Rohr: Dance of Contemplation and Action
“The dance of action and contemplation is an art form that will take your entire life to master. Like Moses at the burning bush, many of us begin with a mystical moment and end with social action or what looks like politics..”—Richard Rohr Daily Meditations, July 5, 2017. Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 6, 11.
Life indeed is a dance where we first sit out the dance as we contemplate the love of God as a mystic. Later, we bravely go on the dance floor as activists for those harmed by fear. An ideal is to do both, but balance often is never our strong suit. When I returned to the life of a “religious” after a five-year interlude from God, I had an insatiable hunger to read and study about God. I think this came from my medical training. If we want to know about a subject, we research and study in-depth what has already been written about it. Then for some unknown reason, I wrote about what I was experiencing. Again, this may have come from my immersion in academic medicine, which spilled into my spiritual life with the call to “publish or perish.”
One December night, I remember reading an Advent piece at an early Christmas gathering of the women of St. Mark’s. Mrs. Metcalf, a renowned speech teacher who also sat on our pew at the church, said to me in passing as we picked up our plates for dinner, “It is good to see another mystic.” Mystic, I never thought of myself as a mystic, but suddenly knew a master had just been anointed me. Again, I believe many gifts of seeing God’s presence at work in the world came from my medical specialty. My job as a radiologist was to look for the unknown in the shadows, often in the dark, by imaging techniques, X-rays, CT, MRI, or ultrasound, examining a hidden inside world.
God uses every part of our experience. No experience is wasted. Eventually, over many, many years of just writing about this experience, I have been moved to action, making phone calls, writing letters, marching, visiting the sick and dying, working with those who have difficulty getting groceries, advocating for prisoners and immigrants, supporting homeless veterans, working with people in recovery. As long as we can see the love of God in our contemplation and in our actions, my experience is that we will know peace, one of the fruit of the spirit. I know I am off track when that peace or “piece” is missing.
I share this dance on the ninth day of the Christmas season, and look forward to learning from other “mystics” who also seek to know more about what will be next on our dance cards.
Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/