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The Vision Statement
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As an example of what I mean by encouraging the capacity to welcome new situations, I’d like to relate an incident that happened when I arrived in an airport the other day. As I arrived at the baggage claim to wait for my bag, I saw a baby and his mother who had arrived on the same plane. A short distance away a dog was sitting with its master, and as the youngster was just learning to walk, it began to toddle uncertainly towards the dog. It found the animal very interesting. As the baby approached the dog, I was fascinated to see the expression on the dog’s face. It was evidently not happy about the situation and was hoping that this child was not going to make it, because the poor dog didn’t know what he would do. As the toddler proceeded, he leaned so far forward that he fell down. He would get up…fall down…and finally, this one-year-old decided the best thing to do was to lean back, and as he did so he fell on his behind. It was charming to watch the determination of this infant to learn to walk. He wasn’t in the slightest discouraged by the number of times that he fell. And neither was his mother as she kept her patience while the baby struggled. It was only the dog that was disturbed about this process. |
I was an abbot for twenty years and was expected to make decisions. That was the way I was trained. In the rule of Benedict, the abbot is directed to consult a committee of senior monks in small matters and the whole community in matters that are more significant. It is possible to do that in a monastery of reasonable proportions, but it isn’t easy to find the time and the motivation to work through the process of consensus in large communities.
At this conference, we are presenting the initial draft of the changes we put forward after two or three years of work by the Board and the rewrite committee. They have worked very hard to articulate the impossible, which is the mystery of our vocation as a 21st century charism. We don’t say we have succeeded; all we can say is that this is our respectable best on the basis of many meetings, telephone conferences, and written suggestions. We are asking each leadership body and each of you as a voting member, and all those in the broader membership, to make further suggestions or to point out what still seems unclear.
The broader the consultation the more likely we are to get a better result. We are asking you to talk to your constituency about it; your small groups, chapters or clusters, and perhaps put some ideas together to see if they fly in your local chapter, and then let us know, and we will certainly take them very seriously.
The reason I think this is important is because the experience of these Theological Principles and the Administrative and Structural Principles, some of which also have a theological or experiential side, have proved to be extremely useful. We don’t have any direct hierarchical accountability at this point. The chief thing we have that can unite us for the years to come is our consent to the Vision Statement. We must affirm what we consider the spirit of Contemplative Outreach and a faithful articulation of its fundamental nature without claiming a specific text to be the last word on the subject. It may need to be changed again or reaffirmed in another ten or twenty years. In any case, this is the spirit in which I invite you to look at these modifications.
Contemplative Outreach has been growing, so an objective criterion to which to bring our day to day experience is what we are trying to present. In many chapter newsletters, the custom has arisen of printing the Vision and the Theological Principles as they have been articulated until now. The new text is not to replace them, but simply to add a few more points that were not in the former and to find clearer ways of expressing them. Of course, we cannot articulate that which is a mystery. We can only point to it or hint at it as in poetry. Much of scripture is poetry or myth in the sense of trying to express truths that are beyond prose or the ordinary way of articulating things. It is out of respect for the mystery that we do not presume that we can encompass it in a few words, statements, or propositions once and for all, or to inscribe it in stone.
In any charismatic movement or in the foundation of religious communities in the Christian religion, once the founder passes away, the next generation, out of loyalty to their experience of the mystery and sometimes to the founder, tends to make rules, policies, and structures to preserve the spirit that was enjoyed in the early days of the movement. The spirit cannot be preserved that way. We need structures and policies, but these need the flexibility to adjust to new situations and ideas. An ongoing evaluation from the heart of those who hold positions of servant leadership is important.
What
you need to be careful of after my departure as chairman of Contemplative
Outreach is not to overdo loyalty to what we are doing now or to me as the last
word on any subject. I’m just a channel of the charism we have received. I
couldn’t have done anything that has happened without the collaboration,
inspiration, and creativity of our various structural bodies, board members, and
dedicated membership. It is a corporate project and hence it is constantly
changing. That is one of the principles of listening to the Spirit whose voice
is extended not just through the leadership but throughout the whole
organization. This is a characteristic of the rule of Benedict which says that
when everyone has to be consulted the youngest members of the community should
be included. In Benedict’s view, God sometimes speaks through the young, as he
did in the case of a number of the prophets in the Old Testament.
In this consultation what we are looking for is the guidance of the Spirit, especially through the Gift of Counsel, one of the seven Gifts of the Spirit that gives the discernment, flexibility, openness, loyalty, and integrity to sense when something is off center and to consult with senior teachers, and sometimes, when a matter concerns the whole membership, to consult them also.
Our proposed new Vision Statement has been extended to include the Theological, Structural, and Administrative Principles instead of being a compressed summary of them. Thus the whole package is now the Vision. We ask you to read it in the spirit of Lectio Divina.
Fidelity to the integrity of any spiritual movement seems to be two-pronged. One is to maintain the wisdom of the past along with its experience and senior teachers. One consults the tradition, in other words, with great respect and willingness to learn, and then one sees whether new situations or new inspirations are calling us out of certain structures into others that might be more effective or that might incorporate new ideas and programs into the original inspiration. Even if the new and refined Vision is not articulated in the most precise and exact terms, my feeling is that the Spirit has given us already all we need to know. A refined text can only help to support our ongoing experience of the Vision and its spirit, as well as to relate to the continuing expansion of Contemplative Outreach. The Principles may need to be adjusted to other cultures, circumstances, and possibilities.
In this consultation what we are looking for is the guidance of the Spirit,
especially through the Gift of Counsel
For instance, we have tried to adapt to prison ministry, to the homeless, and now we are trying to move into youth outreach, hospice, seminaries, universities, and to ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue at the university level. We are open to any truth that throws light on the vocation we have received. Our vocation is to bring the experience of the love of God into this world. And that means into every part of the world and every level of knowledge from kindergarten to graduate school and old age. We don’t want to think small about this, because it is not our idea. It is God’s idea, who is infinite. We have the support and movement of That-Which-Is, and therefore needs to express through us, insofar as we can, the divine mercy, goodness, tenderness, courtesy, freedom, forgiveness, collaboration and cooperation—all the things humans are supposed to be doing anyway, but which they cannot do without the contemplative experience. We are committed not just to our own personal self-perfection. We are interested in the whole world, all humanity, past, present and to come; and all of science insofar as it is genuine and true. In our time science has become a new form of the revelation of God. The infinitesimal of quantum mechanics, the infinitude of space of astrophysics, and the cellular structure of living things are teaching us about God’s thoughts in a way that was never before available. This is especially true for inter-religious exchanges where dialogue has reached a spiritual level that has never before been possible in the history of the world. We still have to cultivate the unity of Christians, which is greatly enhanced by the bonding that takes place in the silent prayer that the ecumenical movements have fostered. This doesn’t mean we don’t respect differences or follow our own particular belief system according to the loyalties of our respective religious commitments. But in sharing silence we find a level of unity that transcends differences and enables us to be united, at least in prayer and meditation with all our Christian brothers and sisters.
Obviously, to be baptized into the body of Christ is a much bigger factor than any other in the ecumenical scene, but because of historical circumstances, it is going to take a generation or two for the rank and file of believers to get the message. After that, it may take a few more generations for people to realize that all of scripture and indeed all religions are preaching about the oneness of the human family and our accountability for each other. Few until now have listened. Contemplative prayer accessed through practices such as Centering Prayer can bring this experience of God into the world, into social institutions, economic development, political affairs, and ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue.
Other moral issues are arising. We are not asked to solve them all, but to live in a world that has them. We have to deal with them in our own way. We have found through the practice of Centering Prayer that our ability to be strengthened within by the presence of Christ enables us to maintain a certain equanimity in the midst of our own personal struggles in daily life and work, and even in the horrendous tragedies and various forms of violence that are taking place daily in the world and all over the world.
Our experience as contemplatives doesn’t dispense us from trying to find remedies with our contemporaries in any way that is possible and to try to bring not only justice and charity into the world, but utmost charity. This is the kind of love that is ready to lay down one’s life for everyone else in the human family; the kind of love that is prepared to forgive everything and everyone, because that is the kind of love we have received and are receiving from God. It is that mystery that we are trying to convey as we let go of our false selves and allow the divine Spirit to awaken in us the image of God that is always there, but which for whatever reason, we may think isn’t there.
Newsletter Table of
Contents ~ Fr. Keating's Article ~ President's
Letter ~ Reader's Reflections
Contemplative Life Program ~ New
Resources ~ Spanish Corner ~ Chapter
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What
is the primary focus of the unity of Contemplative Outreach as a network? I
think it is to maintain the integrity of the method of Centering Prayer and its
conceptual background. For a number of years, it has been the duty of the Board
of Trustees to find out how to do that. Maintaining the integrity requires a
razor-edged discernment, one that requires certain structures and policies, and
at the same time realizes that this integrity presupposes the capacity to make
exceptions and to be open to new initiatives and creativity.