Session 1: March 4, 2012

Chapter 1: A Lever and a Place to Stand [Fulcrum]

The reference is to Archimedes (287-212 BCE). “If the lever stretched far enough and the fulcrum point remained fixed close to the earth, then even a small weight at one end would be able to move the world at the other”—this is Rohr’s metaphor for speaking about contemplation and action. Contemplation is the fixed point, the place to stand—it’s a slight distance from the world, but at the same time close to it, “loving it, feeling its pains and its joys as our pains and our joys” (2). It’s anchored in reality—without ideology, denial, or fantasy.

He feels St. Francis of Assisi and Thomas Merton loved the world and criticized it. They found the ‘hidden wholeness,’ what Rohr calls the “Unified Field.”

We often can’t find our levers, “or true ‘delivery systems by which to move our world’ (3). Religious are often too removed, and others don’t have the spiritual practice. We need both the ‘contemplative eyes’ and the involvement with the pain of the world, as the prophets had and as Jesus had. Titles or ordination do not confer it. Jesus was a layman; so were the Twelve. But there is the “innate wisdom of good people” that the church rightly calls the "sense of the faithful." And contemplation establishes “you inside the sensus fidelium of the Unified Field of the Holy Spirit” (4).

Action comes before contemplation, and it is the failures and limitation of action that drive you back into contemplation. There is a cycle of life and prayer that give you the lever and the place to stand “because you are being moved yourself inside a much larger Flow” (4).

Chapter 2: Amusing Ourselves to Death

Most of us have PhDs. in dualistic thinking. To get out of dualistic thinking, we need to try to “think things together.” That will change everything! Even our politics may change!

You yourself have to be present in order to appreciate the Real Presence. Information is not the same as transformation, or PhDs would all be saints.

Two big words for different ways of "knowing:"

Cataphatic: knowing through words and images;
Apophatic: knowing through silence. An un-knowing. You come to realize: I don’t need to know everything, because I am being held. I can “fall into” the Unified Field.