Book of the Month | The Contemplative Writer

Book of the Month: Thoughts in Solitude

Posted on August 8, 2016August 8, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

Week Two: Transformation in Solitude

Can you make yourself more loving, holy, or virtuous?

I suspect that you could try, but Thomas Merton suggests that you’ll fail and feel quite bad about it. His alternative is far from flashy: solitude.

In solitude we can rest fully in the love of God and trust the rest to God’s presence within us. Merton writes:

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“If man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit. Everything must be elevated and transformed by the action of God, in love and faith.”

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“There is no hope for the man who struggles to obtain a virtue in the abstract—a quality of which he has no experience. He will never efficaciously prefer the virtue to the opposite vice, no matter how much he may seem to despise the latter.”

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“What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?”

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Learn more about Thoughts in Solitude…

For Reflection

Book of the Month: Thoughts in Solitude

Posted on August 1, 2016August 1, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

Week One: The Cost of Neglecting Solitude

Thomas Merton makes me want to take a walk in the woods for a week. At a time when we have no shortage of words, we desperately need the wisdom and insight that comes from extended periods of solitude. Just by virtue of his beautiful prose, Merton makes solitude desirable.

Via the book’s description: “Thoughts in Solitude addresses the pleasure of a solitary life, as well as the necessity for quiet reflection in an age when so little is private.”

Here are a few quotes from Merton to consider:

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“When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority.”

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“God’s plan was that they [the Israelites] should learn to love Him in the wilderness and that they should always look back upon the time in the desert as the idyllic time of their life with Him alone.”

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Learn more about Thoughts in Solitude…

For Reflection

Featured Book: Falling Upward

Posted on July 25, 2016July 6, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

Week Four: Second Half of Life Enlightenment

Falling Upward challenges us to stop seeking enlightenment. The more we try to create spiritual breakthroughs, the more frustrated we’ll become. We can only seek God and then take whatever enlightenment and breakthroughs result.

Religion can be healthy or unhealthy. While we begin our religious journeys by learning rules and facts, the deeper Christian experience is a union with God–Jesus called this abiding. Richard Rohr speaks of these two movements as the two halves of life. Both are necessary, but the first half of life can become toxic and unhealthy if it’s all we ever know.

Once we fail, doubt, and struggle, we are most ready to experience God on God’s own terms. Rohr writes:

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Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. You will see only what you have already decided to look for, and you cannot see what you are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force you to look where you never would otherwise.

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Many people are kept from mature religion because of the pious, immature, or rigid expectations of their first-half-of-life family. Even Jesus, whose family thought he was “crazy” (Mark 3:21), had to face this dilemma firsthand.

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By the second half of life, you have learned ever so slowly, and with much resistance, that most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot, and incites a lot of push-back from those you have attacked.

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“The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” I learned this from my father St. Francis, who did not concentrate on attacking evil or others, but just spent his life falling, and falling many times into the good, the true, and the beautiful. It was the only way he knew how to fall into God.

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For Reflection

Are you encouraged or discouraged to read Rohr’s thoughts on reaching enlightenment?

Take 5 minutes today to rest in God’s direction for your life.

Featured Book: Falling Upward

Posted on July 4, 2016July 2, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

Week Three: Transforming Mercy

God sees our failures and desires to show mercy and to restore us. We see our failures, and we worry that we have finally gone too far. We categorize sins and define who is in and who is out based on the category of the sin.

God’s stated desire is that we abide in him and grow. When we are cut off from the vine, we will struggle and sin. While sin is serious, it’s also an avenue for mercy. Confessing our sin to a merciful God will send us on the path to restoration. When we feel most “cut off” from God, we especially need to reconnect with Christ, our vine who gives us life.

Here’s what Richard Rohr has to say in Falling Upward:

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As St. Gregory of Nyssa already said in the fourth century, “Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”

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We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question—even when it is not entirely true—over the mercy and grace of God.

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Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God’s own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.

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In the divine economy of grace, sin and failure become the base metal and raw material for the redemption experience itself. Much of organized religion, however, tends to be peopled by folks who have a mania for some ideal order, which is never true, so they are seldom happy or content.

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For Reflection

Meditate on the word “abide” for fine minutes.

Invite God into the “disorderly” parts of your life today.

Featured Book: Falling Upward

Posted on June 27, 2016June 23, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

Week Two: Moving Beyond Control

Contemplation creates a space in our lives for God to settle and perhaps speak without our intellects trying to control our religious experience. In Falling Upward, Richard Rohr writes that the first half of life is particularly hostile toward contemplation because we are struggling to define our identities and beliefs.

However, many find that the boundaries we’ve devoted our first half of life to constructing are never as solid as we thought. This is where the falling comes in. Most importantly, this is where we can find true spiritual growth.

The loss of control over our spirituality can open us to new movements of the Spirit of God. Here’s what Richard Rohr has to say in Falling Upward:

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The very unfortunate result of this preoccupation with order, control, safety, pleasure, and certitude is that a high percentage of people never get to the contents of their own lives! Human life is about more than building boundaries, protecting identities, creating tribes, and teaching impulse control.

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Very few Christians have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time. Our Western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well. Without a contemplative mind, we do not know how to hold creative tensions.

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God has to undo our illusions secretly, as it were, when we are not watching and not in perfect control, say the mystics. That is perhaps why the best word for God is actually Mystery. We move forward in ways that we do not even understand and through the quiet workings of time and grace.

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For Reflection

What are you trying to control today?

Take 5 minutes to surrender that part of your life to God today.

Featured Book: Falling Upward

Posted on June 20, 2016November 26, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

Week One: A Different Kind of Fall

Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” John 12:24 NRSV

In Falling Upward, Richard Rohr provides the metaphor of “falling” in order to describe the process of “dying” and rising in the two halves of life. Perhaps the idea of falling appeals to us a bit more than dying.

Rohr suggests that we spend the first half of life establishing an identity and the second of half of life filling that identity or putting it to use.

I would add that most people I know go through their 20’s with a deep, abiding fear of the future. They don’t want to fail. They don’t want to go off track from the path to success and security. They want to know that they are OK and that God is real. In the midst of this anxiety, they either tend to become defensive/reactive or they just give up on all things spiritual. Rohr’s book can help navigate both this season the fall out that it has left with those of us beyond our 20’s.

If anything, Falling Upward will assure you that you’re not crazy and that the pain and failure you fear the most can actually help you let go of what you cannot control and enter into a deeper sense of God’s presence.

Here are a few quotes about Rohr’s idea of “falling”:

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If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A “perfect” person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.

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By denying their pain, avoiding the necessary falling, many have kept themselves from their own spiritual depths—and therefore have been kept from their own spiritual heights.

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When you are in the first half of life, you cannot see any kind of failing or dying as even possible, much less as necessary or good.

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The first half of life is to create a proper container for one’s life and answer the first essential questions: “What makes me significant?” “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?” The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.

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For Reflection

How does the fear of failure show up in your life today?

How can God meet you in your fear today?

Featured Book June 20, 2016.jpg

Featured Book: The Ragamuffin Gospel

Posted on June 13, 2016June 10, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

Week Three: God’s Command for Stillness

As we prepare our family to move this week, I’m going to keep things on the shorter side. And what could be a better challenge in the midst of so much moving than the command from God to be “still” and know that I am God?

We are continuing our feature of Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel this month where he reflects on the love of God and the meaning of the cross:

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The ragamuffin church is comfortable with periods of silence, sitting still, listening attentively, and experiencing the divine presence. “Be still and acknowledge that I am God” (Psalm 46:10) is not merely a pious suggestion, but a divine injunction. Page 220

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Alan Jones notes, “The most difficult part of mature faith is to allow ourselves to be the object of God’s delight.” Page 223

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For Reflection

Are you feeling able to be still or are you always on the go in this season?

How can you make space to be still before God today?

Featured Contemplative Book: The Ragamuffin Gospel

Posted on June 6, 2016June 4, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

Week Two: What the Cross Tells Us

Brennan Manning writes that we can make the mistake of turning salvation into a process or transaction when the cross itself is God’s ultimate act of love for us. The cross tells us just how deeply God loves us.

As I’ve read the works of contemplative Christians, I’ve noticed that many of them had their most profound revelations while meditating on the cross. It’s on the cross that God demonstrated his commitment to saving us through a different kind of power that doesn’t resort to force or degrading others. The cross tells us just how far God’s love will go for us.

The cross tells us that God saw a violent, self-centered people and still preferred to sacrifice himself at the mercy of our religious and political institutions rather than demanding the love and honor that is his due.

We are continuing our feature of Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel this month where he reflects on the love of God and the meaning of the cross:

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“We need a new kind of relationship with the Father that drives out fear and mistrust and anxiety and guilt, that permits us to be hopeful and joyous, trusting and compassionate…

The gospel of grace calls us to sing of the everyday mystery of intimacy with God instead of always seeking for miracles or visions. It calls us to sing of the spiritual roots of such commonplace experiences as falling in love, telling the truth, raising a child, teaching a class, forgiving each other after we have hurt each other, standing together in the bad weather of life, of surprise and sexuality, and the radiance of existence.” Page 77-78

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“In his monumental work The Crucified God, Jürgen Moltmann writes, ‘We have made the bitterness of the cross, the revelation of God in the cross of Jesus Christ, tolerable to ourselves by learning to understand it as a necessity for the process of salvation.’” Page 108

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“Do you really accept the message that God is head over heels in love with you? I believe that this question is at the core of our ability to mature and grow spiritually. If in our hearts we really don’t believe that God loves us as we are, if we are still tainted by the lie that we can do something to make God love us more, we are rejecting the message of the cross.” Page 165

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For Reflection

Featured Contemplative Book: The Ragamuffin Gospel

Posted on May 30, 2016May 28, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

Week One: Receiving God’s Love

Author Brennan Manning touches on a mystery that has long been a struggle in my Christian faith: How do I begin to love God?

So much of my evangelical background focuses on emotions and passion, being on fire for God and committing to a relationship with all sincerity. If you aren’t “feeling it,” it’s hard to know what to do next.

I learned the hard way that you can’t learn your way into loving God or make yourself love God out of duty or obligation, because this is what good Christians do.

Manning’s solution is striking, simple, and the best kind of news: we love God because he first loved us (see 1 John 4:19). In fact, the foundation of Christianity, the cross, and healthy Christian religious practice and spirituality is the love of God that preempts all of our best efforts.

While I could recommend several Manning books, including The Furious Longing of God, we’re going to feature his popular book The Ragamuffin Gospel this month:

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We must go out into a desert of some kind (your backyard will do) and come into a personal experience of the awesome love of God. Then we will nod in knowing agreement with that gifted English mystic Julian of Norwich, “The greatest honor we can give Almighty God is to live gladly because of the knowledge of his love.”

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In essence, there is only one thing God asks of us—that we be men and women of prayer, people who live close to God, people for whom God is everything and for whom God is enough. That is the root of peace. We have that peace when the gracious God is all we seek.

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Do you really believe that the Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is gracious, that He cares about you? Do you really believe that He is always, unfailingly present to you as companion and support? Do you really believe that God is love?

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Get our latest blog posts delivered to your inbox or sign up for the weekly contemplative email and receive a free eBook: The Contemplative Writer.

For Reflection

Featured Contemplative Book: 100 Days in the Secret Place

Posted on May 23, 2016November 26, 2016 by Ed Cyzewski

Week Four: Silence and Trust

Distractions or focusing during prayer are the two most common prayer struggles I hear about from subscribers to this site. It’s hard to know where to begin with prayer if you can’t even clear your mind for a few moments.

This is why practices such as centering prayer encourage us to choose a word, phrase, or icon to focus on while sitting in silence before God. This is a a learned discipline, not a simple trick or life hack that immediately makes it easy to pray. In fact, we are surrounded every day with some of the most sophisticated distractions ever known to man. Sitting in silence before god is no easy task.

Perhaps today’s reflections from 100 Days in the Secret Place will help you keep going with prayer. Silence is not easy to cultivate, but it is such a valuable discipline to practice. In addition, just the act of silence can prove a valuable starting point for prayer. Silence gives God raw materials that can be shaped and directed.

Here are this week’s selections from 100 Days in the Secret Place:

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Simply bringing yourself quietly before God will do more than worrying or being too religious.

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Silence also helps you put space between you and the world. Out of the silence that you cultivate, you will find strength to meet your needs.

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Offer Him your tangled mess and He will turn everything toward His own merciful purpose. You must learn to let go of everything whether God ever gives you what you so eagerly desire or not. The most important thing is to go back to communion with God—even if it seems dry and you are easily distracted.

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How are you going to cultivate an inner silence if you are always talking? You cannot want God and the things of the world at the same time. Don’t you realize that your prayer will be affected by what you cultivate in your daily life?

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Real prayer is nothing more than loving God. Prayer is not made great by a lot of words, for God knows your inmost feelings before you say them.

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Keep in Touch

Get our latest blog posts delivered to your inbox or sign up for the weekly contemplative email and receive a free eBook: The Contemplative Writer.

For Reflection

Featured Book May 23, 2016