Peace and Every Good
A visit to Richard Rohr's Center for Contemplation and Action
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Peace and Every Good
Here in a white room at the Visitors Center Richard Rohr’s voice arrives on an LG TV— a bit raspy, which makes me worried. What if he passes while I’m on campus, my standing mute as EMTs roll him to a would-be reprieve from what I know he fears not? How often we are driven by fear instead of drawn toward love. How the self-created self fades from the stage if you pay less and less attention to it. That’s the gift of contemplation— you might forget the you who came here hoping for a chance encounter with the Founder, secluded today in his adobe hermitage. My sitting a while nearby in the courtyard. Leaving full, grateful for the sun’s warmth on a crisp April morning at 5 Points Road in Albuquerque.
Notes
I took the speedy Rail Runner train from Santa Fe to Albuquerque yesterday, then Ubered to the Center for Action and Contemplation, founded in 1987 by Franciscan Father Richard Rohr.
I knew it was unlikely I would have a chance to say hello to Father Richard, who lives in a hermitage on the CAC campus. At 81, his health is frail yet robust in his readiness for whatever comes next. A month ago today he released a timely new book The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage.
The Center receives many visitors and sells books by Father Richard and others on the CAC’s faculty. My souvenir from the shop is an insulated coffee mug inscribed with the Franciscan greeting, “Peace and Every Good.” In Latin that’s Pax et Bonum.
It was 52 degrees yesterday with a breeze, but the courtyard drew me outside for an hour of sitting, reading, and writing on my Kindle Scribe.
The central feature of this peaceful yard is a cottonwood tree with three main trunks. It’s named the Trinity Tree. It’s well over a century old. Its gnarly branches look as if they are dancing in the sky.
Inside the Visitors Center, a room with white walls and a television offers space for meditation. Father Richard’s recorded voice gives an overview of contemplation to introduce 20 minutes of silence, followed by a single strike of a bell.
What struck me most in his message was how meditation enables us to move from ego consciousness to soul awareness. Or, as he put it poetically, to move “from being fear driven to being love drawn.”
It was love that drew me to Albuquerque yesterday. Today at a table at Henry & the Fish in Santa Fe, I see love as the connecting thread for this visit.
Georgia O’Keefe touched it when she said of her good fortune, “Maybe it’s because I’ve taken hold of anything that came along that I wanted.”
With the help of an ATM, I took hold of a lapis bolo tie made by Randy Hoskie. I knew how much I wanted it as soon as I spotted that mesmerizing blueness on his blanket at the Palace of the Governors.
When I first arrived, with no clear plan for how I would spend my time, I feared I had made a mistake to sign up as Darlene’s sherpa for her fiber collage workshop.
Love solved that problem, too.
When she returned to our hotel room each night, tired and glowing with progress made on her quilts, it was as if I’d met someone new on a trip to Santa Fe.
“Your whole view of the world will change—from fear to connection,” Father Richard said in his meditation video.
Pax et Bonum.
Fantastic.