FINAL RETREAT FOR THE YEAR

The final 3 day Individually Guided Silent Retreat for this year will be at Volmoed from the 13-15 November 2018. Space is limited and places are allocated on a first come first served basis. If you would like to be a part of this retreat then please contact David Newton on 0725865241 or newtond@telkomsa.net as soon as possible and I will let you have forms.

Spirituality;Vocation and Transformation

One of the most inspiring writers in this field that I enjoy reading is Richard Rohr. I was so deeply struck by his thoughts in the meditation from CAC today. I share this meditation in its entirety with references. Certainly worth a read.

Vocation

 

 

 

Swallowed by a Whale
Wednesday, May 30, 2018

 

The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully belong to it. It’s not possible to save the world by trying to save it. You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a better place. Discovering your unique gift to bring to your community is your greatest opportunity and challenge. The offering of that gift—your true self—is the most you can do to love and serve the world. And it is all the world needs. —Bill Plotkin [1]

Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. . . . That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for “voice.” Vocation does not mean a goal I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. . . . I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity. —Parker Palmer [2]

I believe that the Book of Jonah can best be read as God moving someone from a mere sense of duty or career to a sense of personal call, vocation, or destiny. Notice that this vocation is almost thrust upon Jonah. It sometimes takes being “swallowed by a whale” and taken into a dark place of listening and discernment to let go of our small, separate self and its private agenda. Jonah had to be shoved out of the boat, or he would never reach Nineveh, the place to which God had called him. Eventually, we must allow ourselves to be drawn by our soul’s desire rather than driven by ego needs.

The motivating energies of ego and soul are very different. The soul’s impulse comes quietly and generously from within; we do not look for payment, reward, or advancement because we have found our soul gift, our inherent gladness. To be an oblate—someone who is offered—is quite different from seeking security, status, or title.

Listen, wait, and pray for your unique gift, your True Self. Meditation should lead to a clarity about what you are and, maybe even more importantly, what you are not. I have found it difficult over the years to tell people when something is not their gift; it is usually very humiliating for the person to face their own illusions and sense of entitlement. One sign that something is your vocation is that you would do it for free, even if there is no reward or social payoff. This clarifies a vocation quite quickly.

Parker Palmer writes:

How much dissolving and shaking of ego we must endure before we discover our deep identity—the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic vocation. . . .

Today I understand vocation . . . not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God. [3]

 

Gateway to Presence:
If you want to go deeper with today’s meditation, take note of what word or phrase stands out to you. Come back to that word or phrase throughout the day, being present to its impact and invitation.

 

 

[1] Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (New World Library: 2003), 13.

[2] Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Jossey-Bass: 2000), 4.

[3] Ibid., 9-10.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (Paulist Press: 2014), 82-83.

Image credit: Automat (detail), 1927, Edward Hopper, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa.

 

 

VOLMOED RETREAT MARCH 2018

Special time with some very special people!! Thanks for your openness!

TRUE TRANSFORMATION - TRANSFORMATION INTO THE IMAGE OF CHRIST......

The Lost Tradition of Contemplation
Tuesday, January 9, 2018

The awesome and even presumptuous message of divinization is found in the Judeo-Christian story of Creation: we are “created in the image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:27 and 5:2). Many tomes of theology have been written to clarify this claim, and this is theologians’ primary consensus: “Image” is our objective DNA that marks us as creatures of God from the very beginning. “Likeness” is our personal appropriation and gradual realization of this utterly free gift of the image of God. It’s all too easy to recognize our daily unlikeness to God in ourselves and others, so we have a hard time believing this could be true in ourselves or others. But some form of contemplative practice will allow us to rest in and trust this deeper and truest self.

Actually, who you are in God and who God is in you is the only self that has ever existed. It’s the only self that exists right now. The trouble is, most people don’t know it. It’s not their fault; we just have not given them the tools they need to connect with who they really are. The dualistic and argumentative mind will never get you there. Thus we have an identity crisis on a massive scale!

The contemplative mind has not been systematically taught in the West for the last five hundred years. The Spanish Carmelites Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) and John of the Cross (1542-1591) were the last well-known teachers of contemplative awareness in European thought. With the so-called “Enlightenment” and the argumentative Reformation, Western Christianity almost abandoned contemplation in favor of dualistic thinking and its own strange form of “rational” thought, which actually produced fundamentalism in both its Catholic and Protestant forms. Thomas Merton (1915-1968) felt that even the monasteries no longer taught the contemplative mind in any systematic way, as monks just “said prayers” with their old dualistic minds. Without contemplation, there is not much depth or interiority to Christianity. It is just beliefs and belonging systems. That is probably why the Reformation was so necessary. Unfortunately, reacting to unjust or unhealthy systems with only dualistic thinking will produce more of the same.

You cannot know God the way you know anything else; you only know God or the soul of anything subject to subject, center to center, by a process of “mirroring” where like knows like and love knows love—“deep calling unto deep” (Psalm 42:7). The Divine Spirit planted deep inside each of us yearns for and responds to God—and vice versa (see James 4:5). The contemplative is deeply attuned and surrendered to this process.

We are not so much human beings trying to become spiritual. We’re already inherently spiritual beings and our job is learning how to be good humans! I believe that’s why Jesus came as a human being: not to teach us how to go to heaven, but to teach us how to be a fully alive human being here on this earth.

DAILY DEVOTION FOR TODAY ON THE "CENTRE FOR ACTION AND CONTEMPLATION" site by Richard Rohr.

Note: It would be helpful if you also read the previous two devotions this week i.e. Sunday and Monday, as in these he clarifies terms like "Divinization', and "Image" and "Likeness"  revealing that his thinking is in line with mainline Christian thinking.

FROMin 

Prayer and Transformation

Contemplative spirituality would agree with the devotional school of spirituality in saying that constant  change or conversion, the biblical reality of Metanoia, is a necessary imperative in the spiritual life. But whereas devotional spirituality would want to think of such change as primarily in terms of behaviour, contemplative spirituality, without being unmindful of this kind of change, would tend to stress the need for change in consciousness. It is not enough that we behave better; we must come to see reality differently. We must learn to see the depths of things, not just reality at a superficial level.This especially means we need to see the non-separateness of the world from God and the oneness of all reality in God: the Hidden Ground of Love in all that is. Prayer is a kind of corrective lens that does away with the distorted view of reality that, for some mysterious reason, seems to be my normal vision, and enables me to see what is as it really is.

-From Silence on fire by William H. Shannon

A CHALLENGE FOR CHRISTIANS TODAY

What the world longs for from the Christian religion is the witness of men and women daring enough to be different, humble enough to make mistakes, wild enough to be burned in the fire of love, real enough to make others see how unreal they are. Jesus, Son of the Living God, anoint us with fire this day. Let your word not just shine in our hearts, but let it burn. Let there be no division, compromise, or holding back. Separate the mystics from the romantics, and goad us to that daredevil leap into the abyss of your love.

                                                                      From Reflections for Ragamuffins by Brennan Manning

A TIMELY REMINDER FROM ANTHONY DE MELLO

Here then is another reason why apostles withdraw to make a retreat; they need to be charged with the Holy Spirit.The Holy Spirit is given to those who watch and pray and wait patiently, those who have the courage to get away from everything and get to grips with themselves and with God in solitude and silence. No wonder every one of the great prophets, and indeed Jesus himself, retired to the desert for long periods of silence, prayer, fasting, wrestling with the forces of evil. The desert is the furnace where the apostle and the prophet are forged. The desert and not the marketplace. The marketplace is where apostles function. The desert is where they are formed and seasoned and receive their commission and their message for their world, "their" gospel. (Emphasis mine)

-From Contact with God by Anthony De Mello