Everything Belongs: the Gift of Contemplative Prayer
“If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.”
Love people even in their sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
(From Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, quoted at the opening of the second chapter)
I really, really like Everything Belongs. I like it so much because it’s good for me. It functions for me as a sort of mantra. I tend to live inside my head. I search for the right thing to think—constantly. And this book exists to remind me that I’m more than what I think and that life is more than the sum of our thinking. This book invites me to open my eyes.
My early faith and religious experience helped form my identity. But it wasn’t long before I was just trying to “get it right.” That’s pretty normal for religion, but it can also drain you of life. I fall into the same old pattern when I make my life and reading and search all about thinking the right things.
The fundamental premise of this book is that there is something deeper to reality, that our everyday distractions don’t let us access. “The [God question] is resolved in you, when you agreed to bear the mystery of God: God’s suffering for the world and God’s ecstasy in the world” (17). Everything belongs: contemplation and spiritual sight mean holding the tensions. It’s about learning to see and a readiness to learn. God is at work in the darkness and despair, so even the dark moments “belong”—don’t rush through.
Rohr says that “we live ourselves into new ways of thinking,” not the opposite (19). I wrote in the margin: “But also, sometimes, we think ourselves into new ways of living.” That’s from experience, where something I’ve read or a thought I’ve been challenged with has changed the way I live. It’s both things, right? And maybe Rohr is right; living is the primary way of formation.
On being human:
In other words, our journeys around and through our realities, or “circumferences,” lead us to the core reality, where we meet both our truest self and our truest God. We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity.
This bit has special significance to me in light of how I’ve brought the question of what it means to be human to my HULA students.
Spiritual Sight and Liminal Space
The key to spiritual sight is the starting point that you’re already there: you are already in the presence of God. We must learn to see it. “Prayer is not primarily saying words or thinking thoughts. It is, rather, a stance. It’s a way of living in the Presence, living in awareness of the Presence, and even of enjoying the Presence” (31).
Rohr argues that “most spiritual work is readying the student” (38). That’s my starting point at HULA because that was my experience: you learn when you’re ready to learn. I was a late bloomer. I wasn’t ready to learn when I studied abroad. I barely learned when I was in college. It wasn’t until grad school, when I took a church history class of all things, that I was finally ready to learn, and everything started to connect. Then Katie and I got to direct Harding in Zambia in the fall of 2012, and that’s when I began to see more deeply. The students we traveled with as well as our hosts in Zambia taught me something important about what it means to be human. My three months in Zambia brought me into a liminal space. It was “voluntary displacement for the sake of transformation of consciousness, perspective, and heart” (48). That’s the key piece about what gives travel the potential to be spiritually formative. “There is another world, much bigger and more inclusive, that both relativizes and re-enchants this world that we take as normative” (48).
I went on to write a dissertation about travel as a spiritual practice, so I won’t say more about that here. But when I first read this section of Everything Belongs back in 2018, things clicked into place. It’s not only about travel, but my experiences of travel—from my first ventures to the US from Italy, to mission trips and study abroad and everything in between (aka, vacation)—have opened me up to be ready to learn. I’ll repeat, I was a late bloomer, so it took me until I was 24 to travel with humility and honesty, the two virtues Rohr argues are the “foundation of all spirituality” (48). Only then was I able to hear something beyond what I already knew. It’s good to have our fundamental assumptions questioned every so often. Liminal space gives you a pattern for living and learning that becomes a part of the way you see all things. And it leads here:
When we can see the image of God where we don’t want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own (58).
The Contemplative Stance and Being Whole
On contemplation, this was a gut punch, and really the reason I’m taking the time to write something about this book, and others that are my favorites. It helps me stop.
Only then, when you stop the parade of new voices and ideas, will you see the underlying and ever-recurring patterns. (76)
But being nothing has a glorious tradition. When we are nothing, we are in a fine position to receive everything from God. (77)
“Prayer heals our split from life itself. It heals our disconnectedness from the deepest stream itself” (87). This is why I need this reminder: I wake up early, make coffee and read and read. I go about the rest of the day and connect with people. I spend the evening with my kids and go to bed, and the cycle repeats. I need the practice of connecting to the deepest stream. Otherwise I’ll walk blindly through each step.
On coming to peace within the search: “Prayer lives in a spacious place” (90).
As someone said, “If you understand it, things are just as they are. If you don’t understand it, things are just as they are.” The mystery is to be ready to receive things just as they are and be ready to let them teach us. (90)
The Vulnerability of God, Holy Tears, New Life
On the vulnerability of God, “forgiveness is God’s entry into powerlessness” (134).
A few days ago, my four-year old asked me if I ever cry. I told him that of course I cry, and that it’s good for us to cry sometimes. And then he said, “But Dad, I’ve never seen you cry.” Touché.
It’s an important critique. Toward the end of the book, Rohr says that “weeping is a gentle release of water that washes, baptizes, and renews” (148). Tears are a gift, and the church would do better to grieve than to accuse, as we are more often known for doing. “A Christian is one who, along with Jesus, agrees to feel, to suffer the pain of the world,” and shed tears. “We need to take the low road of Jesus back to tears” (152). And in the liminal space—that sacred, in between space—transformation is found. The divine pattern of transformation includes failure, death, so that the God of life may bring about something new.
The contemplative stance is the Third Way. We stand in the middle, neither taking the world on from the power position nor denying it for fear of the pain it will bring. We hold the realization, seeing the dark side of reality and the pain of the world, but we hold it until it transforms us, knowing that we are complicit in the evil and also complicit in the holiness. Once we can stand in that third spacious way, neither fighting nor fleeing, we are in the place of grace out of which newness comes. Creativity comes from here, and we can finally do a new thing for the world. (171)
Following Jesus, then, is “a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world” (179).
It’s the path of grounded, embodied wisdom, where everything belongs.
Helpful Mantras
Here are a few of the mantras from throughout the book that I’ll leave you with:
God’s life is living itself in me. I am aware of life living itself in me. (57)
God beneath you,
God in front of you,
God behind you,
God above you,
God within you. (57)
You cannot not live in the presence of God.
Be still and know that I am God.
Be still and know that I am.
Be still and know.
Be still.
Be. (62)
I recognize that I’m in a river that is bigger than I am. The foundation and the flow of that river is love. Life is not about me; it is about God, and God is about love. (79)
Whether you’re coming from a place of faith rooted in a specific tradition, or you no longer consider yourself a person of faith, the following disclosure might be helpful: Rohr is a Franciscan universalist who looks for truth in all of the great religious traditions. He writes mostly from a Jesus-centered space, but he also argues that “the Gospel is not a competing idea. It’s that by which we see all ideas in proper context” (94). So he leans on Buddhism quite a lot, as well other perspectives well outside of Christianity. I find a lot of what he writes compelling; you’ll have to see for yourself.