. I realized I could easily inflict some serious damage, to the point of killing this bully. I thought and thought, and finally concluded I couldn’t kill this boy. Jesus would not approve, I would not approve, and this was not something I wished on anyone.
My anger scared me. I realized I could do this; I was quite capable of protecting myself, but only in a violent way. I didn’t have the skills, the wisdom, or the courage to confront this bully in a nonviolent manner—except that, ultimately, I did, by not doing anything. From that moment on, I knew revenge was not a way forward. Besides, it never reconciled with what I already knew—that everything belonged—but why weren’t others getting it? Even I knew this at an early age, but I couldn’t figure out why nobody else did. I didn’t know my own value and didn’t have anyone else to show me otherwise.
The summer of my high school graduation was an eventful one. My favorite person in the world, my maternal grandmother, died of a massive stroke the day after my high school graduation. We had just moved to Columbia, South Carolina that year. The family drove to bury her where she was raised, in Mason City, Iowa, where my mother had gone to boarding school since she was seven, after her
father had passed. I’d asked my parents if I could return to Tulsa for the summer and they allowed it! They had placed an enormous trust in me and for that I’m forever grateful. That summer, my friends and I hitchhiked to Little Rock, Arkansas to see a Frank Zappa concert. What a great formative experience that was, sleeping on the side of the freeway in a ditch until the next morning. I felt excited about the next stage in life: college.
There were so many conversations I had in my mind, bargaining with God about having sex with guys in high school, feeling so guilty about going against the dominant cultural taboos and sadly not realizing how I’d been socialized in a deeply unconscious and grossly unaware society. It was only after entering college that I discovered I was not alone. There were others just like me! Suddenly, I heard about Stonewall and then Gay Pride, followed very soon after, of course, by AIDS.
Ibecame very angry with America. It was the Reagan era, when my parents left the Democratic Party and became card-carrying Republicans. The establishment of a perpetual atmosphere of discrimination angered me, especially when I began working in corporate America. Having to be dependent on the dominant Republican hierarchy for my paycheck felt like prison. My social justice conscience was born overnight as conflict was everywhere, which is a very scary proposition for an Enneagram Nine to confront. Remaining hidden seemed like a very good idea, a safe place to be—until it was not.
Upon finishing college, my partner and I moved to Miami, Florida, where he grew up. Wow, what a culture shock that was, coming from the deep South— but of course, a most welcome one. It was like going to the New York City of the South, with parties every night of the week and temptation everywhere. Then the HIV/ AIDS pandemic arrived at my doorstep. My friends became infected overnight and were suddenly dying. I went to way too many funerals at such a young age, and I was afraid of getting tested, knowing the obvious.
Finally, I faced my fears and got tested, and of course I was HIV positive. I’m not sure why God spared my life; I never got sick. But just knowing it could be imminent was concern enough, until the drug cocktail was invented—thank you, Dr. David Ho! We had a new lease on life. I wake up every day grateful to God and science.
This became the impetus for my spiritual path, and now HIV is just a chronic, manageable disease.
There’s a part of me that feels justified, but also hopeful, with the arrival of COVID-19 because no one is immune. Perhaps it might just move the planet into a more compassionate awareness. I know I learned through my adolescent bullying experience that revenge is not the way forward, but neither can I reject or dishonor that part of me which helps me to integrate my shadow with my light. Upon acknowledging these opposing, polarizing aspects of myself, paradox unifies me in stillness, finding my egoic self in a loving unity, being held by Something even closer to me than breath.
I’m not sure exactly when it was that I decided I was tired of being an introvert and that I desired to live in the “we” space too. This was a grand entry point in my spiritual journey of being in solidarity with others who were also experiencing social injustice and working with others to confront it.
Watching PBS in Miami late one night, I saw Gangaji, this beautiful woman in a blue flowing gown with platinum hair, extolling the virtues of the Enneagram. That was the second time I’d heard that word. I immediately searched for it on the Internet and booked my registration with the Enneagram Institute. Upon arrival and while meeting people the first day, I learned of Richard Rohr. That Part One training was so impressive I signed up for all the other trainings and retreats. Subsequently, I joined a Fourth Way group in Ft. Lauderdale and two years later I was in the Living School and doing the Illuman Men’s Rites of Passage. I’m saying yes to everything while traveling on the superhighway of my soul’s journey into God, where Bonaventure has become one of my favorite mystics.
It was revealing to discover my behavioral patterns were that of an Enneagram Nine. Learning about and socializing with other Nines and Ones and Twos, etc.—well, to discover I have a pattern which is the root cause of my craziness was an incredible relief! I’d always thought I was the lone weirdo, a mystery never to be solved and doomed to suffer forever. Shortly thereafter, when I began to realize I was perfectly normal, I subscribed to Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations. Here was Richard Rohr, echoing and validating everything I felt to be true and, even more, providing philosophically sound, common-sense
stories and examples illuminating the rich religious history that I never heard growing up in Catholic school.
Yet another scourge to be processed, and what an involutionary process this has been! The Living School resolved a lot of that trauma by delving deeply into the gold mine of the Christian mystical tradition. This was a priceless journey, being properly guided by wisdom masters who know deeply the value of a good education. Learning what is mine to do continues to feed my desire for unity with others in peaceful exchange. I’ve been learning the language of nonviolence, facilitating Monday night discussions on Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations at the Trinity House Catholic Worker, as we all gather to inquire in the tradition of Socrates, who has been known to have said, “know thyself.” It’s such a joy to participate in the weaving of my story into the collective our story with great humility.
Jesus, the Buddha, Richard Rohr, St. Bonaventure, the scientific method, and Ken Wilber have been the greatest influences on my understanding and the redefining of my notion of God. I’m not sure I ever really believed God was a gray-bearded man in the sky but, being a product of Western culture, I wasn’t entirely free of that image either. My inquiry into other religious traditions, along with my vipassana training and then centering prayer, provided a solid foundation for releasing old beliefs while making room for a cosmic non-dual understanding of Reality.
This understanding of God has always been supported by my life’s experiences of the cultural diversity encountered in working abroad and my advanced education in international relations, proving that everything belongs because it’s already here. Richard Rohr’s further elucidation of the nature of God as relationship and exchange; the trinitarian flow endlessly giving Itself away to further Creation’s purpose; and that belonging and purpose are the existential nature of God, along with the penultimate concept of mercy being the true nature of God—for me finally close any gap.
Belonging and purpose are the existential nature of God.
I have seen my own healing in reconciling my Enneagram Nine childhood message that I didn’t matter. It happened because, as the child, objectively speaking, I was in control, in the sparking of reactions by my parents, and this resulted in their not knowing what to do with me. The message they sent was that I did matter, but the corruption of that message, in alignment with the Divine Plan, formed my personality and the subsequent Cosmic Egg journey of coming full circle, back to my soul’s intended lesson, of my destiny that personal responsibility is the God-given healing that I am fortunately able to receive in this incarnation. It’s been hard learning how to un-identify with the narcissistic images of myself—not only letting go of, but also being with and facing my attachments and stinking thinking head on.
The ability and the opportunity to share the hard-earned, Godgiven wisdom of the perennial tradition has nourished my soul profoundly and gives me that inner strength, that deep faith, that all shall be well—but not before having been tested and failing, then falling into that deep inner knowing, that Holy Faith, Holy Strength. The knowledge gained from the wisdom masters along my path, combined with the contemplative practices coalescing my being, keep me grounded and bring my attention back to myself. This prodigal son is forever grateful for all the suffering and delusions put in the path of my soul’s journey into a metanoia of cosmic union with God. ·
Giving Freely and Receiving Graciously
By Barbara C. Otero-López
Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow’s edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.1
—Robin Wall Kimmerer
The mysterious and beautiful work of nature has been a great teacher for me this past year. The time that I have spent at home during the pandemic has blessed me with a chance to slow down: go on more hikes, work in my backyard, and relish the beauty and wonder of the natural world. The wise words and stories in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass have also given me scientific language and perspective that is beautifully intertwined with the indigenous ways that my own Native American ancestors shared.
This way of life strives to live in harmony with nature through the practice of generosity, reciprocity, and only taking what we need. Just as an example, I have been deeply impacted in a new way by the scientific wonder of how plants utilize carbon dioxide to produce food for themselves and how they reciprocate through their gift of oxygen for the benefit of other creatures. As Kimmerer so poetically puts it, “My breath is your breath, your breath is mine. It’s the great poem of give and take, of reciprocity that animates the world.”2
This biological dance of interdependency and exchange of lifegiving breath that occurs in and under our very noses has helped me to truly revel in the interconnectedness that I share with God and all Her creation. In this current moment, when the world is facing unique and growing challenges, nature’s many examples of “dancing while standing still” are inviting me to further explore the interconnectedness which is rooted and manifested in my own relationships with my loved ones, my communities, and communities outside of my own, who are all uniquely and simultaneously living through the many trials of our times.
This appreciation of connection has moved me into broadening my own narrative by examining how all the stories of life and love intersect and join together in symphony. As a mother facing an empty nest, I’m in a stage of life where I am somewhat redefining myself, seeking out what is mine to do next. I have put a lot of energy into revisiting my own story, reviewing the choices that have formed my life’s path and brought me to where I am today. I have pondered the challenges that I faced as a child, as an adolescent, as a young adult, and as a wife and mother. I want to understand how I showed up in these times of my life and how that influences how I show up today. Certainly, on this path I have bumped into shadows and things of which I am not proud. I have recognized where I was missing boundaries and did not stick up for myself when I should have, and also celebrated the times when I actually did. In other words, during this time of my life when I am wanting to know what’s next, I have benefited from self-reflection, coming face to face with my ego, and learning the difference between needing to be in control and having trust and faith in the slow work of God.
Undoubtedly, my story is strongly influenced by the stories of the communities that shaped me. I am a product of my strong Roman Catholic background. My identity is intertwined with my New Mexican history. All these containers have given me shared meaning, a sense of belonging to tradition, and a generosity of spirit that was modeled through my family and cultural values. However, coming to terms with my genealogical and cultural history, of both my oppressed Native American ancestors and those who were their Spanish oppressors, is more complicated than I ever thought to imagine. Facing and forgiving the atrocities that have been allowed to occur and continue in the Roman Catholic Church is close to home and, at the moment, seemingly impossible to reconcile. It is a lifetime of work to understand both how my containers are far from perfect and, all the while, that waking up to how all these stories have explicitly and inexplicitly shaped me is vital for me not only to have compassion for myself but also to recognize and stand in solidarity with all who come from complicated histories.
Acknowledging how my lighter Latina skin has given and continues to give me privileges in life and how my darker-skinned sisters and brothers are forced to struggle in ways that I could never understand is important work that I strive to continue with diligence. There are cycles of pain in the stories of my culture that need to be brought to light and awakened in my heart so that I can accept those parts that may be out of my control but have shaped me just the same. More importantly, I must also recognize those parts that are within my control so that I do what I can to foster healing and stop any further transmission of that pain. It is in these instances that I am so grateful for community, both those communities that exist within my own containers and those outside of them. Through shared experiences with family and friends, I am able to process and recognize beauties and shortcomings of my expanded sense of self. Through relationship with those whose stories I do not share, I am able to see beyond and into a greater story of what is.
There’s so much in my own story and the stories of all my containers that I could easily get stuck in a vortex of evaluating and re-evaluating the good and bad of it all. Yet I’ve come to realize that it is through my curiosity and respect for others that I experience a reprieve from my own navel gazing by wanting to enter reverently into stories outside of my own. From a very young age, I have found
Through relationship with those whose stories I do not share, I am able to see beyond and into a greater story of what is.
myself escaping my own realities through books on history, faraway places, and even fantastical ones. I have jumped at every blessed opportunity to travel and live in places whose cultures are both rich and different from my own. As a result, I have developed a great respect for the lives and experiences of others because they help me to see things differently and offer me perspectives I had not considered. I have learned, for instance, that as not all geographic regions are high deserts like my own, there are so many different needs, motivations, and ways of doing things. Different problems dictate different kinds of solutions. As many cultures and communities have endured triumphs and traumas to which I couldn’t possibly relate, there are also so many different ways to express and learn from pain and joy. There is a lovely book written by Elyse Poppers that is an anthology of 267 words for love in Sanskrit.3 This insight into the Sanskrit language and the culture in which it flourished is a reminder that love itself is boundless and can manifest itself in ways my languages never gave me words to express.
On the surface sometimes, cultures and communities outside of our own and those with which we are familiar can seem so disconnected and unrelatable. We can often be driven by fear of the unknown or things to which we cannot relate because we cannot recognize a shared meaning—we cannot see ourselves or our loved ones in those stories. We can slip into an “us versus them” mentality and let fear and a perception of scarcity force us into self-serving actions. I am hopeful that there is a way to look beyond this surface and learn from the stories of others while finding a way to stich them alongside my own. Perhaps, through the common thread of The Story, of which we are all a part, we can learn to be in solidarity with those triumphs and
traumas that we cannot share and somehow discover ways in which we can all flourish.
In today’s landscape, I find it incredibly challenging to come to terms with the many differing political and ecological viewpoints that so often feel irreconcilable. The racial and social inequities that are deeply rooted in our psyches and systems are in dire need of restitution and healing. These challenges are so immense that sometimes they can all feel quite overwhelming. It can be very difficult to know what is mine to do for the better good.
And yet, I am so inspired by nature’s great but silent acts of photosynthesis and respiration because I know that it is in the unique gifts that God gives each individual species, and each one of us, that we are all called to be conduits for God’s action in the world. It doesn’t matter that I fall short. It doesn’t matter that my small self is flawed and that my containers are flawed. God uses my unique gifts and shortcomings for the greater good. As Fr. Rohr writes, “God always uses very unworthy instruments so we can never think that it is we who are accomplishing the work.”4 In their humble existence, plants give us life-giving breath while never asking for anything in return. But then, graciously, they accept our breath to repeat the life-giving cycle once again. For this I am grateful, and when I open my eyes with a desire to truly see and appreciate the many unique gifts and blessings that all God’s creation has to offer, I am flooded with a great need to honor and protect it.
Mother Nature has inspired me to continually discover what is mine to give and to give it freely, while seeking to appreciate and accept the gifts of others. For me, this cycle of giving freely and receiving graciously is a preface to The Story. By appreciating and accepting each other’s gifts, we can begin to discover the beauty of what we all do share. We can save ourselves “from the illusion of we and the smallness of me ”5 and enter a greater realm of the universal meaning of which we are all a part.
We can stitch our stories together to create a tapestry of Love that grows even more beautiful through the inclusion and participation of all our gifts, shared and received. I think that our current moment is offering us a choice. We can choose to live in fear and skepticism of that which exists outside of our own stories. We can choose to act out of a perception of scarcity to protect
what is ours to protect—our livelihoods and our possessions, our privileges and our perspectives. Alternatively, we can seek to understand and appreciate all the beautiful ways that others contribute to The Story.
We all have a chapter. We all have a living story to tell. By choosing to honor and receive the gifts of others and by generously giving of ourselves, I believe that we can grow in confidence together, knowing that we are all part of a greater story. ·
From My Jesus to the Universal Christ and Back
By Mark Longhurst
Jesus and I go way back. Admittedly, the terms of our relationship were constrained. I pledged my six-year-old life to him, after all, out of terror. The impetus arose when a traveling youth minister visited my church and told the tragedy of Sodom and Gomorrah. The youth minister narrated the scene while an artist drew chalk-based Bible art to illustrate the fire raining down from heaven. Lot and family fled, while Lot’s wife stole a glance at the burning city—and God punished her for it, turning her to salt. I missed the mythic metaphor and believed it literally. The preacher explained that fire and salt would be my future, too, but that there was an escape plan if I accepted Jesus into my heart—which, of course, I did. He died for my sins to save me. I had no idea what it all meant, but given the conditions, it seemed like the only option.
As befitting a hero and his rescuee, Jesus and I became close. My story became part of his story. He had saved me from torment, after all, so the least I could do was give him my gratitude. But it also became clear throughout church and youth group socialization that Jesus operated as more than a protective shield from sulfur or salt. People talked to Jesus. They asked him for things like a healing for Cousin Ray’s cancer or for Diane to say yes when Stevie asked her to the prom. They shared their most vulnerable secrets and yearnings with Jesus and so I did the same. I mimicked the minister’s prayers of thanking Jesus for saving my life, but mostly I pleaded with him for Casey to stop giving me charley-horses in gym class. I confided in Jesus when I was scared. On good days, I cracked jokes to Jesus when no one was looking. We were buddies, Jesus and I.
Eventually, Jesus even became my boyfriend—or at least that’s what my Christian college friends and I called him. We poked fun at the songs of praise we sang to God and Jesus. The lyrics resembled pop top-forty love ballads, with nineties bridges and repetitive choruses expressing lovers’ aching hearts:
I want to know you. I want to see your face.
I want to know you more!
I want to touch you. I want to see your face. I want to know you more!
In college chapel services, the more enthusiastic the praise singer, the more spiritual I thought they were. The front-row attendees waved, raised, and pumped their hands, shouting ebulliently, “Yes, Lord!” and “We thank you, Jesus!” I carried my share of cynical jadedness, but when it came to singing songs to Jesus, I was all heart, closing my eyes, tears streaming, hands uplifted with the eager ones.
There was just one problem: Jesus’ death loomed much larger than his life. In fact, my Jesus didn’t really have much of a life. What was his story other than my story? Jesus and I had become close, yes, but who was he, exactly, other than the sacrificial firefighter warding off hell’s flames?
The premise of Professor Borgman’s Biblical Literature class at evangelical Gordon College sounded simple enough: to read the Bible as literature. However, for those of us raised on the Bible as an unerring, literal account of salvation, reading it literarily—instead
of literally—was subversive. Borgman repeatedly pressed us toward the specifics of the text, which yielded surprising, contradictory, and jarring details. Some were, admittedly, of the introductory sort that one immediately encounters in a Divinity School first-year course. Genesis has two creation stories! Luke is the author of his own Gospel and the book of Acts! The simple practice of reading the biblical text and paying attention to its linguistic twists and storytelling signals, though, changed how I understood not only the Bible, but also the story of Jesus itself. It refuted the belief I carried that the Bible somehow dropped wholesale from God to humanity, mediated by a few furiously typing court stenographers—and it also helped me hear Luke’s Gospel as if for the first time.
For example, I learned that Jesus taught a specific Way. Not only does much of the action with Jesus and the disciples take place “on the way” in Luke’s Gospel (for example, see Luke 10:38), but Jesus launches and models a Way of justice, peace, and inclusion, especially for the lowly or marginalized. Mary sings of the Way through which “he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly” (Luke 1:52). In his first sermon, Jesus quotes and claims that the prophet Isaiah’s words have come true in his own ministry: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed” (Luke 4:18). Jesus quoting Isaiah echoes a larger tradition of God’s Way of Jubilee in which debts are forgiven, the enslaved are liberated, and the poor have what they need (Leviticus 25). Jesus’ arrival is like a great banquet, he says, a time of feasting for everyone—and especially the poor, broken, and wounded (Luke 14:15–23).
The story of the Jesus I initially called “mine,” it turned out, was not really the story of Jesus. It was the story of me. The story of Jesus Christ includes me but—to state the spiritually obvious—is not only for me. To push Luke’s insight into the theological realm: Jesus is for others, for all others, especially those made “other” by oppressive powers. In the midst of the Nazi genocidal “othering” of Jewish people, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) made “being there for others” the summary of Jesus’ identity. Jesus is the “man for others,” he wrote in his letters from a Nazi prison cell. Behind bars, he jotted down notes for a book he intended to write
about “the experience that a transformation of all human life is given in the fact that ‘Jesus is there only for others.’”1
The simplicity of this statement conceals its subversiveness. “Of course Jesus is there for others,” we might think, when what we often really mean is that “Jesus is there for others in my group.” We claim Jesus as our Jesus. Christ is for you, my evangelical upbringing taught, as long as you, too, join my team and affirm Jesus as the exclusive way, truth, and life Conversely, I’ve met plenty of liberal Christians who sneer at “those” Christians who still believe in miracles or Jesus’ bodily resurrection. Jesus is for you, it seems they are saying, as long as you are not an evangelical!
When exclusive religion meets imperial power, however, a more nefarious Jesus is created. Our Jesus becomes, falsely, the Jesus to which the world must bend its will, leaving murdered and enslaved bodies, along with stolen land, in his wake. The early church breathed a persecution-free sigh of relief when Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and the Roman Empire became Christian—but they also began populating Roman armies and providing theological justification for war and conquest.2 Several fifteenth-century papal bulls, such as Pope Alexander VI’s Inter Caetera, provided spiritual justification for the claiming of other lands and peoples, all in the name of the one, true Christian religion.3 White, male Christian slave traders in the United States wielded Paul’s words, “Slaves, obey your masters” (Ephesians 6:5) as a law from no less an authority than God.4
But the imperial Jesus, too, is not Jesus. It is a Jesus twisted to match the image and story of the Empire, which conveniently ignores the actual story of Jesus. As Luke tells it, Jesus’ way is inclusion, solidarity with the marginalized, and expansive life for others. Such breadth and depth of love, however, are inherently threatening to the boundary-keepers of empire and religion.
Richard Rohr has done the Western Church a tremendous service by helping us retrieve a third option in our tradition, beyond the narcissism of my Jesus and the racism of our Jesus—the Universal Christ. Jesus Christ is not only “for me” or even “for others.” Jesus Christ is also the divine presence in every thing. Christ is not Jesus’ last name, as Fr. Rohr is fond of saying, but God’s generative and living presence at the heart of reality itself.
I long suspected that there was infinitely more to Christ than the man. Biblical passages such as Colossians 1 tipped me off: “He
If he’s only my Jesus, and not everyone and everything else’s Jesus too, then Jesus has become far too small and only a narcissistic reflection of me.
is before all things and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17). John’s Gospel (1:1–14) placed the Word, made flesh in Jesus, at creation’s beginning, with and as God. Other passages, out of which Christ’s cosmic identity emerged, plain baffled me: What was this Wisdom about which the writer of Proverbs wrote, “appointed from eternity, before the world began” (8:23)?
In his humble, clear, and trustworthy way, Fr. Rohr told us in modern language what these Scriptures pointed toward: The First Incarnation of Christ takes place not in the birth of Jesus, but at the origin of the universe. All creation is God’s Beloved Child! From his book The Universal Christ we read:
When Christians hear the word “incarnation,” most of us think about the birth of Jesus, who personally demonstrated God’s radical unity with humanity. But . . . I want to suggest that the first Incarnation was the moment described in Genesis 1, when God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the light inside of everything. . . . The Incarnation, then, is not only “God becoming Jesus.” It is a much broader event. . . . Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God.5
Fr. Rohr reminds the church, especially those of us in the West, that Christ’s presence is universal. It’s a truth forgotten by many but remembered and heralded by Christian mystics throughout the ages. Consider the perspective of theologian and bishop Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 395):
Who, looking at the universe, would be so feeble-minded as not to believe that God is all in all; that he clothes himself with the universe, and at the same time contains it and dwells in it? 6
or the monk Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662):
He who has no beginning is seen in things that must have a beginning; the invisible in the visible; the intangible in the tangible. Thus he gathers us together in himself, through every object . . . enabling us to rise into union with him, as he was dispersed in coming down to us.7
Just because Jesus Christ is cosmic, however, does not mean that he is not personal. The Universal Christ is, at the same time, the particular Jesus of Nazareth. And just because Christ is in all things does not mean that Christ is any less in me. My story includes a Jesus that I still call “mine”—God’s intimate and loving presence available to me, as I learned in my evangelical days—even as he also belongs to everyone and everything else. I can even hum some of those pop praise songs again, because my prayer is still to “want to know you and seek your face.”
Jesus has to be for me if Jesus is to have any meaning. He may be the Word through whom all things were made and the light that enlightens the world (John 1), but unless I can experience that ongoing divine creativity and life in my life, it has no relevancy for me. The same God who stretched sky and spun planets must mysteriously also know and care for the unique rhythm of my heartbeat. Otherwise, what’s the personal point? But if he’s only my Jesus, and not everyone and everything else’s Jesus too, then Jesus has become far too small and only a narcissistic reflection of me. The real Jesus likely knows nothing about the small Jesus that, in truth, mirrors my ego. As Thomas Merton memorably quipped in New Seeds of Contemplation, to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.8
Jesus and I are still close—closer than ever, in fact—but we’ve redefined the relationship. There is no longer a distant, angry deity lingering behind him, seeing and knowing my faults, and ready to pounce with punishment. Jesus is still my rescuer, but not from hell— that mythic place of fiery torment evoked more from Dante’s Inferno than the Bible itself. Rather, Jesus has become the mirror to
me of God’s love at the heart of reality. Jesus has not so much saved me from disaster as saved me for life. My Story of Jesus is, at the same time, Our Story of Jesus, which is simultaneously The Story of Christ unfolding throughout all reality. ·
Learning to See Beyond the Normative
By Leslye Colvin
Returning to one’s childhood home as a mature adult can be a special time to ponder the cycles or stories of evolution in one’s life. The dynamics of remembering our earliest relationships and revisiting significant places may reveal answers to questions never asked. These are not necessarily articulated questions, but may be understandings arising from a deeper or expanded perspective. In a word, it can be lifegiving.
I moved home to be the caregiver for my then-eighty-two-yearold mother in October 2015. At the time of this writing, she is receiving palliative care for late-stage dementia.
The small site on the map marking my birthplace is quite ordinary. Ozark is one of a zillion small towns across the globe. Yet, the location
is personal, as it witnessed the birth of myself, my siblings, my parents, and two of my grandparents. It is the town from which my parents moved when they married. It is also the town where a biracial greatgreat-grandfather settled and changed his last name from “Lee” to “Boykin” because of a death threat.
The Certificate of Live Birth issued by the State of Alabama identified me as “colored” and “girl.” No newborn could know how these normative labels would be used to identify those options to which a person may or may not aspire. They were intended to consign the designated as powerless or inferior, to limit ways of thinking, of being. The two words reveal more about the constructed system that employs them than it does about the infant who simply wants to be fed when hungry, changed when wet, comforted when distraught, and always loved.
I entered the world, in a sense, as an extension of the lives of others. Looking back across six decades, I understand that circumstances impacting my existence were beyond my control and awareness. It is as though the multifaceted layers of humanity, time, and space converged to move me from stardust to the one known as Leslye Alise Colvin.
My journey has never been linear, nor was it intended to be. While, as children, our developing minds learn to move from A to B to C, hopefully our first teacher—our lived experience—teaches us differently. The process is enhanced as we learn to apply discernment and critical thinking skills to our lived experiences and how we navigate them. We come to know that the dominant narrative is not the only one, and we have the capacity to free ourselves from predictable and binary patterns.
Through my early years, a significant portion of my life unfolded in the extreme southeastern corner of Alabama, the land of the Muscogee. In the midst of extended family, it was commonplace for elders to share stories of their life, and to speak of ancestors whom I did not remember or never knew. Through this process, our humanity and belonging were affirmed through conversations revealing how normative practices were established to deny both.
Through summer drives to Ohio, I knew that, as a child, my mother had moved there from Alabama with her maternal family. It would be years before I understood their move to be part of the Great Migration, a massive movement of African Americans from the south to the north. The impetus was a hunger to experience a truer sense
of freedom during the first half of the last century. Unfortunately, in this new region, they would find white supremacy to be different, but still ever-present. It was here that as children my siblings and I were first called “nigger,” as shouted by a boy in a white body while he was riding by my aunt’s house on a bicycle.
From the family unit, my identity expanded to understand the role of faith, community, region, and nation. My parents depended on several sources to stay abreast of current affairs. They read the local newspaper and Ebony magazine and watched morning and evening national news broadcasts to keep informed. I observed my extended family engaging in the same practices. I remember thinking as a child that it was a part of being a grownup. Less than 100 miles north of my home, Rosa Parks had chosen to keep her seat on a public bus. In doing so, she violated unjust yet normative practices and laws. This single act was the tipping point for the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Current events did not unfold exclusively in distant places, but in our lives. My siblings and I attended, and my parents taught in, racially segregated schools that were deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court before my birth. Medical examinations required our using the building’s side door to enter a small, windowless waiting room, through which we accessed the single exam room reserved for us. Even so, in the safety of our home, we celebrated the struggle for Civil Rights and recited the mantra, “I’m Black and I’m proud.”
Some decisions made for or by us provide opportunities to expand our understandings. Christianity has been the faith tradition of my family for generations, a belief system supportive of a relationship with the Divine. The humble birth of a Jewish infant to a family living under oppression and his execution by the state were parallel to the challenges in this world for African Americans.
As descendants of kidnapped Africans who survived the Transatlantic Slave Trade, members of the Black Church feel a strong connection to the biblical narrative of the Hebrew people, who had themselves been enslaved in a foreign land. Their experience of God using Moses to guide them to freedom was a beacon of assurance that God would liberate Blacks as well.
This awareness was mine when three generations of my family entered the Roman Catholic Church in a region where Catholics were a small minority among Christians identifying as Protestant. My
paternal aunt and grandparents did so in Ozark a short time before my immediate family did in our hometown. With only one parish in a racially segregated community, the two priests openly welcomed us. The parishioners in white bodies included those who embraced us and those who were challenged by the Spirit’s invitation to us to become Catholic. Our mere presence and involvement in the life of the parish was an affront to the normative, as was Jesus’ embrace of the Samaritan woman.
As a child, it was surprising for me to see that some family members and friends also found it problematic that we would join a “white” church. While we belonged to a parish in which most parishioners were in white bodies, I did not think of it as a white church. In my young mind, it was simply a Catholic parish and, as such, part of the universal church. It was my church.
It was affirming for me to see annual televised news reports from the Vatican as the Pope celebrated Christmas Midnight Mass and the Easter Vigil. Among the throngs of people gathered, the universality of the Church was apparent, even on a black-and-white television, as I saw scores of people who looked like my family, unlike the parish of my hometown. There was something significant in these images, beyond what I was able to express. My Church was intended to be inclusive, thereby transcending the flawed racial construct that dominated our society.
Dwelling in a racially segregated environment constantly provides opportunities to question racism for those willing to see what is happening beyond the normative. For generations, my family has appreciated education as a way to improve the odds of advancement, regardless of racist obstacles, and a way to serve the community. This was more apparent when schools were segregated racially. What was gained through education—formal or informal—could never be taken from anyone.
As a high school student, I made my first retreat when the Office of Youth Ministry for the Archdiocese of Mobile introduced Search for Christian Maturity. The three-day retreat brought together teens from across the southern part of the state to Montgomery Catholic High School. The racially diverse event was a pivotal moment for me, as I first experienced a spiritual high. This gathering allowed me to engage with other African American Catholic teens for the first time.
The enduring intergenerational trauma that began with my ancestors on the African continent and now resides within my body compels me to do more now, while breath is in my body.
It was this desire to be with others like myself that led me to enroll at Xavier University of Louisiana. Founded by Saint Katharine Drexel (1858–1955), Xavier is the only historically Black Roman Catholic college or university in the Western hemisphere. For the first time in my life, I lived in an environment that never questioned my faith.
Although I had wanted a Black Catholic environment as an undergraduate, there was no such consideration when planning for graduate school. After receiving the offer of an assistantship from the Office of Minority Graduate Student Recruitment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I was bound for New England. During my two years of study, I resided in a dormitory for students who identified as graduate and/or international. With more than 60 percent of the residents being from other countries, this proved to be one of the most enriching experiences of my life as I was immersed in a rich environment of diverse cultures, faiths, foods, and languages. What better way is there to learn from others than living together?
For the first time in my life, I developed friendships with members of the global community and the world’s other great faith traditions. In meeting Catholics from other countries, I began to see in new ways how faith and culture influence one another beyond my personal experiences. The richness of this period offered new ways of thinking. One
of the first surprises was students from other nations who questioned whether I was really from Alabama. My assumption was that I did not present the same limited stereotypes of Black women from the South as portrayed in American media.
Decades later, I remember the feeling of shifting my thinking. A woman from Taiwan was preparing a meal for a special cultural day. She was criticized by a citizen of the US for eating bacon that had been boiled as part of her recipe. Her quick response was to question the practice of placing a headless turkey on a holiday dinner table. How revealing was it that I had never considered the featured item on the Thanksgiving menu as a headless turkey? It is not as appealing as my father’s smoked turkey.
With friends who were Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh, it was commonplace to offer prayers across religious boundaries. It was during this period that my understanding of the Christian God began to expand to God, the Divine Mystery. It was a surprise for me that my more expansive perspective of the Divine enriched my Catholic faith in ways I can still not verbalize. Who am I to consider limiting or denying the enlivened expression of the Divine Mystery?
It was during my time in Massachusetts that I learned about parishes with ethnic identities. It was surprising to learn of cities that were home to an Irish parish, an Italian parish, a Polish parish, and a French-Canadian parish. This was new to me. While the ethnic identities were not necessarily accurate descriptors of the current membership, the labels of origin remained. I could never image such practices in Alabama, where the simple dualism of white supremacy reigned. In southern cities, African Americans who were denied full participation in parishes because of white supremacy established their own faith communities.
Upon my move home, I learned that Fr. Patrick Maher (1927–2017), the priest who had accompanied my aunt and grandparents into the Catholic church in Ozark, was in retirement in my hometown parish. From our conversations, I learned that he had been ordained in Ireland in 1954 to serve in what was then the Diocese of Mobile. His first assignment was at St. Jude’s, the parish and school that served the African American community in Montgomery. In his own words, he said it was through this assignment that he first came to know and love Black people and that he would have been a very different priest
without this lived experience. This was the only assignment in which he cried when it ended.
Fr. Maher arrived in Montgomery one year before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) began serving as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. When I asked about his support of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Fr. Maher said that he had provided transportation for those boycotting the unjust system, but he wished he had done more. My regret is not having invited him to share more.
My body experienced a visceral response to the continuing violence known as white-body supremacy upon the 2020 murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others. It led me to ask, “Am I next?” I had long forgotten the sensation, the angst, but clearly my body remembered it from my childhood during the challenges of the Civil Rights Movement. The enduring intergenerational trauma that began with my ancestors on the African continent and now resides within my body compels me to do more now, while breath is in my body.
In the southern US, public affirmations of faith by Christians are commonplace and considered virtuous. From my perspective, they are interwoven with the illusion of southern hospitality. People from other parts of the country quickly notice how easily southerners make eye contact and speak to passersby. “Have a good day,” rolls off our tongues as effortlessly as our southern accents. We can easily have polite conversations about blue skies, the need for rain, the intense heat, the high humidity, and college football.
Being from a rural part of the country, I recognize the value of manure as fertilizer. However, once it becomes rancid, it is of no value. Southern hospitality is a form of snow-covered, rancid manure. It is not how it appears. If it were genuine for the majority of those living in the region, our history and present would be models for the study of human dignity. The racial disparities revealing the enshrinement of white supremacy would be nonexistent.
A few years ago, I was interviewed by a journalist for Vatican Radio. A member of the African diaspora, she commented that Alabama was known as a place where Black people were famous for fighting against oppression. I was shocked as a sense of pride swept over me. Her words were true. How had I not recognized this truth?
Even in societies identifying as Christian, the heart of the Gospel of the Universal Christ is not normative. It always beats in response
to Jesus’ reading from Torah (Isaiah 61:1): “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.” ·
Touching Butterflies
By Cindy Kroll
Francis called all creatures, no matter how small, by the name of brother and sister, because he knew they had the same source as himself.
—Bonaventure
One summer several years ago, for a short season, parts of the natural world inexplicably lost their fear of me. I’d developed an illness that had not yet been diagnosed, one that left me feeling like I was living in a smoky fog that was slowly choking the vitality from my mind and body. It cast me into the thinnest of places, where I was quite literally slowed down—my feet were so painful that stepping onto a hard floor without slippers at times brought tears to my eyes—but also created a spiritual causeway that led me to the CAC as a Living School student, and eventually to a role on staff overseeing finances.
As the illness progressed, I began to spend hours in nature. People felt foreign: too fast, too unpredictable. And it appeared that the
monarch butterflies, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and crickets recognized something different about me. I could gently touch them, just a feather’s touch at the edge of their wing or their body. I could hold out my hand and a dragonfly would land on my finger. My kids began to demand I show them, like a circus trick. I couldn’t find answers to what was happening to my body, but it was as if the world around me was confirming that whatever was eluding diagnosis was not eluding notice. I discovered Fr. Richard Rohr’s work during this time and eventually felt led to apply to the Living School, looking for words for what was rising, and was accepted into the program. I found myself introduced to a community that spoke a similar language, that recognized and experienced this mystery in their own striking ways. Eventually a diagnosis came, then a surgery that brought an immediate clearing of my mind and a slower but steady healing of my body. And with it, the curtain closed. I was cast back into my own world.
I’ve always been drawn to nature as a means of connection to God, but after that experience I began to watch more closely. I began to see my place in it, as it, no longer visiting as a foreigner but inherently belonging. One day, I noticed the leaves of the maple that draped onto the deck where I journaled every morning all summer. I contemplated the ways in which that tree sustained me with its shade, its oxygen. Then I realized that after all these years of living in community with that tree, I was not only looking at a tree, but also a physical manifestation of converted carbon dioxide, perhaps some of which had come from the exhales I’d laid upon its leaves, day after day. I wondered what tiny sliver of the branch might be made of my own captured breath.
I also wonder if taking the time to contemplate the natural world, to experience the felt imminence of how we are already and always part of each other, might be one way to help understand what Fr. Richard calls Other Stories. It might be showing us that when we participate in community outside Our Story, the result is not a loss of our diversity, but instead an invitation to hold a piece of others’ stories within us, to accept the wisdom of what is offered deeply enough that it takes hold as part of us.
A couple summers after my surgery, my family decided to grow milkweed to feed the monarch butterflies. We gathered the tiny caterpillars and placed them in safe harbor on a couple of the plants we potted and placed in a net enclosure. It sat on the deck where I spent
my mornings. I watched them closely, fascinated by the organized way in which they methodically consumed the milkweed, munching along the edge of a leaf, row by row.
One appeared to stop moving one day, and I wondered if it had died. It lay motionless for the day. In the morning, it had changed. It was larger and its markings were subtly but noticeably different. The dark detritus of a shed skin lay around it. The caterpillar had passed into a new instar stage, what I soon learned was one of five instars before it eventually formed into a chrysalis.
Although we all recognize the grand final transformation to a butterfly, I’ve noticed my own experiences of transformation have involved much smaller shifts, grounded in stillness. I am often prompted, as was the caterpillar, to halt and wait, pulled to pause and surrender (in what often feels like humiliation) something else that I finally recognize does not serve Love.
One of my favorite poems is “The Summer Day,”1 the wellknown classic by Mary Oliver. On mugs, posters, and even tattoos we are reminded of its urgent final question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” But my favorite words are much earlier, and only two: “this grasshopper.” In these two words, she demonstrates how to see. She brings us to know, as Fr. Richard calls it, “the scandal of the particular”: not any grasshopper, but this grasshopper. And not only that singular creature, but the window into the universal story that it reveals as a result of her willingness to slow down long enough to truly see it.
That grasshopper, that caterpillar, that tree all call me to something that feels like community. They offer something in themselves that points me to The Story in which we all participate together. As I learned in the Living School, we can only recognize what is already part of us. These ephemeral creatures, in that way, mirror and illuminate our own eternal spark as well as their own.
Often, it seems like what I am experiencing is simply a remembering of what indigenous cultures would consider common knowledge. Notably, my experiences most often occur on the margins, in moments of unrushed stillness. In The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry describes the farmers in the Andes who preserved margins of untilled soil as a place to nurture diversity, a seedbed of creative evolution that resulted in the proliferation of durable plants in a region
of varying microclimates on the different mountainside elevations. If part of our work in this moment is to remember, it might be more important than ever that we make space to listen to each other’s stories.
At CAC, I am now tasked with helping to steward the financial resources we’ve been blessed to receive from our community. I am curious how Mother Earth, the creative feminine, might help walk us all toward a place of sustainable financial flourishing. At a time when she’s showing with growing clarity the impact of our choices, how can we allow her to guide us, through her unrelenting, generous immediacy, to a healthy relationship with money?
Through this lens, I begin to see that our organization is just one part of a web of organizations connected deeply to each other, perhaps sometimes unseen, as roots connect trees underground. The money flowing and the people interacting in and between them are the embodied reality of relationship, connecting what seems at times contrived, unrelated, and unconnected to the natural world. Could we even consider the patterns of nature as a model—say, the profusion of seeds the maple provides each spring—and recognize them not as merely an insurance policy for the tree’s own survival, but also as participation in a communal generosity that creates the potential for all to thrive?
In the end, what I experienced during my illness was a brief opening that came and then fell back away. As I healed, words aligned to experience, ordered it, and formed it into something I could communicate to others. But this language feels more like a pointer than the real Story. There’s still a tether down to a place I can only sense, not name. Time spent in intentional relationship with the natural world holds the tether at the surface, in what feels like an ongoing invitation. Just a couple summers ago, long past the medical issues but again dwelling in a liminal space due to new disorder in my life, I walked slowly toward the park I’d visited thousands of times. It was a warm summer morning, but the shaded sidewalk remained cold and wet with dew. A movement caught my eye; it was a monarch struggling on the sidewalk, its wings stuck against the wet concrete. I stooped down, picked up a small twig, and offered it to the butterfly. It immediately climbed on. I walked, carrying it hanging from the twig, and brought it to a sun-drenched bush in the park. It climbed dutifully off the twig and onto a branch. I wondered if I should wait, but decided to move on. When I came back the same way, it was gone. ·
From the Conceptual to the Contextual
By Lisa E. Powell
Ilooked up the word “cosmic” in the dictionary. It’s one of those words where I think I know what it means until I stop to think about its meaning. According to Merriam-Webster, cosmic means “of or relating to the cosmos, the extraterrestrial vastness, or the universe in contrast to the earth alone; of, relating to, or concerned with abstract spiritual or metaphysical ideas; cosmic wisdom.”1
Ah! It’s likely the “abstract spiritual” wisdom is where I’m getting tripped up. I must examine my own experiences and develop my own interpretations. Like a flag flapping in the wind, the metaphysics of it are hard to grasp. Just when I think I’ve captured an edge, it escapes me.
Still, flags help me go from the conceptual to the contextual. In My Story, flags have helped me question “my limited and limiting frame of reference,” “my group, and its leaders.”2 They have also
facilitated my journey into my own soul and individuated woundedness. Our Story’s flagpoles have helped me poke holes in the history of my family, group, nation, and religion, and The Story needs no flags.
My favorite personal flag story occurred at the age of twentyseven. I had spent six months abroad—three months in New Zealand followed by three months in Australia. I was headed back to the States, and I wasn’t happy. I dragged myself off Bondi Beach near Sydney to return to the soggy gray skies of a midwestern spring. A fourteenhour overnight flight during which I was sandwiched between two big men also left me feeling uncomfortable.
Upon landing, I groggily made my way to US Customs. To my surprise, it was a very impressive sight, with several huge US flags hanging from the ceiling. There was no mistaking that I was back on home soil.
I shuffled my way to the front of the line. The customs agent was a large man who seemed to tower over me. He looked at me
Surely, we must have learned
sternly. He looked at my passport. He looked back at me. He studied my face. He looked back at the passport. There were a couple more rounds of this scrutiny before a huge smile erupted on his face as he looked at me and said, “Welcome home.” I choked up, barely squeaking out a “thank you” as he handed me my passport. Suddenly I was happy to be home, despite my worldview being turned on its head during my time abroad. The flags were there to witness and welcome my reentry. To this day, thirty years later, I believe travel is the best teacher.
Something else I learned during that trip is that the world doesn’t necessarily see America the way that much of America sees America, especially in families like mine, where any comments considered to be criticism—however constructively intended—were shut down and shushed up. Critical thinking was considered just plain critical. While cracked eggshells are welcomed when eating hard-boiled eggs, we could not allow cracks in our façade for fear of seeing what’s underneath. Instead, Our Story paints America as the savior of the world.
Once, when my former husband and I drove down the street toward my childhood home, he looked out the window and asked, “Is today a national holiday that I don’t know about?” It wasn’t. Flying the American flag is a strong tradition in the Midwest, especially in the summer. Memorial Day celebrations were complete with planting pansies, decked-out bicycles, and proud, flag-waving parades. Baking cherry pies and setting off fireworks were essential on the Fourth of July. That’s the middle-class environment in which I was raised. I wanted for nothing, and I wanted more.
Shortly after my trip Down Under, I moved to New Mexico. When asked what I like most about the state, I say it’s the blue skies, the cultural diversity, and the green and red chiles. Now I need to add the state flag, despite—or perhaps because of—its cultural appropriation from the Zia Pueblo. The red Zia symbol floats on a bright yellow background. It’s simplicity, genius; it’s symbolism, sacred. After twenty-eight years of living in New Mexico, I can honestly say it represents My Story, Our Stories, and The Story in my life.
that all our stories are connected.
As I write this, flags from all around the world are flying high and proud at the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo, Japan. I admit that I still find something very compelling about seeing an American—or Americans—standing atop a podium with gold medals draped from their necks, Stars and Stripes behind them, and the Star-Spangled Banner playing for all to hear. We see the flag raised for our silver and bronze medal winners too. The years of training endured by “our” athletes are a source of pride for most Americans, even though we had nothing to do with their success or their sacrifice.
The Olympics are being held amidst a global pandemic caused by a deadly virus that knows no borders and does not discriminate. My first Olympic memory was as a four-year-old child, standing in my grandparents’ living room watching American Peggy Fleming gracefully figure skate her way to a gold medal in Grenoble, France. Four years later, I learned about evil for the first time amidst the televised tragedy of eleven Israeli athletes killed by the virus of hate during the Munich Olympics.
Most days, I feel like I am on the edge of The Story. When it comes to The Story, I typically experience a crisis of confidence. As Fr. Richard Rohr says, confidence is found in the mysterious alchemy of faith, hope, and love. It’s hard to feel confident when all I can do is hope I have enough faith and love when my spirit is flagging and that next gust of wind is upon me.
With the past year and a half filled so full of tragedy as well as unexpected grace and abundant blessings—a time where, surely, we must have learned that all our stories are connected—rather than representing each country by its individual flag, perhaps humanity and The Story would be better represented by one flag—the interlocking Olympic rings—wherein we might see, once and for all, that no one wins if we don’t all share equally in the universal “thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”3
There has to be solid ground, trust, and shared security, or we cannot move outward. There has to be a foundational hope, and for hope to be a shared experience there must be agreed-upon meanings and shared stories that excite and inspire us all. If these are truly stories from the great patterns that are always true, they will catapult us into a universal humanity, a pluralistic society, where we can both stand on solid ground and, from that solid ground, create common ground. If it does not support our movement outward, then it is not solid ground at all.4 ·
Listening to Learn about Our Own Stories
By Peter Levenstrong
The room was full of mostly white, liberal Christian folks, and I was sitting in the back. The subject of the talk was ultimate consciousness and how that interacts with the current social struggles of the world in which we live. The speaker, who is both white and straight, said that “black people and gay people often have a harder time ascending to this level of ultimate consciousness, because they’re so wrapped up in their identity of being black or gay.” Though the speaker didn’t go so far as to say that issues of civil rights are unimportant or should be ignored, the message was clear: Social concerns like justice and equity for people of various identities are, at best, a “distraction” from the main focus of a contemplative life.
I was floored. I looked around me, at the room full of silent white faces (or even nodding heads) and couldn’t believe that we were all going to just accept this as fact. Did no one even feel like challenging the assertion that cisgender/heterosexual white folks like me had an inherently easier time of coming to greater awareness and consciousness, and that we didn’t have our own identities that got in the way of our progress? Had we not proven, time and time again, that the assumption of white normativity (where the privileged identity is seen as “normal” and anything other than a privileged identity is seen as adding a layer of identity that otherwise isn’t present) is baseless and flawed?
In fact, it is for the very reason just mentioned that I think people of privileged identities like myself have more work to do on the level of Our Story, rather than less, before they can truly come to recognize The Story. Many of us are not even aware of our own stories and the stories of our ancestors, and don’t realize the way that we still benefit to this day from the systems set up by our forebears. Consequently, we have so much more work to do. This is because disadvantaged folk, in my experience, tend to have a much stronger grasp on the reality of the status quo and the complexity of Our Story/Their Story than those who benefit from the way things are, if for no other reason than that they have to, in order to survive.
For liberal white Christians who like to spend their time focused on the level of The Story without engaging in the details of Our Story/ Their Story, this message may be a bit hard to swallow. But the truth is, in addition to the fundamentalists, zealots, and people who use religion to disguise their real belief system, there are plenty of liberal white folks in our country who haven’t spent adequate time learning about the reality of life in our society—that of their own life, or that of others.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, arguably one of the most liberal pockets within the United States. The last time our nine counties leaned Republican in a presidential election was in 1980, and that was for a fellow Californian. We like to think of ourselves as the enlightened future of the United States, but for many people of color, the present Bay Area isn’t working out too great. On a recent webinar about housing in the Bay Area, I felt quite convicted to hear Fred Blackwell, the CEO of the San Francisco Community Foundation, say the following about the racist implementation of housing policy:
We like to think of ourselves as a dark blue region in a blue state. We have this perception of ourselves as liberal, progressive, tolerant, [and] inclusive. And frankly, when it comes to race and economic status, our perception of ourselves is out of line with reality. When I think about the kind of things that we tolerate... we should be ashamed of ourselves.1
This is why the dual focus of action and contemplation is so critical: because we can’t come to know God without first knowing and understanding the specific context of the world in which we live, so that we can hear God’s voice in the fight for justice, for equity, for all people. It is through the particular that we can come to know the universal, and if we think we know the universal without actually understanding the context of the particular, then we’ve got a false image of the universal.
There are plenty of ways to learn about our own particular stories and the stories of others. One of the best resources I’ve come across (other than the numerous helpful books written by BIPOC authors such as Anthea Butler, Austin Channing Brown, and Teresa Mateus, to name a few) is the program called Sacred Ground, a free curriculum designed and paid for by the Episcopal Church for Episcopal congregations (and anyone who chooses to partner with them) to learn about the intersection of race and faith in our society. Over the course of ten sessions, participants in Sacred Ground learn about whiteness, the particular histories and present realities of various communities of color, and what sort of efforts are working to change the status quo. In the congregation where I am engaged in ministry, St. Gregory’s of Nyssa in San Francisco, we went through this program in partnership with a neighboring Roman Catholic church. The program was so profoundly impactful for our congregants that we decided to do it again, offering it as a repeat for anybody who decided they want to delve deeper into what they learned, or for anyone else who wasn’t able to go through it the first time.
There are many ways to get involved in learning about and engaging with the Our Story/Their Story levels of the Cosmic Egg. But for me, as a Christian, they all boil down to one thing: learning from others what it means to follow in the steps of Jesus as he leads us in the great cosmic dance through this life and beyond. Unlike God,
Often the people who are most marginalized have the sharpest understanding of the way the world works.
whom “no one has ever seen” (John 1:18), Jesus became incarnate as a particular human being in a particular place and time in the world; he “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). It is through getting to know his context, seeing how he acted and interacted with other people, as well as how other people responded to him, that we can come to know God, and know where God is leading us today.
Again, it’s through the particular that we come to know the universal, and it’s often the people who are most marginalized who have the sharpest understanding of the way the world works. So, when we read the story of the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4:1–42) entering into a verbal and theological wrestling match with Jesus, it makes a huge difference to know the fact that Samaritans and Jews did not speak with each other, and especially that a woman talking privately to a man was absolutely taboo. Knowing and understanding this cultural context (Our Story/Their Story) impacts how we come to know God’s nature (The Story) as one that prizes the voices of those whom others deem unworthy or undeserving. And looking for stories from modern-day women who are marginalized, on a basis of both gender and race, sheds light on those to whom God is leading us to pay more attention, such as the women of color who find their own voices in a toxic work environment, or in an unhealthy community setting, and begin to speak up for themselves despite the danger it might pose to them and their careers.
Likewise, if you’ve read the beatitudes in Matthew 5, you’ll be familiar with the teaching to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:44–45). Knowing who was persecuting the Jews of Jesus’ time makes a huge difference to understanding this teaching. Jesus wasn’t just speaking in a vacuum, about persecution
in general, but rather to the particular context of Roman imperial rule. He wasn’t just talking about “enemies” such as other people in your workplace or church community whom you find to be really annoying. The type of “enemy” he’s addressing is a Roman soldier who can impel you to forced labor, impose extractive taxes, and imprison you. I’ve never had such an enemy in my life, so it’s hard for me to imagine the depth of love and prayer that Jesus is asking of us, but there are many people in our society today who have faced very similar situations and yet are still able to live up to Jesus’ calling. Hearing the stories of single mothers with children who have been evicted and forced out onto the street, and yet who find the strength within themselves to show the sheriff and their landlord respect and even pray for their wellbeing, profoundly impacts my awareness of what Jesus’ teachings actually look like when played out in the world.
Finally, understanding the context of Jesus’ crucifixion and death makes all the difference for practicing Christians as we engage with Our Story/Their Story. Understanding that Jesus was killed by crucifixion because he manifested a political threat to the stability of the Roman Empire in the Judean province (as the “king of the Jews”) transforms our perspective of the pinnacle event of the Christian story, from both a theological and a social lens. It also speaks directly to how we interpret such modern-day events as the lynching of black men by mobs of white men, or by white men in police uniforms. They are killed because they pose a threat to our society’s stability and status quo. Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection is God’s once-for-all judgment upon systems of state-sanctioned violence or murder, and it’s time that more Christians paid attention to the details of Our Story/Their Story in the Gospels and recognize what that says about God’s Story—The Story—and how our current social structures fit in (or don’t).
As contemplatives living in the modern-day world, we have a lot of great examples to follow as we learn to engage on the levels of both Our Story/Their Story and The Story. Many of our greatest contemplative role models—Teresa of Ávila, Howard Thurman, Thomas Merton—were deeply involved in the social movements of their time and laid the groundwork for future nonviolent activism. For those who came from places of privilege, they first had to learn from people who were facing the brunt of systemic oppression to get
a clearer picture of what was happening. For those who did not come from privilege, that knowledge was second nature to them, because it was necessary for their survival.
Those of us who are white and liberal can all too easily be tricked into thinking that we know all there is to know about Our Story/ Their Story, when in fact the version we’ve been told is full of halftruths and mythic lies. These lies build up a false sense of complacency with the world that is unmerited and undeserved. Rather than thinking of ourselves as occupying a place of advantage when it comes to knowing (and transcending) the level of Our Story/Their Story, let us recognize that we have so much more learning to do. This learning often looks like listening to the people who are most marginalized by the current systems of the world in which we live and privileging their voices over our own or those who look like us, because it’s usually the people who are impacted the most by the systems in which we live who have the most accurate and truthful understanding about Our Story/Their Story. ·
Gateway to Knowing
By Felicia Murrell
Inever questioned the world in which I grew up. I followed the rhythms set for me by those around me, understanding the world and how to situate myself in it through the lenses and lives of those in authority over me. I learned to orient myself to their whims and flights of fancy. I learned when it was necessary to shrink myself, to make myself disappear.
In the small rural North Carolina town of my youth, Blacks lived on one side of the tracks and Whites on the other. The grocery stores, diners, convenience store, post office, schools, and gas stations were across the tracks, on the White side of town. On our side of the tracks, only a small store my great-uncle owned, the candy lady’s home, and three predominantly Black churches were easily accessible to us. Even in the late seventies and on into the early eighties, we stepped off the sidewalk when White people walked past, turning our gaze downward or to the side, never making direct eye contact. We paused
our movement to let them enter establishments first, and on the rare occasion that we got to eat at Jones’ (the local café), we called in our food order and then crossed the railroad tracks to the café’s back door, where we gave our money to the one Black worker and retrieved our greasy hamburgers and hot dogs in a small paper sack. Nothing about this life seemed abnormal. This was Our Story.
As a child, I existed in a world of play, family, and church—and then I went to school, where I interacted with White people for the first time. And with play being such an integral part of the world in which I grew up, it never dawned on me that asking my White classmates, “Can I come over to your house to play?” was taboo.
I was five. What did I know about situational ethics and contextual relationships?
More than four decades have passed since I posed that question, but I’ll never forget the replies of those twin sisters in my kindergarten class. One shook her head and said, “You’re a secret. We can’t play with you when we’re not at school.” “Why?” I asked in five-year-old naïveté. The other sister answered, “Cause you’re a [n-word]. My grandma don’t want us playing with [n-word].”
I shrugged off their comments, and we continued our play as if nothing cruel had transpired, yet indelible ink wrote across the pages of my heart in crisp kindergarten crayon scribble: I’m good enough to play with at school but not good enough to be invited into your home. That day, the measuring stick known as comparison, etched with varying degrees of insignificance and unworthiness, formed in the recesses of my soul. And long into adulthood, I would constantly be measuring myself by how well I adapted and fit into whiteness.
By the time that happened at school, I had more questions burrowing into my little five-year-old brain than I knew what to do with. Why did people stop talking and stare at us with mean glares if we went through the front door at Jones’? Why did we have to go to the back door? Why did they only have one Black person working across
Success and advancement were Others’ Stories, for people across town on the other side of the tracks.
town? Why was the dance studio in our town only for White girls? Why did we tame our joy and become quiet in the presence of White people? Why wouldn’t the twins’ grandmother let me play at their house? And why did that n-word feel bad? Why? Why? Why?
There were so many things that didn’t make sense, but the tracks stilled my questions. Years later, Dr. Barbara Holmes would help me understand that the framework for My Story has always been a blackness shaped in response to whiteness, particularly as one raised in the rural South, where Our Story was formed on lynching trees that bore strange fruit: heightened awareness, cautious docility, silence. No one talked about race. No one expressed discontent or named things aloud. No one mentioned the way things were. We didn’t buck the system. We kept our heads down and did what we were supposed to do. Success and advancement were Others’ Stories, for people across town on the other side of the tracks. We were to stay in our place and follow the natural order of things, which I did until I no longer could.
Like matryoshka dolls nesting within one another, My Story as a small child was a fragmented, compartmentalized part of Our Story. In the shadow of dominant voices, My Story felt less essential, even unnecessary. Without a clear understanding of the whole, My Story was incomplete. But My Story was all I knew until I was exposed to Other Stories.
My grandmother left the Deep South before I was born, migrating north to Washington, DC. There, she and my grandfather carved out a life of joy amid toil. And, in the summer, my brother and I were fortunate enough to ride the Greyhound bus, carrying foil-wrapped ham sandwiches and cold fried chicken, to join them. Our grandmother was intentional about exposure. Believing idle time to be the devil’s workshop, she structured our summers with visits to the zoo, museums, the Mint, and the Capitol; swimming; fountain wading at Union Station; and she introduced us to the performing arts. Without us ever boarding a plane, my grandmother made sure we knew the world was bigger than Clayton, North Carolina. There were Other Stories, and while these outings merely served as introductions, she helped us see the possibility of these stories being available to us as well. My grandmother’s intentionality gifted me with points of connection to a larger story beyond my narrow worldview.
When we remain stuck in the loop of Our Story without consideration of Other Stories, particularly when “Our” is framed in (or lived in response to) a Eurocentric, patriarchal, dominant paradigm as the standard of measurement for all Other Stories, we are left with an incomplete model.
Exposure to Other Stories is an invitation, a gateway to knowing. But it’s merely that—an opportunity to know. A welcoming and acceptance of diversity may create familiarity, but it’s not the same as knowing. Deep, intimate knowing empowers agency, offers reciprocity, and, through mutuality, affords us the opportunity to be the custodians of our own story without being othered as an aside or a concession to dissent.
From kindergarten through university, I played, studied, and participated in groups and teams alongside White people, but there was no interest in intimate knowing. I’ve worked with White people in the workplace and I have gone to church with White people for most of my adult life. Some would even say we were friends, but there has been no interest in deep knowing. We’ve mingled contextually, but not with the kind of knowing that re-members, re-joins, re-collects. Any story without deep, intimate knowing leaves the parties untouched.
Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “The energetic bandwidth in which the heart works is intimacy, the capacity to perceive things from the inside by coming into sympathetic resonance with them. . . . The heart takes its bearings directly from the whole.”1
Intimacy—into me you see.
Empathy is imagined embodiment, placing myself into the Story of another and gazing through their eyes: seeing their lived experience; thinking for perhaps the first time how that person would feel encountering certain things—certain policies, language, or interactions; receiving their pain, but not through a myopic imagining that one might have apart from this deep intimacy.
Empathy transcends the imagining of a life we never have to personally live, making the kindred connection that allows our hearts to break open to the painful, fearful, or even joyous experiences of another in such a deep way that we can never again unknow what we’ve come to know. Empathy fosters deep knowing.
And there, in the clear-eyed seeing of who we are to one another— interconnected, where nothing lives separate and distinct from the
Transcendence is not a denial or detachment from My Story or Our Story. It is an arduous commitment to truth-telling.
other, where there is uniqueness of personhood and space for the ways in which we vary and are different from one another—is the invitation into the possibility of the moment.
Intimate, empathetic knowing allows for “sympathetic resonance,” a melding of hearts forged in the weaving of stories and lives together until there is only The Story, which is the restoration of all things as all are oned in the Oneing of Love.
Only Love is finite, and in the bounty of Love, we are held and we are known.
Within the frame of both/and, Our Story and Other Stories weave together in the native language of be-ing, which is oneness. This is not a oneness that spiritually bypasses the beauty of particularity, but one that harmoniously holds the complexity of all things in their distinct and unique specificity. It doesn’t require people to become “pure, white light” or a blob of detached personhood to reach the highest level of homeostasis or enlightenment. Instead, it honors the colorful spectrum of humanity without trying to erase or deny its biodiversity. Oneness undergirds distinction, diversity, and multiplicity. In this Oneing that celebrates all difference, we can each live into our full humanity, embracing our truest, most authentic selves, and give ourselves to the well-being of others in perichoretic mutuality without fear of absorption or domination.
The image of Russian nesting dolls, all carved from the same wood, shaped the same, painted the same, feels fitting when thinking of where we are in the world today. Fear rises as some rush to erase or reimagine history. It’s a world where calls for peace and unity feel weaponized. Colorblindness replaces clear-eyed seeing, lost amid our need for ease, for sameness. Pressure mounts to decry the harmonious voices, exclaiming in concert for a chord of sameness. Same feels safe.
Same feels comfortable. It requires no effort and little thought. Same can be achieved on autopilot. The appeal of sameness is that it doesn’t require us to be present or aware in the way that is required when wading through the messy complexity of being human and being in relationship with other messy, complex humans.
Could this be why we need to produce maps to explain the mysteries of our complexity as humans? We erect pillars of certainty—tidy, neat guideposts that reduce our vibrant existence into small, static pictures. Maps are fixed, finite, and once we’ve memorized our mapped route, we often navigate unconsciously—until change, like a global pandemic, creates unfamiliar detours.
What if the Universe is not asking for yet another map to attempt to make sense of the world as we know it? What if the tension is an invitation to let go and allow mystery without attempting to quantify or explain it? What if we surrendered to change, to this invitation into a new story, one not dominated by Eurocentric patriarchal rationalization? Like a singular wave rising up and out of a larger body of water, My Story blends into Our Story, yielding to the change of our energetic makeup. “By being receptive to the things that we don’t understand,” writes Dr. Barbara Holmes in her latest book, Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Global Village, “we fling open the center of our being to the mysteries of the Divine.”2
All that you touch You Change.
All that you Change Changes you.
The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.3
How do we honor our uniqueness while destroying varying degrees of separation? How do we move toward each other in love, the truth of our authentic power? Perhaps, we welcome change instead of resisting it. To expand my worldview beyond the paradigm of Southern, Christian, rural or working poor to a larger cosmic frame that is inclusive, universal, affirming, and accepting, I needed to see the parts and the whole in all their majestic splendor and their messy complexity.
Transcendence is not a denial or detachment from My Story or Our Story. It is an arduous commitment to truth-telling; to fully seeing; to empathetic listening that requires the work of living and be-ing in the world; of deep, intimate knowing; of moving beyond our theories and maps into relationship building. This is not a quick work, nor is it an easy work. The work is rife with tension and discomfort and necessitates patience, time, humility, and kindness.
Perhaps Love is inviting us to embrace fluidity, to ebb and flow, to move with the current, to shapeshift in ways that are no longer disjointed, fragmented, or separated into neat, tidy categories. Bodies of water are always changing. Unimpeded, ocean water spills into gulfs. Gulfs spill into rivers. Rivers spill into lakes. Lakes spill into tributaries. All are commingling as one, interdependent, interconnected, yet distinct in their purpose—just as Our Stories are commingled, interconnected, interdependent, spilling over and into one another, back and forth in the Oneing of Love. ·
Mything the Point of My Story
By Michael Petrow
Carl G. Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychologist and explorer of the soul par excellence, claimed we find the meaning of our life in our stories; they function as the true scripture—the Word of God1 —for us. Origen of Alexandria (c. 184–c. 253), who heavily influenced Jung, claimed that it is essential to examine our stories because God “makes the height of spiritual health and blessedness to consist in the knowledge and understanding of oneself.”2 Both men seemed to think that exploring my story deeply would somehow lead us to know others and God authentically. Jung wrote:
Self-knowledge is not an isolated process. . . . Nobody can know himself and differentiate himself from his neighbor if he has a distorted picture of him, just as no one can understand his neighbor if he had no relationship to himself. The one conditions the other and the two processes go hand in hand.3
It seems that from the moment we are born, we start telling and being told stories about how the world is. We cobble these together to form an internal “GPS” to help us navigate life—to find our way in and around the world:
God, or the gods—our master narratives about the fundamental principles of existence, what some have called The Story.
People —our beliefs about humanity, society, relationships, and social systems, what some have called Y/Our Story.
Self —My Story, everything that I think I know about myself.
This GPS exists to help us explore the world, to get out and encounter others, to listen deeply and learn. In theory, knowing My Story helps me to empathize and meet others in Y/Our Story. Combining our shared experience is my best guess as to whatever The Story might be. I run into problems when I start to fall in love with My Story about reality and project it out onto everyone else, mistaking My Story for Y/Our Story and The Story. Then my GPS stops updating.
But life is often kind enough to steer us off the map, right into a situation where our GPS fails us, and we crash into the rocks of irreconcilable paradox, something too big for our schema. Jung went so far as to say that God orchestrates radical confrontations with others and reality to get us out of our willfulness and subjectivity.4 While we need this “stripping of the veils of illusion” to encounter reality, it is very painful and dangerous, and feels like a death.5 Often our sense of self, understanding of the world, and faith in God/the gods fall apart.
I’ve lived this. Both my parents, my brother, and I all started out as pastors. Like so many people, I was deeply let down by the Evangelical Story, church leaders, and who I became in that system. So, I cast it off and found a better version of The Story, pursuing comparative religious studies and psychology.
By 2008, I was in a doctoral program that I loved and working in my dream job, leading a progressive spiritual community attached to a Manhattan theater. Then, in six months’ time, my brother had taken his own life; my brother’s daughter had been born without a father; the stock market had crashed, wiping out my dream job; and
my mother had died with very little warning. The new story that I thought I was living had fallen apart, externally and internally.
In theory, our stories give us a sense of coherence in the midst of chaos. “We are all tellers of tales. We each seek to provide our scattered and often confusing experiences with a sense of coherence by arranging the episodes of our lives into stories.”6 I believed in the right to write as a rite, as the primary way that I explored myself and others, and talked to God/the gods. But in the midst of this chaos, I found rest only in contemplation. I cherished being invited to move beyond words and narrative, letting go of faith in any story of coherence. I ceased journaling, verbal prayer, and looking for meaning in it all.
As the years have gone by, I’ve found that just because I think I’m done with My Story doesn’t mean it’s done with me. In fact, my trying to ignore it has only invited it to wreak havoc in my life, coloring the present with the past, often without my realizing it. Jung frequently warned us how often we confuse our unconscious stories with fate. I’ve used “contemplation” to avoid going back and working with those moments, letting that story retell itself to me and offer me new layers of meaning.
But lately, I’ve come to realize contemplation is deep listening, not deep ignoring.
Interestingly, Jung claimed that just when the GPS we’ve written fails, an inner GPS quietly comes online, a “central guidance system”7 of sorts that begins leading us to the story we didn’t want to see, or couldn’t see: the shadow story— which is not the false story, but the unseen reality we meet in radical confrontations with others and ourselves.
So, I’ve started listening to that inner GPS and letting her re/tell me stories. I let myself return again to what Origen called “the care for self-knowledge,”8 which comes of reading and writing “the books of the soul” and “the pages of our heart”9 and asking the questions Jung believed are most important: What myth am I living?10 and What is its meaning?
Contemplation is deep listening, not deep ignoring.
I’ve let myself use the word myth instead of story for the following reasons.
Myths are messy, full of contradictions, as I am full of contradictions. I think about my brother’s suicide: I love my brother; I hate my brother. I forgive my brother; I resent my brother. I miss my brother; I feel his presence with me at all times. I am nothing like him, and I hate how much we are alike. I think also about my life: I am grateful for my losses and how they opened me up, but I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy, and I would never seek to relive them. Origen stated that our mind lives between feeling one way, and then another—at all times.
Myths are multiple. Have you ever playfully argued with family or friends who remember the same story differently? If you were to record yourself telling the same story once a week for a month, then go back and listen, chances are even you tell the same story differently at different times. We are a collection of different stories that contradict each other and don’t line up accurately on a timeline. Jung claimed that in fact these variant stories actually reflect the “polycentric”11 shape of our souls. Many “little people”12 exist inside of us, multiple personalities with multiple voices and multiple stories, and this is natural and healthy. James Hillman (1926–2011) wrote that “we too are ultimately a composition,” “always constituted of multiple parts.”13 Learning to listen to them equips us to hear the many stories of numerous different people outside of us. We are multiple selves at the same time, always living in the wheel of the samsara of the self. Embracing the plurality inside of us equips us to embrace the plurality outside of us.
In fact, Origen told us that this is why scripture is shaped the way it is—full of contradictions like a human person: “For just as man consists of body, soul, and spirit, so in the same way does scripture, which has been prepared by God for man’s salvation.”14 For example, in exploring how “one” is experienced as “a diversity of persons” in Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung in fact cited Origen, who wrote: “See how he who thinks himself one is not one, but seems to have as many personalities as he has moods.”15 Why does the Bible offer so many different versions of the same stories? Quite simply because we do, every day. Psyche is multiple, and that’s the whole point.
I ache for how my poor brother could not bring his personal lifestyle in line with what he thought was expected of him as an evangelical pastor. He ended up living a lie—or, more accurately, lying to live. His life and death remind me to celebrate my inconsistencies and multiplicities, to keep telling and living my stories in as many different ways as I need to, letting them contradict each other and remembering the vitality is in the variance.
Myths are always in the middle. As a spiritual director, I often hear, “I don’t really know where to start this story.” I always respond, “Start in the middle, because we are always there, working our way backward and forward.” Our stories don’t have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They aren’t straight or chronological in their meaning. This reality was burned into my mind two weeks before my mother died. I held her limp hand, looking into her fading eyes, on the same day that I looked into the blazing eyes of my newborn niece as she gripped my hand like a tiny vice—life is a wheel of death and resurrection.
Likewise, just as our stories are circular, they keep coming around again to offer us new layers of meaning. Jung stated the human soul is like an apokatastasis16 —a theological word he borrowed from Origen that refers to the cosmos being a cycle of healing, where all things come around again to become whole, but always more complex and diverse. Origen believed that all souls existed before this incarnation in unity and bliss. Likewise, at the end of time—and by the effort of personal transformation—he believed all souls will be restored to harmonious coexistence, although with more of the “diversity and variety” gained by incarnation and individuation, which “will in its turn provide causes and occasions of diversity in that other world which is to come after this.”17 These two ideas, taken together, form the pillars of his controversial and beautiful notion of the apokatastasis. The divinity is in the diversity, the progress is in the plurality, the vitality is in the variance, and there is no end to the meanings of our stories.
Myths are mutable. Our stories change with each telling; they grow as we grow. What My Story meant then, might not be what My Story means now. We all benefit from an outside editor, such as a good friend, spiritual director, or therapist who can offer us a new telling of an old story.
My stories are not really mine alone.
Myths are mutual.
The night my brother died, a total stranger looked me in the eye and said, “You are telling yourself a story about every warning sign you missed and every way you should have prevented this. Stop.” I needed a better story.
Myths are medicinal. Jung claimed that myths evolve over time, because their natural function was to help the soul heal. Following our inner “life instinct,”18 what might seem like grievous loss may yet yield growth. Our wounds may lead to wisdom, our detours to new direction, and our losses to new love. We stay open because we never quite know where the story is going. Our worst choices can lead to our best outcomes—“What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?”—so we have to be willing to companion others and ourselves on a “daring misadventure.”19
Origen stated that our worst injuries eventually become “health bestowing wounds”; 20 the worst scandals invite us to the deepest meaning;21 when we lose sight of God, our search becomes all the deeper;22 and when we wrestle with “impossibilities,”23 we move beyond our stories being “absurd fables and silly tales.”24
But, in the end, receiving this healing perspective is a choice we can only make for ourselves. It is toxic to force it on someone else’s story. Jung saw the principal human malady as the lack of a myth, a “healing fiction” which “give(s) meaning and form to the confusion of (their) neurotic soul.” This is so central to Jung’s psychology that he defined “psychoneurosis . . . ultimately as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.”25
Myths are made up. Myths are profoundly subjective fiction, but it’s the great work of an incarnate life to write a myth that yields meaning—to find “a meaning worthy of God.”26 Meaning, like love, is often made as much as it is found.
Myths move us to meet others. They are how we move in the real world. I’ve shared snapshots of my story, which connect me to the stories of others: exvangelicals, those who’ve lost a parent. The semicolon tattoo emblazoned on my middle finger—draw your own conclusions—quietly connects my story with my brother’s and connects both of us to others touched by suicide. Even Origen and Jung offer me a story about how to read my stories, to make my myths meaningful.
My stories—my myths—are not really mine alone. Myths are mutual. They move me toward encounter with others. Yet I cannot know anyone or anything without constantly coming up against the limits of my own subjectivity and facing what cannot be known. In the end, this reminds me that Myths are mystery. They always bring us to the limits of what we can know—and as such, are myths mystical?
In the end, I am reminded that in My Story of The Story, Incarnation is participation in story, the divine acting out in flesh of the healing of the world. No matter how contemplative we become, “stories make us human,” for humanity is a storytelling animal.27 To lose our stories is to lose touch with our humanity. To ignore My Story is an all-too-easy shortcut to ignore Y/Our Story, and to bypass suffering altogether, and that utterly misses the point.
Contemplation does not erase My Story. It liberates it from the tyranny of the ego’s singular point of view so that it can lead me to Y/Our Story and The Story. ·
There’s a Crack in Everything
By Brie Stoner
For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises.
—Audre Lorde
In the final season of the podcast Another Name for Every Thing (ANFET), Richard Rohr, Paul Swanson, and I explored the themes of Richard’s Cosmic Egg of meaning. The conversations were rich and full of insight, buoyed by the love and deep respect I have for my co-hosts. But between the stories, profound insights, laughter, and tears, listeners may have noted my struggle to harmonize my woman’s experience as a lover, mother, and maker with the Egg map.
Perhaps it was the pandemic with its embodied articulation of our fluid permeability, or the necessary rupture of social structures that dealt this final fissure, but an irreparable fault line has emerged
in my own adherence to what I believe to be a theologically fragile, predominantly Euro-American, and patriarchal approach to what it means to be a “contemplative,” with its corresponding maps, from these and other tectonic shifts in my own life over the last several years. A rupture has occurred, and no number of lofty spiritual blueprints can account for the organic, wild nature and incarnationally messy materiality of this change. While I won’t minimize the discomfort of the circumstances that led to this opening, I don’t see this break as problematic. On the contrary, I am beginning to see it as the place of emergence in me, as the beginning of a new possibility breaking through, the crack as sacredly vaginal . . . as the wound of the blooming.
Whenever a cosmic map, egg or otherwise, is drawn, there’s a danger of sealing off what is permeable, abstracting from what is bodily, filling in what is mysterious, covering over what is alternative, or just ignoring the inevitable cracks that naturally occur in our attempt to create clean categories in our chaotic, evolutionary, unfolding universe. To put a vaginal twist to the oft-quoted Leonard Cohen song, “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the life gets in.”
The eggshell boundaries for each level of story-meaning feel too distinct to match my own experience in feeling the profound porousness of the current cultural categorical confusion and creative collectivity. It’s too easy to disembody and separate “my,” “our,” “others,” “the” from the messy fluidity and mingling, bodily becoming in joining and distinction, sweat and secretions, decay and birth of how matter operates in the beautifully complex ecosystem—certainly, at least, in relationship to my own experience in my fleshy, permeable, feminine body.
To speak this way is to join my voice to theologians and thinkers like Beatrice Bruteau, Joy Bostic, bell hooks, Beverly Lanzetta, Audre Lorde, and Catherine Keller, all of whom declaratively point out the predominant discomfort with cracks, darkness, crevices, fluids, ruptures, and female bodiliness as part of the misogynistic, oppressive evil in the shadow of Christian theologies and the societies founded upon their values.
What follows is my own endeavor, a femininely incarnational spin on the Cosmic Egg that, instead of focusing on domes, embraces instead the fissures and cracks in the shells. For me, this is an act of unknowing trust: The inevitable ruptures of this and other maps of meaning can become the location of a new, emergent way of finding meaning.
In Brian McLaren language, this effort represents a new stage of faith after doubt, a way to ride free of the training wheels of approvalseeking, of falling through the modern and postmodern human instinct to try to rationalize everything, and as a blessed mystical rest from needing to restrict reality to the confines of our own impoverished, tired ideas or exhausted categories. As one of the more than half of the human population who actually produces eggs and sheds them monthly, it is one thing to talk about eggs of meaning, and another thing to bear them in the flesh. The latter experience, as all women know, is earmarked by an intimate embrace of the unknowing, physical, fleshy, fluid, permeable, earthly, carnal, and messily intermingled realities, which is where I believe the emergent meaning actually lies. Finally, I do not share this essay as a replacement of Richard’s metaphor but, hopefully, as when a minor fifth is added to a major fourth, this exploration can be a creative, albeit sonically complicating, addition and harmonic extension to his articulation; perhaps one that results (at least for some readers) in a Cohen-like “broken sigh of Hallelujah.”
HUMPTY’S NON-MISTAKE AS CUBISM
The cracks that postmodernity has made in our grand stories, or in this cosmic egg, might be seen by some as problematic. Yes, it is true that the necessary postmodern disruption of modernity resulted in a predominant culture of cynicism, embodied perhaps most clearly in the caricature of the gen-ex flannel dystopia of nirvana-listening cohorts singing their nihilism. The postmodern movement, however, was valid in its anti-essentialist critiques, disruptions of colonialism, chiseling away at the blind adherence to institutions. Postmodernism had a necessary role to play.
But for some time now, and gaining force in the last twenty years, a new emerging collective of philosophical voices have been gathering force in the articulation of what many believe to be a new philosophical movement. These voices identify what they are expressing as the vernacular of a “post-postmodern” or metamodern movement—not in needing to become the largest overarching story, but as referring to the term metaxy —which is to move between opposite terms and beyond them.1
We need to hold stories lightly, loosely, and harmonize them as unfinished jazz.
The coinciding attributes could be characterized not by the cynical deconstruction that so drove postmodernity, but by a pragmatic idealism that dances and volleys between both the positivism of modernity and the healthy critiques of postmodernity, that holds the tension harmonically between them. It is the emergence of a vernacular of both hope and skepticism, of oscillations of adherence and detachment, and where “narratives are both necessary and problematic, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed.”2 It stresses process-ontologies that transition us from the premise of being in static categories and into the dynamism of becoming. Perhaps we could say that in emphasizing movement-in-the-between, this metamodern vernacular is characterized by seeking to transcend and include the positive gifts of both modernity and postmodernity and orient instead toward what is creatively unfolding in a nondeterministic, open-source, and open-ended way.
To illustrate its characterizing qualities further, I offer this little twist on the classic Humpty Dumpty tale.
Let’s imagine that our Cosmic Egg (which I accidentally named the Cosmic Ed in one ANFET episode) has the last name of Dumpty. Because Ed Dumpty identifies as carrying all four multiple nested eggs of meaning within, Ed identifies as a they. Ed Dumpty is sitting on a wall. We could call this moment a picture of modernity: everything looks whole, and perfectly nested within Ed, but let’s consciously note that Ed is entirely alone and quite boundaried off by this wall. As you well know, Ed—by forces we do not know—falls off the edge and “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t get Ed together again.” Here lies the postmodern dilemma: The crack is deemed permanent and there’s nothing to be done except rage with Kurt Cobain.
Now, let’s imagine that the story isn’t finished and that, in the midst of lying there in their sticky, yolky pieces, Ed Dumpty decides they’re not finished either. So, Ed slowly starts to arrange themselves in a chaotic riot of edges and curves, using the yolk as the glue, affixing themselves to the wall in a new artistic expression. While the pieces of
Ed are drying, a wind kicks up and blows in bits of leaves, and grass, and sand . . . and Ed winds up accreting some new organic layers to themselves in this iteration of their life as a cubist mural masterpiece.
Well, the king’s horses and men walk by one day and are so taken by the startling beauty of the shockingly sharp edges, the boldness of the strange, seemingly disparate shapes that are held in wholeness by the cubist composition’s movement, that they go and tell the townspeople, and the neighboring townspeople, and that town’s neighboring townspeople.
And here’s the greatest part of it all: Ed is constantly changing Because Ed is cracked open and vulnerable to the forces of nature, and in constant communication with so many new people from neighboring kingdoms, Ed’s expression is ever-emergent, changing constantly, and their life is made all the richer for their original sticky, happy, crack-inducing accident.
The non-end.
SCRAMBLING THE EGG STORIES
As my creative interpretation of the famed Humpty story shows, we can become addicted to our stories, even the good ones, depending on them to make sense of reality. But philosophers like Bayo Akomolafe are asking whether our addiction to storyas-all and narrative-logic map is still a useful or constructive practice. “A world where everything is moored to logic, to power, to syntax and plot and scheme and expectation and meaning, leaves no place for magic, for the inextricability and beauty of a glimpsed sunset.”3
Now, remember the metamodern creative combining of construction and deconstruction, of dancing in the middle? I am not asserting that there is no longer any role at all for story, or that story is not still, and always will be, a function of creating culture, claiming agency and belonging in expressing what is sacredly unique to each experience, and also providing teaching and wisdom. But perhaps we need to consider Akomolafe’s admonition to notice our addiction to the Euro-American colonizing determinism of the metanarrative arc, and to notice the mechanics of narratives that also, by their nature, place us on a map where the end is the goal, and the messy middle what needs to be borne or endured.
We need to hold stories lightly, loosely, and harmonize them as unfinished jazz. A foundational alignment to process, unfolding, and evolution also troubles our addiction to stories because, frankly, our stories are never finished (even in death, our lives live on through descendants, stories, and the very real live decay of our bodies in the ground, etc.) and any category of a story is disrupted at any moment by the emergent properties of what we do not know. We are so much more than what happens to us. This is an open system and none of us can create clean categorical containers to hold the flowy mess of our mingling identities as intertwined and blooming together.
The implications of the metamodern instinct to queer our need for narrative are that those of us in the contemplative Christian traditions can begin to release the artificial bookends that are overly influencing our theologies and cosmologies. We are experiencing the emergence of a potential collective theological shift out of our condemning and problematic creation-account neurosis and our eschatological obsessive conjecturing and falling instead into the radical embrace of the incarnational middle-ing: present in the here and now-ing, in the fleshy intermezzo midst-of. The shift to the middle is an emphasis toward embodied, imaginative agency to collaborate with the chaos known as our Universe in the process of creative unfolding. And, fine, if you want the most honest attempt at one cosmological metanarrative that actually is in tune with our cosmos, it is this one:
In the midst of the middle, the beginning is ever changing as the neverending creative unfolding.
Everything is motion. Time is not linear. There is no beginning and there is no end. The big bang was a theory that is now being debunked. Even if our galaxy caves in, there are billions more. There are coexistent multiple dimensional possible alternatives that we cannot see. This Universe is mysteriously, relationally, and reciprocally collaborative. Even in death, our bodies are alive with bacteria. The categories of quantum physics alone have blown to bits the foundational assumptions of most of our theology, and yet we still nostalgically reach back for the outdated lenses and then wonder why we are so nauseated. The field of biology has opened our eyes to the interdependency of all bodies on this larger planetary body, but apparently all this mysterious and messy materiality is more
Oneing than we want to see. Many of us would rather find meaning in abstract maps that, by their dissonance with this material realm, pull us out of our bodies and out of our present divine incarnational possibilities.
Consider this admonition by philosopher Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm:
Communication does not take place in some abstract linguistic horizon. A sign has to be physicalized in order to be interpreted. Signs must become sound waves, scent trails, printed letters and so on before they can be meaningful. Meaning is of the world, not separate from it.4
Meaning is located here in the process, in the matter mattering, in making (John 9:6: “and Jesus spat into the dust”), in the proportions of our imagination (Matthew 8:26: “Oh you of little faith”), in our capacity to initiate ourselves and each other to break open into unknowing again and again, into larger and larger perspectives (Matthew 5:27–28: “You have heard it said . . . but I say”).
With this reframe, creative participation then is freed as the sole focus, and contemplation becomes our rigorous commitment to be fully present in the midst of it, so that we can welcome disruption with joy, be cracked open with gratitude, and see ruptures as sites of possibility breaking through. Contemplation becomes the practice of incarnating in these bodies, so that we can show up in the image of the Community Formerly Known as God and cocreate with them. By retraining our gaze toward the creative Christic cracks in our maps, we are declaratively embodying the union between matter and spirit and choosing to end the anti-Christ, anti-body ideologies that have so long held prevalence in Christian thinking and institutions.
Live your own wild, incarnational piece of this great unfolding masterpiece.
What does this mean for our cosmic egg? For me, the meaning is in cracking the egg wide open to reveal the yolk of meaning as embryo, as sticky, creative possibility. Like Ed Dumpty, we have a chance to create a new form of art out of “what was,” to make a “what could be,” something new out of the pieces of what once held our meaning.
And what of the shelled distinctions of my, our, others, the? To riff off Richard’s Introduction, perhaps it’s best to err on the side of simplicity and describe each of those lines of meaning as distinct but inextricable DNA strands of the egg-embryo itself. They are harmonizing realties that are cocreating each other and cannot be pulled apart from the sacred relational cord they form, nor can they be extricated from their movement toward becoming more-than-yolk.
To quote Bayo Akomolafe:
Queer matter disturbs our commonsense accounts of reality, and speaks of the world as a gushing series of intersecting practices that spill into the supposedly “other,” a breaching of boundaries. . . . A world where relata (or “things”) and their properties emerge from relationships, and not the other way around.5
Yolk-as-meaning eases the separation of my from our, our from others, others from the. This is not an erasure or distinction—a flattening of the stories themselves—but rather an effort to make permeable the co-existent and continual unfolding influence of each upon the other. Yolk-as-meaning embraces incarnation as the location of the divine, as the messy, coincident, sexual, Christically carnal and as the collaboratively, communally creative. Yolk-as-meaning invites us to cease our puritanical and platonic discomfort with bodiliness (looking at you, Augustine; you too, Aquinas; you too, *insert most of the esteemed male theologians in our patriarchal lineage*) and our obsession to pedestalize abstraction beyond, above, and outside this fleshy, messy, awkward mattering.
In short, Yolk-as-meaning invites us to finally rupture away from anti-Christ, anti-body ontological maps that serve as scaffolding for
systems of oppression and anti-material ecological irresponsibility to exist in our world. Yolk-as-meaning declares the messy middle potentiality as the sacred opportunity . . . and that perfection only exists in the embrace of the imperfect process of becoming.
What does all this mean for concepts of a Christian God? Perhaps we can finally shelve concepts of perfection as being-that-doesn’tchange and at last breathe life into the dust of our God-concepts and let them become. The Community Formerly Known as God exists only in Godding. The relating is in the creative exchange. God does not exist outside or apart from the unfolding, but is the catalyzing verb in the happening itself. The messy fluids of the anointing (the Christ) baptize us whenever we move with that ecstatic flow of love-making creativity, embodied in a regular practice of conceiving, carrying, birthing, and releasing (in new life or in surrendered blood) what “could be.”
And finally, what does this mean for us?
If you are alive, you are a creative. So, for the love of God . . . make! Create! Have faith—not just in Jesus, but in yourself, to be able to bring new possibilities into this realm, to breathe life into dust, and to create something new. Speaking of dust, please come back to earth, come back to your body, because this world deeply needs conscious, embodied humans who can sacralize the middling and care for all bodies and the planetary body in the midst of the agony and ecstasy of this life. Feel pleasure, joy, sorrow, grief, hope, and fury, and let all of it become the fuel for your creative contribution, whatever it may be.
Stop worshiping long-dead mystics or pedestalizing contemplative teachers’ lives. Live your own wild, incarnational piece of this great unfolding masterpiece. Stop infantilizing yourself as though you yourself cannot move mountains. Be that which you are becoming, because you are not alone in longing for the largeness in you to expand beyond every category you’ve been given. This instinct is the divine community moving in you and in the more-than-human community of which you are a part on this planet’s precariously evolving life.
And what about meaning? The meaning is in the making. Make your practice that of embodied radical presence. Place yourself in the posture of full willingness to incarnate courageous creativity—every day. Then and only then can the process become the product, the
meaningful arrival found in the fleshy middling—here in the porous, permeable, messy togethering.
Our shared hope emerges through the cracks of our own unknowing as we join in the field of possibility and create something wildly beautiful out of all these identities and ideas that once held the embryo of our own unfolding. If you outgrow a container, map, or egg (as I have), I hope you know there is nothing wrong with you. It means you are becoming. Hallelujah! Do not dismiss the broken eggshells of what was before. Treasure and create something from the fragments in gratitude for the wombs that delivered you right here, right where you should be: becoming, in the middle of it all. ·
No Story
By Cynthia Bourgeault
The Western mental-rational mind is stuck in story because it’s stuck in perspectival thinking. Perspectival thinking is such a pervasive frame that we can no longer imagine any alternative. Beyond My Story, Our Story, Other Stories, and The Story, there is No Story. I have tasted it (first in Centering Prayer); now I thirst to live it fully. Only then are we truly free to become human beings.
PERSPECTIVE
Jean Gebser (1905–1973) was a philosopher, linguist, and poet who described the structures of human consciousness. Gebser was the primary source for Ken Wilber’s more popular stages of consciousness.
Gebser’s cultural home base was the world of art. He was a personal friend of Pablo Picasso and examples culled from art history dot the landscape of his book The Ever-Present Origin, illustrating almost every significant point he made. So, it’s not surprising that
his master interpretive lens, perspective, should itself derive from the domain of art.
Yes, perspective—just like you likely learned in elementary school art. When you first began drawing pictures, probably as a preschooler, Mommy, Daddy, and your big sister were always bigger, no matter where they appeared in your picture, because, for you, that’s what they were. Then someone taught you about foreground and background, and you learned how to make things at the back of the picture smaller to show that they were farther away. You learned to draw your house at a slight angle on the page so that you could show two sides of it at once. You may or may not have consciously realized that you were learning how to proportion the various bits and pieces in relation to a hypothetical point on the horizon, but your drawings got more orderly, and they began to convey a sense of depth.
That’s exactly what we’re talking about here, but now applied as an organizing principle for the field of consciousness.
According to Gebser, the five structures of consciousness—archaic, magic, mythic, mental, and integral—can be grouped into three larger categories (three worlds, as he called them): unperspectival, perspectival, and aperspectival. While the nomenclature may at first feel intimidating, it’s actually quite easy to master if you keep your elementary school art days in mind.
Unperspectival is how you drew before you learned about foreground and background, when everything was all just placed onto the drawing sheet. Perspectival is the drawing sheet once you’ve learned to arrange things in relationship to that hypothetical point on the horizon. Aperspectival is what ensues once you’ve learned to convey several perspectives simultaneously, as in some of Picasso’s surrealistic artwork, where he simultaneously shows us the front side and back side of a person. (For Gebser, the prefix “a” always conveys the meaning of “free from.” Thus, an aperspectival view is one that is free from captivity to a single central point of reference.)
·The unperspectival world embraces the archaic, magic, and mythic structures.
·The perspectival world hosts the mental structure.
·The aperspectival world is the still-emerging integral structure.
Each of these three perspectives is properly called a world because it comprises an entire gestalt, an entire womb of meaning in which we live and move and make our connections. Each has its own distinctive fragrance, ambience, and tincture. Each is an authentic pathway of participation, a genuine mode of encountering the cosmos, God, and our own selfhood. Each has its brilliant strengths and its glaring weaknesses. Compositely, they evoke “the width and length and height and depth” (Ephesians 3:18) of our collective human journey into consciousness.
I am aware that I am walking the razor’s edge as I choose my words here, seeking to escape the gravitational field of perspectival consciousness that would lock this all back into the evolutionary timeline. It is true, of course, that these three worlds broadly demarcate the three major epochs of Western human cultural history: ancient, medieval, and modern. But it’s always been a bit dicey to try to hold these timelines too tightly or to limit structures of consciousness to specific historical eras.
We have stunning exemplars of the mental structure breaking through in ancient Greece and Israel, and the mythic still lives among us today in much of the American heartlands. Gebser’s model deftly sidesteps these all-too-familiar cul-de-sacs by reminding us that the “worlds” (and the structures they encompass) are phenomenological, not developmental. While they appear to join the flow of linear time at specific entry points, they have in fact always been present and must continue to be present, for they are part of the ontology of the Whole.
Gebser’s visually oriented presentation allowed him to make one additional, very important point. From a visual standpoint, perspective is really a matter of dimensionality, and dimensionality is in turn a function of degree of separation. Gebser built on this insight to draw powerful correlations between the emergence of perspective within the structures of consciousness and the emergence of the egoic—i.e., individual—selfhood so foundational to our modern self-understanding.
In the unperspectival world, everything exists in guileless immediacy (as with preschooler art). There is relatively little separation between viewer and viewed. The external world mirrors a self-structure that is still fluid and permeable. This is the world of “original participation,”1 as philosopher Owen Barfield (1898–1997) once
To truly take in another’s perspective is to take in another world and allow that world to touch our hearts and wash over us deeply.
famously described it, where the cosmos is at its most numinous and communicative, and the sense of belonging is as oceanic as the sea itself.
As we enter the perspectival world, the double-edged sword begins to fall. The same growing capacity for abstraction that makes possible the perception of proportion and depth also—by the same measure—increases our sense of separation. We stand more on the outside, our attention fixed on that hypothetical point on the horizon which organizes our canvas and maintains the illusion of depth within a flat plane. Order is maintained, but at the cost of a necessary distancing and a strict adherence to the artifice that makes the illusion possible in the first place. Deception enters, riding on the back of that abstractive power, as original participation gives way to a growing sense of dislocation and exile. That is essentially our modern world: “oscillating,” writes Jeremy Johnson, “between a powerlessness to control the forces unleashed by the perspectival world on the one hand, and a total self-intoxicating power on the other”—in a word, “between anxiety and delight.”2
It is my own observation here (rather than either Johnson’s or Gebser’s) that the perspectival contains an inherently deceptive aspect since it is intentionally creating a sleight of hand, the illusion of three-dimensionality within a two-dimensional plane. But if I have not wandered too far off the mark, the observation gives me some strong additional leverage for emphasizing why resolutions to the perspectival crisis can never emerge from within the perspectival structure itself, and why the much-hyped “integral emergence” cannot simply be a new, improved version of our old mental habits—not even a vastly increased “paradox tolerance.” We need to get out of Flatland altogether.
For me, that is what aperspectival is essentially all about. It is an authentic transposition of consciousness from a two-dimensional
plane to a sphere. Within that sphere, inner and outer worlds come back together again, and a sense of authentic belongingness returns. Numinosity returns as well—the felt sense of a cosmos directly infused with the vivifying presence of Origin. Selfhood once again becomes fluid and interpenetrating even as presence becomes more centered and intensified.
The perspectival is at best a foreshadowing and at worst a mental simulacrum of authentic aperspectival three-dimensionality. The real deal can indeed be attained; in fact, it is now breaking in upon us whether we like it or not. But the cost of admission entails the overhaul not only of our fundamental attitudes, but of our entire neurophysiology of perception.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that, in the Gebserian system, perspective is not simply a point of view; it is a completely different world of seeing, unfolding according to its own protocols—its own core values and ways of making connections. To truly take in another’s perspective is not simply to take in another’s “position” and arrange the pieces dialectically on a mental chessboard. Rather, it is profoundly to take in another world and allow that world to touch our hearts and wash over us deeply until it, too, becomes our own. It is to listen in a whole new dimension. I believe Gebser would argue that this dimension only truly opens up with the inbreaking of the aperspectival structure. TIME
As I ponder this striking visual metaphor, I am struck by how this same basic configuration seems to apply to that other organizing convention of the mental structure of consciousness: time. In perspectival time, the “vanishing point” would be that arbitrary consummatum est (whether you construe that to be your own death, the Armageddon, the Omega Point, or simply the end of some process in which you’re currently involved). The line leading back to it is linear time, and what in a painting takes shape as “background” and “foreground” finds its temporal equivalent in “past,” “present,” and “future.” The perspectival world marches to the drumbeat of linear time.
Whether in visual or temporal mode, perspectival consciousness is always playing against an endpoint—finding itself somewhere on
a line leading back to a point. The pervasive subliminal pressure of that invisible line converging on a distant point explains some of the more hypnotic blind spots of the mental structure of consciousness. It’s why we naturally group things in threes: “beginning, middle, end” and “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” In perspectival seeing, things fall naturally into stages and sequences, and the relationship between objects tends to take on a hierarchical (Gebser called it “pyramidical”) character as they are assigned their respective rank and value on the perspectival line.
Time tends to become spatialized, with “earlier” morphing into “lower” and “later” morphing into “higher.” That is why, in all sincerity and with no intent to cause harm, many people under the sway of the mental structure of consciousness will state categorically that the mythic and magic stages of consciousness (since they appear “earlier” on the historical timeline) are “less evolved.” The artist’s prerogative to assign order and proportion becomes the moralist’s duty to impose value and judgment, and it all happens so fast that we don’t even see how we’ve been blindsided.
The real problem, of course, is that we forget that we are seeing through a periscope. What appears to our eyes to be “the real world” is in fact the world as projected through a powerful perspectival ruse that does indeed convey tremendous ordering and synthesizing power, but only within the limits of its governing conventions. Take away the vanishing point on the horizon, and the whole ruse collapses.
Perspectival thinking is by nature sectored thinking. The validity of the proportions and the illusion of three-dimensionality are legitimate only within the cone of perception it generates, and in order to create that cone in the first place, certain things must be excluded from the picture. In single-point perspective, you can only show two sides of the house; when you try to show three, you have exceeded the terms of the convention. If the sides don’t naturally fall along the same line of sight, you can’t force them together. It breaks the rules.
Gebser stressed this point in a hard-hitting paragraph which speaks so forcefully to what is so rarely named but can only be seen as perspectival arrogance:
Perspectival vision and thought confine us within spatial limitations. . . . The positive result is a concretion of man and space; the negative result is the restriction of man to a limited segment
where he perceives only one sector of reality. Like Petrarch, who separated landscape from land, man separates from the whole only that part which his view or thinking can encompass, and forgets those sectors that lie adjacent, beyond, or even behind.
. . . Man, himself a part of the world, endows his sector of awareness with primacy; but he is, of course, only able to perceive a partial view. The sector is given prominence over the circle; the part outweighs the whole. As the whole cannot be approached from a perspectival attitude to the world, we merely superimpose the character of wholeness onto the sector, the result being the familiar “totality.”3
The totalizing proclivities of perspectival seeing form one of the most insidious and virulent contributors to our contemporary cultural impasse. For now, perspectival humility begins with accepting the givens within which we Flatlanders must abide. Those of us who still mostly inhabit the mental structures of consciousness can no more wish (or proclaim) ourselves into aperspectival consciousness than we can flap our wings and fly. But we can wield this extraordinary tool responsibly and indeed courteously, provided we remember that the license to arrange, synthesize, and assign rank and value is valid only within the sector of consciousness that has immediately given rise to it. Above all, it must never be used to colonize or tyrannize another structure of consciousness. To do so constitutes an unpardonable offense against the Whole.
So how does this excursion into perspectival thinking shed light on the topic at hand in this issue? The connection is actually quite direct.
Story is the signature artform of perspectival consciousness. Story is what results when we generate our selfhood—our core sense of identity—through that perspectival lens. We then become the artist standing outside the canvas of our life, gazing down on our “self,” in third person, as from a distance. What emerges from the perspectival convention is a strong sense of myself as a unique individual with a story to tell, moving along the timeline which is my life—my “spiritual journey”—toward that point on the horizon upon which everything converges. Just as in art, the convention confers an overall coherence and a simulacrum of depth and dimension. We voraciously draw out identity from it, unaware that we have just imprisoned ourselves in a mirage.
But what about myth, you ask? Haven’t we had story from the beginning of time? Yes and no. Myths are different in the same way that an icon is different from a Renaissance portrait. There is more immediacy, no personal self-center, no implicit narrative and timeline with myth. It’s all right here and now. In fact, Gebser argued, the mythic structure of consciousness begins to wane precisely as the elements of story become more and more pronounced, heralding the dawn of the perspectival self.
No Story occurs when I awaken to the mirage and begin to seek other, more immediate ways of being present to my own reality—coinciding with it, rather than reflecting on it, as Beatrice Bruteau (1930–2014) deftly pointed out.4 When I stop being the hero or victim of a story generated through my own perspectival cone; when the subject (“I”) and object (“me”) poles of my identity have rejoined at center and I see directly from a simple, embodied wholeness, that is the end of story. Some call it nondual awakening. ·
The bulk of this article is reprinted with permission from Lessons 2 and 3 of Cynthia Bourgeault’s blog series on Gebser.
Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village
Barbara Holmes
CAC Publishing, 2021
A Book Recommendation by Lee Staman
In the Spring 2021 edition of Oneing, I had the privilege of reviewing Resmaa Menakem’s powerful book on bodies and racialized trauma, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. It seems fitting that Barbara Holmes’ latest book, Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village, looks beyond the individual and into the communities that make up our lives, specifically the communal trauma we experience and the subsequent response.
Crisis Contemplation begins with the thing that disrupts, the event that upends lives and communities. Holmes identifies three components: “The event is usually unexpected, the person or community is unprepared, and there is nothing that anyone could do to stop it from happening.”1 The chapter on crisis explores a variety of afflictions that can affect communities, from the natural to the systemic. Although this recurring list can leave us “gulping the darkness,”2 she has a realistic, clear-eyed hope that sees a possible rebirth of sorts through the crisis. Holmes does well to describe this unsettling and dismantling of “control and agency” that then opens a space for what she terms crisis contemplation: “This space that I name contemplative is a place of breaking, relinquishment, and waiting. This is not occurring in peaceful
repose on our meditation pillows, not during the shared experiences of village life, but in the midst of a disorienting freefall.”
This refuge during disruption is not how contemplation is typically viewed or practiced. Crisis contemplation is not necessarily a choice that can be made but is frequently made for us because of the circumstances of our lives. For Holmes, contemplation is not a disconnect; it is not a retreat from the world. It is rather, first and foremost, a practice that we do with our bodies. Her examples include those we might often associate with contemplation—prayer and stillness—but she also includes music, writing, dance, social justice activism, and teaching.
Crisis contemplation prepares us and prepares communities by being honest with the trauma that has occurred and acknowledging that little will be the same. From here, we move into the village response and the latter half of the book. I felt that this was Holmes’ most important and powerfully written chapter. There was so much here that another book could easily come out of it. For example, she has a brief examination of the community lament response, a somewhat misunderstood form of prayer that can be incredibly powerful, as she does well to explain. She rightly identifies the sorrow component but reminds us of the sometimes-forgotten justice-oriented structure of the lament. As Walter Brueggemann puts it, “These prayers are real prayers and not merely psychological acts of catharsis whereby the speaker ‘feels better’ by expressing need out loud. These prayers are seriously addressed to God, who is expected to answer.”3 I would have loved to hear more of her thoughts on this but, again, maybe that is for another book.
Her conception of the village is helpful and commonsensical:
Villages are organizational spaces that hold our collective beginnings. They are spaces that we can return to (if only through memory) when we are in need of welcoming and familiar places.... The functions of such a group may include the fostering and maintenance of common needs, interests, and safety. To put it simply, our belonging in these associations includes social and sacred responsibilities to individuals and the group.
Cultures that have a strong collective understanding of what sustains them are often better able to weather trauma: “When there is a crisis, it takes a village to survive.” Songs, movement, sharing a meal,
and connection with ancestral history are just some of the glues that bind communities. This type of idea of a village or community is often so foreign to what Wendell Berry calls, “a rootless and placeless monoculture”4 that frequently pervades modern society. The information that modernity tends to prioritize is often antithetical to the “everyday mysticism, and the spiritual vibrancy of multiple realities” that are core to a culture and community with deep, deep roots. As Holmes beautifully puts it,
A world without ancestors is lonely. . . . It matters how we understand our sojourn in this reality. If we consider our lives to be comprised of segments separated by a dash that encompasses birth and death dates, we will be inconsolable when trauma truncates our realities and delays our destinations. But, if we consider ourselves to be part of a continuum of life that does not end with death, but transitions to a life after life, our perspectives can change.
Barbara Holmes could easily have ended Crisis Contemplation with her necessary chapter on healing, but I am thankful she took a futureoriented route and concluded with a chapter that offers more possibilities. Her idea of “cosmic rebirthing” and the recovery of “everyday mysticism” grabbed ahold of my imagination and brought it into my body. She describes being
born into a family of shamans, root workers, and healers. These women and men saw beyond the veil and mediated the realms of life after life. They knew how to cure you of what ailed you, spiritually and in the natural world. The mystics that I knew could get a prayer through, birth a baby, and bring you a message or warning from the other side. They were amazing and sometimes a little bit scary.
This is honest, in-the-dirt mysticism brought low from saints and thinkers of ages past and into our often careless, hopeful, stubbed-toe existence. I agree with her, it is scary, and I know I am wary of it, but it just brims with hope and possibility.
On the practical side of things—as also found in Menakem’s book—is the inclusion of questions and practices meant to take the
reader deeper into what each chapter has covered. Thankfully, these range from the more cerebral and recollective, “Ask yourself the following questions about your shadows: What are you hiding—what fears, weaknesses? What do you want to shed?” to the physical and immersive, “Prepare art supplies of your choosing for intuitive or soul art.” I appreciated the reminder after the chapter on healing (which did not include practices) that it is a process, not a practice. I will add that there are also short but thorough summaries after most chapters that would be valuable in the pedagogical use of this book. ·
A Rude Awakening
1 Drew E. Jackson, “A Rude Awakening,” God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021), 68. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www. ivpress.com.
The
Ecotones of
the Cosmic Egg of Meaning
1 As quoted in Amy Frykholm, Wild Woman: A Footnote, the Desert, and My Quest for an Elusive Saint (Minneapolis: Broadleaf, 2021), 42.
2 Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2020), 113.
3 One of my favorites of James Finley’s poetic phrases.
4 Rohr, 103.
5 Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society (New York: Anchor, 1995), 150.
6 I extend gratitude to Fred Bahnson, who explores the theme of ecotones brilliantly in Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 115–119.
7 “Ecotone Explained,” Ecological Society of America, https://www.esa.org/ esablog/about/ecotone-explained/.
10 My use of the word miracle falls from a belief that life as a whole is more than I can understand. Therefore, I am humbled by it and submit to its mystery.
11 Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (New York: Image, 1969), 68.
12 Douglas E. Christie, Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes on Contemplative Ecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 23.
13 Antonio Machado, “Proverbios y Cantares de Campos de Castilla,” 1917
14 Pierre Hadot, Plotinius or the Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 47.
15 This idea stems from the work of Bayo Akomolafe. See “The Burden of the New Story,” Bayo Akomolafe, October 2016, https://bayoakomolafe. net/project/the-burden-of-the-new-story/.
Honoring
All Four Domes of Meaning
1 Psalm 46:10.
2 Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (Boston: Shambhala, 2005), 177
Giving Freely and Receiving Graciously
1 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 176
2 Kimmerer, 344–345.
3 Elyse Poppers, The Little Love Book: 267 Words for Love in Sanskrit (LifeForm Projects, 2017).
4 Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2018), 258.
5 Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2020), 104.
From My Jesus to the Universal Christ and Back
1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 381
2 Bruce D. Chilton, “Christianity in War,” in Just War in Religion and Politics: Studies in Religion and the Social Order, ed. Jacob Neusner, Bruce D. Chilton, and R. E. Tully (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013), 117
3 Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 15, 19, 21.
4 See Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that Are Transforming the Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010), Chapter 7 for a discussion of how pro-slavery Christians used the Bible to defend their position.
Oneing 116
5 Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019), 12–13.
6 Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Orations, 25 (PG 45, 65–68) from Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (New York: New City Press, 1995), 39–40.
7 Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua (PG 91, 1288) from Clément, 227–228.
8 Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1961), 34
Touching Butterflies
1 Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon, 1992).
From the Conceptual to the Contextual
1 “Definition of cosmic,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/cosmic.
2 Richard Rohr, “Introduction,” Oneing 9, vol. 2 (2021), 17.
3 Roone Arledge, ABC’s Wide World of Sports, as cited in Noah Finz, “The Thrill of Victory, The Agony of Defeat,” LinkedIn, March 6, 2020, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thrill-victory-agony-defeat-noahfinz/.
4 Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2020), 118.
Listening to Learn about Our Own Stories
1 “Episcopal Impact Fund and Eden Housing present HOUSING THE BAY,” YouTube, July 29, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjCJY2cVjQ.
Gateway to Knowing
1 Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2016), 120.
2 Barbara Holmes, Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2021), 134
3 Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2012), chap. 1.
Mything the Point of My Story
1 “It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God [a Logos]. The Word of God comes to us, and we have no way of distinguishing whether and to what extent it is different from God. There is nothing about this Word that could not be considered known and human, except for the manner in which it confronts us spontaneously and places obligations upon us” (C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston [New York: Vintage, 1989], 340).
2 Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson (New York: Newman, 1956), 130.
3 C.G. Jung, Collected Works 14, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), para. 739. We cannot only focus on our inner reality. My Story “is possible only if the reality of the world around us is recognized at the same time” as Y/Our shared Story (Jung, Collected Works 14, para. 739).
4 C.G. Jung, “Letter to M. Leonard,” December 5, 1959, Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951–1961, trans. R. F. C. Hull (East Sussex, UK: Routledge, 1976), 525.
5 “This stripping off of the veils of illusion is felt as distressing and painful. . . . This phase demands much patience and tact, for the unmasking of reality is as a rule not only difficult but very often dangerous” (Jung, Collected Works 14, para. 739).
6 Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self (New York: Guilford, 1993), 11.
7 Edward C. Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest: Basic Concepts of Analytical Psychology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 218
8 Origen, Song, 130
9 Origen: Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, ed. Hans Urs von Balthasar, trans. Robert J. Daly (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1984), 327
10 In Symbols of Transformation, Jung wrote, “to get to know ‘my’ myth, I regarded . . . as the task of tasks,” asking of the reader as well, “What is the myth you are living?” (Jung, Collected Works 5, xxv).
11 James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 24.
12 C.G. Jung, as quoted in Hillman, 24.
13 Hillman, 41, 24.
14 Origen, On First Principles: Being Koetschau’s Text of the De Principiis Translated into English, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), 276
15 Jung, Collected Works 14, para. 6
16 Jung, Collected Works 9.ii, para. 73
17 Origen, On First Principles, 78
18 Jung, Memories, 348
19 C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 200, 211.
20 Origen, Song, 199.
21 Origen, First Principles, 285.
22 Origen, Song, 280.
23 Origen, First Principles, 286–287.
24 Origen, Song, 28–29.
25 Jung, Psychology and Religion, 199.
26 Origen, First Principles, 287.
27 Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York: Mariner Books, 2012).
There’s a Crack in Everything
1 Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2, no. 1 (2010): 5677, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677.
2 Cher Potter, “Timotheus Vermeulen talks to Cher Potter,” TANK Magazine 55 (Spring 2012): 215, https://tankmagazine.com/issue-55/ talk/timotheus-vermeulen.
3 Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2017), 32.
4 Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 182
5 Akolomafe, 112
No Story
1 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), chap. 6.
2 Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness (Seattle: Revelore, 2019), 58
the cosmic egg 119
3 Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2020), 18.
4 Beatrice Bruteau, The Grand Option: Personal Transformation and a New Creation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 51
Recommended Reading
1 For a deeper look at this movement from the expected to the unexpected to something else entirely, see Richard Rohr’s The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2020).
2 From one of the many poignant poems, some by Dr. Holmes, scattered throughout the text.
3 Walter Brueggemann, Reverberations of Faith: A Theological Handbook of Old Testament Themes (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 119.
4 Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York: Random House, 1993), 151
Unveiled, Vol. 10, No. 1
Richard Rohr ends his Introduction to “Unveiled,” the forthcoming, Spring 2022 edition of Oneing, with these apocalyptic words: “Unveiling is a gift for those who are ready to see more fully. Unveiling is a disaster for those who do not want you to see.”
The “gift,” it seems, “for those who are ready to see more fully,” is the blessing of contemplation—which has been absolutely necessary to get through the past two catastrophic years. It takes a contemplative mind to be able to see and absorb the ugly underbelly of the US, as revealed by a political administration that unwittingly unveiled it. It takes a contemplative mind to spend months living and working in previously unimagined isolation—away from family, friends, and colleagues because of a devastating pandemic—and not lose hope. It takes a contemplative mind to see live footage of global starvation and death, desperate Afghan men falling from an airplane, and the effects of global warming—and be able to absorb it all with faith and love.
“The Greek word apocalypsis,” according to Rohr, “literally means to unveil something and thus to reveal its true form and colors.” The contributors to the Spring 2022 edition of Oneing have been invited to do just that: unpack and reveal what the contemplative mind is capable of both holding and grieving in each moment in time.
Both the limited-print edition of CAC’s literary journal, Oneing, and the downloadable PDF version will be available for sale in April 2022 at https://store.cac.org/.
A collision of opposites forms the cross of Christ. One leads downward preferring the truth of the humble. The other moves leftward against the grain. But all are wrapped safely inside a hidden harmony: One world, God’s cosmos, a benevolent universe.
