Contemplative practices are pathways into the direct experience of divine presence and love.

Contemplative practices are many things. Our Christian tradition teaches us that they are pathways into the direct experience of divine presence and love. Contemporary neuroscience adds that they are also pathways into self-regulation…. Contemplative practices—both solitary and communal—help us resist conformity with wisdom and courage.

Studying biases and authoritarianism is also helping me understand in a deeper way why contemplative practices, and especially contemplative practices in community, are so important right now.  

I am thinking about these authoritarian patterns not only to better understand what’s happening now in my country. I’m also trying to understand my own country’s history—how millions of so-called Christians in [the United States] consented to the genocide of Indigenous peoples and then consented to the enslavement of kidnapped and trafficked Africans and then consented to American apartheid in the Jim Crow era and then resisted the civil rights movement.   

Protecting Our Own Light

Richard Rohr, March 31, 2025