Rohr: Dance of Contemplation and Action

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, I wrote about what I was experiencing for some unknown reason. 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 considered myself a mystic, but suddenly, I knew a master had just anointed me. Again, I believe 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 past 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/




Living in the Present Moment

The Present

“What comes next? The answer is we never know. No matter how smart we are, how carefully we have planned, or how much data we have gathered, we are still only mortals who can never control the future. We live in the now, in the eternally changing series of spaces we call the present. The now is where we shine. In the now, we can have an impact, be creative, shape reality, and build relationships that can withstand change.

What happens tomorrow may always be a surprise, but what happens today can still feel our presence. In fact, we are the artists of the now. We can turn a moment into a memory, a glance into a promise, an idea into a vision that will last forever.” —Steven Charleston Daily Facebook Page.

seibert girls living and enjoying the present moment

I think I became aware of the gift of living in the present moment in the 1980s when I bought Spencer Johnson’s 80-page book, The Precious Presence, as a Christmas present for my husband and decided to read it first. It is a practical parable of a man living in our fast-paced world trying to find meaning and peace, opening the most precious present. Later, during my self-help period, I would read two more of Spencer’s books, The One Minute Manager and Who Moved the Cheese, trying to cope with the demands of a busy pediatric radiology practice.

Then, I was reminded again of the power of living in the present when I read from C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters that God meets us only in the present moment. “The Present is the point at which time touches eternity.” This is where God lives in our lives. God is not in the past or the future but is there to greet us in the present moment.

living in the present moment

 How do we stay in the present moment? Anthony DeMello in Sadhana teaches us that living in our body and not living out of our head keeps us grounded in the present moment. Likewise, spending time in nature connects us to the present.

Being with children keeps us in the present. Children live there and invite us into all its possibilities. We set up a creche with nativity figures that increase each week in Advent in our narthex or entrance or lobby area of our church. Most adults hurry right by it, but almost all the children stop and look and even want to touch it.

In this new year, may we learn to live into the miracles that happen in the present moment, every day, every moment, every second.

Buechner, Lewis: Telling Secrets

“I have come to believe that, by and large, the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else.”—Frederick Buechner in Telling Secrets, Buechner Quote of the Day.

In Telling Secrets, Buechner reminds us that we are often like the dwarves in the stable in The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. We do not see the good or realize the beauty around us, but live trapped by our dark secrets. We are as sick as our secrets and can only get well by airing these secrets, if only in our own hearts.

Like the dwarves, we live huddled together in what we think is a cramped, pitch-black, dark stable with little room to breathe. In reality, we are amidst an endless green meadow where the sun shines, and the sky is blue. Aslan himself (God) stands there offering freedom, but the dwarves cannot see him and only see each other.

 We are our secrets, and sharing them with a trusted spiritual friend has much to do with the mystery of staying connected to the God within us and honoring our humanness.

One year, our former rector, Danny Schieffler, sent me this quote from John Dutton of the television series “Yellowstone.” “Secrets are like callouses on the heart. If you have enough of them, pretty soon, you can’t feel anything.”

What secrets are we carrying into the new year that will keep us in the dark and prevent us from feeling our connection to God, our neighbor, and our true selves?