Contemplative Christian Resurrection

To love is to will the good of others. Love has objective moral values. Those who love authentically experience suffering. If God is love then to approach closer to God requires us to accept the intensity of being loved more deeply than perhaps we are presently capable of loving ourselves. It is difficult to love and we tend to feel hurt, ashamed, unworthy, broken, and fearful. Despite all of our messiness, God loves us anyways and desires a personal communion with each one of us.

In forming this group, the goal is to cultivate more love, wisdom, and virtue that enables us to more effectively serve our families, communities, and achieve greater emotional sobriety from the challenges of modern life. Emotional sobriety basically means that we are capable of experiencing the high and lows of life without numbing ourselves, self-medicating, fleeing, distracting, and trying to escape our experience. On more extreme levels of the spectrum people develop various addictions that harm their lives and keep them in a perpetual state of flight, fight, and primal survival. As a result, this group will discuss topics such as addiction recovery, grief support, spirituality, biblical study, theology, holistic healing, homeschooling, natural birth, and natural death. All of these topics that help us learn how to love, be responsible, trust a higher power, learn right reason, and navigate the difficulties of the human experience with mature, emotional sobriety.

This group is not officially affiliated to any church or organization and is open to everyone earnestly interested in these topics. It is open to all the beloved children of God because you matter, you are loved, you are worth the trouble, and you were creating by a loving Creator who runs after you every day trying to bring you closer into communion with Him.

Catholics have a rich history of theology that has addressed nearly every problem we face today and is more actively at work in our lives than we might realize. An often glossed over fact regarding 12 step recovery programs is that the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous had a Catholic priest as his spiritual director and sponsor. Bill W spent 13 years with a Jesuit priest Fr. Ed Dowling from St. Louis who helped develop AA. The 12 steps mirror the spiritual exercises from St. Ignatius who founded the Jesuit order in 1543. This is one example of how Catholic teachings are alive in the world today and have saved millions of lives while leading them to a closer relationship with God. Most physical and mental ailments are spiritual maladies as recovery programs recognize. Addicts were once considered hopeless cases destined for death and insane asylums. The Catholic science of the saints provides one of the deepest and most comprehensive studies of mind, body, and soul that exists throughout human history. Discovering this vast resource of wisdom is a humbling experience. This can be especially challenging in a culture that believes it is the most knowledgeable and advanced group of humans that has ever existed; which results in patterns of pride, addiction, and perceived superiority which inflicts great harm.

"To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one's own eyes. One cannot see one's own eyes because they are that with which ones sees and God is the light by which we see." - Thomas Merton

“When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything.” - G.K. Chesterton

A modification of the 12 steps reveals the principles below that can be used to recover from any existing addiction and have an authentic spiritual experience. Today everyone is struggling from some type of addiction and escapism that affects their relationship with self, neighbor, and God.

1. Our will to action and intellect have habitual patterns that form a template.
2. Our passions, sensory experiences, and faith influence our human experience in known and unknown ways beyond our present understanding.
3. Silent and shared reflection with others helps us discern the will and way of the divine Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).
4. Moral theology, the science of the saints, and scripture provides revelation for how our ways have fallen short of God’s ideal ways.
5. Through an act of penance we give voice to acknowledging how we have fallen on the path of the suffering servant.
6. We offer our sacrifice of self-oblation to transform ourselves inside and outside to be renewed by God’s grace and aligned with His providence.
7. We are sent into the world to draw others into God’s loving, peaceful community through our example of service and presence.

"O my brother, the contemplative is not the man who has fiery visions of the cherubim carrying God on their imagined chariot, but simply he who has risked his mind in the desert beyond language and beyond ideas where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust, that is to say in the surrender of our own poverty and incompleteness in order no longer to clench our minds in a cramp upon themselves, as if thinking made us exist. The message of hope the contemplative offers you, then, brother, is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God; but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present to you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you ever found in books or heard in sermons." - Thomas Merton - Letter on the contemplative life