CONTEMPLATIVES AND ACTIVISTS
In different seasons we have hosted Contemplatives and activist groups in London where we combine contemplation with activism. Contemplation gives some serious energy to carry on with activism despite all the frustrations and not burn out. Activist mystics are our inspiration.
Reading Contemplatively some books and saying mantras and liturgies have helped us to return to the source and stay connected to the divine source within when the hectic-ness of life can sway us as well as regular rhythmic prayer times and mantras/liturgy
Here is a list of some of our inspirations
Thomas Merton
Richard Rhor
Rik Skinflitr8r
Gerard The Monk
So we will tell you about how these people’s journeys have inspired us:
Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist, and scholar of comparative religion. Merton wrote more than 50 books in a period of 27 years, mostly on spirituality, social justice, and quiet pacifism, as well as scores of essays and reviews. Among Merton’s most enduring works is his bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). His account of his spiritual journey inspired scores of World War II veterans, students, and teenagers to explore offerings of monasteries across the US. It is on National Review’s list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the century.
By the 1960s, he had arrived at a broadly human viewpoint, one deeply concerned about the world and issues like peace, racial tolerance, and social equality. He had developed a personal radicalism that had political implications but was not based on ideology, rooted above all in non-violence. He regarded his viewpoint as based on “simplicity” and expressed it as a Christian sensibility. His New Seeds of Contemplation was published in 1961.
In a letter to Nicaraguan Catholic priest, liberation theologian, and politician Ernesto Cardenal (who entered Gethsemani but left in 1959 to study theology in Mexico), Merton wrote:
“The world is full of great criminals with enormous power, and they are in a death struggle with each other. It is a huge gang battle, using well-meaning lawyers and policemen and clergymen as their front, controlling papers, means of communication, and enrolling everybody in their armies”.
Here is a list of his books inspirational to both contemplative mystics and Activists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton_bibliography
Here are the books we covered in SPEAK monastic gatherings Contemplative and Activist meetings and reflection time:
Contemplation in a World of Action.
No Man Is an Island.
Thoughts in Solitude.
Seeds of Destruction.
Gandhi on Non-Violence.
Faith and Violence.
The Non-Violent Alternative.
New Seeds of Contemplation.
Mystics and Zen Masters.
The Inner Experience.
More info about the inspiration of Thomas Merton
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Merton
Richard Rhor
Franciscan Richard Rohr is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in 1987 because he saw a deep need for the integration of both action and contemplation—the two are inseparable. As Father Richard likes to say, the most important word in our Center’s name is neither Action nor Contemplation, but the word and.
Contemplation is a way of listening with the heart while not relying entirely on the head. Contemplation is prayerful letting go of our sense of control and choosing to cooperate with God and God’s work in the world. Prayer without action, as Father Richard says, can promote our tendency to self-preoccupation, and without contemplation, even well-intended actions can cause more harm than good.
Who We Are
In his 2016 book The Divine Dance, Rohr suggests that the top-down hierarchy of Western Christianity since Emperor Constantine has held ecumenical traditions back for centuries, and that the future of people of faith will have to involve a bottom-up approach maintains what he would call prophetic positions, on the “edge of the inside” of a church that he sees as failing to transform people, and thus increasingly irrelevant. In a critique of Rohr published in the New Oxford Review, Reverend Bryce Sibley writes that Rohr asserts that God holds both the masculine and the feminine together rather than either or binary dualistic thinking and criticizes ecumenical religious rituals that focus on rules rather than the paramount centrality of relationship with God, and neighbor.
We love this Book:
The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009)
In his teaching on scripture, such as in his book Things Hidden, Rohr calls the biblical record a human account of humanity’s evolving experience with God, “the word of God in the words of people”.[19] His book Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self suggests Jesus’s death and resurrection is an archetypal pattern for the movement from “false self” to “true self”, from “who you think you are” to “who you are in God”.[ Rohr’s 2014 book Eager to Love explores the key themes of Franciscan spirituality, which he sees as a “third way” between traditional orthodoxy and heresy, a way of focusing on the Gospel, justice, and compassion.[21]
Rohr emphasizes “alternative orthodoxy”, a term the Franciscan tradition has applied to itself, referring to a focus on “orthopraxis”—a belief that lifestyle and practice are much more important than mere verbal orthodoxy which he feels is much overlooked in Catholic preaching today.[ According to Rohr’s teachings, a person does not have to follow Jesus or practice any formal religion to come by salvation, but rather “fall in love with the divine presence, under whatever name”. Rohr says people are disillusioned with conservative churches that teach that nonbelievers go to Hell. The Perennial Tradition, or Perennial Philosophy, forms the basis of much of his teaching; his work’s essential message focuses on the union of divine reality with all things and the human potential and longing for this union. Rohr and other 21st-century spiritual leaders explore the Perennial Tradition in the Center for Action and Contemplation’s issue of the publication Oneing.
Rohr has reported that a group of local Catholics secretly recorded his sermons to have him excommunicated. They delivered the tapes to the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, then Archbishop of Cincinnati, who reviewed them and determined that they were within the bounds of the Church’s teachings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rohr
Rik Skinflitr8r
A Dutch poet who joined us at our SPEAK gathering for several years in a Row to do the Lou-tergy- loud lout-ish liturgy
Gerard The Monk
A Dutch monk joined us at the SPEAK gathering several years in a row to do the DJing and Visuals . He has since joined a Monastery in Holland where he works in the garden kitchen is often in prayer and frequently posts lovely contemplative pictures that inspire us.
whoops this is all men!! Need to find some more women