The Living School
Thank you, Zion, for investing in continuing education for your pastor. Last week, I completed a course I'd been taking all 2024. It was a spiritual formation program called the Living School: Essentials of Engaged Contemplation.
“Grounded in the transformative wisdom and practices of the Christian contemplative traditions, its purpose is to equip students to work together for a more just and connected world.”
The year was divided into three trimester, each with a focus on a "path."
- Path of Contemplation
- Path of Descent
- Path of Love
More on these later.
Throughout, we were invited to a daily prayer practice, with weekly readings, teachings by core faculty and guests, and journaling prompts. It was a fully online course. There were some 400-500 students, grouped into "pods" of about 50 and "circles" of 10 or 12. Each month we gathered in our pods and circles to share a prayer practice together, practice sitting in discomfort, and reflect on the course. There were also online pod and circle chats to engage with each other throughout.
Core faculty included Brian McLaren, James Finley, and Barbara Holmes, with Randy Woodley and Carmen Acevedo Butcher as adjunct. Barbara Holmes died during the course. She was 81.
So, the paths. What is contemplation? You may already be familiar, and you've probably heard me talk about it. The Center for Action and Contemplation describes it this way.
Contemplation is a way of listening with the heart while not relying entirely on the head. Contemplation is a 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.
What is descent? It's described by St. John of the Cross in his Dark Night of the Soul and by Richard Rohr in Falling Upward. This poem, “Growing Down,” by Drew Jackson describes it too.
Know that growth
more often looks like
letting go
than adding more;
having all the extra
stripped away
until all that’s left
Is Love.
What is love? Or specifically, the path of love? It's about our unique callings as individuals to be a loving presence in the world. Paul speaks on it in First Corinthians today. Here's how Barbara Holmes put it, shortly before her death:
Everybody’s not called to do everything. … We just want it all easy. Everybody’s called to do this. Everybody’s supposed to do that. It isn’t that way. Each of us has an inclination and a calling of the spirit that is so specific, and when you do that, you get a multiplicity of efforts that can bring systems down.
We’ve seen the Berlin Wall fall. We know Jericho falls with people just walking around. Waters part, and we say, “Well, that was then.” But this also can be now.
The systems that are built on exploitation will fall. If we don’t believe that, then we don’t believe that God is God. So do what you are called to do. If you’re supposed to be outside throwing rocks, throw them. If you’re supposed to be inside being a good administrator, trying to make change from the inside, do that.
And we don’t judge each other as to why one isn’t doing the other. That’s a waste of energy. We are all one community working as a microcosm of different efforts.
Thanks again. —PC