|
Dear friends,
While reflecting on 2025's highlights for this eBulletin, I read a blog post entitled "Messy Christmas." I mention it here not to push anyone to read Dr. Tom Neal's rich and deeply human theology—after all, the beauty of our shared practice lies precisely in its non-conceptual nature and the fact that we meet in the Silence, where varied theological perspectives fade into the background in favor of our underlying unity—but because Tom's words landed deeply for me, helping foster a more spacious inner landscape from which to reflect.
Yes, it's true that our small but growing nonprofit reached a number of milestones and has plenty of achievements to celebrate this year (scroll to the end of this note for some highlights). It's also true that too many cycles of violence continue their self-perpetuation — in our world, our countries, our localities, our families, and, speaking personally, even within myself.
How do people survive without contemplative practices?
Christmas this year was a day of solitude and silence for me, flanked by midnight liturgy at a local re-entry community and the virtual Centering Prayer sit we hosted late in the day on the 25th. I was holding in my heart everyone inside the walls, as well as those (inside and out) carrying heavy burdens of grief, frustration, or loneliness. It made for a somber, but also deeply connecting, holiday. Weighing particularly on me was a friend's story of having recently served as spiritual advisor for a man who spent over 30 years on death row — including sitting in prayer, with a hand on Frank Wall's foot, through his execution. ("The sunshine state" set a new and horrifying record in 2025: this was our 19th, more than triple any other state and the most in any year here since the death penalty was reintroduced in 1974.)
How grateful I am for the shared practice that teaches us to embrace, in Thomas Keating's words, "all of reality, exactly as it is." Much of the time, at PCF/Praestolari as elsewhere, reality entails the painful awareness of being in the midst of various messes. Centering Prayer helps me sit still in the shame, the discouragement, the recognition of their being blood on my hands, and then to do at least a little better at choosing to respond, rather than to react.
Buoyed by this practice rooted in Christian monasticism but accessible to people of all faiths and no particular faith, we can experience the reality that God (hear Love, Life, Source, Universe, or whatever works best for you), in Tom Neal's words, "has descended inside our broken minds that race, our bodies that ache, our relationships that wound, our histories that burden" and "enters to heal them from within, by embracing them all as his (sic) own." Tom is here describing what he calls, "the consolation of Christmas," but is this not simply an elaboration of one of Lawrence's frequent reminders to the Outside the Walls group: "God's got you!"?
| 
