contemplative

Practicing Gratitude: A Path to Rewiring Our Minds

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In the November 28, 2025, edition of Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, the spiritual practice of gratitude is highlighted through the lens of psychological and spiritual growth. The meditation — titled “Minding Positivity” — makes a startling claim: our brains may be wired to cling to negativity. Like Velcro, we instinctively hold on to problems, fears, and regrets, while letting positive experiences slip away like cheese on hot Teflon. 

This tendency — to dwell on what’s wrong rather than celebrate what’s good — can shape how we view ourselves, our lives, and the world. But Rohr draws on neuroscience (notably the work of Rick Hanson) to show that the brain is malleable: by consciously choosing to hold onto positives for at least fifteen seconds, we can recondition our minds. 

In other words: gratitude isn’t optional. It’s a spiritual discipline. By repeatedly turning toward love, trust, patience, and goodness — even in small moments — we gradually build “neuroplasticity”: an increased bandwidth for freedom, openness, and compassion. Rohr frames this rewiring as the very heart of authentic spirituality. 

Why This Matters More Than Ever

  • We live in a negativity-saturated world. Between media cycles, social pressure, and personal anxieties, it’s easy to let negativity dominate our inner narrative. This meditation cuts directly across that tendency.
  • Spirituality isn’t just about morality — it’s about psychology. By linking contemplative practices to brain science, the text bridges faith and neuroscience. Gratitude becomes a practical, embodied discipline.
  • Small shifts can lead to profound transformation. You don’t need great insight or dramatic experiences — just small, regular conscious choices to linger in gratitude. Over time, that can change how you see yourself, others, and your place in the world.

Key Takeaways and Invitation

  • Start simple: notice one small good thing today and hold on to it, mentally or in a journal, for at least 15 seconds.
  • When negativity or fear arises, gently reorient to something authentic, lovely, or kind — even if it feels small or insignificant.
  • See gratitude not as a passing “positive vibe,” but as a spiritual and neurological discipline: a way to expand your capacity for love, acceptance, and presence.
  • Recognize that this kind of transformation — from fear to trust, from reactivity to stillness — is not optional or secondary. It’s essential.

Source: Minding Positivity – Richard Rohr – https://email.cac.org/t/d-e-gjulhtt-tlkrhtkhkt-e/

The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage – Book Interview

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Oprah and Rohr explore the transformative power of embracing tears as a path to healing and societal change, drawing on decades of theological study. Father Rohr weaves the wisdom of Old Testament prophets into our culture, showing how their cries for justice and renewal offer examples for our own breakthroughs. Throughout the episode, Rohr responds to questions from guests seeking to embody his philosophy in their careers, relationships, and everyday life.

One Source of Love – by Richard Rohr

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Yet before you can love your neighbor—your brother or sister—as yourself, you must first love yourself. And to first love yourself, you must know that God loves you now and loves you always.
—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, God Has a Dream 

Richard Rohr connects our ability to love others with our ability to receive God’s love. 

Authentic love is of one piece. How we love anything is how we love everything. Jesus commands us to “Love our neighbors as we love ourselves,” and he connects the two great commandments of love of God and of neighbor, saying they are “like” one another (Matthew 22:39). So often, we think this means to love our neighbor with the same amount of love—as much as we love ourselves—when it really means that it is the same Source and the same Love that allows us to love ourselves, others, and God at the same time! That is unfortunately not the way most people understand love, compassion, and forgiveness—yet it is the only way they ever work.  

We cannot sincerely love another or forgive offenses inside of dualistic consciousness. Many pastors and priests have done the people of God a great disservice by preaching the gospel to them but not giving them the tools to live it out. As Jesus put it, “Cut off from the vine, you can do nothing” (John 15:5). The “vine and the branches” offer one of the greatest Christian mystical images of the non-duality between God and the soul. In and with God, I can love everything and everyone—even my enemies. Alone and by myself, my willpower and intellect will seldom be able to love in difficult situations over time. Many folks try to love by willpower, with themselves as the only source. They try to obey the second commandment without the first. It never works long-term. 

Finally, of course, there’s a straight line between love and suffering. If we love anyone or anything deeply and greatly, it’s fairly certain we’ll soon suffer because we have offered control to another, and the cost of self-giving will soon show itself. Undoubtedly, this is why we are told to be faithful in our loves, because such long-term loyalty and truly conscious love will always lead us to the necessary pruning (John 15:2) of the narcissistic self. 

Until we love and until we suffer, we all try to figure out life and death with our minds. Then a Larger Source opens up within us and we “think” and feel quite differently through “knowing the Love, which is beyond all knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19). Thus, Jesus would naturally say something like, “This is my commandment: you must love one another!” (John 13:34). Authentic love (which is always more than an emotion) initially opens the door of awareness and aliveness, and then suffering for that love keeps that door open for mind, body, and will to enter. I suspect for most of us that is the work of a lifetime. 

Reference: 
Adapted from Richard Rohr: Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 206–207. 

Shared from Center for Action and Contemplation – Daily Meditations

HOMECOMING – God Is Bringing Us Home – Richard Rohr

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We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. 
—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets 

In the Everything Belongs podcast, Father Richard speaks about the spiritual path that winds both away from and toward one’s true home:  

The first going out from home we can say is the creation of the ego. While this is a necessary creating, it is also the creating of a separation. It’s taking myself as central. We probably need to do that, at least until we reach middle age. But then we need to allow what we’ve created to be uncreated. Maybe I was a great basketball player, but that’s gone now. Or maybe I was good-looking, but that’s gone now.  

When we can say “yes” to that uncreation and still be happy, we’ve done our work. My True Self is in God and not in what I’ve created. My self-created self gave me a nice trail to walk on, and something to do each day, but it isn’t really me. It might be my career or my vocation; yet as good as it is, it isn’t my True Self.  

In the metaphor of life as a journey, I think it’s finally about coming back home to where we started. As I approach death, I’m thinking about that a lot, because I think the best way to describe what’s coming next is not “I’m dying,” but “I’m finally going home.” I don’t know what it’s like yet, but in my older age I can really trust that it is home. I don’t know where that trust comes from or even what home is like, but I know I’m not going to someplace new. I’m going to all the places I’ve known deeply. They’re pointing me to the big deep, the Big Real. I do think homecoming is what it’s all about. 

Father Richard continues to reflect upon finding his home in God in this season of his life:  

Well first, I have to say, I don’t fully know how to live there. I’m used to living for 80 years out of building an education, a persona, a reputation, a career. When we’ve worked at those things for so long, on a very real level we don’t know how to live without them. But thank God, they’re taken away from us. God slows us down, I think necessarily, or we won’t fall into the True Self.  

My understanding of the second half of life is mostly homesickness for the True Self. I want to learn to be who God really created me to be. And I think all God wants me to be is who I really am.

Shared by – https://cac.org/daily-meditations/

Love Deeply

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Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love even more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant. Every time you experience the pain of rejection, absence, or death, you are faced with a choice. You can become bitter and decide not to love again, or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds.

“Into the Darkest Hour” – an Advent/Christmas poem by Madeline L’Engle

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It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hungry yawned the abyss –
and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.

It was a time like this
of fear & lust for power,
license & greed and blight –
and yet the Prince of bliss
came into the darkest hour
in quiet & silent light.

And in a time like this
How to celebrate his birth
When all things fall apart?
Ah! Wonderful it is
with no room on the earth
the stable is our heart.

— Madeleine L’Engle

Celebrating Incarnation –

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Richard Rohr describes why Christmas and celebrating the Incarnation of Jesus is foundational to Franciscan spirituality:

In the first 1200 years of Christianity, the central feast or celebration was Easter, with the high holy days of Holy Week leading up to the celebration of the resurrection of Christ. But in the thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi entered the scene. He intuited that we didn’t need to wait for God to love us through the cross and resurrection. Francis believed the whole thing started with incarnate love. He popularized what we now take for granted as Christmas, which for many became the major Christian feast. Christmas is the Feast of the Incarnation when we celebrate God taking human form in the birth of Jesus.

Francis realized that since God had become flesh—taken on materiality, physicality, humanity—then we didn’t have to wait for Good Friday and Easter to “solve the problem” of human sin: the problem was solved from the beginning. It makes sense that Christmas became the great celebratory feast of Christians because it basically says that it’s good to be human, it’s good to be on this Earth, it’s good to have a body, it’s good to have emotions. We don’t need to be ashamed of any of it! God loves matter and physicality.

With that insight, it’s no wonder Francis went wild over Christmas. (I do too—my little house is filled with candles at Christmastime.) Francis believed that trees should be decorated with lights to show their true status as God’s creations, and that’s exactly what we still do eight hundred years later.

And there’s more: when we speak of Advent or preparing for Christmas, we’re not just talking about waiting for the little baby Jesus to be born. That already happened two thousand years ago. In fact, we’re welcoming the Universal Christ, the Cosmic Christ, the Christ that is forever being born (incarnating) in the human soul and into history.

We do have to make room for such a mystery, because right now there is “no room in the inn.” We see things pretty much in their materiality, but we don’t see the light shining through. We don’t see the incarnate spirit that is hidden inside of everything material.

The early Eastern Church, which too few people in the United States and Western Europe are familiar with, made it very clear that the Incarnation of Christ manifests a universal principle. Incarnation meant not just that God became Jesus, but that God said yes to the material universe and physicality itself. Eastern Christianity understands the mystery of incarnation in the universal sense. So it is always Advent because God is forever coming into the world (see John 1:9).

We’re always waiting to see Spirit revealing itself through matter. We’re always waiting for matter to become a new form in which Spirit is revealed. Whenever that happens, we’re celebrating Christmas. The gifts of incarnation just keep coming! Perhaps this is enlightenment.

Shared via https://cac.org/daily-meditations/ – Center for Action and Contemplation

Adapted from An Advent Meditation with Richard Rohr (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2017), video. No longer available.

God Is Being Itself – Richard Rohr

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The great chain of being was the medieval metaphor for ecology before we spoke of ecosystems. While it was structured as a hierarchy, with each link in the chain “closer” to God, I view it as a philosophical and theological attempt to speak of the interconnectedness of all things on the level of pure “Being.” Today we might call it “the circle of life.” If God is Being Itself (Deus est Ens), as both St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas taught in the thirteenth century, then the great chain became a way of teaching and preserving the inherent dignity of all things that participate in that Divine Being in various ways. For me, it speaks of the inherent sacrality, interconnectedness, and communality of creation.

These are the links in the great chain of being:

Link 1:  The firmament/Earth/minerals within the Earth
Link 2:  The waters upon the Earth (snow, ice, water, steam, mist)
Link 3:  The plants, trees, flowers, and foods that grow upon the Earth
Link 4:  The animals on the Earth, in the skies, and in the seas
Link 5:  The human species, capable of reflecting on the other links
Link 6:  The heavenly realm/Communion of Saints/angels and spirits
Link 7:  God/the Divine Realm/the Mystery that creates a universe as such, which needs a Center, Source, and Ground for any coherence.

Such a graphic metaphor held all things together in an enchanted universe. If we could not see the sacred in nature and creatures, we soon could not see it at all. [1]

As the medieval theologians predicted, once the chain was broken and one link not honored, the whole vision collapsed. Either we acknowledge that God is in all things, or we have lost the basis for seeing God in anything. Once the choice is ours and not God’s, it is merely a world of private preferences and prejudices. The “cosmic egg” is shattered.

Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274), who is called the second founder of the Franciscan Order, took Francis’ intuitive genius and spelled it out into an entire philosophy. “The magnitude of things … clearly manifests the immensity of the power, wisdom, and goodness of the triune God, who by his power, presence, and essence exists uncircumscribed in all things.” [2] Bonaventure expanded on Alan of Lille’s philosophical idea of God as one “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” God is “within all things but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things, but not aloof; below all things, but not debased.” [3] Therefore the origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, fullness, activity, and order of all created things are the very “footprints” and “fingerprints” (vestigia) of God. [4]

[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, insert in A New Cosmology: Nature as the First Bible (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2009). Available as MP3 audio download. 

[2] Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God 1.14, trans. Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 65.  

[3] Bonaventure, Soul’s Journey 5.8; Cousins, 100–101. 

[4] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2001, 2020), 149–150. 

The Bible Breaks the Pattern – By Richard Rohr

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The point that must be remembered is that most of political and church history has been controlled and written by people on the right because they are normally the people in control. One of the few subversive texts in history, believe it or not, is the Bible. The Bible is a most extraordinary text because, again and again, it legitimates, not the people on the top, but invariably the people on the bottom or those who move toward those on the bottom-from Abraham to Moses to Jeremiah to Job to John the Baptist to Jesus. It has taken an amazing degree of denial and selective attention to miss this quite-obvious alternative pattern. After a while, we might get tired of the rejected son, the younger son, the barren woman, the sinner, the outsider always being the chosen one of God! It is the biblical pattern—which we prefer not to see. It takes away our power to exclude “the least of the brothers and sisters” because that is precisely where Jesus says he is to be found (Matthew 25:40)! If indeed women, blacks, members of other religions, gays, and other outsiders are least in our definition, it seems that gives them, in fact, a privileged and revelatory position! They are not to be excluded, but honored. Jesus takes away from us— and from religion —the possibility of creating any class system or any punitive notion. Unfortunately, thus far, it has not worked very well.

+ Adapted from A Lever and a Place to Stand: The Contemplative Stance, the Active Prayer, pp. 98-99.

Incarnationalism – Richard Rohr

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Whenever the human and the divine coexist, at the same time, in the same person, you have Christianity. I don’t know that it finally matters what Scriptures you read, liturgies you attend, or moral positions you hold about this or that, as much as it is how you live trustfully inside of God’s one world. This creates honest people, people who don’t waste time proving they’re right, superior, or saved. They just try to live and love the daily mystery that they are in the loving presence of God. “God comes to you disguised as your life,” as Paula D’Arcy proclaimed the first time we taught together. Imagine that!

There are basically four worldviews: (1) reality is just matter, (2) reality is just spirit, (3) through religion and morality, you can work to put matter and spirit together (the most common religious position), and (4) the material world has always been the place where Spirit is revealed. You cannot put them together–they already are together, as in Jesus. Only the fourth position, incarnationalism, deserves to be called authentic Christianity. It has little to do with the right rituals, only the right reality.

+ Adapted from Great Themes of Paul: Life as Participation (Recording).