A Long Loving Look

Writing a daily inspirational reflection or blog is a disciplined, humbling experience.  The disciplined part should be self-explanatory.  It is like exercise or playing an instrument.  It won’t work if I just do it if and when I feel like it.  Discipline means I do it---regardless of feelings.  Over the years I have learned that insight is not too closely linked to how I feel.  In the end that is a relief!

Writing these pieces is also quite humbling.  On one level it seems presumptuous that whatever I think or say others will want to read.  This smacks of a false humility.  I actually know there are folks who want to know what I think.  Some are intrigued by how I think.  I know I am not brilliant.  But I do have experiences and I know how to reflect on them and how to learn from them.  And this is what some people want to know.  So I humbly submit it day after day.

In order to feed my own soul, I do look at what others say.  Of course, we tend to pick our favorites in this regard.  One of my favorites is the Franciscan, Richard Rohr.  Rohr is about my age, but came through life very differently than I have.  We both have pretty humble midwestern backgrounds.  But he was a Catholic from the get-go.  And I was a pre-Vatican II Quaker who barely knew anything about Catholics.  Rohr became a Franciscan.  It would be at least college before I would have had any clue what that even meant!

Rohr writes a daily blog which I read.  While we share many similarities, we remain quite different guys.  He has more training in psychology than I do.  And because he is Catholic, he has read some Catholic authors whom I have not.  But we share much.  We are both interested in the contemplative tradition.  I think Quakers have always been contemplative, but we never used that language until very recently.  So when someone like Rohr talks about the contemplative life, I pay close attention.

He did just that in a recent blog.  Rohr was doing a series on his Order’s founder, namely, St. Francis of Assisi.  Francis was a well-to-do playboy until a series of events put him on the spiritual quest.  The upshot was a commitment to follow the way of Jesus.  Francis saw poverty as the hallmark of that way of life and so committed himself and his followers to that simple life.  But he was also a contemplative. 

This is where I began to follow Rohr.  In a recent post Rohr reflects on Franciscan contemplative spirituality.  Rohr says of Francis, “He practiced contemplation, or ‘a long loving look at the real,’ which allowed him to see in a new way.”  This offers a wonderfully simple definition of contemplation.  Contemplation is a long, loving look at the real.  That makes contemplation seem quite ordinary. Contemplation has to do with the real.  That is deceptively simple.

It is deceptively simple, because too many of us complicated the real.  And some of us fabricate our own versions of what is real---reality.  Through our experience and, sometimes, our education, we develop views of reality that are actually very real!  We create illusions and substitute our illusion for reality.  Or we warp reality in a way to make it fit the way we want the world to be.  This was the early world of Francis.

Through a kind of conversion process, Francis learned to see in a new way---a contemplative way.  This is what Rohr has seen and said.  The key piece for me was not the long look at reality.  Rather it was a long, loving look.  I am not sure what all it means to look at reality lovingly.  But I am up for learning more.  I think Rohr adds a helpful piece when he says it is like getting a new pair of glasses.  He describes it as, “Seing from a pair of glasses beyond our own is what I call ‘participative seeing.’  He  pushes this further.  “This primal communion, communicates spaciousness, joy, and a quiet contentment.”  This is quite descriptive of the contemplative experience.

The contemplative receives a primal communion.  That communion communicates qualities of spaciousness and joy and contentment.  That I long for.  And that I can begin to have by living the contemplative life.  In the contemplative life I am free for what is real.  I am free because “the essential gap between me and everything else has been overcome.  I am at home in a benevolent universe, and I do not need to prove myself to anybody, nor do I need to be ‘right,’ nor do others have to agree with me.”

Those last words of Rohr do a wonderful job of describing the life of the contemplative.  He or she comes to be at home in a benevolent universe.  Such a universe is not out to get you!  That universe is present and provides a loving reality that wants you not only to survive, but to thrive.  At times this is difficult to trust.  But that is why it is a journey of faith.

It begins in faith, but it is not a head trip through theology.  It is a journey of life through the experience of a long loving look at reality.  Reality turns out to be a benevolent universe that communicates joy, contentment and spaciousness.  How fine!