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Listened to Richard Rohr discussion. Thinking through how to let go of my goals to find God.

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thankful for this new way to worship and temporarily disengage from what's going on in the world

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thankful for this new way to worship and temporarily disengage from what's going on in the world

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Today I'm reminded of how much joy comes not from the things we have in our lives, but rather from the people in our lives. Love you all.

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Words from Heschel that really resonate today...

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Words from Heschel that really resonate today...

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Even when the soul is seared, even when no prayer can come out of our tightened throats, the clean, silent rest of the Sabbath leads us to a realm of endless peace, or to the beginning of an awareness of what eternity means."

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When Yoga Mike dropped that jewel I was ready to do a talk back.

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I've always felt a little intimidated by yoga.  I really enjoyed how Yoga Mike made it feel so inclusive and cool, and the connection he made to yoga and the church was deep.

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I've always felt a little intimidated by yoga.  I really enjoyed how Yoga Mike made it feel so inclusive and cool, and the connection he made to yoga and the church was deep.

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I am so deeply grateful to all of you to this magnificent New Roots community. This time with all of  you, in this time of crisis is what heals and salves. Thank you

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Felt really grateful to be able to practice with the New Roots family. I have been practicing yoga for a couple of years, but it was special to do it with you all.

I was also reminded of how there are many Christians who can be closed to the practice and to many things that they see as "unChristian." I am thankful to be in a community where we can lean into whatever things bring us closer to God.

I also feel like it was ordained for us to be with Yoga Mike who has clearly experienced Christians attacking rather than showing love. It was a reminder to me that our community should certainly put energy towards being with each other and doing justice in the world, but that we are also called to show that there is a different way to follow Christ. I didn't expect that to be part of this day, but I think we were able to show a different kind of Christianity and I hope we will continue to connect with him and others who have been hurt by the forms of Christianity that have been hurtful to many of us too.

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today, on this pentacost sunday, is a deeply ironic day for the church to be skittish about fire. if riots are the language of the unheard, would that the holy spirit empower the people of god, who are called by gods name, to hear and understand what these tongues of flame are saying.

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Just expressing gratitude for Rolando’s piece today as I am reminded that he, Joyce and Pricilla are often New Roots’ see-ers, each having the power to look behind, ahead and into the depths to elucidate meaning and healing. This is a rare prophetic gift in communities and we have deep wells at New Roots.  The community must not only draw on these sources, but must protect these (re)sources.

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Share thoughts, reflections, photos, creations, etc. throughout the day!

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Share thoughts, reflections, photos, creations, etc. throughout the day!

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I’m excited for our inaugural Sabbath Sunday and it couldn’t be more timely. The last couple of days have been pretty anxiety filled and sleepless. It was hard for me to wait until 10.30 to move into a more calm and restorative space.  So, I began this morning reading this piece in the Boston Globe’s Idea section to start shifting my gaze in the right direction.  Also read a few more pages of the Sabbath.  Can’t wait to continue this journey this morning with the New Roots community.

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Years ago, researchers at the University of Virginia recruited hundreds of college students and staff and asked them to spend six to 15 minutes in "thinking periods," alone in a room with no distractions. They could think about whatever they wanted, but were offered some prompts. Afterward, most said they felt very uncomfortable and the boredom was comparable to physical pain.

The scientists then slightly modified the experiment, giving the participants the option to get electric shocks during the thinking periods. Many asked for the shocks.

Timothy Wilson, the social psychologist leading the study, was surprised, and a bit disheartened, to see that the human mind, "stuffed full of pleasant memories" and equipped with the unique ability to look inward and create imaginary worlds, seemed incapable of handling a few minutes of boredom.

"We really thought this [thinking time] was something people would like," he said. Instead, participants found a temporary disengagement from external activities almost unbearable. "Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative," the study concluded.

The lockdown measures for the COVID-19 pandemic turned that same premise into an involuntary social experiment on a massive scale. And guess what happened? A lot of electric shocks. As stay-at-home orders dramatically limited our ability to engage with the world in the usual ways, the ominous possibility of idleness and boredom surfaced. All of a sudden, many people intuitively understood what the philosopher Blaise Pascal meant when he wrote that "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone," and planned some distraction strategies to avoid being too much with themselves. The electric shocks came in many different forms: news doomscrolling; massive live streaming; compulsive gardening; sourdough starters; back-to-back webinars; pornography consumption as a coping mechanism. Overworking, of course. Anything but falling into the long-lost art of doing absolutely nothing.

During my more than two months in lockdown in Italy - the first country in the West to shut down, and one of the last to approach an extremely confused reopening phase - I had virtual drinks with people I wouldn't hang out with in real life (no offense). I attended seminars I wasn't interested in. I received countless invitations to things I couldn't care less about, and I was quite sure even the people setting them up weren't really into them either. Not only did I dive into the incessant flow of well-meant and totally unnecessary activities in a time of forced inactivity, but I couldn't refrain from commenting on the dynamic in group chats with people who, just like me, struggled to sit quietly in a room.

As parents of two little children, my wife and I were physically exhausted just by attending to our daily tasks, but I still managed to preemptively avert occasions of tedium and fill potential moments of silence. I video chatted a lot with my parents, who live in a different part of the country. Those conversations provided essential emotional connection and support, but after a while, I didn't have much to add to what I had told them the day before. Our days looked eerily alike. My quarantine began with Zoom FOMO and is slowly ending with Zoom fatigue.

Part of my discomfort is the result of the guilt-ridden realization of having repeatedly violated a dogma of contemporary life: busyness. Our world values not just productivity but also the feeling of being productive, always engaged in activities whose stated purpose is to provide something objectively measurable, but whose actual goal is the engagement itself.

"Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy," said Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher whose popularity spiked during the pandemic.

In the hard-to-recollect life before COVID-19, most of us were always swamped with stuff, constantly juggling impossibly jammed schedules, and quietly hurting at the prospect of the intensity of it waning. Multitasking is a state of the modern soul. The lockdowns didn't alter that notion, they just constrained it in a much more limited set of possibilities.

The author Andrew Smart termed this mood the "culture of effectiveness" in a book praising idleness and non-industriousness as vehicles of positive social change. A self-described "survivor of the corporate-mandated 'Six Sigma' training to improve efficiency," Smart claimed that the culture of effectiveness is, in fact, ineffective. Drawing from the scientific literature on neuroscience, he made the case that filling life with activity harms the brain. The human mind is made to be unplugged frequently.

At a deeper level, my anxious attempts to keep up with the pre-pandemic shares of self-administered electric shocks revealed a mindset in which fulfillment occurs only through some active engagement with things. In modernity, human satisfaction rhymes with action. But it wasn't always like this. For centuries, people not only survived without the incessant distractions that characterize the contemporary condition but considered the absence of diversions a key part of a fulfilled life. "Happiness does not consist in pastimes and amusements, but in activities in accordance with virtue," wrote Aristotle, adding that the highest virtue is what pertains to the "divinest part of us," that is the intellect. Therefore, the ancient philosopher concluded, perfect happiness lies in the "activity of contemplation."

In contemporary parlance, "the activity of contemplation" is almost a contradictory phrase. Certainly, I initially struggled to consider those dreaded moments devoted to just thinking during the lockdown as "active" in any possible sense. But as the weeks passed, the possibility emerged that in boredom and silence might be enshrined a kernel of truth about oneself. In fact, a growing body of research even suggests that boredom makes us more creative. That creative process hinged on inner life is an inherent part of our humanity.

In his thoughtful critique of big tech, Franklin Foer argued that the most subtle danger it poses is not the massive concentration of power, but the relentless erosion of the spaces for self-reflection. "To me, the destruction of contemplation is the existential threat to our humanity," he argued. The trouble is that the contemporary mind is not well trained to value its contemplative side. "The untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself," concluded the study on the electric shocks. Understanding the value of doing nothing is a lot of work.

Mattia Ferraresi is a writer for the Italian newspaper Il Foglio. Follow him on Twitter @mattiaferraresi

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The difficulty of doing nothing - The Boston Globe

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Years ago, researchers at the University of Virginia recruited hundreds of college students and staff and asked them to spend six to 15 minutes in "thinking periods," alone in a room with no distractions. They could think about whatever they wanted, but were offered some prompts.

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- How do I define and experience Sabbath?
- When do I feel most connected to Spirit?
- What does play look like for me?
- What do I consider work?
- What brings me delight?

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Click below to join!

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82925955005

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Below, you will find some articles, podcasts etc. to inspire and support your Sabbath experience

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This song has been such an inspiration for me during this time. 'In the Silence' by Jason Upton.

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This song has been such an inspiration for me during this time. 'In the Silence' by Jason Upton.

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https://youtu.be/EAqKj9toFo4

-Sarah

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“The Sabbath” - Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

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“The Sabbath” - Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

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“He who wants to enter the holiness of the day must first lay down the profanity of clattering commerce, of being yoked to toil. He must go away from the screech of dissonant days, from the nervousness and fury of acquisitiveness and the betrayal in embezzling his own life. He must say farewell to manual work and learn to understand that the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man. Six days a week we wrestle with the world, wringing profit from the earth; on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.”

Excerpt From
The Sabbath
Abraham Joshua Heschel

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This Sabbath Sunday, following our Solidarity Saturday, my heart and mind are heavy. Like so many of us, I am heartbroken by the events of the past week—the violence and hatred followed by understandable desperation and anger. In my Lectio Divina reading this week, when I was at my lowest point in confronting the state of affairs of our country and my complicity with it (“I spoke to you in your prosperity, but you did not listen” Jeremiah 20:21), I read Daniel 4:1 where Nebuchadnezzar says, “Peace be multiplied to you.”

I felt that this was not possible. How can we have peace multiplied when there is so much destruction and death? Where is God in this? Where am I in this? But I stayed with it. “Multiplied Peace” became my mantra for the day, and I started to see my own agency to move from “my silence in prosperity” to an openness to God which has a profound effect on me and those around me. Through individuals, peace can be multiplied. It might not overcome the structures in place that allow for horror and injustice (only God will do that in the fullness of time), but we can multiply the peace of God in order to withstand these structures for ourselves and our community.

I am struggling with how to use my day today. Heschel’s challenge to lay down “being yoked to toil” is beautiful, and I need to hear this admonition. I need to stop embezzling my life. Yet, I have a camera that a friend lent me, and I need to document the city for my artwork. It seems that this is perhaps another example of my addiction to work and achievement. As Heschel says, “the world has already been created and will survive without the help of man.”

Today on the Feast of Pentecost where God gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit, my Lectio Divina reading was Matthew 5:13-16, the Sermon on the Mount. Christ tells us not to lose our saltiness and to let our light shine. Salt brings out flavor; it preserves food; in lacto-fermentation of vegetables, it kills bad bacteria and lets the good bacteria to grow. Salt is not a food in and of itself—it activates something else. It is related to the “y’all.”

Light is similar. We are not the source of light, we are the objects that allow the light to reflect. We cannot face the source of light without hurting our eyes, but we need the light to function. Through our willingness to reflect God’s light, we “give light to all in the house.” Through a collection of lights, we create “a city on a hill that cannot be hidden.” The collective light is not man-made, electric light, with false hues of yellow, green, blue, and red. Instead, it is the true light of God exposing the reality of who we are. The city on the hill is the Beloved Community—God’s Kingdom on earth.

So, today, I need to take my friend’s camera out into the city—a city that is threatened by an unseen virus and by the unseen forces of hatred, injustice, and “silence in prosperity.” This will not be toil, it will be prayer and meditation. I will go armed with the love and insight that has come from the New Roots Community who has given light to all in the house.

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Genesis 2:2-3

“By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.  Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.”

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Leviticus 23:3

““ ‘There are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a day of sabbath rest, a day of sacred assembly. You are not to do any work; wherever you live, it is a sabbath to the Lord.”

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We must conquer space in order to sanctify time. All week long we are called upon to sanctify life through employing things of space. On the Sabbath it is given us to share in the holiness that is in the heart of time. Even when the soul is seared, even when no prayer can come out of our tightened throats, the clean, silent rest of the Sabbath leads us to a realm of endless peace, or to the beginning of an awareness of what eternity means. There are few ideas in the world of thought which contain so much spiritual power as the idea of the Sabbath. Aeons hence, when of many of our cherished theories only shreds will remain, that cosmic tapestry will continue to shine. Eternity utters a day."

- Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (p. 89)

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"Silence is a Door to God" by Howard Thurman

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"The Practice of Awe and Wonder"

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About This Show

Show Info:

Another Name for Every Thing with Richard Rohr is a conversational podcast series on the deep connections between action and contemplation. Richard is joined by two students of the Christian contemplative path, Brie Stoner and Paul Swanson, who seek to integrate the wisdom amidst diapers, disruptions, and the shifting state of our world. Richard Rohr is a globally recognized ecumenical teacher whose work is grounded in Christian mysticism. He is a Franciscan priest and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.Read more "

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Bonus: The Relationships that Shape Us

In this bonus episode we find Paul Swanson and Brie Stoner in dialogue without Richard Rohr. Recorded in the Fall 2019, Richard had to jettison to a meeting in Santa Fe and encouraged Brie and Paul to record a conversation without him on relationships, work, and parenting within the lens of the Universal Christ. This episode draws from the concrete experiences of Brie and Paul as they seek to live out the values of the Universal Christ within the reality of precocious kids, demanding work, and meaningful committed relationships.

Visit cac.org/podcast to listen to season one of Another Name for Every Thing

Visit universalchrist.org to learn more about the core themes of Richard's book, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe

This podcast is made possible, thanks to the generosity of our donors. If you would love to support the ongoing work of the Center for Action and Contemplation and the continued work of our podcasts, you can donate at cac.org/podcastsupport Thank you!

We'd love to have your thoughts in mind as we think about future seasons, help us out by filling out this survey: anothernameforeverything.com

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Episodes of This Show

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Another Name For Every Thing with Richard Rohr

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Listen to Another Name For Every Thing with Richard Rohr episodes free, on demand. Another Name for Every Thing with Richard Rohr is a conversational podcast series on the deep connections between action and contemplation.

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10:30am Introduction/Opening
11:00am Independent Study
11:30am Meditation/Movement
12:30pm Connect + Share

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A collaborative playlist for Sabbath Sunday at New roots! Click the bottom right corner to pop-out the playlist into a new window.

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A Meditation on the Lives Lost to Police Brutality

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A Meditation on the Lives Lost to Police Brutality

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Family Yoga at 4pm!

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Our yoga classes focus on breath, strength, rejuvention, integrity and spirit. Our dedicated, certified and insured yoga teachers will help you find the right class for you.

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[Join here at 10:30am]

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82925955005

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[Join here at 12:30pm!]

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82925955005