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#3961 - Friday, July 23, 2010 - Editor: Jerry Katz
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
"[Contemplative
life] holds the key -- 'nondualistic thinking' -- to the next
level of Christian existence." -Richard Rohr
In the last few years there have emerged small but sturdy
branches of nondual Judaism (especially as founded by Jay
Michaelson) and nondual Christianity. The latter, especially as
founded by Richard Rohr, is presented in today's issue.
Michaelson and Rohr have been seen in the Highlights before.
Nonduality and Christianity
Excerpts from an article published today in the National Catholic
Reporter
http://ncronline.org/print/19301
“I hope whatever emerging Christianity is,” said
Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr, a featured speaker at the
[“Emerging Christianity: How We Get there Determines Where
We Arrive”] conference, “it’s going to be much
more practice-based than doctrine-based. Where has this obsession
with believing correct doctrines gotten us? The Roman church is
right back into it, although maybe that’s why God is
humiliating us, to say: ‘This obsession with being right and
having the whole truth, look where it’s gotten you, Roman
church,’ ” he said in a not-so-thinly veiled reference
to the then-breaking story that the shadow of the clergy sex
abuse scandal had darkened the door of the papal palace. “It
might well be in the great scheme of God’s grace the only
way to bring us to humility, to balancing all of our absolutely
certain knowing with a necessary unknowing.”
...
Whether a relative handful of people meeting in the New Mexico
desert (some 570 people from 45 U.S. states and five other
countries) can be considered a measure of new things emerging,
only time will tell. Numbers aside, the discussion was broad
enough to cross a range of denominational borders and ideological
presumptions, and it wasn’t about easy fixes or the simple
overthrow of dogma and traditional practice. In fact, in some
instances, the case was quite the opposite.
If Rohr, for Catholics, embodies in many ways whatever is left of
the renewal impulses of the Second Vatican Council, he also is a
leading advocate today of contemplative life, the ancient
discipline that has found a resurgence in some unlikely places.
It is an aspect of Christianity that Rohr thinks has been
shortchanged in the church over the centuries. He also believes
it holds the key -- “nondualistic thinking” -- to the
next level of Christian existence. That level, he said, will be
one that goes beyond the mind, beyond rationality, beyond ego.
“The mind,” he said, “is never going to get us to
a great church. It will always create some moral and doctrinal
distinctions because that’s the way the ego operates. The
ego prefers the dualistic mind.” In contrast, he said,
“the soul prefers to embrace things, not to name things. It
is what it is without a name. It is what it is as it is. The soul
has a different set of eyes, and my assumption is that the soul
sees with contemplative eyes. It sees things without needing to
label them up or down.”
...
[Conference speaker Shane Claiborne says]“One of those I
would say is that we have a movement in the church that is trying
to connect orthodoxy and orthopraxis. We’re not throwing out
the things that we believe, but we’re trying to also have
practices that work those things out. What has happened in the
past few decades is that our Christianity has just been about
what we believe, as if our Christianity was just a doctrinal
statement. But in Jesus you don’t see a presentation of
ideas. You see an invitation to join a movement and the actions
of that movement.”
Read the entire article:
http://ncronline.org/print/19301