inherently argumentative Christianity jumped the tracks even further. It set us
on a very limited “rational” way of knowing that just didn’t provide a wide
enough lens to process those scriptures or ancient contemplative teachings. It
was like trying to see the universe with a too-small telescope. We kept ourselves
so busy trying to process the idea of Jesus as the personal incarnation of God,
and a God that an empire (East or West!) could make use of, that we had little
time or readiness to universalize that message to all “flesh” (John 1:14), much
less all of creation (Romans 8:18–23). And surely there was no room for
“sinners” or outsiders of almost any sort—which was of course the exact
opposite of Jesus’s message and mission. Our small empires and our small minds
needed a self-serving God and a domesticated Jesus who could be used for
ethnic purposes.
This is where a contemplative way of knowing must come to the rescue and
allow us to comprehend a cosmic notion of Christ and a nontribal notion of
Jesus. It will also help us know that it was not just ill will that kept us from the
Gospel, but actually a lack of mindfulness and capacity for presence (along with
our cultural captivity to power, money, and war, of course).
The contemplative mind can see things in their depth and in their wholeness
instead of just in parts. The binary mind, so good for rational thinking, finds
itself totally out of its league in dealing with things like love, death, suffering,
infinity, God, sexuality, or mystery in general. It just keeps limiting reality to
two alternatives and thinks it is smart because it chooses one! This is no
exaggeration.*1 The two alternatives are always exclusionary, usually in an angry
way: things are either totally right or totally wrong, with me or against me,
male or female, Democrat or Republican, Christian or pagan, on and on and on.
The binary mind provides quick security and false comfort, but never wisdom.
It thinks it is smart because it counters your idea with an opposing idea. There is
usually not much room for a “reconciling third.” I see this in myself almost
every day.
In our time, I have been encouraged to see a rediscovery of the broad and
deep contemplative mind, which for the first two thousand years of Christianity
had largely been limited to monks and mystics. This rediscovery has been the
heart of our purpose at the Center for Action and Contemplation, and the core
of my teaching over the past forty years. It is not our metaphysics (“what is
real”) that is changing, but our epistemology—how we think we know what is
real. For that, we can thank a combination of insights from psychology, therapy,
spiritual direction, history, and Eastern religions, along with the rediscovery of