The Cosmic Egg

My Story, Our Story, Other Stories, The Story

CAC Publishing
Center for Action and Contemplation
cac.org
“Oneing” is an old English word that was used by
Lady Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) to describe the
encounter between God and the soul. The Center for Action
and Contemplation proudly borrows the word to express
the divine unity that stands behind all of the divisions,
dichotomies, and dualisms in the world. We pray and
publish with Jesus’ words, “that all may be one” ( John 17:21).

editor:
Vanessa Guerin

a ssoci at e editor:
Shirin McArthur

publisher:
The Center for Action and Contemplation

a dv isory boa r d:
David Benner
James Danaher
Ilia Delio, OSF
Sheryl Fullerton
Stephen Gaertner, OPraem
Ruth Patterson

Art, Design, and Composition by Nelson Kane

© 2021 Center for Action and Contemplation.

All rights reserved.
Oneing
An Alternative Orthodoxy

The biannual literary journal of the Center for Action and Contemplation.

The Perennial Tradition, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 2013

Ripening, Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 2013

Transgression, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 2014

Evidence, Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 2014

Emancipation, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 2015

Innocence, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 2015

Perfection, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2016

Evolutionary Thinking, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2016

Transformation, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 2017

Politics and Religion, Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 2017

Anger, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 2018

Unity and Diversity, Vol. 6, No. 2, Fall 2018

The Universal Christ, Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 2019

The Future of Christianity, Vol. 7, No. 2, Fall 2019

Liminal Space, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 2020

Order, Disorder, Reorder, Vol. 8, No. 2, Fall 2020

Trauma, Vol. 9, No. 1, Spring 2021

Oneing is a limited-edition publication; therefore, some editions are

no longer in print. To order available editions of Oneing, please visit
https://store.cac.org/.

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Oneing
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 O neing volume 9 no. 2

R ICHAR D ROH R
Introduction 15

D R E W E . JAC K S O N
A Rude Awakening 19

PA U L S WA N S O N
The Ecotones of the Cosmic Egg
of Meaning 21

A L I S O N K I R K PAT R I C K
Honoring All Four Domes of Meaning 29

DA N O ’ C O N N O R
My Story 35

BAR BAR A C. OTE RO -LÓP E Z

Giving Freely and Receiving Graciously 41

M A R K LO N G H U R S T
From My Jesus to the Universal Christ
and Back 47

L E S LY E C O LV I N
Learning to See Beyond the Normative 55

CI N DY K ROLL
Touching Butterflies 63
LI SA E. P OWE LL
From the Conceptual to the Contextual 67

P ETE R LEVE N STRONG

Listening to Learn about Our Own Stories 71

FELICIA MURRELL
Gateway to Knowing 77

M ICHAE L P ETROW
Mything the Point of My Story 85

B R I E S TO N E R
There’s a Crack in Everything 93

C Y N T H I A B O U R G E A U LT
No Story 103

RECOMMENDED READING
Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village
A Book Recommendation by Lee Staman 111

NOTE S 115
 EDITOR’S NOTE

A
s R ich a r d Rohr notes in his Introduction to this edition
of Oneing, it was approximately thirty years ago that he first
discovered the image of several ovals or “domes” of meaning,
which for him came to form what he calls the Cosmic Egg: “My Story,”
“Our Story,” “Other Stories,” and “The Story.” Like a silver thread,
Rohr’s teaching is woven through many of his recordings, books, con-
ferences, and most recently the curriculum of the Center for Action
and Contemplation’s Living School.
When this edition of Oneing was being planned and contributors
considered, it made most sense to focus primarily on CAC’s Living
School participants. Many of these students have spent significant
time with Rohr’s teaching on the Cosmic Egg. In addition, included
are a powerful poem by CAC board member Drew Jackson and
an article by emerita core faculty member Cynthia Bourgeault that
essentially moves beyond everything written before it. (Do save her
article for last!)
I strongly recommend that the articles be read in the order in
which they appear, because careful consideration has gone into their
placement. Some of the stories are emotionally provocative and others
are more intellectual in their approach, but they all address the mean-
ing of the Cosmic Egg in brilliant, unique ways.
I am truly honored to call these gifted contributors my friends
and colleagues!

Vanessa Guerin
Editor, Oneing

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Oneing
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 contributors

Richard Rohr, OFM is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province

and the Founding Director of the Center for Action and Contemplation
(CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. An internationally recognized author
and spiritual leader, Fr. Richard teaches primarily on incarnational mysticism,
non-dual consciousness, and contemplation, with a particular emphasis
on how these affect the social justice issues of our time. Along with many
recorded conferences, he is the author of numerous books, including The
Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope
For, and Believe and The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder. To learn more
about Fr. Richard Rohr and the CAC, visit https://cac.org/richard-rohr/
richard-rohr-ofm/.

Drew E. Jackson is the lead pastor of Lower Manhattan’s Hope East

Village and serves as the president of Pax, a peacemaking organization that
he cofounded. He joined the CAC Board of Directors in 2019, where he
serves as the board secretary and is on the contemplative governance and
mission and strategy committees. Drew considers writing to be one of his
deepest connections to the Divine. His book of poetry, God Speaks Through
Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming, was published in 2021 and another
book is in the works. When not leading his faith community in New York,
Drew enjoys playing board games with his wife, Genay, and their twin
daughters. To learn more about Drew E. Jackson, visit https://www.
djacksonpoetics.com/.

Paul Swanson is a Senior Program Designer at the CAC, where he

supports the creation and curation of podcasts, online courses, and the Living
School. He is a graduate of North Park University (BA) and Creighton
University (MA), where he studied scripture, theology, and spirituality.
He is a jackleg Mennonite and member of Our Lady of the Tall Trees. Paul
and his wife, Laura, have two feral and beloved children. Learn more about

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Paul’s work kindling the examined life for contemplatives in the world at
https://contemplify.com/.

Alison (Ali) Kirkpatrick is a spiritual director, writer, freelance

editor, and independent contractor who serves on the editorial team for
Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations. She has a long history in Catholic education,
graduating from the University of San Diego and Loyola Marymount
University, and is a 2016 sendee of the CAC’s Living School. The positive,
holistic vision at the heart of the Franciscan tradition has allowed Ali to
continue in the Christian faith, championing inclusive language, evolutionary
thinking, and radical love for all, especially those in the LGBTQIA+
community. You may contact her regarding spiritual direction, editing, or
writing projects at Alikirks@gmail.com.

Dan O’Connor is a CAC staff member who lives in Albuquerque, New

Mexico and serves as a financial analyst on the finance team. Dan has a
bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s in international relations. He is
a Living School sendee from the 2017 cohort. Dan serves as treasurer on the
local boards of the Trinity House Catholic Worker and Illuman New Mexico.
He facilitates the Trinity House Catholic Worker Monday evening group,
which reads Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations in deep reflective discussion
around what it means to live in a Christian contemplative movement. You
may contact Dan O’Connor at doconnor@cac.org.

Barbara C. Otero-López lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico and wears

many hats. She is an engineer by trade but her passion for learning and
nurturing education for others has allowed her to work for the past twenty-
five years as a program manager, curriculum developer, instructional designer,
and teacher. Barbara has studied Learning Science as a PhD student at the
University of New Mexico and now works as an independent consultant
for the Center for Action and Contemplation. She is a CAC Living
School student in the 2022 cohort and a wife and mother of two amazing
daughters. If you wish to contact Barbara Otero-López, her email address is
boterolopez.nm@gmail.com.

Mark Longhurst is the Managing Editor of Richard Rohr’s Daily

Meditations and also a sendee of the CAC’s inaugural Living School 2015
cohort. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School,
worked in Boston-based social justice nonprofits for ten years, and pastored
churches in the United Church of Christ a decade more. In his personal life,
he is committed to a new monastic rule of life, enjoys writing occasionally
through his Ordinary Mystic newsletter (https://ordinarymystic.substack.

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com/), and is a passionate fan of contemporary art. He lives in Williamstown,
Massachusetts with his wife, Faith, and two young boys.

Leslye Colvin is a writer, contemplative activist, and social commentator.

Inspired by the Roman Catholic social justice tradition, she is passionate
about encouraging diversity of thought, especially as it relates to those
often marginalized within the community. Leslye has been interviewed by
America, U.S. Catholic, South Africa’s Radio Veritas, and Vatican Radio on the
construct of race. A sendee of the CAC’s Living School and a student of
the Haden Institute, Leslye serves on the boards of NETWORK Lobby
for Catholic Social Justice and Catholic Democrats. To learn more about
Leslye Colvin, visit her blog, Leslye’s Labyrinth (https://www.leslyecolvin.
me/leslyeslabyrinth1), which features writings from her African American
Catholic heart.

Cindy Kroll joined the CAC in 2019 as the Managing Director of

Finance and Business Analytics. She envisions a world where financial
decisions don’t have to conflict with Jesus’ teachings of humility, simplicity,
and love, and works tirelessly to align the CAC’s financial model with its
contemplative tradition and Richard Rohr’s teachings. Richard Rohr’s book
Falling Upward steered her path toward CAC, first as part of the Living
School 2019 cohort and then as a member of the board of directors’ finance
committee. Cindy is a Certified Public Accountant, has a master’s degree
in software systems, and earned a business coach certification. When she’s
not leading the finance team, you can find her on a meditative nature walk,
journaling, writing poetry, or with her two children, Kaitlyn and Evan.

Lisa E. Powell earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the
University of New Mexico and is a sendee of the CAC’s Living School. An
online teaching facilitator for the CAC, Lisa is also the founder of Fulcrum-8,
a nonprofit organization and online ministry supporting subtle saints,
momentary mystics, and spiritual seekers who are committed to evolutionary
change in a revolutionary time. She lives in Albuquerque with her two rescue
dogs, Nito and L.G., who teach her daily about unconditional love. You may
contact Lisa Powell at fulcrum8www@gmail.com.

Peter Levenstrong is an Episcopal priest at St. Gregory of Nyssa

Episcopal Church in San Francisco, California. A recent graduate of Yale
Divinity School, he is grateful to now be doing ministry back home in the
Bay Area. In his early twenties, Peter went through multiple conversions:
first to the Christian faith and then to the work of social justice. He finds his
ministerial vocation to be walking with others in the continual process of

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conversion to which Christ invites every one of us. Peter is a sendee of the
CAC’s Living School. To learn more about Peter Levenstrong, visit https://
www.saintgregorys.org/sermons---peter-levenstrong.html.

Felicia Murrell is a certified master life coach with over twenty years
of church leadership experience. She also serves the publishing industry as
a freelance copy editor and proofreader and is the author of Truth Encounters.
A student of the CAC’s Living School in the 2022 cohort, Felicia resides in
Albuquerque, New Mexico with her husband, Doug. Together, they have
four adult children. You can connect with Felicia on Instagram @hellofelicia_
murrell or read more of her writing at http://feliciamurrell.blogspot.com/.

The Rev. Dr. Michael Petrow, a CAC staff member, holds degrees in
religious studies, mythology, and psychology. He has worked as a teacher,
spiritual director, theater chaplain, and counselor with at-risk youth.
Michael is a graduate of the Guild for Spiritual Guidance and a sendee of
the CAC’s Living School. He started his education at Moravian College and
received his doctorate from Pacifica Graduate Institute. After exploring how
transformation occurs within sacred traditions the world over, Michael’s
dissertation focused on the complementary theories of C.G. Jung and Origen
of Alexandria, which teach us to read sacred texts mythically and mystically.

Brie Stoner is the founder and host of Unknowing, a podcast and online
learning community platform exploring the spiritual path of creative
possibility. She is also a recording artist, musician, and composer. Her music
has been featured in national and international campaigns, including the
NOOMA series, featuring Rob Bell. Brie’s previous projects include being
co-host for the CAC podcast Another Name for Every Thing with Richard Rohr,
and the Chief Spiritual Officer to UNITE, an initiative at the intersection of
spirituality, society, and politics in Washington, DC. A sendee of the CAC’s
Living School, she currently lives in Michigan with her two boys, splitting
her time between her podcast and music and painting. To learn more about
Brie Stoner, visit http://briestoner.com/.

Cynthia Bourgeault is a modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest, writer,

and internationally known retreat leader. She divides her time between
solitude in her seaside hermitage in Maine and spreading the recovery of
the Christian contemplative and Wisdom paths. Her roots are firmly planted
in the Benedictine monastic tradition while her wings soar in the Christian
mystical lineage, and her wisdom is tempered by daily mindfulness and
embodiment practice learned through more than thirty years of participation
in the Gurdjieff Work. A CAC emerita core faculty member, she has been

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honored as one of the 100 most spiritually influential living people in 2021.To
learn more about Cynthia Bourgeault, visit https://cynthiabourgeault.org/.

Lee Staman, MLIS is the Library Director at the CAC. His work focuses
on cataloging, preserving, and making accessible all Fr. Richard Rohr’s
work. Lee earned degrees in philosophy and theology before studying
library science at the University of Washington. While there, his in-depth
study of a nineteenth-century Torah from the Arabian Peninsula ignited a
passion for the further study of Judaism along with the beliefs and practices
of smaller religious communities. His interests include Wendell Berry, the
Premier League, biblical studies, and books about books. Lee resides in
Seattle, Washington with his wife and children, to whom he still reads the
Patristics to put them to sleep. Lee Staman may be contacted at lstaman@
cac.org.

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Oneing
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 introduction

I
t wa s proba bly thirty years ago that I first discovered a rather
plain image of several ovals or “domes” of meaning, which for me
form the Cosmic Egg: “My Story,” “Our Story,” “Other Stories”
(which I recently added), and “The Story.” The image has proven
helpful through many years of teaching. There were certain retreats
or conferences where I could tell that people, perhaps visual learn-
ers, “got” my message and direction only after seeing this diagram. It
became a geometric imprint which helped the viewer comprehend the
general shape of all wholeness, mental and emotional health, and good
philosophy and theology too. One advantage of the image is that we
do not have to be highly educated to understand it. Some academic
types might consider it even too simplistic, but I do not think it is.
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 Medieval Franciscan William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) coined a
principle that other philosophers either loved or hated: “Do not multiply
entities that are not necessary.” Because it amounted to a shaving-down
process, it has long been referred to as Ockham’s Razor! My simple
paraphrase of his formal Scholastic philosophical principle is this:
Always trust and move forward with the simpler answer. This diagram is a
clever result of Ockham’s Razor at work — and I might simplify it even
a bit more in my “clean shave” explanation here!
Very few periods of history and a small minority of cultures and
individuals have ever honored all four domes of meaning at the same
time. Usually one was dominant, while a second, third, and fourth
were neglected. Some, at least, got two, but missed out on the whole-
ness that would have been offered by the others. Here are some exam-
ples of the different honoring of all four domes of meaning, always
remembering that each must include the others!
In most ancient religions and medieval Catholicism too, The Story
and its “spiritual speak” were so dominant that Other Stories, Our
Story, and My Story were largely deemed unreal or of little regard.
The Jewish people did have the honesty to include much of their his-
tory (Our Story) in Sacred Scripture, and many stories of individuals
like Abraham and David (My Story), but always as a part of the larger
tribal story. There was not yet much appreciation for Other Stories,
which is the gift of our modern age.
For most eras, My Story was completely lost as irrelevant or
meaningless. The concept of the substantial human individual had
not yet been developed (Buddhism would influence that shift toward
individual recognition for Hinduism and Protestantism would do the
same for Catholicism). My Story was largely of no concern — a few
biblical characters and Augustine’s Confessions being early exceptions.
There were some few individuals — those we would often call
“great” or “Blessed” in every age — who could represent and somehow
hold together all four domes of meaning at the same time. However,
they still did so at their own cultural level of development, which
explains perhaps how some saints could still be anti-Semitic, believe
in fables, or, like St. Joan of Arc (d. 1431), lead her country of France
in a violent war against the English.
Then there are those who have no real understanding of Other
Stories, The Story, or My Story and live entirely inside the world of
the comparisons, competitions, and violent rivalries which result from

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living only in Our Story. Much of Chinese history, most of Feudal
Europe, and tribal Africa might be included here. “My group and its
leaders, its ‘god,’ and its needs,” are their limited and limiting frame
of reference.

O
nly r ecen t ly h av e I felt it necessary to add a fourth
dome of meaning to the Cosmic Egg, which shows, I believe,
an evolution in human consciousness. The term Other Sto-
ries illustrates the painful recognition that my frame is not the only
frame, not likely the most important frame, and maybe even a frame
with a lot of shadow and blind spots when compared to other stories.
This is the great advantage of studying history, literature beyond our
own language, anthropology, world cultures, and, frankly, experienc-
ing some world travel, if one is so privileged.
This expansion of perspective has only become widely possible in
the last hundred years or so and reaction is showing itself in the world-
wide “identity politics” which is leading people — with no evidence — to
declare that Our Story is the measure of all things, and all Other Stories
are evil, pagan, inferior, ignorant, or superstitious. As we encounter
more and more of the world’s Other Stories, many are broadening their
wisdom while others are broadening their fear. It looks like it will take
us some time (centuries?) to resolve this drive to exclude, to scapegoat,
to judge, and to dismiss other peoples’ stories. There is only one thing more
dangerous than the individual ego and that is the group ego. Only non-dual,
“second tier” folks, mystics, and not even all saints seem capable of such
universal capacity. Yet this viewpoint is increasing quite rapidly world-
wide, moved ahead by things like the United Nations, Doctors without
Borders, many lifelong missionaries, emerging Christianity, and seekers
and philosophers of universal truth.
Still, only a minority will venture into a universal and inclu-
sive frame of reference (The Story), while others limit themselves to
journeys into their own private soul and woundedness (My Story).
These cannot give us any liberation from or even understanding of
the tyrannies of tribe, family, and culture (Our Story). With no deep
experience of actual transcendence, and with little self-knowledge,
Our Story folks are highly open to massification, groupthink, and
conformity passing for real knowledge. They generally use entertain-
ment, sporting events, consumerism, or war itself as a substitute for
true worship and true community or friendships. I personally believe

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 much of USA culture is at this level — and trapped here because it is
convinced that its story and culture are The Story. In fact, most groups
participate in such group narcissism.
Finally, we either have people who live inside The Story or think
they live inside The Story. Those who truly live there have embraced
and integrated their personality, shadow, woundedness, family issues,
culture, and contextualizing life experiences under The One. Those
who think they live there (but do not) are those we would call fun-
damentalists, zealots, or people who use religion to disguise their real
belief system (money, power, politics, classism, or security needs being
the most common). They think they have the final “text,” but they just
use it to hide from any real context that would expose them. Some call
this “spiritual bypassing.” Jesus’ metaphors for this group are “Phari-
sees” and “teachers of the Law,” or just “the Rich Man.”
What makes the Bible so unique as a work of literature is
that — surely without knowing it — it honors all four domes of mean-
ing to some degree: the importance of the individual and personal
responsibility (the foundational meaning being preoccupation with
“sin”), the history and context of one individual religion (the “scandal
of the particular”), Israel’s early confrontation and then Jesus’ specific
confrontation with cultures other than Judaism, while their One God
(YHWH) oversees, loves, liberates, and includes the whole process
and every level.
This is a truly integral spirituality, a truly catholic worldview,
and the unrecognized goal of all monotheistic religions. These, like
Jesus, “have nowhere to rest their head” except in the One Love. These
will “save” the world, because they can honor and include every part
of history/herstory and no longer consider themselves the center of
anything except as the beneficiary of a personal and amazing grace.

— Richard Rohr

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A Rude Awakening

Luke 4:24–27

when you are finally

roused out of the dream world
in which God is only for you and yours
it will be a rude awakening

when you come to the realization

that God has always been for them
whoever them is
you will hear the sound of chains breaking

— Drew E. Jackson1

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Oneing
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 The Ecotones of the
Cosmic Egg of
Meaning
By Paul Swanson

Die and Become. Until you have learned this, you are but a dull
guest on this dark planet.1
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I
liv e inside a Western culture that roars at the sight of mythic,
self-made men rocketing into orbit. While these rocketmen were
on their recent space excursions, the blue planet they left behind
reached record high temperatures and the ocean rolled her dead onto
the shores. A person can only take the myth of Western individualism
seriously for so long before its excesses reveal its shadow.

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 The “individual life” is a tempting oxymoron. It turns out that
individuals want to be distracted from the collective climate cacoph-
ony created by a throwaway culture—even if that distraction contrib-
utes to said cacophony. Individualism created its own worst enemy, a
disassociated collection of self-obsessed individuals. Individualism is
the match that lights the fuse of global self-destruction.
Am I pushing the hyperbolic edges to make a point? That depends
on your perspective. The land that I love and within which I reside is
fragmented by the myth of American individualism. This myth plays
a key role in beshitting on the land and people that I love. Yet I dare
to hope. I see the myth of individualism crumbling. Emerging from
the cracks of that foundation is a longing unfeigned.
I am getting ahead of myself. Allow me to back up to move forward.
Myths are frameworks and stories that strive to make sense of
humanity’s place within culture and cosmos. Religions were first
drafted by gregarious mythmakers in cahoots with a Mystery so large
it was deemed Divine. They wrote poetry, enacted rituals, and told
stories in praise for all they knew and did not know. With this defini-
tion in mind, it is fair to say that many religious folks throughout the
ages swapped their poetry pens for matches.
And yet I have hope. I have hope because human myths evolve.
They evolve alongside the species that crafted them. I have hope that
a grand metanoia can occur in our gorgeous, yet mangy bipedal spe-
cies—that humans can take their rightful place in the world without
demanding a severance package that will sink it.

Without the great patterns that are always true,

we get lost in choosing between tiny patterns.2
— Richard Rohr, OFM

I
n service to this grand metanoia, I am suggesting an experimen-
tal approach to the myths, religions, and stories that shape us. I am
advocating that we play in their craggy reef edges, that we swim
out beyond the blurry boundaries, where seas of meaning meet, in full
expectation that the “oceanic oneness”3 will turn us over and bring us
to new shores of being. It is time for humanity to risk a radically new
embodied relationship with one another and the stories that shape us.
Together we can breathe new understandings into old myths.

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 The elasticity of Fr. Richard Rohr’s Cosmic Egg of Meaning pro-
vides a starting space for this playful exploration. In healthy tension
with the myths that have guided us thus far, he upends the fallacy of
Western individualism through the celebration of layers that inhabit
the framework. This visual framework simplifies the curvy multivo-
cality of the interconnected narrative of being. To put it plainly, it can
be difficult to hold the vastness of meanings in one’s psyche, so the
Cosmic Egg breaks it down neatly. There are four major “Stories” of
the Cosmic Egg: My Story, Our Story, Other Stories, and The Story.
They are presented separately but operate in relationship with one
another.4 Their interdependence is a subtle concomitance. A spirit of
energetic exchange takes place across the interstitial Stories, converg-
ing to create a textured whole. The beauty, truth, and goodness of the
Cosmic Egg is felt and found in the exchanges at the edges. This is a
spirited exploration of those textured exchanges.

We exist because we exchange.5

— Susan Griffin

L
ifegiving exch ange h appens when physical bodies with
porous boundaries mingle. This is called an ecotone.6 An ecotone
is “the transition from one ecosystem to another,”7 a place of
tension and integration, a point of exchange. There is a sensuality
to this ecological term, for an ecotone occurs “at edges and physical
boundaries, where fresh water meets salt water and water meets land,
where tides roll up and down coasts, where woodlands become pas-
tures and the fir trees of taiga forests give way to the lichen and grass
of tundra.”8 Even the etymological roots of ecotone are instructive for
this exploration of the Cosmic Egg of Meaning. An ecotone is the
combination of “house/dwelling” and “tension.”
The ecotones that form across the four Stories of the Cosmic Egg
have the potential to transform stagnant myths in new, communally
edifying directions. When My Story hobnobs with Other Stories,
Our Story is impacted, which enhances my understanding of The
Story. Now, my entire relationship to reality must expand. This ener-
getic exchange is more than a ripple effect that pulsates out to its natu-
ral dissipation. Healthy exchange between two or more Stories builds
respect for, and responsibility to, one another, while each changes

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in service to the emerging whole. This is the heightened transfer of
energy that occurs in an ecotone. At this level of exchange, vulner-
ability and risk-taking into parts unknown are requirements for being
a conscious part of a Storied membership. To me, this is the incarnate
adventure of a lifetime. For if this is truly a Christ-soaked world, then
it is in the ecotones where I can fully participate in Christic exchanges.
One might even dare call this exchange, this work of love, the Mysti-
cal Body of Christ.

I am a man mostly ignorant of the things that are

most important to me.9
— Wendell Berry

M
y ow n e x pedi tions across the ecotones of the Cosmic
Egg of Meaning have been paramount for my evolving par-
ticipation in the Mystical Body of Christ. Having defined
the terms of exploration, I now want to introduce four contemplative
movements that have aided this conscious participation in the eco-
tones of the Cosmic Egg of Meaning: gratitude, humility, ignorance,
and inquiry. Playing at the edges of boundaries does not need to be
without thoughtful preparation.
Life is a miracle and Mystery has a gratuitous nature.10 Before any
existential walkabout, one should rest under the shade of gratitude.
Gratitude is a posture of acceptance toward the givenness of life. Even
in small doses, gratitude alters the relationship between the explorer,
the map, and uncharted terrain. It gives the explorer breathing room,
space to humble themself before all that they have not yet encountered.
Humility is exposure to the elements. Humility sleeps out under
the infinite stars to feel the tingle of the distant intimacy of night. It
does not build walls to keep out the unknown or unforeseen. Humility
embraces the hospitality of strangers. It becomes one continual bow
before Mystery.
Humility leads to the undefended way of ignorance. This type of
ignorance is not a frozen weakness of immovable views, but a kenotic
movement toward a ready and curious position. It transforms the
explorer into a pilgrim.
This ignorance readies the pilgrim for respectful inquiry. Unspo-
ken questions rest on the pilgrim’s tongue as they now see that “the

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 Before any existential walkabout,
one should rest under the
shade of gratitude.

true contemplative is not the one who prepares his mind for a particu-
lar message that he wants or expects to hear, but who remains empty
because he knows that he can never expect or anticipate the word that
will transform his darkness into light.”11
These four contemplative movements are practices on the pilgrim-
age across the ecotones in the Cosmic Egg, practices in becoming and
discerning the vectors of possibilities in Stories unknown. Authentic
exchange occurs in these partially defined places, in the rub of tension
without the pursuit of dominion. When you meet these courageous
pilgrims, greet them with a kiss, for your salvation may be in that
exchange.

There is . . . no safe position when it comes to engaging fundamental

questions of religious and spiritual meaning; one must be prepared
to risk everything.12
— Douglas E. Christie

T
her e is a risk to this pilgrimage. A pilgrim does not begin
this journey as a blank slate. The Stories they received in child-
hood might be dated or lead to destructive ends. What was
once mapped out as safe passage may now be speckled with barbwire
trappings. Those who received their Stories from a position of domi-
nance are often unable to question the stories’ prevalence in their for-
mation. They are not able to explore in the spirit of exchange. Instead,
ecotones are seen as spaces to seize or conquer.
Those who have found their My Story and Our Story to be mar-
ginalized and muted by Other Stories (experienced as Dominant
Stories) are not always able to meet in an ecotone. The boundaries of
mutual exchange have been violated too many times. The continual
breach and invasion from dominant Other Stories harms both sides,

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25
but particularly those living under its occupation. The imperative is on
those (like me) who embody the history and authorship of the domi-
nant paradigm to practice the contemplative movements of unknowing.
One practices the movements so as to walk with less dependency on
ego-serving Stories to shift the direction of myth.
Exchange is rarely clean. Even with the most graceful movements
of unknowing, wounding is likely. I wear enough scars to know that
the risk of wounding is present whenever love is possible. We risk
and we wound. We risk wounding the Stories that sustained us up
to a point. We risk injuring the people who have loved us. We risk
harming those whose voices have been covered by the hands of history.
Exchange requires stepping into naked reality. Transformation only
happens in an ecotone, in mutual vulnerability, without a prescribed
outcome. There are no waivers to sign at the entrance of an ecotone.
We risk it all to birth new stories and expand old ones. One seasoned
pilgrim named the risk best: “Traveler, there is no road. The road is
made by walking.”13

Life is a presence which always precedes us.14

— Pierre Hadot

T
he gi v enne ss of my life belongs to The Story. I received
My Story without question and lived into the pressing ques-
tions of Our Story. As curiosity grew, I began to feel for the
edges of these Stories. The versions of the Stories I was living sud-
denly burst. Mystery overflowed and its allurement beckoned me. I
rebelled, stretched, deconstructed, and ultimately made amends with
the Stories that shaped me. Slowly, I learned that the way is not for-
ward or backward, but awkward.15 The Stories that once comforted
me no longer did. My explorations veered off center. Contemplative
movements became my practice as I ventured out into the unknown. I
can still hear the pleas of the risk-averse know-it-alls demanding that
I come back to the center this very second.
As I explore the ecotones, silence is my preferred language. It
helps me keep my ears open. In the ecotones of Other Stories, I dis-
cover my own foreign assumptions. I hear songs of the heart ring out
in dialects untranslatable. My eyes bear witness to wounds that can-
not be dressed by individual efforts. I double over in laughter at jokes

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26
supposedly at my expense. I am a vagabond of the ecotones with no
place to lay my head. I ain’t lost; look, I just found a dropped pack of
Mary Oliver’s cigarettes. I must be on the right path.
My center has shifted to the edges of My Story, Our Story, and
Other Stories. I now wonder if the center of The Story is nowhere
and everywhere. I have come to see the Mystical Body of Christ as the
exchanges between the material and the mystical. To lose sight of these
vivified exchanges—these ecotones—is to lessen the whole body, the
individual part, and emergences in between.
In the exchange between miracle and membership, I am reminded
that “Life is a presence which always precedes us.” There is a salty
texture to that line that remains on my lips. It reminds me of words
Athanasius gave me. I recite them to myself. I set up camp in a nearby
ecotone. My pockets are empty, and I am holding on to nothing but a
frayed thread to guide the way. I believe it to be a tether of The Story.
My hunch is that it runs across the fabric of all our Stories. It con-
nects me to you, us to them—them and those beyond, and then back
to us all over again. We are knitted together in a cosmic membership
that breathes anew into the myths that shape us. The Story glimmers
through the brush of this exchange.
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Oneing
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 Honoring All Four
Domes of Meaning
By Alison Kirkpatrick

I
n his r eflection on the Cosmic Egg, Fr. Richard Rohr laments
that few people or places “have ever honored all four domes of
meaning at the same time.” I feel fortunate to be one of the lucky
few exposed to such a worldview. I was raised in a Franciscan parish
in the early 1970s, just after the Second Vatican Council. The brown-
robed friars, with their Birkenstocks and beards, embraced the spirit of
the Council wholeheartedly. Where a crucified Jesus normally hung
behind the altar, we had a risen Christ — holding his cross in one hand
and making a sign of peace with the other. If I had to sum it up, The
Story told through the Franciscan lens was Christ is risen. We shall too.
Alleluia. The message didn’t negate the existence of suffering or diminish
the importance of morality or justice, but it did put them in context with
the mercy, forgiveness, love, and ultimate triumph of God and goodness.
In that Franciscan parish, I sensed the domes of meaning nested
together. I was God’s beloved (My Story), and I was part of a beloved

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29
tradition and church (Our Story), but in the spirit of St. Francis, that
love wasn’t exclusive. It belonged to everyone and everything (Other
Stories). While that last theme was underdeveloped, I believed from
my earliest days that there was no one, no thing, and no where that
God wasn’t actively “in love” and seeking to bring new life. To this
day, it remains the truest story I know.
It’s as if, at each juncture of my life, each turning point and chal-
lenge, the Universe seems to be asking me, Do you think this can be
excluded? or I seem to be asking God, Do you love even this? and Can you
help me to love this too?
There are so many ways that we get trapped in thinking that there
is a perfect story or that the way our family, our religion, or our nation
tells Our Story is, in fact, The Story. While this might comfort us or
keep us in line for a while, it limits our imagination, our potential, and
even more insidiously, it limits our ability to love ourselves and oth-
ers as God loves us. In fact, I have learned over and over throughout
my life that Other Stories — those that are shared with us or when we
have felt “othered” ourselves — offer us the greatest opportunity for
growth and transformation.

µ ¬µ

W
hen I wa s nineteen, I got pregnant by a man I hardly
knew and would not marry. Although my upbringing was
progressive in many ways, every story I had heard grow-
ing up from family, church, and culture communicated quite clearly that
I was “damaged goods,” unworthy and possibly even unlovable. I had
two choices — abortion or adoption. While the former offered me some
immediate relief and protection, I chose the latter, trusting that it had
a greater chance of bringing “new life” in a literal and figurative way. I
wanted to love my child as best as I could, and I believed that meant let-
ting her go to be raised in a two-parent home with everything I wanted
for her and could not give her myself. Beyond that, whether my parents’
love for me would be diminished in some permanent way, or whether
I would ever be loved by anyone else, I trusted that God loved me and
that I could still love myself. I believed that this “other story,” told in
faith and love, belonged to The Story.
I wasn’t wrong. Although I moved away to “protect” my and
my family’s reputations, I met my husband in that new town when I

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30
was seven months pregnant. The story I wanted to hide became the
love story of my life. He was there when I went into labor and when
I signed the adoption papers forty-eight hours later. Along with my
parents and siblings, he was there for the weeks and months of over-
whelming grief, trusting that I did the right thing while also healing
from it. He has been there every day since and we have raised three
children of our own who are young adults now. The daughter I gave
up for adoption turns thirty this fall, and I feel privileged to be a part
of her story, though it is not mine to tell.
For a while after my daughter’s adoption, I felt some frustration
toward my parents and the church for the story they told me about a
woman’s value, particularly as it related to her sexuality, but by the
time I had teenagers of my own, I had fallen into the same trap. While
I had jettisoned certain stories, I was guilty of repeating other well-
worn tropes of church and culture that were in many ways just as
damaging. As Richard Rohr often says, I had confused the container
with the contents.
I wanted my children to find their True Selves, health, happiness,
and an open-hearted love for themselves, others, and the world. What
I communicated to them was a prescribed set of expectations that I
thought would get them those things, which included church atten-
dance, serious academics, athletics, work, and appropriate friendships.
It worked well enough when they were young, but by the time they
became teenagers it was costing all of us something precious — authen-
tic and open relationships. Even with the best of intentions and my
own experience of loss, I had succumbed to the overwhelming pres-
sure to let Our Story stand in for The Story.
With the help of a transformative book, The Conscious Parent, and
a good therapist, I set about trying to make it right by making space
for our children’s individual stories to flourish. I started listening
instead of suggesting, affirming instead of critiquing, trusting instead
of hovering, hugging instead of pushing, being instead of doing. It was
a contemplative practice all day, every day to release what I thought
I knew and to trust that Love would do the rest.
Like most contemplative practices, it felt simultaneously like doing
nothing and like the hardest thing in the world to “be still and know”1
I was not in control. And like any consistent contemplative practice,
it eventually gave birth to greater compassion for everyone, including
myself. In the words of Thomas Merton (1915–1968), “The beginning

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31
 There are so many ways that we
get trapped in thinking that
there is a perfect
story.

of this love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the
resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.” 2 I had loved my
children to the best of my ability, which is to say, not nearly enough.
I surrendered my desire to perfect their stories, and I came to know
on a deeper level that each and every story is lovingly held in The
Story. Everyone participates in the cosmic pattern of life, death, and
resurrection; it is simply my privilege to witness the journey and to
mirror the beauty of their story back to them. The listening practice
that began at my kitchen table turned out to be the training ground
for my future work as a spiritual director.

µ ¬µ

T
her e is one more story I’d like to tell. Our oldest daughter
came out when she was sixteen years old. I’d like to think she
wasn’t afraid of how we would react, but I don’t think that is
entirely true. While we had been attending a welcoming church for
a few years already, I cringed at how many sermons she had heard
growing up that railed against gay marriage and promoted homopho-
bia. I wept when I thought of any insensitive or ignorant comments
we might have made. We immediately affirmed her in the fullness of
her identity, and she has rewarded us over the last eight years by trust-
ing us with more of her story. Even more significantly, she’s invited her
friends to our home to share their lives and stories with us.
Sadly, some of the Other Stories that have been largely excluded
by Christian churches, including much of the Roman Catholic Church,
are those of the LGBTQIA+ community. Many of our daughter’s
friends have been rejected by their family and friends. Churches
that once welcomed them and called them beloved children of God

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 told them in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that The Story no longer
includes them. This is especially true for her trans and nonbinary
friends whom I have been privileged to know. My heart breaks when
their new names and pronouns are ignored by those who are supposed
to love them the most. While I can understand the need to grieve who
we thought our children were (which is true of any child — straight,
gay, or trans), I cannot understand the wholesale rejection of who
our children have discovered themselves to be. This is part of their
story, so, as a family, it is part of Our Story, and it is certainly part of
the evolving Story God is telling in and through creation. Ultimately,
the cross reveals that love is the only story that matters, so I love their stories.
Paula D’Arcy has a succinct line often shared by Richard Rohr:
“God comes to us disguised as our lives.” After twenty-plus years of
Catholic education and a lifetime of seeking, that line pretty much
sums up my operative theology. If it is in my life, then I know that
God is speaking to me through it. I may feel blessed and nourished by
it; I may find it confusing, challenging, and even downright unpleasant
sometimes; but trusting in the Cosmic Egg leads me to greater wisdom
and a more Christ-like love for the world.
·

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Oneing
34
 My Story
By Dan O’Connor

I
’v e always been a kind, quiet, and gentle soul wandering about.
If there were a wanderer job, I’d be very well suited. My therapist
told me I’d been a warrior in a prior life. That made a lot of sense
and must explain where I find myself now.
Growing up, and as a closeted gay man until my thirties, I’d suc-
cumbed to the conditioned belief that I didn’t belong in this world
and certainly not to the culture of rugged individualism. This cultural
characteristic dramatically sets Americans apart from the rest of the
world and, in my opinion, is our greatest national and cultural weak-
ness. Even today, our LGBTQIA+ youth continue to suffer from
the misunderstanding that everything indeed belongs, since the war
on poor people, the trans community, and BIPOC — well, American
Realism is hardly that!
It seems like so long ago: those days of suffering from the deep
anxiety of not recognizing my authentic self. Looking back, my
upbringing in an Irish Catholic environment was a loving experience,
but also conditioned — as I’ve learned through the CAC’s Race, Equity,

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35
and Belonging (REB) staff training — by my ancestral trauma that is
still with me today.
Attending Roman Catholic elementary school in the Chicago sub-
urbs and going to Mass every day gave me a good foundation for the
tradition early on, but eventually I came to see that the pious behavior
of those who attended church did not resonate with their actions out-
side it. That became very confusing for me, and I became cynical about
the church because of the hypocrisy I sensed in myself and others. Yet,
I’ve never forgotten what I learned in those early days and consciously
do my best to be kind in my daily social interactions. It’s not hard to
do for an Enneagram Nine, as that’s our nature. But it’s just as vital
we do it for ourselves too.
My family moved around quite a bit during my adolescent and
high school years. So, sadly, learning who and what to trust became
a growing issue for me. I discovered that it’s not easy for an introvert
to make friends. As a freshman at Bishop Kelly High School in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, I was bullied a lot. That same year, I smoked my first joint
and saw my first concert: ZZ Top and Three Dog Night. The bullying
experience left me confounded as to how to respond. After one day of
being mostly psychologically bullied, I began plotting my revenge. I
realized I could easily inflict some serious damage, to the point of kill-
ing this bully. I thought and thought, and finally concluded I couldn’t
kill this boy. Jesus would not approve, I would not approve, and this
was not something I wished on anyone.
My anger scared me. I realized I could do this; I was quite capable
of protecting myself, but only in a violent way. I didn’t have the skills,
the wisdom, or the courage to confront this bully in a nonviolent man-
ner — except that, ultimately, I did, by not doing anything. From that
moment on, I knew revenge was not a way forward. Besides, it never
reconciled with what I already knew — that everything belonged — but
why weren’t others getting it? Even I knew this at an early age, but I
couldn’t figure out why nobody else did. I didn’t know my own value
and didn’t have anyone else to show me otherwise.
The summer of my high school graduation was an eventful one.
My favorite person in the world, my maternal grandmother, died of
a massive stroke the day after my high school graduation. We had
just moved to Columbia, South Carolina that year. The family drove
to bury her where she was raised, in Mason City, Iowa, where my
mother had gone to boarding school since she was seven, after her

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36
father had passed. I’d asked my parents if I could return to Tulsa for
the summer and they allowed it! They had placed an enormous trust
in me and for that I’m forever grateful. That summer, my friends and
I hitchhiked to Little Rock, Arkansas to see a Frank Zappa concert.
What a great formative experience that was, sleeping on the side of
the freeway in a ditch until the next morning. I felt excited about the
next stage in life: college.
There were so many conversations I had in my mind, bargaining
with God about having sex with guys in high school, feeling so guilty
about going against the dominant cultural taboos and sadly not real-
izing how I’d been socialized in a deeply unconscious and grossly
unaware society. It was only after entering college that I discovered
I was not alone. There were others just like me! Suddenly, I heard
about Stonewall and then Gay Pride, followed very soon after, of
course, by AIDS.

I
bec a me v ery a ngry with America. It was the Reagan era,
when my parents left the Democratic Party and became card-car-
rying Republicans. The establishment of a perpetual atmosphere
of discrimination angered me, especially when I began working in cor-
porate America. Having to be dependent on the dominant Republican
hierarchy for my paycheck felt like prison. My social justice conscience
was born overnight as conflict was everywhere, which is a very scary
proposition for an Enneagram Nine to confront. Remaining hidden
seemed like a very good idea, a safe place to be — until it was not.
Upon finishing college, my partner and I moved to Miami,
Florida, where he grew up. Wow, what a culture shock that was,
coming from the deep South — but of course, a most welcome one.
It was like going to the New York City of the South, with parties
every night of the week and temptation everywhere. Then the HIV/
AIDS pandemic arrived at my doorstep. My friends became infected
overnight and were suddenly dying. I went to way too many funerals
at such a young age, and I was afraid of getting tested, knowing the
obvious.
Finally, I faced my fears and got tested, and of course I was HIV
positive. I’m not sure why God spared my life; I never got sick. But
just knowing it could be imminent was concern enough, until the
drug cocktail was invented — thank you, Dr. David Ho! We had a
new lease on life. I wake up every day grateful to God and science.

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37
This became the impetus for my spiritual path, and now HIV is just a
chronic, manageable disease.
There’s a part of me that feels justified, but also hopeful, with the
arrival of COVID-19 because no one is immune. Perhaps it might
just move the planet into a more compassionate awareness. I know
I learned through my adolescent bullying experience that revenge is
not the way forward, but neither can I reject or dishonor that part
of me which helps me to integrate my shadow with my light. Upon
acknowledging these opposing, polarizing aspects of myself, paradox
unifies me in stillness, finding my egoic self in a loving unity, being
held by Something even closer to me than breath.
I’m not sure exactly when it was that I decided I was tired of
being an introvert and that I desired to live in the “we” space too. This
was a grand entry point in my spiritual journey of being in solidarity
with others who were also experiencing social injustice and working
with others to confront it.

W
atching PBS in Miami late one night, I saw Gangaji,
this beautiful woman in a blue flowing gown with plati-
num hair, extolling the virtues of the Enneagram. That
was the second time I’d heard that word. I immediately searched for it
on the Internet and booked my registration with the Enneagram Insti-
tute. Upon arrival and while meeting people the first day, I learned
of Richard Rohr. That Part One training was so impressive I signed
up for all the other trainings and retreats. Subsequently, I joined a
Fourth Way group in Ft. Lauderdale and two years later I was in
the Living School and doing the Illuman Men’s Rites of Passage. I’m
saying yes to everything while traveling on the superhighway of my
soul’s journey into God, where Bonaventure has become one of my
favorite mystics.
It was revealing to discover my behavioral patterns were that of
an Enneagram Nine. Learning about and socializing with other Nines
and Ones and Twos, etc. — well, to discover I have a pattern which
is the root cause of my craziness was an incredible relief! I’d always
thought I was the lone weirdo, a mystery never to be solved and
doomed to suffer forever. Shortly thereafter, when I began to realize I
was perfectly normal, I subscribed to Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations.
Here was Richard Rohr, echoing and validating everything I felt to be
true and, even more, providing philosophically sound, common-sense

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stories and examples illuminating the rich religious history that I never
heard growing up in Catholic school.
Yet another scourge to be processed, and what an involutionary
process this has been! The Living School resolved a lot of that trauma
by delving deeply into the gold mine of the Christian mystical tradi-
tion. This was a priceless journey, being properly guided by wisdom
masters who know deeply the value of a good education. Learning
what is mine to do continues to feed my desire for unity with others
in peaceful exchange. I’ve been learning the language of nonviolence,
facilitating Monday night discussions on Richard Rohr’s Daily Medita-
tions at the Trinity House Catholic Worker, as we all gather to inquire
in the tradition of Socrates, who has been known to have said, “know
thyself.” It’s such a joy to participate in the weaving of my story into
the collective our story with great humility.
Jesus, the Buddha, Richard Rohr, St. Bonaventure, the scientific
method, and Ken Wilber have been the greatest influences on my
understanding and the redefining of my notion of God. I’m not sure
I ever really believed God was a gray-bearded man in the sky but,
being a product of Western culture, I wasn’t entirely free of that image
either. My inquiry into other religious traditions, along with my vipas-
sana training and then centering prayer, provided a solid foundation
for releasing old beliefs while making room for a cosmic non-dual
understanding of Reality.
This understanding of God has always been supported by my
life’s experiences of the cultural diversity encountered in working
abroad and my advanced education in international relations, prov-
ing that everything belongs because it’s already here. Richard Rohr’s
further elucidation of the nature of God as relationship and exchange;
the trinitarian flow endlessly giving Itself away to further Creation’s
purpose; and that belonging and purpose are the existential nature
of God, along with the penultimate concept of mercy being the true
nature of God — for me finally close any gap.

B e l o n g i n g a n d p u r p o s e a re t h e
existential nature
of God.
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39
 I have seen my own healing in reconciling my Enneagram Nine
childhood message that I didn’t matter. It happened because, as the
child, objectively speaking, I was in control, in the sparking of reac-
tions by my parents, and this resulted in their not knowing what to
do with me. The message they sent was that I did matter, but the cor-
ruption of that message, in alignment with the Divine Plan, formed
my personality and the subsequent Cosmic Egg journey of coming full
circle, back to my soul’s intended lesson, of my destiny that personal
responsibility is the God-given healing that I am fortunately able to
receive in this incarnation. It’s been hard learning how to un-identify
with the narcissistic images of myself — not only letting go of, but also
being with and facing my attachments and stinking thinking head on.
The ability and the opportunity to share the hard-earned, God-
given wisdom of the perennial tradition has nourished my soul pro-
foundly and gives me that inner strength, that deep faith, that all shall
be well — but not before having been tested and failing, then falling
into that deep inner knowing, that Holy Faith, Holy Strength. The
knowledge gained from the wisdom masters along my path, com-
bined with the contemplative practices coalescing my being, keep me
grounded and bring my attention back to myself. This prodigal son is
forever grateful for all the suffering and delusions put in the path of
my soul’s journey into a metanoia of cosmic union with God.
·

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40
 Giving Freely and
Receiving Graciously
By Barbara C. Otero-López

Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by

shimmering at the meadow’s edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be
doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.1
— Robin Wall Kimmerer

T
he m yst er ious a nd beautiful work of nature has been a
great teacher for me this past year. The time that I have spent
at home during the pandemic has blessed me with a chance
to slow down: go on more hikes, work in my backyard, and relish
the beauty and wonder of the natural world. The wise words and
stories in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass have also given
me scientific language and perspective that is beautifully intertwined
with the indigenous ways that my own Native American ancestors
shared.

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41
 This way of life strives to live in harmony with nature through
the practice of generosity, reciprocity, and only taking what we need.
Just as an example, I have been deeply impacted in a new way by the
scientific wonder of how plants utilize carbon dioxide to produce food
for themselves and how they reciprocate through their gift of oxygen
for the benefit of other creatures. As Kimmerer so poetically puts it,
“My breath is your breath, your breath is mine. It’s the great poem of
give and take, of reciprocity that animates the world.”2
This biological dance of interdependency and exchange of life-
giving breath that occurs in and under our very noses has helped me
to truly revel in the interconnectedness that I share with God and all
Her creation. In this current moment, when the world is facing unique
and growing challenges, nature’s many examples of “dancing while
standing still” are inviting me to further explore the interconnected-
ness which is rooted and manifested in my own relationships with
my loved ones, my communities, and communities outside of my own,
who are all uniquely and simultaneously living through the many tri-
als of our times.
This appreciation of connection has moved me into broadening
my own narrative by examining how all the stories of life and love
intersect and join together in symphony. As a mother facing an empty
nest, I’m in a stage of life where I am somewhat redefining myself,
seeking out what is mine to do next. I have put a lot of energy into
revisiting my own story, reviewing the choices that have formed my
life’s path and brought me to where I am today. I have pondered the
challenges that I faced as a child, as an adolescent, as a young adult,
and as a wife and mother. I want to understand how I showed up in
these times of my life and how that influences how I show up today.
Certainly, on this path I have bumped into shadows and things
of which I am not proud. I have recognized where I was missing
boundaries and did not stick up for myself when I should have, and
also celebrated the times when I actually did. In other words, during
this time of my life when I am wanting to know what’s next, I have
benefited from self-reflection, coming face to face with my ego, and
learning the difference between needing to be in control and having
trust and faith in the slow work of God.

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42
U
ndoubt edly, my story is strongly influenced by the sto-
ries of the communities that shaped me. I am a product of my
strong Roman Catholic background. My identity is inter-
twined with my New Mexican history. All these containers have
given me shared meaning, a sense of belonging to tradition, and a
generosity of spirit that was modeled through my family and cultural
values. However, coming to terms with my genealogical and cultural
history, of both my oppressed Native American ancestors and those
who were their Spanish oppressors, is more complicated than I ever
thought to imagine. Facing and forgiving the atrocities that have been
allowed to occur and continue in the Roman Catholic Church is close
to home and, at the moment, seemingly impossible to reconcile. It is a
lifetime of work to understand both how my containers are far from
perfect and, all the while, that waking up to how all these stories have
explicitly and inexplicitly shaped me is vital for me not only to have
compassion for myself but also to recognize and stand in solidarity
with all who come from complicated histories.
Acknowledging how my lighter Latina skin has given and con-
tinues to give me privileges in life and how my darker-skinned sis-
ters and brothers are forced to struggle in ways that I could never
understand is important work that I strive to continue with diligence.
There are cycles of pain in the stories of my culture that need to be
brought to light and awakened in my heart so that I can accept those
parts that may be out of my control but have shaped me just the same.
More importantly, I must also recognize those parts that are within my
control so that I do what I can to foster healing and stop any further
transmission of that pain. It is in these instances that I am so grateful
for community, both those communities that exist within my own
containers and those outside of them. Through shared experiences
with family and friends, I am able to process and recognize beauties
and shortcomings of my expanded sense of self. Through relationship
with those whose stories I do not share, I am able to see beyond and
into a greater story of what is.
There’s so much in my own story and the stories of all my con-
tainers that I could easily get stuck in a vortex of evaluating and
re-evaluating the good and bad of it all. Yet I’ve come to realize that
it is through my curiosity and respect for others that I experience a
reprieve from my own navel gazing by wanting to enter reverently
into stories outside of my own. From a very young age, I have found

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43
Through relationship with those whose
stories I do not share, I am able
to see beyond and into
a greater story of
what is.

myself escaping my own realities through books on history, faraway

places, and even fantastical ones. I have jumped at every blessed
opportunity to travel and live in places whose cultures are both rich
and different from my own. As a result, I have developed a great
respect for the lives and experiences of others because they help me to
see things differently and offer me perspectives I had not considered.
I have learned, for instance, that as not all geographic regions are
high deserts like my own, there are so many different needs, motiva-
tions, and ways of doing things. Different problems dictate different
kinds of solutions. As many cultures and communities have endured
triumphs and traumas to which I couldn’t possibly relate, there are
also so many different ways to express and learn from pain and joy.
There is a lovely book written by Elyse Poppers that is an anthology
of 267 words for love in Sanskrit.3 This insight into the Sanskrit lan-
guage and the culture in which it flourished is a reminder that love
itself is boundless and can manifest itself in ways my languages never
gave me words to express.
On the surface sometimes, cultures and communities outside of our
own and those with which we are familiar can seem so disconnected
and unrelatable. We can often be driven by fear of the unknown
or things to which we cannot relate because we cannot recognize a
shared meaning — we cannot see ourselves or our loved ones in those
stories. We can slip into an “us versus them” mentality and let fear
and a perception of scarcity force us into self-serving actions. I am
hopeful that there is a way to look beyond this surface and learn from
the stories of others while finding a way to stich them alongside my
own. Perhaps, through the common thread of The Story, of which we
are all a part, we can learn to be in solidarity with those triumphs and

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44
traumas that we cannot share and somehow discover ways in which
we can all flourish.
In today’s landscape, I find it incredibly challenging to come to
terms with the many differing political and ecological viewpoints that
so often feel irreconcilable. The racial and social inequities that are
deeply rooted in our psyches and systems are in dire need of restitu-
tion and healing. These challenges are so immense that sometimes they
can all feel quite overwhelming. It can be very difficult to know what
is mine to do for the better good.
And yet, I am so inspired by nature’s great but silent acts of pho-
tosynthesis and respiration because I know that it is in the unique gifts
that God gives each individual species, and each one of us, that we
are all called to be conduits for God’s action in the world. It doesn’t
matter that I fall short. It doesn’t matter that my small self is flawed
and that my containers are flawed. God uses my unique gifts and
shortcomings for the greater good. As Fr. Rohr writes, “God always
uses very unworthy instruments so we can never think that it is we
who are accomplishing the work.”4 In their humble existence, plants
give us life-giving breath while never asking for anything in return.
But then, graciously, they accept our breath to repeat the life-giving
cycle once again. For this I am grateful, and when I open my eyes with
a desire to truly see and appreciate the many unique gifts and blessings
that all God’s creation has to offer, I am flooded with a great need to
honor and protect it.
Mother Nature has inspired me to continually discover what is
mine to give and to give it freely, while seeking to appreciate and
accept the gifts of others. For me, this cycle of giving freely and receiv-
ing graciously is a preface to The Story. By appreciating and accepting
each other’s gifts, we can begin to discover the beauty of what we
all do share. We can save ourselves “from the illusion of we and the
smallness of me”5 and enter a greater realm of the universal meaning
of which we are all a part.

W
e can stitch our stories together to create a tapestry of
Love that grows even more beautiful through the inclu-
sion and participation of all our gifts, shared and received.
I think that our current moment is offering us a choice. We can choose
to live in fear and skepticism of that which exists outside of our own
stories. We can choose to act out of a perception of scarcity to protect

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45
what is ours to protect — our livelihoods and our possessions, our
privileges and our perspectives. Alternatively, we can seek to under-
stand and appreciate all the beautiful ways that others contribute to
The Story.
We all have a chapter. We all have a living story to tell. By choos-
ing to honor and receive the gifts of others and by generously giving of
ourselves, I believe that we can grow in confidence together, knowing
that we are all part of a greater story.
·

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From My Jesus to the
Universal Christ
and Back
By Mark Longhurst

J
e sus a nd I go way back. Admittedly, the terms of our rela-
tionship were constrained. I pledged my six-year-old life to
him, after all, out of terror. The impetus arose when a traveling
youth minister visited my church and told the tragedy of Sodom
and Gomorrah. The youth minister narrated the scene while an artist
drew chalk-based Bible art to illustrate the fire raining down from
heaven. Lot and family fled, while Lot’s wife stole a glance at the
burning city — and God punished her for it, turning her to salt. I
missed the mythic metaphor and believed it literally. The preacher
explained that fire and salt would be my future, too, but that there
was an escape plan if I accepted Jesus into my heart — which, of course,
I did. He died for my sins to save me. I had no idea what it all meant,
but given the conditions, it seemed like the only option.
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47
 As befitting a hero and his rescuee, Jesus and I became close. My
story became part of his story. He had saved me from torment, after all,
so the least I could do was give him my gratitude. But it also became
clear throughout church and youth group socialization that Jesus oper-
ated as more than a protective shield from sulfur or salt. People talked
to Jesus. They asked him for things like a healing for Cousin Ray’s
cancer or for Diane to say yes when Stevie asked her to the prom.
They shared their most vulnerable secrets and yearnings with Jesus
and so I did the same. I mimicked the minister’s prayers of thanking
Jesus for saving my life, but mostly I pleaded with him for Casey to
stop giving me charley-horses in gym class. I confided in Jesus when I
was scared. On good days, I cracked jokes to Jesus when no one was
looking. We were buddies, Jesus and I.
Eventually, Jesus even became my boyfriend — or at least that’s
what my Christian college friends and I called him. We poked fun at
the songs of praise we sang to God and Jesus. The lyrics resembled
pop top-forty love ballads, with nineties bridges and repetitive cho-
ruses expressing lovers’ aching hearts:

I want to know you. I want to see your face.

I want to know you more!
I want to touch you. I want to see your face.
I want to know you more!

In college chapel services, the more enthusiastic the praise singer,

the more spiritual I thought they were. The front-row attendees
waved, raised, and pumped their hands, shouting ebulliently, “Yes,
Lord!” and “We thank you, Jesus!” I carried my share of cynical jaded-
ness, but when it came to singing songs to Jesus, I was all heart, closing
my eyes, tears streaming, hands uplifted with the eager ones.
There was just one problem: Jesus’ death loomed much larger than
his life. In fact, my Jesus didn’t really have much of a life. What was
his story other than my story? Jesus and I had become close, yes, but
who was he, exactly, other than the sacrificial firefighter warding off
hell’s flames?
The premise of Professor Borgman’s Biblical Literature class at
evangelical Gordon College sounded simple enough: to read the
Bible as literature. However, for those of us raised on the Bible as an
unerring, literal account of salvation, reading it literarily — instead

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 of literally — was subversive. Borgman repeatedly pressed us toward
the specifics of the text, which yielded surprising, contradictory, and
jarring details. Some were, admittedly, of the introductory sort that
one immediately encounters in a Divinity School first-year course.
Genesis has two creation stories! Luke is the author of his own Gospel
and the book of Acts! The simple practice of reading the biblical text
and paying attention to its linguistic twists and storytelling signals,
though, changed how I understood not only the Bible, but also the
story of Jesus itself. It refuted the belief I carried that the Bible some-
how dropped wholesale from God to humanity, mediated by a few
furiously typing court stenographers — and it also helped me hear
Luke’s Gospel as if for the first time.
For example, I learned that Jesus taught a specific Way. Not only
does much of the action with Jesus and the disciples take place “on
the way” in Luke’s Gospel (for example, see Luke 10:38), but Jesus
launches and models a Way of justice, peace, and inclusion, especially
for the lowly or marginalized. Mary sings of the Way through which
“he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the
lowly” (Luke 1:52). In his first sermon, Jesus quotes and claims that
the prophet Isaiah’s words have come true in his own ministry: “The
Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good
news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives,
recovery of sight to the blind, to release the oppressed” (Luke 4:18).
Jesus quoting Isaiah echoes a larger tradition of God’s Way of Jubilee
in which debts are forgiven, the enslaved are liberated, and the poor
have what they need (Leviticus 25). Jesus’ arrival is like a great ban-
quet, he says, a time of feasting for everyone — and especially the poor,
broken, and wounded (Luke 14:15–23).

T
he story of the Jesus I initially called “mine,” it turned out,
was not really the story of Jesus. It was the story of me. The
story of Jesus Christ includes me but — to state the spiritually
obvious — is not only for me. To push Luke’s insight into the theologi-
cal realm: Jesus is for others, for all others, especially those made “other”
by oppressive powers. In the midst of the Nazi genocidal “othering” of
Jewish people, the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–
1945) made “being there for others” the summary of Jesus’ identity.
Jesus is the “man for others,” he wrote in his letters from a Nazi prison
cell. Behind bars, he jotted down notes for a book he intended to write

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49
about “the experience that a transformation of all human life is given
in the fact that ‘Jesus is there only for others.’”1
The simplicity of this statement conceals its subversiveness. “Of
course Jesus is there for others,” we might think, when what we often
really mean is that “Jesus is there for others in my group.” We claim
Jesus as our Jesus. Christ is for you, my evangelical upbringing taught,
as long as you, too, join my team and affirm Jesus as the exclusive
way, truth, and life. Conversely, I’ve met plenty of liberal Christians
who sneer at “those” Christians who still believe in miracles or Jesus’
bodily resurrection. Jesus is for you, it seems they are saying, as long
as you are not an evangelical!
When exclusive religion meets imperial power, however, a more
nefarious Jesus is created. Our Jesus becomes, falsely, the Jesus to which
the world must bend its will, leaving murdered and enslaved bod-
ies, along with stolen land, in his wake. The early church breathed a
persecution-free sigh of relief when Emperor Constantine converted to
Christianity and the Roman Empire became Christian — but they also
began populating Roman armies and providing theological justification
for war and conquest.2 Several fifteenth-century papal bulls, such as
Pope Alexander VI’s Inter Caetera, provided spiritual justification for
the claiming of other lands and peoples, all in the name of the one, true
Christian religion.3 White, male Christian slave traders in the United
States wielded Paul’s words, “Slaves, obey your masters” (Ephesians
6:5) as a law from no less an authority than God.4
But the imperial Jesus, too, is not Jesus. It is a Jesus twisted to
match the image and story of the Empire, which conveniently ignores
the actual story of Jesus. As Luke tells it, Jesus’ way is inclusion, sol-
idarity with the marginalized, and expansive life for others. Such
breadth and depth of love, however, are inherently threatening to the
boundary-keepers of empire and religion.
Richard Rohr has done the Western Church a tremendous ser-
vice by helping us retrieve a third option in our tradition, beyond the
narcissism of my Jesus and the racism of our Jesus — the Universal Christ.
Jesus Christ is not only “for me” or even “for others.” Jesus Christ is
also the divine presence in every thing. Christ is not Jesus’ last name, as
Fr. Rohr is fond of saying, but God’s generative and living presence
at the heart of reality itself.
I long suspected that there was infinitely more to Christ than
the man. Biblical passages such as Colossians 1 tipped me off: “He

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If he’s only my Jesus, and not everyone
and everything else’s Jesus too, then
Jesus has become far too small
an d o n ly a n a r c i s sist ic
r e f le c ti o n
of me.

is before all things and in him all things hold together” (Colossians
1:17). John’s Gospel (1:1–14) placed the Word, made flesh in Jesus, at
creation’s beginning, with and as God. Other passages, out of which
Christ’s cosmic identity emerged, plain baffled me: What was this
Wisdom about which the writer of Proverbs wrote, “appointed from
eternity, before the world began” (8:23)?
In his humble, clear, and trustworthy way, Fr. Rohr told us in
modern language what these Scriptures pointed toward: The First
Incarnation of Christ takes place not in the birth of Jesus, but at the
origin of the universe. All creation is God’s Beloved Child! From his
book The Universal Christ we read:

When Christians hear the word “incarnation,” most of us think

about the birth of Jesus, who personally demonstrated God’s
radical unity with humanity. But . . . I want to suggest that the
first Incarnation was the moment described in Genesis 1, when
God joined in unity with the physical universe and became the
light inside of everything. . . . The Incarnation, then, is not only
“God becoming Jesus.” It is a much broader event. . . . Everything
visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God.5

Fr. Rohr reminds the church, especially those of us in the West,

that Christ’s presence is universal. It’s a truth forgotten by many but
remembered and heralded by Christian mystics throughout the ages.
Consider the perspective of theologian and bishop Gregory of Nyssa
(c. 335–c. 395):

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51
 Who, looking at the universe, would be so feeble-minded as not
to believe that God is all in all; that he clothes himself with the
universe, and at the same time contains it and dwells in it? 6

or the monk Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662):

He who has no beginning is seen in things that must have a

beginning; the invisible in the visible; the intangible in the tangi-
ble. Thus he gathers us together in himself, through every object
. . . enabling us to rise into union with him, as he was dispersed
in coming down to us.7

J
ust bec ause Je sus Christ is cosmic, however, does not mean
that he is not personal. The Universal Christ is, at the same time,
the particular Jesus of Nazareth. And just because Christ is in all
things does not mean that Christ is any less in me. My story
includes a Jesus that I still call “mine” — God’s intimate and loving
presence available to me, as I learned in my evangelical days — even as
he also belongs to everyone and everything else. I can even hum some
of those pop praise songs again, because my prayer is still to “want to
know you and seek your face.”
Jesus has to be for me if Jesus is to have any meaning. He may
be the Word through whom all things were made and the light that
enlightens the world (John 1), but unless I can experience that ongoing
divine creativity and life in my life, it has no relevancy for me. The
same God who stretched sky and spun planets must mysteriously
also know and care for the unique rhythm of my heartbeat. Otherwise,
what’s the personal point? But if he’s only my Jesus, and not everyone
and everything else’s Jesus too, then Jesus has become far too small and
only a narcissistic reflection of me. The real Jesus likely knows nothing
about the small Jesus that, in truth, mirrors my ego. As Thomas Mer-
ton memorably quipped in New Seeds of Contemplation, to be unknown
of God is altogether too much privacy.8
Jesus and I are still close — closer than ever, in fact — but we’ve
redefined the relationship. There is no longer a distant, angry deity
lingering behind him, seeing and knowing my faults, and ready to
pounce with punishment. Jesus is still my rescuer, but not from
hell — that mythic place of fiery torment evoked more from Dante’s
Inferno than the Bible itself. Rather, Jesus has become the mirror to

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me of God’s love at the heart of reality. Jesus has not so much saved
me from disaster as saved me for life. My Story of Jesus is, at the same
time, Our Story of Jesus, which is simultaneously The Story of Christ
unfolding throughout all reality.
·

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Oneing
54
 Learning to See
Beyond the
Normative
By Leslye Colvin

R
etur ning to one’s childhood home as a mature adult can
be a special time to ponder the cycles or stories of evolution in
one’s life. The dynamics of remembering our earliest relation-
ships and revisiting significant places may reveal answers to questions
never asked. These are not necessarily articulated questions, but may
be understandings arising from a deeper or expanded perspective. In
a word, it can be lifegiving.
I moved home to be the caregiver for my then-eighty-two-year-
old mother in October 2015. At the time of this writing, she is receiv-
ing palliative care for late-stage dementia.
The small site on the map marking my birthplace is quite ordinary.
Ozark is one of a zillion small towns across the globe. Yet, the location

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55
 is personal, as it witnessed the birth of myself, my siblings, my parents,
and two of my grandparents. It is the town from which my parents
moved when they married. It is also the town where a biracial great-
great-grandfather settled and changed his last name from “Lee” to
“Boykin” because of a death threat.
The Certificate of Live Birth issued by the State of Alabama
identified me as “colored” and “girl.” No newborn could know how
these normative labels would be used to identify those options to
which a person may or may not aspire. They were intended to consign
the designated as powerless or inferior, to limit ways of thinking, of
being. The two words reveal more about the constructed system that
employs them than it does about the infant who simply wants to be
fed when hungry, changed when wet, comforted when distraught,
and always loved.
I entered the world, in a sense, as an extension of the lives of oth-
ers. Looking back across six decades, I understand that circumstances
impacting my existence were beyond my control and awareness. It is as
though the multifaceted layers of humanity, time, and space converged
to move me from stardust to the one known as Leslye Alise Colvin.
My journey has never been linear, nor was it intended to be.
While, as children, our developing minds learn to move from A to B
to C, hopefully our first teacher—our lived experience—teaches us dif-
ferently. The process is enhanced as we learn to apply discernment and
critical thinking skills to our lived experiences and how we navigate
them. We come to know that the dominant narrative is not the only
one, and we have the capacity to free ourselves from predictable and
binary patterns.
Through my early years, a significant portion of my life unfolded
in the extreme southeastern corner of Alabama, the land of the Mus-
cogee. In the midst of extended family, it was commonplace for elders
to share stories of their life, and to speak of ancestors whom I did not
remember or never knew. Through this process, our humanity and
belonging were affirmed through conversations revealing how norma-
tive practices were established to deny both.
Through summer drives to Ohio, I knew that, as a child, my
mother had moved there from Alabama with her maternal family. It
would be years before I understood their move to be part of the Great
Migration, a massive movement of African Americans from the south
to the north. The impetus was a hunger to experience a truer sense

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of freedom during the first half of the last century. Unfortunately, in
this new region, they would find white supremacy to be different, but
still ever-present. It was here that as children my siblings and I were
first called “nigger,” as shouted by a boy in a white body while he was
riding by my aunt’s house on a bicycle.
From the family unit, my identity expanded to understand the
role of faith, community, region, and nation. My parents depended on
several sources to stay abreast of current affairs. They read the local
newspaper and Ebony magazine and watched morning and evening
national news broadcasts to keep informed. I observed my extended
family engaging in the same practices. I remember thinking as a child
that it was a part of being a grownup. Less than 100 miles north of
my home, Rosa Parks had chosen to keep her seat on a public bus. In
doing so, she violated unjust yet normative practices and laws. This
single act was the tipping point for the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Current events did not unfold exclusively in distant places, but
in our lives. My siblings and I attended, and my parents taught in,
racially segregated schools that were deemed unconstitutional by the
Supreme Court before my birth. Medical examinations required our
using the building’s side door to enter a small, windowless waiting
room, through which we accessed the single exam room reserved for
us. Even so, in the safety of our home, we celebrated the struggle for
Civil Rights and recited the mantra, “I’m Black and I’m proud.”
Some decisions made for or by us provide opportunities to expand
our understandings. Christianity has been the faith tradition of my
family for generations, a belief system supportive of a relationship
with the Divine. The humble birth of a Jewish infant to a family living
under oppression and his execution by the state were parallel to the
challenges in this world for African Americans.

A
s de scenda n ts of kidnapped Africans who survived the
Transatlantic Slave Trade, members of the Black Church feel
a strong connection to the biblical narrative of the Hebrew
people, who had themselves been enslaved in a foreign land. Their
experience of God using Moses to guide them to freedom was a bea-
con of assurance that God would liberate Blacks as well.
This awareness was mine when three generations of my family
entered the Roman Catholic Church in a region where Catholics
were a small minority among Christians identifying as Protestant. My

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57
paternal aunt and grandparents did so in Ozark a short time before
my immediate family did in our hometown. With only one parish in
a racially segregated community, the two priests openly welcomed
us. The parishioners in white bodies included those who embraced
us and those who were challenged by the Spirit’s invitation to us to
become Catholic. Our mere presence and involvement in the life of
the parish was an affront to the normative, as was Jesus’ embrace of
the Samaritan woman.
As a child, it was surprising for me to see that some family mem-
bers and friends also found it problematic that we would join a “white”
church. While we belonged to a parish in which most parishioners
were in white bodies, I did not think of it as a white church. In my
young mind, it was simply a Catholic parish and, as such, part of the
universal church. It was my church.
It was affirming for me to see annual televised news reports from
the Vatican as the Pope celebrated Christmas Midnight Mass and the
Easter Vigil. Among the throngs of people gathered, the universality
of the Church was apparent, even on a black-and-white television, as
I saw scores of people who looked like my family, unlike the parish
of my hometown. There was something significant in these images,
beyond what I was able to express. My Church was intended to be
inclusive, thereby transcending the flawed racial construct that domi-
nated our society.

D
w elling in a racially segregated environment constantly
provides opportunities to question racism for those willing
to see what is happening beyond the normative. For genera-
tions, my family has appreciated education as a way to improve the
odds of advancement, regardless of racist obstacles, and a way to
serve the community. This was more apparent when schools were
segregated racially. What was gained through education—formal or
informal—could never be taken from anyone.
As a high school student, I made my first retreat when the Office
of Youth Ministry for the Archdiocese of Mobile introduced Search
for Christian Maturity. The three-day retreat brought together teens
from across the southern part of the state to Montgomery Catholic
High School. The racially diverse event was a pivotal moment for me,
as I first experienced a spiritual high. This gathering allowed me to
engage with other African American Catholic teens for the first time.

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 The enduring
intergenerational trauma
that began with my ancestors on the
African continent and now resides
within my body compels me to
do more now, while breath
is in my body.

It was this desire to be with others like myself that led me to

enroll at Xavier University of Louisiana. Founded by Saint Katha-
rine Drexel (1858–1955), Xavier is the only historically Black Roman
Catholic college or university in the Western hemisphere. For the
first time in my life, I lived in an environment that never questioned
my faith.
Although I had wanted a Black Catholic environment as an under-
graduate, there was no such consideration when planning for graduate
school. After receiving the offer of an assistantship from the Office of
Minority Graduate Student Recruitment at the University of Mas-
sachusetts Amherst, I was bound for New England. During my two
years of study, I resided in a dormitory for students who identified
as graduate and/or international. With more than 60 percent of the
residents being from other countries, this proved to be one of the most
enriching experiences of my life as I was immersed in a rich environ-
ment of diverse cultures, faiths, foods, and languages. What better way
is there to learn from others than living together?
For the first time in my life, I developed friendships with members
of the global community and the world’s other great faith traditions.
In meeting Catholics from other countries, I began to see in new ways
how faith and culture influence one another beyond my personal expe-
riences. The richness of this period offered new ways of thinking. One

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59
of the first surprises was students from other nations who questioned
whether I was really from Alabama. My assumption was that I did
not present the same limited stereotypes of Black women from the
South as portrayed in American media.
Decades later, I remember the feeling of shifting my thinking. A
woman from Taiwan was preparing a meal for a special cultural day.
She was criticized by a citizen of the US for eating bacon that had
been boiled as part of her recipe. Her quick response was to question
the practice of placing a headless turkey on a holiday dinner table.
How revealing was it that I had never considered the featured item
on the Thanksgiving menu as a headless turkey? It is not as appealing
as my father’s smoked turkey.
With friends who were Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh, it
was commonplace to offer prayers across religious boundaries. It was
during this period that my understanding of the Christian God began
to expand to God, the Divine Mystery. It was a surprise for me that
my more expansive perspective of the Divine enriched my Catholic
faith in ways I can still not verbalize. Who am I to consider limiting
or denying the enlivened expression of the Divine Mystery?

I
t wa s du r ing my time in Massachusetts that I learned about
parishes with ethnic identities. It was surprising to learn of cities
that were home to an Irish parish, an Italian parish, a Polish parish,
and a French-Canadian parish. This was new to me. While the eth-
nic identities were not necessarily accurate descriptors of the current
membership, the labels of origin remained. I could never image such
practices in Alabama, where the simple dualism of white supremacy
reigned. In southern cities, African Americans who were denied full
participation in parishes because of white supremacy established their
own faith communities.
Upon my move home, I learned that Fr. Patrick Maher (1927–
2017), the priest who had accompanied my aunt and grandparents
into the Catholic church in Ozark, was in retirement in my hometown
parish. From our conversations, I learned that he had been ordained in
Ireland in 1954 to serve in what was then the Diocese of Mobile. His
first assignment was at St. Jude’s, the parish and school that served
the African American community in Montgomery. In his own words,
he said it was through this assignment that he first came to know and
love Black people and that he would have been a very different priest

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without this lived experience. This was the only assignment in which
he cried when it ended.
Fr. Maher arrived in Montgomery one year before the Rev. Mar-
tin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) began serving as pastor of Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church. When I asked about his support of the Mont-
gomery Bus Boycott, Fr. Maher said that he had provided transporta-
tion for those boycotting the unjust system, but he wished he had done
more. My regret is not having invited him to share more.
My body experienced a visceral response to the continuing vio-
lence known as white-body supremacy upon the 2020 murders of
Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and others. It led
me to ask, “Am I next?” I had long forgotten the sensation, the angst,
but clearly my body remembered it from my childhood during the
challenges of the Civil Rights Movement. The enduring intergenera-
tional trauma that began with my ancestors on the African continent
and now resides within my body compels me to do more now, while
breath is in my body.
In the southern US, public affirmations of faith by Christians are
commonplace and considered virtuous. From my perspective, they
are interwoven with the illusion of southern hospitality. People from
other parts of the country quickly notice how easily southerners make
eye contact and speak to passersby. “Have a good day,” rolls off our
tongues as effortlessly as our southern accents. We can easily have
polite conversations about blue skies, the need for rain, the intense
heat, the high humidity, and college football.
Being from a rural part of the country, I recognize the value of
manure as fertilizer. However, once it becomes rancid, it is of no value.
Southern hospitality is a form of snow-covered, rancid manure. It is
not how it appears. If it were genuine for the majority of those living
in the region, our history and present would be models for the study
of human dignity. The racial disparities revealing the enshrinement of
white supremacy would be nonexistent.
A few years ago, I was interviewed by a journalist for Vatican
Radio. A member of the African diaspora, she commented that Ala-
bama was known as a place where Black people were famous for
fighting against oppression. I was shocked as a sense of pride swept
over me. Her words were true. How had I not recognized this truth?
Even in societies identifying as Christian, the heart of the Gospel
of the Universal Christ is not normative. It always beats in response

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to Jesus’ reading from Torah (Isaiah 61:1): “The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to
the blind, to let the oppressed go free.”
·

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 Touching Butterflies
By Cindy Kroll

Francis called all creatures, no matter how small, by the name of

brother and sister, because he knew they had the same source as
himself.
— Bonaventure

O
ne su mmer se v er a l years ago, for a short season, parts
of the natural world inexplicably lost their fear of me. I’d
developed an illness that had not yet been diagnosed, one
that left me feeling like I was living in a smoky fog that was slowly
choking the vitality from my mind and body. It cast me into the thin-
nest of places, where I was quite literally slowed down — my feet were
so painful that stepping onto a hard floor without slippers at times
brought tears to my eyes — but also created a spiritual causeway that
led me to the CAC as a Living School student, and eventually to a
role on staff overseeing finances.
As the illness progressed, I began to spend hours in nature. People
felt foreign: too fast, too unpredictable. And it appeared that the

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monarch butterflies, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and crickets recognized
something different about me. I could gently touch them, just a
feather’s touch at the edge of their wing or their body. I could hold
out my hand and a dragonfly would land on my finger. My kids began
to demand I show them, like a circus trick. I couldn’t find answers to
what was happening to my body, but it was as if the world around me
was confirming that whatever was eluding diagnosis was not eluding
notice. I discovered Fr. Richard Rohr’s work during this time and
eventually felt led to apply to the Living School, looking for words
for what was rising, and was accepted into the program. I found
myself introduced to a community that spoke a similar language, that
recognized and experienced this mystery in their own striking ways.
Eventually a diagnosis came, then a surgery that brought an imme-
diate clearing of my mind and a slower but steady healing of my body.
And with it, the curtain closed. I was cast back into my own world.
I’ve always been drawn to nature as a means of connection to God,
but after that experience I began to watch more closely. I began to
see my place in it, as it, no longer visiting as a foreigner but inherently
belonging. One day, I noticed the leaves of the maple that draped onto
the deck where I journaled every morning all summer. I contemplated
the ways in which that tree sustained me with its shade, its oxygen.
Then I realized that after all these years of living in community with
that tree, I was not only looking at a tree, but also a physical manifes-
tation of converted carbon dioxide, perhaps some of which had come
from the exhales I’d laid upon its leaves, day after day. I wondered
what tiny sliver of the branch might be made of my own captured
breath.
I also wonder if taking the time to contemplate the natural world,
to experience the felt imminence of how we are already and always
part of each other, might be one way to help understand what Fr.
Richard calls Other Stories. It might be showing us that when we
participate in community outside Our Story, the result is not a loss of
our diversity, but instead an invitation to hold a piece of others’ stories
within us, to accept the wisdom of what is offered deeply enough that
it takes hold as part of us.
A couple summers after my surgery, my family decided to grow
milkweed to feed the monarch butterflies. We gathered the tiny cat-
erpillars and placed them in safe harbor on a couple of the plants we
potted and placed in a net enclosure. It sat on the deck where I spent

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my mornings. I watched them closely, fascinated by the organized way
in which they methodically consumed the milkweed, munching along
the edge of a leaf, row by row.
One appeared to stop moving one day, and I wondered if it had
died. It lay motionless for the day. In the morning, it had changed. It
was larger and its markings were subtly but noticeably different. The
dark detritus of a shed skin lay around it. The caterpillar had passed
into a new instar stage, what I soon learned was one of five instars
before it eventually formed into a chrysalis.
Although we all recognize the grand final transformation to a
butterfly, I’ve noticed my own experiences of transformation have
involved much smaller shifts, grounded in stillness. I am often
prompted, as was the caterpillar, to halt and wait, pulled to pause and
surrender (in what often feels like humiliation) something else that I
finally recognize does not serve Love.

O
ne of m y favorite poems is “The Summer Day,”1 the well-
known classic by Mary Oliver. On mugs, posters, and even
tattoos we are reminded of its urgent final question: “Tell me,
what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” But
my favorite words are much earlier, and only two: “this grasshopper.”
In these two words, she demonstrates how to see. She brings us to
know, as Fr. Richard calls it, “the scandal of the particular”: not any
grasshopper, but this grasshopper. And not only that singular creature,
but the window into the universal story that it reveals as a result of
her willingness to slow down long enough to truly see it.
That grasshopper, that caterpillar, that tree all call me to some-
thing that feels like community. They offer something in themselves
that points me to The Story in which we all participate together. As
I learned in the Living School, we can only recognize what is already
part of us. These ephemeral creatures, in that way, mirror and illumi-
nate our own eternal spark as well as their own.
Often, it seems like what I am experiencing is simply a remem-
bering of what indigenous cultures would consider common knowl-
edge. Notably, my experiences most often occur on the margins, in
moments of unrushed stillness. In The Unsettling of America, Wendell
Berry describes the farmers in the Andes who preserved margins of
untilled soil as a place to nurture diversity, a seedbed of creative evo-
lution that resulted in the proliferation of durable plants in a region

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65
of varying microclimates on the different mountainside elevations. If
part of our work in this moment is to remember, it might be more
important than ever that we make space to listen to each other’s stories.
At CAC, I am now tasked with helping to steward the financial
resources we’ve been blessed to receive from our community. I am
curious how Mother Earth, the creative feminine, might help walk
us all toward a place of sustainable financial flourishing. At a time
when she’s showing with growing clarity the impact of our choices,
how can we allow her to guide us, through her unrelenting, generous
immediacy, to a healthy relationship with money?
Through this lens, I begin to see that our organization is just
one part of a web of organizations connected deeply to each other,
perhaps sometimes unseen, as roots connect trees underground. The
money flowing and the people interacting in and between them are
the embodied reality of relationship, connecting what seems at times
contrived, unrelated, and unconnected to the natural world. Could
we even consider the patterns of nature as a model — say, the profu-
sion of seeds the maple provides each spring — and recognize them not
as merely an insurance policy for the tree’s own survival, but also as
participation in a communal generosity that creates the potential for
all to thrive?
In the end, what I experienced during my illness was a brief open-
ing that came and then fell back away. As I healed, words aligned to
experience, ordered it, and formed it into something I could commu-
nicate to others. But this language feels more like a pointer than the
real Story. There’s still a tether down to a place I can only sense, not
name. Time spent in intentional relationship with the natural world
holds the tether at the surface, in what feels like an ongoing invitation.
Just a couple summers ago, long past the medical issues but again
dwelling in a liminal space due to new disorder in my life, I walked
slowly toward the park I’d visited thousands of times. It was a warm
summer morning, but the shaded sidewalk remained cold and wet
with dew. A movement caught my eye; it was a monarch struggling on
the sidewalk, its wings stuck against the wet concrete. I stooped down,
picked up a small twig, and offered it to the butterfly. It immediately
climbed on. I walked, carrying it hanging from the twig, and brought
it to a sun-drenched bush in the park. It climbed dutifully off the twig
and onto a branch. I wondered if I should wait, but decided to move
on. When I came back the same way, it was gone.

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·
From the Conceptual
to the Contextual
By Lisa E. Powell

I
l ook ed u p t he word “cosmic” in the dictionary. It’s one of
those words where I think I know what it means until I stop to
think about its meaning. According to Merriam-Webster, cosmic
means “of or relating to the cosmos, the extraterrestrial vastness, or
the universe in contrast to the earth alone; of, relating to, or concerned
with abstract spiritual or metaphysical ideas; cosmic wisdom.”1
Ah! It’s likely the “abstract spiritual” wisdom is where I’m get-
ting tripped up. I must examine my own experiences and develop
my own interpretations. Like a flag flapping in the wind, the meta-
physics of it are hard to grasp. Just when I think I’ve captured an
edge, it escapes me.
Still, flags help me go from the conceptual to the contextual. In
My Story, flags have helped me question “my limited and limiting
frame of reference,” “my group, and its leaders.”2 They have also

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67
facilitated my journey into my own soul and individuated wound-
edness. Our Story’s flagpoles have helped me poke holes in the his-
tory of my family, group, nation, and religion, and The Story needs
no flags.
My favorite personal flag story occurred at the age of twenty-
seven. I had spent six months abroad — three months in New Zealand
followed by three months in Australia. I was headed back to the States,
and I wasn’t happy. I dragged myself off Bondi Beach near Sydney
to return to the soggy gray skies of a midwestern spring. A fourteen-
hour overnight flight during which I was sandwiched between two
big men also left me feeling uncomfortable.
Upon landing, I groggily made my way to US Customs. To my
surprise, it was a very impressive sight, with several huge US flags
hanging from the ceiling. There was no mistaking that I was back
on home soil.
I shuffled my way to the front of the line. The customs agent
was a large man who seemed to tower over me. He looked at me

Surely, we must have learned

sternly. He looked at my passport. He looked back at me. He stud-
ied my face. He looked back at the passport. There were a couple
more rounds of this scrutiny before a huge smile erupted on his face
as he looked at me and said, “Welcome home.” I choked up, barely
squeaking out a “thank you” as he handed me my passport. Sud-
denly I was happy to be home, despite my worldview being turned
on its head during my time abroad. The flags were there to witness
and welcome my reentry. To this day, thirty years later, I believe
travel is the best teacher.
Something else I learned during that trip is that the world
doesn’t necessarily see America the way that much of America sees
America, especially in families like mine, where any comments con-
sidered to be criticism — however constructively intended — were
shut down and shushed up. Critical thinking was considered just
plain critical. While cracked eggshells are welcomed when eating
hard-boiled eggs, we could not allow cracks in our façade for fear of
seeing what’s underneath. Instead, Our Story paints America as the
savior of the world.

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 Once, when my former husband and I drove down the street
toward my childhood home, he looked out the window and asked, “Is
today a national holiday that I don’t know about?” It wasn’t. Flying
the American flag is a strong tradition in the Midwest, especially in
the summer. Memorial Day celebrations were complete with planting
pansies, decked-out bicycles, and proud, flag-waving parades. Bak-
ing cherry pies and setting off fireworks were essential on the Fourth
of July. That’s the middle-class environment in which I was raised. I
wanted for nothing, and I wanted more.
Shortly after my trip Down Under, I moved to New Mexico.
When asked what I like most about the state, I say it’s the blue skies,
the cultural diversity, and the green and red chiles. Now I need to add
the state flag, despite — or perhaps because of — its cultural appropria-
tion from the Zia Pueblo. The red Zia symbol floats on a bright yel-
low background. It’s simplicity, genius; it’s symbolism, sacred. After
twenty-eight years of living in New Mexico, I can honestly say it
represents My Story, Our Stories, and The Story in my life.

that all our stories are connected.

A
s I w r i t e this, flags from all around the world are flying
high and proud at the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo, Japan.
I admit that I still find something very compelling about
seeing an American — or Americans — standing atop a podium with
gold medals draped from their necks, Stars and Stripes behind them,
and the Star-Spangled Banner playing for all to hear. We see the
flag raised for our silver and bronze medal winners too. The years
of training endured by “our” athletes are a source of pride for most
Americans, even though we had nothing to do with their success or
their sacrifice.
The Olympics are being held amidst a global pandemic caused by
a deadly virus that knows no borders and does not discriminate. My
first Olympic memory was as a four-year-old child, standing in my
grandparents’ living room watching American Peggy Fleming grace-
fully figure skate her way to a gold medal in Grenoble, France. Four
years later, I learned about evil for the first time amidst the televised
tragedy of eleven Israeli athletes killed by the virus of hate during the
Munich Olympics.

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 Most days, I feel like I am on the edge of The Story. When it
comes to The Story, I typically experience a crisis of confidence. As
Fr. Richard Rohr says, confidence is found in the mysterious alchemy
of faith, hope, and love. It’s hard to feel confident when all I can do is
hope I have enough faith and love when my spirit is flagging and that
next gust of wind is upon me.
With the past year and a half filled so full of tragedy as well as
unexpected grace and abundant blessings — a time where, surely, we
must have learned that all our stories are connected — rather than rep-
resenting each country by its individual flag, perhaps humanity and
The Story would be better represented by one flag — the interlocking
Olympic rings — wherein we might see, once and for all, that no one
wins if we don’t all share equally in the universal “thrill of victory and
the agony of defeat.”3

There has to be solid ground, trust, and shared security, or we

cannot move outward. There has to be a foundational hope, and
for hope to be a shared experience there must be agreed-upon
meanings and shared stories that excite and inspire us all. If these
are truly stories from the great patterns that are always true, they
will catapult us into a universal humanity, a pluralistic society,
where we can both stand on solid ground and, from that solid

·
ground, create common ground. If it does not support our movement
outward, then it is not solid ground at all.4

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 Listening to Learn
about Our Own
Stories
By Peter Levenstrong

T
he room wa s full of mostly white, liberal Christian folks,
and I was sitting in the back. The subject of the talk was
ultimate consciousness and how that interacts with the
current social struggles of the world in which we live. The speaker,
who is both white and straight, said that “black people and gay
people often have a harder time ascending to this level of ultimate
consciousness, because they’re so wrapped up in their identity of
being black or gay.” Though the speaker didn’t go so far as to say
that issues of civil rights are unimportant or should be ignored, the
message was clear: Social concerns like justice and equity for people
of various identities are, at best, a “distraction” from the main focus
of a contemplative life.

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71
 I was floored. I looked around me, at the room full of silent white
faces (or even nodding heads) and couldn’t believe that we were all
going to just accept this as fact. Did no one even feel like challenging
the assertion that cisgender/heterosexual white folks like me had an
inherently easier time of coming to greater awareness and conscious-
ness, and that we didn’t have our own identities that got in the way
of our progress? Had we not proven, time and time again, that the
assumption of white normativity (where the privileged identity is
seen as “normal” and anything other than a privileged identity is seen
as adding a layer of identity that otherwise isn’t present) is baseless
and flawed?
In fact, it is for the very reason just mentioned that I think people
of privileged identities like myself have more work to do on the level
of Our Story, rather than less, before they can truly come to recognize
The Story. Many of us are not even aware of our own stories and the
stories of our ancestors, and don’t realize the way that we still benefit
to this day from the systems set up by our forebears. Consequently,
we have so much more work to do. This is because disadvantaged folk,
in my experience, tend to have a much stronger grasp on the reality
of the status quo and the complexity of Our Story/Their Story than
those who benefit from the way things are, if for no other reason than
that they have to, in order to survive.
For liberal white Christians who like to spend their time focused
on the level of The Story without engaging in the details of Our Story/
Their Story, this message may be a bit hard to swallow. But the truth
is, in addition to the fundamentalists, zealots, and people who use
religion to disguise their real belief system, there are plenty of liberal
white folks in our country who haven’t spent adequate time learning
about the reality of life in our society — that of their own life, or that
of others.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, arguably one of the most
liberal pockets within the United States. The last time our nine coun-
ties leaned Republican in a presidential election was in 1980, and
that was for a fellow Californian. We like to think of ourselves as the
enlightened future of the United States, but for many people of color,
the present Bay Area isn’t working out too great. On a recent webi-
nar about housing in the Bay Area, I felt quite convicted to hear Fred
Blackwell, the CEO of the San Francisco Community Foundation,
say the following about the racist implementation of housing policy:

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 We like to think of ourselves as a dark blue region in a blue state.
We have this perception of ourselves as liberal, progressive, tol-
erant, [and] inclusive. And frankly, when it comes to race and
economic status, our perception of ourselves is out of line with
reality. When I think about the kind of things that we tolerate . . .
we should be ashamed of ourselves.1

This is why the dual focus of action and contemplation is so criti-

cal: because we can’t come to know God without first knowing and
understanding the specific context of the world in which we live, so
that we can hear God’s voice in the fight for justice, for equity, for
all people. It is through the particular that we can come to know the
universal, and if we think we know the universal without actually
understanding the context of the particular, then we’ve got a false
image of the universal.

T
here are plent y of ways to learn about our own particular
stories and the stories of others. One of the best resources I’ve
come across (other than the numerous helpful books written
by BIPOC authors such as Anthea Butler, Austin Channing Brown,
and Teresa Mateus, to name a few) is the program called Sacred Ground,
a free curriculum designed and paid for by the Episcopal Church for
Episcopal congregations (and anyone who chooses to partner with
them) to learn about the intersection of race and faith in our society.
Over the course of ten sessions, participants in Sacred Ground
learn about whiteness, the particular histories and present realities of
various communities of color, and what sort of efforts are working to
change the status quo. In the congregation where I am engaged in min-
istry, St. Gregory’s of Nyssa in San Francisco, we went through this
program in partnership with a neighboring Roman Catholic church.
The program was so profoundly impactful for our congregants that we
decided to do it again, offering it as a repeat for anybody who decided
they want to delve deeper into what they learned, or for anyone else
who wasn’t able to go through it the first time.
There are many ways to get involved in learning about and engag-
ing with the Our Story/Their Story levels of the Cosmic Egg. But
for me, as a Christian, they all boil down to one thing: learning from
others what it means to follow in the steps of Jesus as he leads us in
the great cosmic dance through this life and beyond. Unlike God,

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73
 Often the people
who are most marginalized
have the sharpest understanding
of the way the world works.

whom “no one has ever seen” (John 1:18), Jesus became incarnate as
a particular human being in a particular place and time in the world;
he “became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). It is through getting
to know his context, seeing how he acted and interacted with other
people, as well as how other people responded to him, that we can
come to know God, and know where God is leading us today.
Again, it’s through the particular that we come to know the uni-
versal, and it’s often the people who are most marginalized who have
the sharpest understanding of the way the world works. So, when we
read the story of the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4:1–42)
entering into a verbal and theological wrestling match with Jesus, it
makes a huge difference to know the fact that Samaritans and Jews
did not speak with each other, and especially that a woman talking
privately to a man was absolutely taboo. Knowing and understanding
this cultural context (Our Story/Their Story) impacts how we come
to know God’s nature (The Story) as one that prizes the voices of
those whom others deem unworthy or undeserving. And looking for
stories from modern-day women who are marginalized, on a basis of
both gender and race, sheds light on those to whom God is leading us
to pay more attention, such as the women of color who find their own
voices in a toxic work environment, or in an unhealthy community
setting, and begin to speak up for themselves despite the danger it
might pose to them and their careers.
Likewise, if you’ve read the beatitudes in Matthew 5, you’ll be
familiar with the teaching to “love your enemies and pray for those
who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in
heaven” (Matthew 5:44–45). Knowing who was persecuting the
Jews of Jesus’ time makes a huge difference to understanding this
teaching. Jesus wasn’t just speaking in a vacuum, about persecution

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in general, but rather to the particular context of Roman imperial rule.
He wasn’t just talking about “enemies” such as other people in your
workplace or church community whom you find to be really annoying.
The type of “enemy” he’s addressing is a Roman soldier who can impel
you to forced labor, impose extractive taxes, and imprison you. I’ve
never had such an enemy in my life, so it’s hard for me to imagine the
depth of love and prayer that Jesus is asking of us, but there are many
people in our society today who have faced very similar situations and
yet are still able to live up to Jesus’ calling. Hearing the stories of single
mothers with children who have been evicted and forced out onto the
street, and yet who find the strength within themselves to show the
sheriff and their landlord respect and even pray for their wellbeing,
profoundly impacts my awareness of what Jesus’ teachings actually
look like when played out in the world.

F
ina lly, under sta nding t he context of Jesus’ crucifixion
and death makes all the difference for practicing Christians as
we engage with Our Story/Their Story. Understanding that
Jesus was killed by crucifixion because he manifested a political threat
to the stability of the Roman Empire in the Judean province (as the
“king of the Jews”) transforms our perspective of the pinnacle event
of the Christian story, from both a theological and a social lens. It
also speaks directly to how we interpret such modern-day events as
the lynching of black men by mobs of white men, or by white men
in police uniforms. They are killed because they pose a threat to our
society’s stability and status quo. Christ’s crucifixion and resurrec-
tion is God’s once-for-all judgment upon systems of state-sanctioned
violence or murder, and it’s time that more Christians paid attention
to the details of Our Story/Their Story in the Gospels and recognize
what that says about God’s Story — The Story — and how our current
social structures fit in (or don’t).
As contemplatives living in the modern-day world, we have a
lot of great examples to follow as we learn to engage on the levels
of both Our Story/Their Story and The Story. Many of our great-
est contemplative role models — Teresa of Ávila, Howard Thurman,
Thomas Merton — were deeply involved in the social movements of
their time and laid the groundwork for future nonviolent activism.
For those who came from places of privilege, they first had to learn
from people who were facing the brunt of systemic oppression to get

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a clearer picture of what was happening. For those who did not come
from privilege, that knowledge was second nature to them, because it
was necessary for their survival.
Those of us who are white and liberal can all too easily be tricked
into thinking that we know all there is to know about Our Story/
Their Story, when in fact the version we’ve been told is full of half-
truths and mythic lies. These lies build up a false sense of complacency
with the world that is unmerited and undeserved. Rather than think-
ing of ourselves as occupying a place of advantage when it comes to
knowing (and transcending) the level of Our Story/Their Story, let
us recognize that we have so much more learning to do. This learning
often looks like listening to the people who are most marginalized by
the current systems of the world in which we live and privileging their
voices over our own or those who look like us, because it’s usually the
people who are impacted the most by the systems in which we live
who have the most accurate and truthful understanding about Our
Story/Their Story.
·

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 Gateway to
Knowing
By Felicia Murrell

I
never questioned the world in which I grew up. I followed
the rhythms set for me by those around me, understanding the
world and how to situate myself in it through the lenses and lives
of those in authority over me. I learned to orient myself to their whims
and flights of fancy. I learned when it was necessary to shrink myself,
to make myself disappear.
In the small rural North Carolina town of my youth, Blacks lived
on one side of the tracks and Whites on the other. The grocery stores,
diners, convenience store, post office, schools, and gas stations were
across the tracks, on the White side of town. On our side of the
tracks, only a small store my great-uncle owned, the candy lady’s home,
and three predominantly Black churches were easily accessible to us.
Even in the late seventies and on into the early eighties, we stepped
off the sidewalk when White people walked past, turning our gaze
downward or to the side, never making direct eye contact. We paused

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our movement to let them enter establishments first, and on the rare
occasion that we got to eat at Jones’ (the local café), we called in our
food order and then crossed the railroad tracks to the café’s back door,
where we gave our money to the one Black worker and retrieved our
greasy hamburgers and hot dogs in a small paper sack. Nothing about
this life seemed abnormal. This was Our Story.
As a child, I existed in a world of play, family, and church—and
then I went to school, where I interacted with White people for the
first time. And with play being such an integral part of the world in
which I grew up, it never dawned on me that asking my White class-
mates, “Can I come over to your house to play?” was taboo.
I was five. What did I know about situational ethics and contex-
tual relationships?
More than four decades have passed since I posed that question,
but I’ll never forget the replies of those twin sisters in my kindergarten
class. One shook her head and said, “You’re a secret. We can’t play
with you when we’re not at school.” “Why?” I asked in five-year-old
naïveté. The other sister answered, “Cause you’re a [n-word]. My
grandma don’t want us playing with [n-word].”
I shrugged off their comments, and we continued our play as if
nothing cruel had transpired, yet indelible ink wrote across the pages
of my heart in crisp kindergarten crayon scribble: I’m good enough to play
with at school but not good enough to be invited into your home. That day, the
measuring stick known as comparison, etched with varying degrees
of insignificance and unworthiness, formed in the recesses of my soul.
And long into adulthood, I would constantly be measuring myself by
how well I adapted and fit into whiteness.
By the time that happened at school, I had more questions bur-
rowing into my little five-year-old brain than I knew what to do with.
Why did people stop talking and stare at us with mean glares if we
went through the front door at Jones’? Why did we have to go to the
back door? Why did they only have one Black person working across

Success and advancement were Others’

Stories, for people across town on
the other side of the tracks.
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town? Why was the dance studio in our town only for White girls?
Why did we tame our joy and become quiet in the presence of White
people? Why wouldn’t the twins’ grandmother let me play at their
house? And why did that n-word feel bad? Why? Why? Why?
There were so many things that didn’t make sense, but the tracks
stilled my questions. Years later, Dr. Barbara Holmes would help
me understand that the framework for My Story has always been a
blackness shaped in response to whiteness, particularly as one raised
in the rural South, where Our Story was formed on lynching trees
that bore strange fruit: heightened awareness, cautious docility, silence.
No one talked about race. No one expressed discontent or named
things aloud. No one mentioned the way things were. We didn’t
buck the system. We kept our heads down and did what we were
supposed to do. Success and advancement were Others’ Stories, for
people across town on the other side of the tracks. We were to stay
in our place and follow the natural order of things, which I did until
I no longer could.
Like matryoshka dolls nesting within one another, My Story as a
small child was a fragmented, compartmentalized part of Our Story.
In the shadow of dominant voices, My Story felt less essential, even
unnecessary. Without a clear understanding of the whole, My Story
was incomplete. But My Story was all I knew until I was exposed to
Other Stories.

M
y gr a ndmo t her l ef t the Deep South before I was
born, migrating north to Washington, DC. There, she and
my grandfather carved out a life of joy amid toil. And, in
the summer, my brother and I were fortunate enough to ride the Grey-
hound bus, carrying foil-wrapped ham sandwiches and cold fried
chicken, to join them. Our grandmother was intentional about expo-
sure. Believing idle time to be the devil’s workshop, she structured our
summers with visits to the zoo, museums, the Mint, and the Capitol;
swimming; fountain wading at Union Station; and she introduced us to
the performing arts. Without us ever boarding a plane, my grandmother
made sure we knew the world was bigger than Clayton, North Caro-
lina. There were Other Stories, and while these outings merely served
as introductions, she helped us see the possibility of these stories being
available to us as well. My grandmother’s intentionality gifted me with
points of connection to a larger story beyond my narrow worldview.

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 When we remain stuck in the loop of Our Story without con-
sideration of Other Stories, particularly when “Our” is framed in (or
lived in response to) a Eurocentric, patriarchal, dominant paradigm as
the standard of measurement for all Other Stories, we are left with an
incomplete model.
Exposure to Other Stories is an invitation, a gateway to know-
ing. But it’s merely that—an opportunity to know. A welcoming and
acceptance of diversity may create familiarity, but it’s not the same
as knowing. Deep, intimate knowing empowers agency, offers reci-
procity, and, through mutuality, affords us the opportunity to be the
custodians of our own story without being othered as an aside or a
concession to dissent.
From kindergarten through university, I played, studied, and par-
ticipated in groups and teams alongside White people, but there was
no interest in intimate knowing. I’ve worked with White people in
the workplace and I have gone to church with White people for most
of my adult life. Some would even say we were friends, but there
has been no interest in deep knowing. We’ve mingled contextually,
but not with the kind of knowing that re-members, re-joins, re-col-
lects. Any story without deep, intimate knowing leaves the parties
untouched.
Cynthia Bourgeault writes, “The energetic bandwidth in which
the heart works is intimacy, the capacity to perceive things from the
inside by coming into sympathetic resonance with them. . . . The heart
takes its bearings directly from the whole.”1
Intimacy—into me you see.
Empathy is imagined embodiment, placing myself into the Story
of another and gazing through their eyes: seeing their lived experi-
ence; thinking for perhaps the first time how that person would feel
encountering certain things—certain policies, language, or interactions;
receiving their pain, but not through a myopic imagining that one
might have apart from this deep intimacy.
Empathy transcends the imagining of a life we never have to per-
sonally live, making the kindred connection that allows our hearts
to break open to the painful, fearful, or even joyous experiences of
another in such a deep way that we can never again unknow what
we’ve come to know. Empathy fosters deep knowing.
And there, in the clear-eyed seeing of who we are to one another—
interconnected, where nothing lives separate and distinct from the

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 Transcendence is not a denial
or detachment from My Story
or Our Story. It is an arduous
commitment to truth-telling.

other, where there is uniqueness of personhood and space for the ways
in which we vary and are different from one another—is the invitation
into the possibility of the moment.
Intimate, empathetic knowing allows for “sympathetic resonance,”
a melding of hearts forged in the weaving of stories and lives together
until there is only The Story, which is the restoration of all things as
all are oned in the Oneing of Love.
Only Love is finite, and in the bounty of Love, we are held and
we are known.
Within the frame of both/and, Our Story and Other Stories
weave together in the native language of be-ing, which is oneness.
This is not a oneness that spiritually bypasses the beauty of particu-
larity, but one that harmoniously holds the complexity of all things
in their distinct and unique specificity. It doesn’t require people to
become “pure, white light” or a blob of detached personhood to reach
the highest level of homeostasis or enlightenment. Instead, it honors
the colorful spectrum of humanity without trying to erase or deny its
biodiversity. Oneness undergirds distinction, diversity, and multiplic-
ity. In this Oneing that celebrates all difference, we can each live into
our full humanity, embracing our truest, most authentic selves, and
give ourselves to the well-being of others in perichoretic mutuality
without fear of absorption or domination.
The image of Russian nesting dolls, all carved from the same wood,
shaped the same, painted the same, feels fitting when thinking of
where we are in the world today. Fear rises as some rush to erase or
reimagine history. It’s a world where calls for peace and unity feel
weaponized. Colorblindness replaces clear-eyed seeing, lost amid our
need for ease, for sameness. Pressure mounts to decry the harmonious
voices, exclaiming in concert for a chord of sameness. Same feels safe.

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Same feels comfortable. It requires no effort and little thought. Same
can be achieved on autopilot. The appeal of sameness is that it doesn’t
require us to be present or aware in the way that is required when
wading through the messy complexity of being human and being in
relationship with other messy, complex humans.
Could this be why we need to produce maps to explain the mys-
teries of our complexity as humans? We erect pillars of certainty—tidy,
neat guideposts that reduce our vibrant existence into small, static pic-
tures. Maps are fixed, finite, and once we’ve memorized our mapped
route, we often navigate unconsciously—until change, like a global
pandemic, creates unfamiliar detours.
What if the Universe is not asking for yet another map to attempt
to make sense of the world as we know it? What if the tension is an
invitation to let go and allow mystery without attempting to quantify
or explain it? What if we surrendered to change, to this invitation
into a new story, one not dominated by Eurocentric patriarchal ratio-
nalization? Like a singular wave rising up and out of a larger body
of water, My Story blends into Our Story, yielding to the change of
our energetic makeup. “By being receptive to the things that we don’t
understand,” writes Dr. Barbara Holmes in her latest book, Crisis
Contemplation: Healing the Global Village, “we fling open the center of
our being to the mysteries of the Divine.”2

All that you touch

You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God Is Change.3

How do we honor our uniqueness while destroying varying

degrees of separation? How do we move toward each other in love,
the truth of our authentic power? Perhaps, we welcome change instead
of resisting it. To expand my worldview beyond the paradigm of
Southern, Christian, rural or working poor to a larger cosmic frame
that is inclusive, universal, affirming, and accepting, I needed to see
the parts and the whole in all their majestic splendor and their messy
complexity.

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 Transcendence is not a denial or detachment from My Story or
Our Story. It is an arduous commitment to truth-telling; to fully see-
ing; to empathetic listening that requires the work of living and be-ing
in the world; of deep, intimate knowing; of moving beyond our theo-
ries and maps into relationship building. This is not a quick work, nor
is it an easy work. The work is rife with tension and discomfort and
necessitates patience, time, humility, and kindness.
Perhaps Love is inviting us to embrace fluidity, to ebb and flow,
to move with the current, to shapeshift in ways that are no longer dis-
jointed, fragmented, or separated into neat, tidy categories. Bodies of
water are always changing. Unimpeded, ocean water spills into gulfs.
Gulfs spill into rivers. Rivers spill into lakes. Lakes spill into tributar-
ies. All are commingling as one, interdependent, interconnected, yet
distinct in their purpose—just as Our Stories are commingled, intercon-
nected, interdependent, spilling over and into one another, back and
forth in the Oneing of Love.
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 Mything the Point
of My Story
By Michael Petrow

C
arl G. Jung (1875–1961), Swiss psychologist and explorer
of the soul par excellence, claimed we find the meaning of our
life in our stories; they function as the true scripture — the
Word of God1 — for us. Origen of Alexandria (c. 184–c. 253), who
heavily influenced Jung, claimed that it is essential to examine our
stories because God “makes the height of spiritual health and blessed-
ness to consist in the knowledge and understanding of oneself.”2
Both men seemed to think that exploring my story deeply would
somehow lead us to know others and God authentically. Jung wrote:

Self-knowledge is not an isolated process. . . . Nobody can know

himself and differentiate himself from his neighbor if he has a
distorted picture of him, just as no one can understand his neigh-
bor if he had no relationship to himself. The one conditions the
other and the two processes go hand in hand.3

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 It seems that from the moment we are born, we start telling and
being told stories about how the world is. We cobble these together
to form an internal “GPS” to help us navigate life — to find our way
in and around the world:

God, or the gods — our master narratives about the fundamental

principles of existence, what some have called The Story.
People — our beliefs about humanity, society, relationships,
and social systems, what some have called Y/Our Story.
Self — My Story, everything that I think I know about myself.

This GPS exists to help us explore the world, to get out and
encounter others, to listen deeply and learn. In theory, knowing My
Story helps me to empathize and meet others in Y/Our Story. Com-
bining our shared experience is my best guess as to whatever The
Story might be. I run into problems when I start to fall in love with
My Story about reality and project it out onto everyone else, mistak-
ing My Story for Y/Our Story and The Story. Then my GPS stops
updating.
But life is often kind enough to steer us off the map, right into
a situation where our GPS fails us, and we crash into the rocks of
irreconcilable paradox, something too big for our schema. Jung went
so far as to say that God orchestrates radical confrontations with
others and reality to get us out of our willfulness and subjectivity.4
While we need this “stripping of the veils of illusion” to encounter
reality, it is very painful and dangerous, and feels like a death.5 Often
our sense of self, understanding of the world, and faith in God/the
gods fall apart.
I’ve lived this. Both my parents, my brother, and I all started out
as pastors. Like so many people, I was deeply let down by the Evan-
gelical Story, church leaders, and who I became in that system. So, I
cast it off and found a better version of The Story, pursuing compara-
tive religious studies and psychology.
By 2008, I was in a doctoral program that I loved and working
in my dream job, leading a progressive spiritual community attached
to a Manhattan theater. Then, in six months’ time, my brother had
taken his own life; my brother’s daughter had been born without a
father; the stock market had crashed, wiping out my dream job; and

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my mother had died with very little warning. The new story that I
thought I was living had fallen apart, externally and internally.
In theory, our stories give us a sense of coherence in the midst
of chaos. “We are all tellers of tales. We each seek to provide our
scattered and often confusing experiences with a sense of coherence
by arranging the episodes of our lives into stories.”6 I believed in
the right to write as a rite, as the primary way that I explored myself
and others, and talked to God/the gods. But in the midst of this
chaos, I found rest only in contemplation. I cherished being invited
to move beyond words and narrative, letting go of faith in any story
of coherence. I ceased journaling, verbal prayer, and looking for
meaning in it all.
As the years have gone by, I’ve found that just because I think I’m
done with My Story doesn’t mean it’s done with me. In fact, my trying
to ignore it has only invited it to wreak havoc in my life, coloring the
present with the past, often without my realizing it. Jung frequently
warned us how often we confuse our unconscious stories with fate.
I’ve used “contemplation” to avoid going back and working with those
moments, letting that story retell itself to me and offer me new layers
of meaning.
But lately, I’ve come to realize contemplation is deep listening, not deep
ignoring.
Interestingly, Jung claimed that just when the GPS we’ve writ-
ten fails, an inner GPS quietly comes online, a “central guidance
system”7 of sorts that begins leading us to the story we didn’t want
to see, or couldn’t see: the shadow story — which is not the false story,
but the unseen reality we meet in radical confrontations with others
and ourselves.
So, I’ve started listening to that inner GPS and letting her re/tell
me stories. I let myself return again to what Origen called “the care
for self-knowledge,”8 which comes of reading and writing “the books
of the soul” and “the pages of our heart”9 and asking the questions
Jung believed are most important: What myth am I living?10 and What
is its meaning?

Contemplation is deep listening,

not deep ignoring.
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 I’ve let myself use the word myth instead of story for the following
reasons.

Myths are messy, full of contradictions, as I am full of contra-

dictions. I think about my brother’s suicide: I love my brother; I
hate my brother. I forgive my brother; I resent my brother. I miss
my brother; I feel his presence with me at all times. I am nothing
like him, and I hate how much we are alike. I think also about my
life: I am grateful for my losses and how they opened me up, but I
wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy, and I would never seek to
relive them. Origen stated that our mind lives between feeling one
way, and then another — at all times.

Myths are multiple. Have you ever playfully argued with family
or friends who remember the same story differently? If you were to
record yourself telling the same story once a week for a month, then
go back and listen, chances are even you tell the same story differ-
ently at different times. We are a collection of different stories that
contradict each other and don’t line up accurately on a timeline.
Jung claimed that in fact these variant stories actually reflect the
“polycentric”11 shape of our souls. Many “little people”12 exist inside
of us, multiple personalities with multiple voices and multiple stories,
and this is natural and healthy. James Hillman (1926–2011) wrote that
“we too are ultimately a composition,” “always constituted of multiple
parts.”13 Learning to listen to them equips us to hear the many stories
of numerous different people outside of us. We are multiple selves at
the same time, always living in the wheel of the samsara of the self.
Embracing the plurality inside of us equips us to embrace the plurality outside
of us.
In fact, Origen told us that this is why scripture is shaped the
way it is — full of contradictions like a human person: “For just as man
consists of body, soul, and spirit, so in the same way does scripture,
which has been prepared by God for man’s salvation.”14 For example,
in exploring how “one” is experienced as “a diversity of persons” in
Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung in fact cited Origen, who wrote: “See
how he who thinks himself one is not one, but seems to have as many
personalities as he has moods.”15 Why does the Bible offer so many
different versions of the same stories? Quite simply because we do,
every day. Psyche is multiple, and that’s the whole point.

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 I ache for how my poor brother could not bring his personal
lifestyle in line with what he thought was expected of him as an evan-
gelical pastor. He ended up living a lie — or, more accurately, lying to
live. His life and death remind me to celebrate my inconsistencies and
multiplicities, to keep telling and living my stories in as many different
ways as I need to, letting them contradict each other and remembering
the vitality is in the variance.

Myths are always in the middle. As a spiritual director, I often

hear, “I don’t really know where to start this story.” I always respond,
“Start in the middle, because we are always there, working our way
backward and forward.” Our stories don’t have a beginning, a middle,
and an end. They aren’t straight or chronological in their meaning.
This reality was burned into my mind two weeks before my
mother died. I held her limp hand, looking into her fading eyes, on
the same day that I looked into the blazing eyes of my newborn niece
as she gripped my hand like a tiny vice — life is a wheel of death and
resurrection.
Likewise, just as our stories are circular, they keep coming around
again to offer us new layers of meaning. Jung stated the human soul is
like an apokatastasis16 — a theological word he borrowed from Origen
that refers to the cosmos being a cycle of healing, where all things
come around again to become whole, but always more complex and
diverse. Origen believed that all souls existed before this incarnation
in unity and bliss. Likewise, at the end of time — and by the effort of
personal transformation — he believed all souls will be restored to
harmonious coexistence, although with more of the “diversity and
variety” gained by incarnation and individuation, which “will in its
turn provide causes and occasions of diversity in that other world
which is to come after this.”17 These two ideas, taken together, form
the pillars of his controversial and beautiful notion of the apokatastasis.
The divinity is in the diversity, the progress is in the plurality, the vitality is in
the variance, and there is no end to the meanings of our stories.

Myths are mutable. Our stories change with each telling; they
grow as we grow. What My Story meant then, might not be what My Story
means now. We all benefit from an outside editor, such as a good friend,
spiritual director, or therapist who can offer us a new telling of an
old story.

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 My stories are not really mine alone.
Myths are mutual.

The night my brother died, a total stranger looked me in the eye

and said, “You are telling yourself a story about every warning sign
you missed and every way you should have prevented this. Stop.” I
needed a better story.

Myths are medicinal. Jung claimed that myths evolve over time,
because their natural function was to help the soul heal. Following our
inner “life instinct,”18 what might seem like grievous loss may yet yield
growth. Our wounds may lead to wisdom, our detours to new di-
rection, and our losses to new love. We stay open because we never
quite know where the story is going. Our worst choices can lead to
our best outcomes — “What would have happened if Paul had al-
lowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?” — so we
have to be willing to companion others and ourselves on a “daring
misadventure.”19
Origen stated that our worst injuries eventually become “health
bestowing wounds”; 20 the worst scandals invite us to the deepest
meaning;21 when we lose sight of God, our search becomes all the
deeper;22 and when we wrestle with “impossibilities,”23 we move
beyond our stories being “absurd fables and silly tales.”24
But, in the end, receiving this healing perspective is a choice
we can only make for ourselves. It is toxic to force it on someone else’s
story. Jung saw the principal human malady as the lack of a myth, a
“healing fiction” which “give(s) meaning and form to the confusion
of (their) neurotic soul.” This is so central to Jung’s psychology that
he defined “psychoneurosis . . . ultimately as the suffering of a soul
which has not discovered its meaning.”25

Myths are made up. Myths are profoundly subjective fiction,

but it’s the great work of an incarnate life to write a myth that yields
meaning — to find “a meaning worthy of God.”26 Meaning, like love,
is often made as much as it is found.

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 Myths move us to meet others. They are how we move in the
real world. I’ve shared snapshots of my story, which connect me to
the stories of others: exvangelicals, those who’ve lost a parent. The
semicolon tattoo emblazoned on my middle finger — draw your own
conclusions — quietly connects my story with my brother’s and con-
nects both of us to others touched by suicide. Even Origen and Jung
offer me a story about how to read my stories, to make my myths
meaningful.
My stories — my myths — are not really mine alone. Myths are
mutual. They move me toward encounter with others. Yet I cannot
know anyone or anything without constantly coming up against the
limits of my own subjectivity and facing what cannot be known.
In the end, this reminds me that Myths are mystery. They always
bring us to the limits of what we can know — and as such, are myths
mystical?
In the end, I am reminded that in My Story of The Story, In-
carnation is participation in story, the divine acting out in flesh of
the healing of the world. No matter how contemplative we become,
“stories make us human,” for humanity is a storytelling animal.27 To
lose our stories is to lose touch with our humanity. To ignore My
Story is an all-too-easy shortcut to ignore Y/Our Story, and to by-
pass suffering altogether, and that utterly misses the point.
Contemplation does not erase My Story. It liberates it from the
tyranny of the ego’s singular point of view so that it can lead me to
Y/Our Story and The Story.
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Oneing
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 There’s a Crack in
Everything
By Brie Stoner

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and
growing our true spirit rises.
— Audre Lorde

I
n t he fina l season of the podcast Another Name for Every Thing
(ANFET), Richard Rohr, Paul Swanson, and I explored the
themes of Richard’s Cosmic Egg of meaning. The conversations
were rich and full of insight, buoyed by the love and deep respect
I have for my co-hosts. But between the stories, profound insights,
laughter, and tears, listeners may have noted my struggle to harmonize
my woman’s experience as a lover, mother, and maker with the Egg
map.
Perhaps it was the pandemic with its embodied articulation of
our fluid permeability, or the necessary rupture of social structures
that dealt this final fissure, but an irreparable fault line has emerged
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 in my own adherence to what I believe to be a theologically fragile,
predominantly Euro-American, and patriarchal approach to what it
means to be a “contemplative,” with its corresponding maps, from
these and other tectonic shifts in my own life over the last several
years. A rupture has occurred, and no number of lofty spiritual blue-
prints can account for the organic, wild nature and incarnationally
messy materiality of this change. While I won’t minimize the discom-
fort of the circumstances that led to this opening, I don’t see this break
as problematic. On the contrary, I am beginning to see it as the place
of emergence in me, as the beginning of a new possibility breaking
through, the crack as sacredly vaginal . . . as the wound of the blooming.
Whenever a cosmic map, egg or otherwise, is drawn, there’s a dan-
ger of sealing off what is permeable, abstracting from what is bodily,
filling in what is mysterious, covering over what is alternative, or just
ignoring the inevitable cracks that naturally occur in our attempt to
create clean categories in our chaotic, evolutionary, unfolding universe.
To put a vaginal twist to the oft-quoted Leonard Cohen song, “There’s
a crack in everything, that’s how the life gets in.”
The eggshell boundaries for each level of story-meaning feel too
distinct to match my own experience in feeling the profound porous-
ness of the current cultural categorical confusion and creative collec-
tivity. It’s too easy to disembody and separate “my,” “our,” “others,”
“the” from the messy fluidity and mingling, bodily becoming in joining
and distinction, sweat and secretions, decay and birth of how matter
operates in the beautifully complex ecosystem — certainly, at least, in
relationship to my own experience in my fleshy, permeable, feminine
body.
To speak this way is to join my voice to theologians and thinkers
like Beatrice Bruteau, Joy Bostic, bell hooks, Beverly Lanzetta, Audre
Lorde, and Catherine Keller, all of whom declaratively point out the
predominant discomfort with cracks, darkness, crevices, fluids, rup-
tures, and female bodiliness as part of the misogynistic, oppressive
evil in the shadow of Christian theologies and the societies founded
upon their values.
What follows is my own endeavor, a femininely incarnational spin
on the Cosmic Egg that, instead of focusing on domes, embraces instead
the fissures and cracks in the shells. For me, this is an act of unknow-
ing trust: The inevitable ruptures of this and other maps of meaning
can become the location of a new, emergent way of finding meaning.

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 In Brian McLaren language, this effort represents a new stage of
faith after doubt, a way to ride free of the training wheels of approval-
seeking, of falling through the modern and postmodern human instinct
to try to rationalize everything, and as a blessed mystical rest from
needing to restrict reality to the confines of our own impoverished,
tired ideas or exhausted categories. As one of the more than half of
the human population who actually produces eggs and sheds them
monthly, it is one thing to talk about eggs of meaning, and another
thing to bear them in the flesh. The latter experience, as all women
know, is earmarked by an intimate embrace of the unknowing, physi-
cal, fleshy, fluid, permeable, earthly, carnal, and messily intermingled
realities, which is where I believe the emergent meaning actually lies.
Finally, I do not share this essay as a replacement of Richard’s
metaphor but, hopefully, as when a minor fifth is added to a major
fourth, this exploration can be a creative, albeit sonically complicat-
ing, addition and harmonic extension to his articulation; perhaps one
that results (at least for some readers) in a Cohen-like “broken sigh
of Hallelujah.”

H U M PTY’S NON-M I STAKE AS CU B I S M

T
he cr acks that postmodernit y has made in our grand
stories, or in this cosmic egg, might be seen by some as prob-
lematic. Yes, it is true that the necessary postmodern disruption
of modernity resulted in a predominant culture of cynicism, embodied
perhaps most clearly in the caricature of the gen-ex flannel dystopia
of nirvana-listening cohorts singing their nihilism. The postmodern
movement, however, was valid in its anti-essentialist critiques, disrup-
tions of colonialism, chiseling away at the blind adherence to institu-
tions. Postmodernism had a necessary role to play.
But for some time now, and gaining force in the last twenty years,
a new emerging collective of philosophical voices have been gathering
force in the articulation of what many believe to be a new philosophi-
cal movement. These voices identify what they are expressing as the
vernacular of a “post-postmodern” or metamodern movement — not
in needing to become the largest overarching story, but as referring
to the term metaxy — which is to move between opposite terms and
beyond them.1

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 We need to hold stories lightly, loosely,
and harmonize them as
unfinished jazz.

The coinciding attributes could be characterized not by the cynical

deconstruction that so drove postmodernity, but by a pragmatic ideal-
ism that dances and volleys between both the positivism of modernity
and the healthy critiques of postmodernity, that holds the tension
harmonically between them. It is the emergence of a vernacular of
both hope and skepticism, of oscillations of adherence and detachment,
and where “narratives are both necessary and problematic, love not
necessarily something to be ridiculed.”2 It stresses process-ontologies
that transition us from the premise of being in static categories and into
the dynamism of becoming. Perhaps we could say that in emphasizing
movement-in-the-between, this metamodern vernacular is characterized
by seeking to transcend and include the positive gifts of both moder-
nity and postmodernity and orient instead toward what is creatively
unfolding in a nondeterministic, open-source, and open-ended way.
To illustrate its characterizing qualities further, I offer this little
twist on the classic Humpty Dumpty tale.
Let’s imagine that our Cosmic Egg (which I accidentally named
the Cosmic Ed in one ANFET episode) has the last name of Dumpty.
Because Ed Dumpty identifies as carrying all four multiple nested eggs
of meaning within, Ed identifies as a they. Ed Dumpty is sitting on a
wall. We could call this moment a picture of modernity: everything
looks whole, and perfectly nested within Ed, but let’s consciously note
that Ed is entirely alone and quite boundaried off by this wall. As you
well know, Ed — by forces we do not know — falls off the edge and “all
the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t get Ed together again.”
Here lies the postmodern dilemma: The crack is deemed permanent
and there’s nothing to be done except rage with Kurt Cobain.
Now, let’s imagine that the story isn’t finished and that, in the midst
of lying there in their sticky, yolky pieces, Ed Dumpty decides they’re
not finished either. So, Ed slowly starts to arrange themselves in a
chaotic riot of edges and curves, using the yolk as the glue, affixing
themselves to the wall in a new artistic expression. While the pieces of
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Ed are drying, a wind kicks up and blows in bits of leaves, and grass,
and sand . . . and Ed winds up accreting some new organic layers to
themselves in this iteration of their life as a cubist mural masterpiece.
Well, the king’s horses and men walk by one day and are so taken
by the startling beauty of the shockingly sharp edges, the boldness of
the strange, seemingly disparate shapes that are held in wholeness by
the cubist composition’s movement, that they go and tell the towns-
people, and the neighboring townspeople, and that town’s neighbor-
ing townspeople.
And here’s the greatest part of it all: Ed is constantly changing.
Because Ed is cracked open and vulnerable to the forces of nature, and
in constant communication with so many new people from neighbor-
ing kingdoms, Ed’s expression is ever-emergent, changing constantly,
and their life is made all the richer for their original sticky, happy,
crack-inducing accident.
The non-end.

SCRAM B LI NG TH E EGG STORI E S

A
s m y c r e at i v e interpretation of the famed Humpty story
shows, we can become addicted to our stories, even the good
ones, depending on them to make sense of reality. But philoso-
phers like Bayo Akomolafe are asking whether our addiction to story-
as-all and narrative-logic map is still a useful or constructive practice.
“A world where everything is moored to logic, to power, to syntax
and plot and scheme and expectation and meaning, leaves no place
for magic, for the inextricability and beauty of a glimpsed sunset.”3
Now, remember the metamodern creative combining of construc-
tion and deconstruction, of dancing in the middle? I am not asserting
that there is no longer any role at all for story, or that story is not still,
and always will be, a function of creating culture, claiming agency
and belonging in expressing what is sacredly unique to each experi-
ence, and also providing teaching and wisdom. But perhaps we need
to consider Akomolafe’s admonition to notice our addiction to the
Euro-American colonizing determinism of the metanarrative arc, and
to notice the mechanics of narratives that also, by their nature, place us
on a map where the end is the goal, and the messy middle what needs
to be borne or endured.

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 We need to hold stories lightly, loosely, and harmonize them as
unfinished jazz. A foundational alignment to process, unfolding, and
evolution also troubles our addiction to stories because, frankly, our
stories are never finished (even in death, our lives live on through
descendants, stories, and the very real live decay of our bodies in the
ground, etc.) and any category of a story is disrupted at any moment
by the emergent properties of what we do not know. We are so much
more than what happens to us. This is an open system and none of us
can create clean categorical containers to hold the flowy mess of our
mingling identities as intertwined and blooming together.
The implications of the metamodern instinct to queer our need for
narrative are that those of us in the contemplative Christian traditions
can begin to release the artificial bookends that are overly influencing
our theologies and cosmologies. We are experiencing the emergence
of a potential collective theological shift out of our condemning
and problematic creation-account neurosis and our eschatological
obsessive conjecturing and falling instead into the radical embrace
of the incarnational middle-ing: present in the here and now-ing, in
the fleshy intermezzo midst-of. The shift to the middle is an emphasis
toward embodied, imaginative agency to collaborate with the chaos
known as our Universe in the process of creative unfolding. And, fine,
if you want the most honest attempt at one cosmological metanarrative
that actually is in tune with our cosmos, it is this one:

In the midst of the middle, the beginning is ever changing as the never-
ending creative unfolding.

Everything is motion. Time is not linear. There is no beginning

and there is no end. The big bang was a theory that is now being
debunked. Even if our galaxy caves in, there are billions more.
There are coexistent multiple dimensional possible alternatives
that we cannot see. This Universe is mysteriously, relationally, and
reciprocally collaborative. Even in death, our bodies are alive with
bacteria. The categories of quantum physics alone have blown to bits
the foundational assumptions of most of our theology, and yet we
still nostalgically reach back for the outdated lenses and then wonder
why we are so nauseated. The field of biology has opened our eyes
to the interdependency of all bodies on this larger planetary body,
but apparently all this mysterious and messy materiality is more

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Oneing than we want to see. Many of us would rather find meaning
in abstract maps that, by their dissonance with this material realm,
pull us out of our bodies and out of our present divine incarnational
possibilities.
Consider this admonition by philosopher Jason Ānanda Joseph-
son Storm:

Communication does not take place in some abstract linguistic

horizon. A sign has to be physicalized in order to be interpreted.
Signs must become sound waves, scent trails, printed letters and
so on before they can be meaningful. Meaning is of the world, not
separate from it.4

Meaning is located here in the process, in the matter mattering,

in making ( John 9:6: “and Jesus spat into the dust”), in the propor-
tions of our imagination (Matthew 8:26: “Oh you of little faith”), in
our capacity to initiate ourselves and each other to break open into
unknowing again and again, into larger and larger perspectives (Mat-
thew 5:27–28: “You have heard it said . . . but I say”).
With this reframe, creative participation then is freed as the sole
focus, and contemplation becomes our rigorous commitment to be
fully present in the midst of it, so that we can welcome disruption
with joy, be cracked open with gratitude, and see ruptures as sites of
possibility breaking through. Contemplation becomes the practice of
incarnating in these bodies, so that we can show up in the image of
the Community Formerly Known as God and cocreate with them. By
retraining our gaze toward the creative Christic cracks in our maps,
we are declaratively embodying the union between matter and spirit
and choosing to end the anti-Christ, anti-body ideologies that have so
long held prevalence in Christian thinking and institutions.

Live your own wild, incarnational piece

of this great unfolding
masterpiece.
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YOLK-M EAN I NG AS MAKI NG I N TH E M E SSY
M I DDLE

W
h at doe s t his mean for our cosmic egg? For me, the
meaning is in cracking the egg wide open to reveal the
yolk of meaning as embryo, as sticky, creative possibility.
Like Ed Dumpty, we have a chance to create a new form of art out
of “what was,” to make a “what could be,” something new out of the
pieces of what once held our meaning.
And what of the shelled distinctions of my, our, others, the? To
riff off Richard’s Introduction, perhaps it’s best to err on the side of
simplicity and describe each of those lines of meaning as distinct but
inextricable DNA strands of the egg-embryo itself. They are harmonizing
realties that are cocreating each other and cannot be pulled apart
from the sacred relational cord they form, nor can they be extricated
from their movement toward becoming more-than-yolk.
To quote Bayo Akomolafe:

Queer matter disturbs our commonsense accounts of reality,

and speaks of the world as a gushing series of intersecting
practices that spill into the supposedly “other,” a breaching of
boundaries. . . . A world where relata (or “things”) and their
properties emerge from relationships, and not the other way
around.5

Yolk-as-meaning eases the separation of my from our, our from

others, others from the. This is not an erasure or distinction — a
flattening of the stories themselves — but rather an effort to make
permeable the co-existent and continual unfolding influence of each upon the
other. Yolk-as-meaning embraces incarnation as the location of the
divine, as the messy, coincident, sexual, Christically carnal and as
the collaboratively, communally creative. Yolk-as-meaning invites
us to cease our puritanical and platonic discomfort with bodiliness
(looking at you, Augustine; you too, Aquinas; you too, *insert most
of the esteemed male theologians in our patriarchal lineage*) and our
obsession to pedestalize abstraction beyond, above, and outside this
fleshy, messy, awkward mattering.
In short, Yolk-as-meaning invites us to finally rupture away from
anti-Christ, anti-body ontological maps that serve as scaffolding for

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systems of oppression and anti-material ecological irresponsibility
to exist in our world. Yolk-as-meaning declares the messy middle
potentiality as the sacred opportunity . . . and that perfection only
exists in the embrace of the imperfect process of becoming.
What does all this mean for concepts of a Christian God? Perhaps
we can finally shelve concepts of perfection as being-that-doesn’t-
change and at last breathe life into the dust of our God-concepts and
let them become. The Community Formerly Known as God exists
only in Godding. The relating is in the creative exchange. God does
not exist outside or apart from the unfolding, but is the catalyzing
verb in the happening itself. The messy fluids of the anointing (the
Christ) baptize us whenever we move with that ecstatic flow of
love-making creativity, embodied in a regular practice of conceiv-
ing, carrying, birthing, and releasing (in new life or in surrendered
blood) what “could be.”
And finally, what does this mean for us?
If you are alive, you are a creative. So, for the love of God . . .
make! Create! Have faith — not just in Jesus, but in yourself, to be
able to bring new possibilities into this realm, to breathe life into
dust, and to create something new. Speaking of dust, please come
back to earth, come back to your body, because this world deeply
needs conscious, embodied humans who can sacralize the middling
and care for all bodies and the planetary body in the midst of the
agony and ecstasy of this life. Feel pleasure, joy, sorrow, grief, hope,
and fury, and let all of it become the fuel for your creative contribu-
tion, whatever it may be.
Stop worshiping long-dead mystics or pedestalizing contempla-
tive teachers’ lives. Live your own wild, incarnational piece of this
great unfolding masterpiece. Stop infantilizing yourself as though
you yourself cannot move mountains. Be that which you are becom-
ing, because you are not alone in longing for the largeness in you to
expand beyond every category you’ve been given. This instinct is
the divine community moving in you and in the more-than-human
community of which you are a part on this planet’s precariously
evolving life.
And what about meaning? The meaning is in the making. Make
your practice that of embodied radical presence. Place yourself in the
posture of full willingness to incarnate courageous creativity — every
day. Then and only then can the process become the product, the

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meaningful arrival found in the fleshy middling — here in the porous,
permeable, messy togethering.
Our shared hope emerges through the cracks of our own un-
knowing as we join in the field of possibility and create something
wildly beautiful out of all these identities and ideas that once held
the embryo of our own unfolding. If you outgrow a container, map,
or egg (as I have), I hope you know there is nothing wrong with you.
It means you are becoming. Hallelujah! Do not dismiss the broken
eggshells of what was before. Treasure and create something from
the fragments in gratitude for the wombs that delivered you right

·
here, right where you should be: becoming, in the middle of it all.

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 No Story
By Cynthia Bourgeault

The Wester n menta l-r ationa l mind is stuck in story because

it’s stuck in perspectival thinking. Perspectival thinking is such a per-
vasive frame that we can no longer imagine any alternative. Beyond
My Story, Our Story, Other Stories, and The Story, there is No Story.
I have tasted it (first in Centering Prayer); now I thirst to live it fully.
Only then are we truly free to become human beings.

PE RS PECTIVE

J
e a n Geb ser (1905– 197 3) was a philosopher, linguist, and
poet who described the structures of human consciousness. Gebser
was the primary source for Ken Wilber’s more popular stages of
consciousness.
Gebser’s cultural home base was the world of art. He was a
personal friend of Pablo Picasso and examples culled from art history
dot the landscape of his book The Ever-Present Origin, illustrating
almost every significant point he made. So, it’s not surprising that
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his master interpretive lens, perspective, should itself derive from the
domain of art.
Yes, perspective — just like you likely learned in elementary school
art. When you first began drawing pictures, probably as a preschooler,
Mommy, Daddy, and your big sister were always bigger, no matter
where they appeared in your picture, because, for you, that’s what they
were. Then someone taught you about foreground and background,
and you learned how to make things at the back of the picture smaller
to show that they were farther away. You learned to draw your house
at a slight angle on the page so that you could show two sides of it at
once. You may or may not have consciously realized that you were
learning how to proportion the various bits and pieces in relation
to a hypothetical point on the horizon, but your drawings got more
orderly, and they began to convey a sense of depth.
That’s exactly what we’re talking about here, but now applied as
an organizing principle for the field of consciousness.
According to Gebser, the five structures of consciousness — archaic,
magic, mythic, mental, and integral — can be grouped into three larger
categories (three worlds, as he called them): unperspectival, perspec-
tival, and aperspectival. While the nomenclature may at first feel
intimidating, it’s actually quite easy to master if you keep your elemen-
tary school art days in mind.
Unperspectival is how you drew before you learned about fore-
ground and background, when everything was all just placed onto the
drawing sheet. Perspectival is the drawing sheet once you’ve learned
to arrange things in relationship to that hypothetical point on the
horizon. Aperspectival is what ensues once you’ve learned to convey
several perspectives simultaneously, as in some of Picasso’s surrealistic
artwork, where he simultaneously shows us the front side and back
side of a person. (For Gebser, the prefix “a” always conveys the mean-
ing of “free from.” Thus, an aperspectival view is one that is free from
captivity to a single central point of reference.)

· The unperspectival world embraces the archaic, magic, and

mythic structures.

· The perspectival world hosts the mental structure.

· The aperspectival world is the still-emerging integral structure.

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 Each of these three perspectives is properly called a world because
it comprises an entire gestalt, an entire womb of meaning in which we
live and move and make our connections. Each has its own distinc-
tive fragrance, ambience, and tincture. Each is an authentic pathway
of participation, a genuine mode of encountering the cosmos, God,
and our own selfhood. Each has its brilliant strengths and its glar-
ing weaknesses. Compositely, they evoke “the width and length and
height and depth” (Ephesians 3:18) of our collective human journey
into consciousness.
I am aware that I am walking the razor’s edge as I choose my
words here, seeking to escape the gravitational field of perspectival
consciousness that would lock this all back into the evolutionary time-
line. It is true, of course, that these three worlds broadly demarcate
the three major epochs of Western human cultural history: ancient,
medieval, and modern. But it’s always been a bit dicey to try to hold
these timelines too tightly or to limit structures of consciousness to
specific historical eras.

W
e h av e st unning exemplars of the mental structure
breaking through in ancient Greece and Israel, and the
mythic still lives among us today in much of the Ameri-
can heartlands. Gebser’s model deftly sidesteps these all-too-familiar
cul-de-sacs by reminding us that the “worlds” (and the structures they
encompass) are phenomenological, not developmental. While they
appear to join the flow of linear time at specific entry points, they have
in fact always been present and must continue to be present, for they
are part of the ontology of the Whole.
Gebser’s visually oriented presentation allowed him to make one
additional, very important point. From a visual standpoint, perspec-
tive is really a matter of dimensionality, and dimensionality is in turn
a function of degree of separation. Gebser built on this insight to draw
powerful correlations between the emergence of perspective within the
structures of consciousness and the emergence of the egoic — i.e., indi-
vidual — selfhood so foundational to our modern self-understanding.
In the unperspectival world, everything exists in guileless imme-
diacy (as with preschooler art). There is relatively little separation
between viewer and viewed. The external world mirrors a self-struc-
ture that is still fluid and permeable. This is the world of “original
participation,”1 as philosopher Owen Barfield (1898–1997) once

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To truly take in another’s perspective is
to take in another world and allow
that world to touch our hearts
and wash over us deeply.

famously described it, where the cosmos is at its most numinous and
communicative, and the sense of belonging is as oceanic as the sea
itself.
As we enter the perspectival world, the double-edged sword
begins to fall. The same growing capacity for abstraction that makes
possible the perception of proportion and depth also — by the same
measure — increases our sense of separation. We stand more on the
outside, our attention fixed on that hypothetical point on the hori-
zon which organizes our canvas and maintains the illusion of depth
within a flat plane. Order is maintained, but at the cost of a necessary
distancing and a strict adherence to the artifice that makes the illusion
possible in the first place. Deception enters, riding on the back of that
abstractive power, as original participation gives way to a growing
sense of dislocation and exile. That is essentially our modern world:
“oscillating,” writes Jeremy Johnson, “between a powerlessness to con-
trol the forces unleashed by the perspectival world on the one hand,
and a total self-intoxicating power on the other” — in a word, “between
anxiety and delight.”2
It is my own observation here (rather than either Johnson’s or Geb-
ser’s) that the perspectival contains an inherently deceptive aspect since
it is intentionally creating a sleight of hand, the illusion of three-dimen-
sionality within a two-dimensional plane. But if I have not wandered
too far off the mark, the observation gives me some strong additional
leverage for emphasizing why resolutions to the perspectival crisis can
never emerge from within the perspectival structure itself, and why the
much-hyped “integral emergence” cannot simply be a new, improved
version of our old mental habits — not even a vastly increased “paradox
tolerance.” We need to get out of Flatland altogether.
For me, that is what aperspectival is essentially all about. It is
an authentic transposition of consciousness from a two-dimensional

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plane to a sphere. Within that sphere, inner and outer worlds come
back together again, and a sense of authentic belongingness returns.
Numinosity returns as well — the felt sense of a cosmos directly infused
with the vivifying presence of Origin. Selfhood once again becomes
fluid and interpenetrating even as presence becomes more centered
and intensified.
The perspectival is at best a foreshadowing and at worst a men-
tal simulacrum of authentic aperspectival three-dimensionality. The
real deal can indeed be attained; in fact, it is now breaking in upon
us whether we like it or not. But the cost of admission entails the
overhaul not only of our fundamental attitudes, but of our entire neu-
rophysiology of perception.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that, in the Geb-
serian system, perspective is not simply a point of view; it is a completely
different world of seeing, unfolding according to its own protocols — its
own core values and ways of making connections. To truly take in
another’s perspective is not simply to take in another’s “position” and
arrange the pieces dialectically on a mental chessboard. Rather, it is
profoundly to take in another world and allow that world to touch
our hearts and wash over us deeply until it, too, becomes our own. It
is to listen in a whole new dimension. I believe Gebser would argue
that this dimension only truly opens up with the inbreaking of the
aperspectival structure.

TI M E

A
s I ponder this striking visual metaphor, I am struck by
how this same basic configuration seems to apply to that other
organizing convention of the mental structure of conscious-
ness: time. In perspectival time, the “vanishing point” would be that
arbitrary consummatum est (whether you construe that to be your own
death, the Armageddon, the Omega Point, or simply the end of some
process in which you’re currently involved). The line leading back to
it is linear time, and what in a painting takes shape as “background”
and “foreground” finds its temporal equivalent in “past,” “present,” and
“future.” The perspectival world marches to the drumbeat of linear time.
Whether in visual or temporal mode, perspectival consciousness
is always playing against an endpoint — finding itself somewhere on

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 a line leading back to a point. The pervasive subliminal pressure of
that invisible line converging on a distant point explains some of the
more hypnotic blind spots of the mental structure of consciousness.
It’s why we naturally group things in threes: “beginning, middle, end”
and “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” In perspectival seeing, things fall
naturally into stages and sequences, and the relationship between
objects tends to take on a hierarchical (Gebser called it “pyramidical”)
character as they are assigned their respective rank and value on the
perspectival line.
Time tends to become spatialized, with “earlier” morphing into
“lower” and “later” morphing into “higher.” That is why, in all sincer-
ity and with no intent to cause harm, many people under the sway of
the mental structure of consciousness will state categorically that the
mythic and magic stages of consciousness (since they appear “earlier”
on the historical timeline) are “less evolved.” The artist’s prerogative
to assign order and proportion becomes the moralist’s duty to impose
value and judgment, and it all happens so fast that we don’t even see
how we’ve been blindsided.
The real problem, of course, is that we forget that we are seeing
through a periscope. What appears to our eyes to be “the real world”
is in fact the world as projected through a powerful perspectival ruse
that does indeed convey tremendous ordering and synthesizing power,
but only within the limits of its governing conventions. Take away the
vanishing point on the horizon, and the whole ruse collapses.
Perspectival thinking is by nature sectored thinking. The validity
of the proportions and the illusion of three-dimensionality are legiti-
mate only within the cone of perception it generates, and in order to
create that cone in the first place, certain things must be excluded
from the picture. In single-point perspective, you can only show two
sides of the house; when you try to show three, you have exceeded
the terms of the convention. If the sides don’t naturally fall along the
same line of sight, you can’t force them together. It breaks the rules.
Gebser stressed this point in a hard-hitting paragraph which
speaks so forcefully to what is so rarely named but can only be seen
as perspectival arrogance:

Perspectival vision and thought confine us within spatial limita-

tions. . . . The positive result is a concretion of man and space;
the negative result is the restriction of man to a limited segment

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 where he perceives only one sector of reality. Like Petrarch, who
separated landscape from land, man separates from the whole
only that part which his view or thinking can encompass, and
forgets those sectors that lie adjacent, beyond, or even behind.
. . . Man, himself a part of the world, endows his sector of aware-
ness with primacy; but he is, of course, only able to perceive a
partial view. The sector is given prominence over the circle; the
part outweighs the whole. As the whole cannot be approached
from a perspectival attitude to the world, we merely superim-
pose the character of wholeness onto the sector, the result being
the familiar “totality.”3

T
he tota lizing procli v ities of perspectival seeing form
one of the most insidious and virulent contributors to our
contemporary cultural impasse. For now, perspectival humility
begins with accepting the givens within which we Flatlanders must
abide. Those of us who still mostly inhabit the mental structures of
consciousness can no more wish (or proclaim) ourselves into aper-
spectival consciousness than we can flap our wings and fly. But we
can wield this extraordinary tool responsibly and indeed courteously,
provided we remember that the license to arrange, synthesize, and
assign rank and value is valid only within the sector of consciousness
that has immediately given rise to it. Above all, it must never be used
to colonize or tyrannize another structure of consciousness. To do so
constitutes an unpardonable offense against the Whole.
So how does this excursion into perspectival thinking shed light on
the topic at hand in this issue? The connection is actually quite direct.
Story is the signature artform of perspectival consciousness. Story
is what results when we generate our selfhood — our core sense of
identity — through that perspectival lens. We then become the artist
standing outside the canvas of our life, gazing down on our “self,” in
third person, as from a distance. What emerges from the perspectival
convention is a strong sense of myself as a unique individual with a
story to tell, moving along the timeline which is my life — my “spiritual
journey” — toward that point on the horizon upon which everything
converges. Just as in art, the convention confers an overall coherence
and a simulacrum of depth and dimension. We voraciously draw out
identity from it, unaware that we have just imprisoned ourselves in
a mirage.

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 But what about myth, you ask? Haven’t we had story from the
beginning of time? Yes and no. Myths are different in the same way
that an icon is different from a Renaissance portrait. There is more
immediacy, no personal self-center, no implicit narrative and timeline
with myth. It’s all right here and now. In fact, Gebser argued, the
mythic structure of consciousness begins to wane precisely as the
elements of story become more and more pronounced, heralding the
dawn of the perspectival self.
No Story occurs when I awaken to the mirage and begin to seek
other, more immediate ways of being present to my own reality — coin-
ciding with it, rather than reflecting on it, as Beatrice Bruteau (1930–
2014) deftly pointed out.4 When I stop being the hero or victim of a
story generated through my own perspectival cone; when the subject
(“I”) and object (“me”) poles of my identity have rejoined at center and
I see directly from a simple, embodied wholeness, that is the end of
story. Some call it nondual awakening.
·
The bulk of this article is reprinted with permission from Lessons 2 and 3
of Cynthia Bourgeault’s blog series on Gebser.

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 RECOMMENDED READING

Crisis Contemplation:
Healing the Wounded Village
Barbara Holmes
CAC Publishing, 2021
A Book Recommendation by Lee Staman

In the Spring 2021 edition of Oneing, I had the privilege of review-

ing Resmaa Menakem’s powerful book on bodies and racialized
trauma, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to
Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. It seems fitting that Barbara Holmes’
latest book, Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village, looks
beyond the individual and into the communities that make up our
lives, specifically the communal trauma we experience and the subse-
quent response.
Crisis Contemplation begins with the thing that disrupts, the event
that upends lives and communities. Holmes identifies three compo-
nents: “The event is usually unexpected, the person or community is
unprepared, and there is nothing that anyone could do to stop it from
happening.”1 The chapter on crisis explores a variety of afflictions that
can affect communities, from the natural to the systemic. Although this
recurring list can leave us “gulping the darkness,”2 she has a realistic,
clear-eyed hope that sees a possible rebirth of sorts through the cri-
sis. Holmes does well to describe this unsettling and dismantling of
“control and agency” that then opens a space for what she terms crisis
contemplation: “This space that I name contemplative is a place of break-
ing, relinquishment, and waiting. This is not occurring in peaceful

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repose on our meditation pillows, not during the shared experiences
of village life, but in the midst of a disorienting freefall.”
This refuge during disruption is not how contemplation is typically
viewed or practiced. Crisis contemplation is not necessarily a choice that
can be made but is frequently made for us because of the circumstances
of our lives. For Holmes, contemplation is not a disconnect; it is not a
retreat from the world. It is rather, first and foremost, a practice that we
do with our bodies. Her examples include those we might often associ-
ate with contemplation — prayer and stillness — but she also includes
music, writing, dance, social justice activism, and teaching.
Crisis contemplation prepares us and prepares communities by
being honest with the trauma that has occurred and acknowledg-
ing that little will be the same. From here, we move into the village
response and the latter half of the book. I felt that this was Holmes’
most important and powerfully written chapter. There was so much
here that another book could easily come out of it. For example, she
has a brief examination of the community lament response, a some-
what misunderstood form of prayer that can be incredibly powerful, as
she does well to explain. She rightly identifies the sorrow component
but reminds us of the sometimes-forgotten justice-oriented structure
of the lament. As Walter Brueggemann puts it, “These prayers are real
prayers and not merely psychological acts of catharsis whereby the
speaker ‘feels better’ by expressing need out loud. These prayers are
seriously addressed to God, who is expected to answer.”3 I would
have loved to hear more of her thoughts on this but, again, maybe that
is for another book.
Her conception of the village is helpful and commonsensical:

Villages are organizational spaces that hold our collective begin-

nings. They are spaces that we can return to (if only through
memory) when we are in need of welcoming and familiar
places . . . . The functions of such a group may include the foster-
ing and maintenance of common needs, interests, and safety. To
put it simply, our belonging in these associations includes social
and sacred responsibilities to individuals and the group.

Cultures that have a strong collective understanding of what sus-

tains them are often better able to weather trauma: “When there is a
crisis, it takes a village to survive.” Songs, movement, sharing a meal,

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 and connection with ancestral history are just some of the glues that
bind communities. This type of idea of a village or community is
often so foreign to what Wendell Berry calls, “a rootless and placeless
monoculture”4 that frequently pervades modern society. The infor-
mation that modernity tends to prioritize is often antithetical to the
“everyday mysticism, and the spiritual vibrancy of multiple realities”
that are core to a culture and community with deep, deep roots. As
Holmes beautifully puts it,

A world without ancestors is lonely. . . . It matters how we

understand our sojourn in this reality. If we consider our lives to
be comprised of segments separated by a dash that encompasses
birth and death dates, we will be inconsolable when trauma
truncates our realities and delays our destinations. But, if we
consider ourselves to be part of a continuum of life that does not
end with death, but transitions to a life after life, our perspectives
can change.

Barbara Holmes could easily have ended Crisis Contemplation with

her necessary chapter on healing, but I am thankful she took a future-
oriented route and concluded with a chapter that offers more possi-
bilities. Her idea of “cosmic rebirthing” and the recovery of “everyday
mysticism” grabbed ahold of my imagination and brought it into my
body. She describes being

born into a family of shamans, root workers, and healers. These

women and men saw beyond the veil and mediated the realms
of life after life. They knew how to cure you of what ailed you,
spiritually and in the natural world. The mystics that I knew
could get a prayer through, birth a baby, and bring you a mes-
sage or warning from the other side. They were amazing and
sometimes a little bit scary.

This is honest, in-the-dirt mysticism brought low from saints and

thinkers of ages past and into our often careless, hopeful, stubbed-toe
existence. I agree with her, it is scary, and I know I am wary of it, but
it just brims with hope and possibility.
On the practical side of things — as also found in Menakem’s
book — is the inclusion of questions and practices meant to take the

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reader deeper into what each chapter has covered. Thankfully, these
range from the more cerebral and recollective, “Ask yourself the fol-
lowing questions about your shadows: What are you hiding—what
fears, weaknesses? What do you want to shed?” to the physical and
immersive, “Prepare art supplies of your choosing for intuitive or soul
art.” I appreciated the reminder after the chapter on healing (which
did not include practices) that it is a process, not a practice. I will add
that there are also short but thorough summaries after most chapters
that would be valuable in the pedagogical use of this book.
·

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 notes

A Rude Awakening
1 Drew E. Jackson, “A Rude Awakening,” God Speaks Through Wombs:
Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity
Press, 2021), 68. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.
ivpress.com.

The Ecotones of the Cosmic Egg of Meaning

1 As quoted in Amy Frykholm, Wild Woman: A Footnote, the Desert, and
My Quest for an Elusive Saint (Minneapolis: Broadleaf, 2021), 42.
2 Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati:
Franciscan Media, 2020), 113.
3 One of my favorites of James Finley’s poetic phrases.
4 Rohr, 103.
5 Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and
Society (New York: Anchor, 1995), 150.
6 I extend gratitude to Fred Bahnson, who explores the theme of ecotones
brilliantly in Soil and Sacrament: A Spiritual Memoir of Food and Faith (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 115–119.
7 “Ecotone Explained,” Ecological Society of America, https://www.esa.org/
esablog/about/ecotone-explained/.
8 “Ecotone Explained.”
9 Wendell Berry, Citizenship Papers (Berkeley, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard,
2003), 181.
10 My use of the word miracle falls from a belief that life as a whole is more
than I can understand. Therefore, I am humbled by it and submit to its
mystery.
11 Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (New York: Image, 1969), 68.

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 12 Douglas E. Christie, Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes on Contemplative
Ecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 23.
13 Antonio Machado, “Proverbios y Cantares de Campos de Castilla,” 1917.
14 Pierre Hadot, Plotinius or the Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 47.
15 This idea stems from the work of Bayo Akomolafe. See “The Burden of
the New Story,” Bayo Akomolafe, October 2016, https://bayoakomolafe.
net/project/the-burden-of-the-new-story/.

Honoring All Four Domes of Meaning

1 Psalm 46:10.
2 Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island (Boston: Shambhala, 2005), 177.

Giving Freely and Receiving Graciously

1 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific
Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed
Editions, 2013), 176.
2 Kimmerer, 344–345.
3 Elyse Poppers, The Little Love Book: 267 Words for Love in Sanskrit
(LifeForm Projects, 2017).
4 Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis,
2018), 258.
5 Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati:
Franciscan Media, 2020), 104.

From My Jesus to the Universal Christ and Back

1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York:
Touchstone, 1997), 381.
2 Bruce D. Chilton, “Christianity in War,” in Just War in Religion and
Politics: Studies in Religion and the Social Order, ed. Jacob Neusner, Bruce
D. Chilton, and R. E. Tully (Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
2013), 117.
3 Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah, Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing,
Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity Press, 2019), 15, 19, 21.
4 See Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that Are
Transforming the Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010), Chapter 7 for a
discussion of how pro-slavery Christians used the Bible to defend their
position.

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 5 Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change
Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019),
12–13.
6 Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Orations, 25 (PG 45, 65–68) from
Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (New York: New City
Press, 1995), 39–40.
7 Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua (PG 91, 1288) from Clément,
227–228.
8 Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions,
1961), 34.

Touching Butterflies
1 Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon, 1992).

From the Conceptual to the Contextual

1 “Definition of cosmic,” Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/cosmic.
2 Richard Rohr, “Introduction,” Oneing 9, vol. 2 (2021), 17.
3 Roone Arledge, ABC’s Wide World of Sports, as cited in Noah Finz,
“The Thrill of Victory, The Agony of Defeat,” LinkedIn, March 6, 2020,
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/thrill-victory-agony-defeat-noah-
finz/.
4 Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati:
Franciscan Media, 2020), 118.

Listening to Learn about Our Own Stories

1 “Episcopal Impact Fund and Eden Housing present HOUSING THE
BAY,” YouTube, July 29, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj-
CJY2cVjQ.

Gateway to Knowing
1 Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity
in Theory and Practice (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2016), 120.
2 Barbara Holmes, Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village
(Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2021), 134.
3 Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York: Open Road Integrated
Media, 2012), chap. 1.

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Mything the Point of My Story
1 “It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of
God [a Logos]. The Word of God comes to us, and we have no way
of distinguishing whether and to what extent it is different from
God. There is nothing about this Word that could not be considered
known and human, except for the manner in which it confronts us
spontaneously and places obligations upon us” (C.G. Jung, Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston [New York:
Vintage, 1989], 340).
2 Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson
(New York: Newman, 1956), 130.
3 C.G. Jung, Collected Works 14, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1977), para. 739. We cannot only focus on our inner
reality. My Story “is possible only if the reality of the world around us
is recognized at the same time” as Y/Our shared Story (Jung, Collected
Works 14, para. 739).
4 C.G. Jung, “Letter to M. Leonard,” December 5, 1959, Letters of C.
G. Jung: Volume 2, 1951–1961, trans. R. F. C. Hull (East Sussex, UK:
Routledge, 1976), 525.
5 “This stripping off of the veils of illusion is felt as distressing and
painful. . . . This phase demands much patience and tact, for the
unmasking of reality is as a rule not only difficult but very often
dangerous” (Jung, Collected Works 14, para. 739).
6 Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making
of the Self (New York: Guilford, 1993), 11.
7 Edward C. Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest: Basic Concepts of Analytical
Psychology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 218.
8 Origen, Song, 130.
9 Origen: Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, ed. Hans
Urs von Balthasar, trans. Robert J. Daly (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 1984), 327.
10 In Symbols of Transformation, Jung wrote, “to get to know ‘my’ myth, I
regarded . . . as the task of tasks,” asking of the reader as well, “What is
the myth you are living?” (Jung, Collected Works 5, xxv).
11 James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper Perennial,
1992), 24.
12 C.G. Jung, as quoted in Hillman, 24.
13 Hillman, 41, 24.

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 14 Origen, On First Principles: Being Koetschau’s Text of the De Principiis
Translated into English, trans. G. W. Butterworth (Gloucester, MA: Peter
Smith, 1973), 276.
15 Jung, Collected Works 14, para. 6.
16 Jung, Collected Works 9.ii, para. 73.
17 Origen, On First Principles, 78.
18 Jung, Memories, 348.
19 C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984), 200, 211.
20 Origen, Song, 199.
2 1 Origen, First Principles, 285.
22 Origen, Song, 280.
2 3 Origen, First Principles, 286–287.
24 Origen, Song, 28–29.
25 Jung, Psychology and Religion, 199.
26 Origen, First Principles, 287.
2 7 Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us
Human (New York: Mariner Books, 2012).

There’s a Crack in Everything

1 Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, “Notes on
Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2, no. 1 (2010): 5677,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677.
2 Cher Potter, “Timotheus Vermeulen talks to Cher Potter,” TANK
Magazine 55 (Spring 2012): 215, https://tankmagazine.com/issue-55/
talk/timotheus-vermeulen.
3 Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter
on Humanity’s Search for Home (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2017), 32.
4 Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 182.
5 Akolomafe, 112.

No Story
1 Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), chap. 6.
2 Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral
Consciousness (Seattle: Revelore, 2019), 58.

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 3 Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin, trans. Noel Barstad (Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press, 2020), 18.
4 Beatrice Bruteau, The Grand Option: Personal Transformation and a New
Creation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 51.

Recommended Reading
1 For a deeper look at this movement from the expected to the unexpected
to something else entirely, see Richard Rohr’s The Wisdom Pattern: Order,
Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati: Franciscan Media, 2020).
2 From one of the many poignant poems, some by Dr. Holmes, scattered
throughout the text.
3 Walter Brueggemann, Reverberations of Faith: A Theological Handbook of
Old Testament Themes (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2002),
119.
4 Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (New York:
Random House, 1993), 151.

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 Coming Spring 2022!

Unveiled, Vol. 10, No. 1

Richard Rohr ends his Introduction to “Unveiled,” the forthcom-

ing, Spring 2022 edition of Oneing, with these apocalyptic words:
“Unveiling is a gift for those who are ready to see more fully. Unveiling
is a disaster for those who do not want you to see.”
The “gift,” it seems, “for those who are ready to see more fully,” is
the blessing of contemplation — which has been absolutely necessary
to get through the past two catastrophic years. It takes a contemplative
mind to be able to see and absorb the ugly underbelly of the US, as
revealed by a political administration that unwittingly unveiled it.
It takes a contemplative mind to spend months living and working
in previously unimagined isolation — away from family, friends, and
colleagues because of a devastating pandemic — and not lose hope. It
takes a contemplative mind to see live footage of global starvation and
death, desperate Afghan men falling from an airplane, and the effects
of global warming — and be able to absorb it all with faith and love.
“The Greek word apocalypsis,” according to Rohr, “literally means
to unveil something and thus to reveal its true form and colors.” The
contributors to the Spring 2022 edition of Oneing have been invited
to do just that: unpack and reveal what the contemplative mind is
capable of both holding and grieving in each moment in time.

Both the limited-print edition of CAC’s literary journal,

Oneing, and the downloadable PDF version
will be available for sale in April 2022
at https://store.cac.org/.

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 A collision of opposites forms the cross of Christ.
One leads downward preferring the truth of the humble.
The other moves leftward against the grain.
But all are wrapped safely inside a hidden harmony:
One world, God’s cosmos, a benevolent universe.

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