The bestselling author of Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life and The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe, he founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987 to help people deepen in their inner lives so that their activism and social engagement might be more sustainable and impactful. Rohr frequently says the most important word in the title is the word “and:”

“We need both action and contemplation to have a whole spiritual journey. It doesn’t matter which comes first; action may lead you to contemplation and contemplation may lead you to action. But finally, they need and feed each other.”

In 2013, his work at the Center blossomed when he joined together with modern-day mystics and wisdom teachers Cynthia Bourgeault and James Finley to form the Living School for Action and Contemplation.

This multi-year program guides small cohorts of students in gaining an experiential understanding of the Christian mystical tradition and how contemplation and action fuse together. Over the past ten years, hundreds of students have been gathered together to learn, process, and experience what Richard calls “incarnational mysticism” and the faculty has expanded to include Barbara Holmes and Brian McLaren.

As an alumnus of the Living School for Action and Contemplation, I can attest: it is a powerful counter-weight to the lack of spiritual formation I’ve experienced and witnessed in local church settings.

In many ways, this space feels like a sort of underground monastery, training folks in a spirituality of depth and mystery.

But here’s my favorite thing about the Living School as a program: it was described on the first day as a sacrificial pancake. In other words, it is always changing. The folks who lead it are always tinkering and questioning what works and what doesn’t. It’s a living program, offering the rest of us an example in our own institutions and communities of what human-centered programs might operate like.

I highly recommend The Living School for anyone who is questioning their Christian upbringing or looking to delve deep, in an embodied way, into the Christian mystical tradition.

(Here’s my approach to contemplative spirituality, impacted in a huge way by Richard’s teachings.)

Influences + Teachers

• Carl Jung

• The Enneagram

• Julian of Norwich

• Ken Wilber

• Teresa of Avila

• Thomas Merton

Approach to Spirituality

Richard approaches all of his work through the lens of what he calls “incarnational mysticism.”

Years ago, someone asked if I could sum up all my teachings in two words. My response was “incarnational mysticism.” The first word, “incarnational,” is Christianity’s specialty and should always be our essential theme. We believe God became embodied…

Many Christians are scared of the word “mysticism.” But a mystic is simply one who has moved from mere belief or belonging systems to actual inner experience of God.

Or another phrase: embodied experience.

Richard Rohr believes and teaches that people need to have an embodied experience of the Divine in order to truly undergo the kind of consciousness shift that Jesus called for in the Bible and that mystics of all major religions have given themselves to.

He writes:

Until people have had some mystical, inner spiritual experience, there is no point in asking them to follow the ethical ideals of Jesus or to really understand religious beliefs beyond the level of formula. At most, such moral ideals and doctrinal affirmations are only a source of deeper anxiety because we don’t have the power to follow any of Jesus’ major teachings about forgiveness, love of enemies, nonviolence, humble use of power, a simple lifestyle, and so on…

✍️ How acquainted are you with your inner life? Have you had this kind of intimate experience of the Divine/What Is? What emerges within you when you read this?

Conceptual Tool: The Tricycle

Here is a conceptual tool Richard uses to help people shift into an experience-first mindset:

Imagine a tricycle, with one wheel in front and two behind.

This tricycle is how Christians interpret the world and how we engage in the process of spiritual knowing. (I say Christians here because of Richard’s emphasis and my general audience, but this tool can be changed to be used with other faiths and secularly as well.) It is a dynamic process that brings together information from three different sources.

The front wheel, or way of interpreting the world, is through one’s experience.

When we observe and interpret the events of our lives, we do so primarily through what we’ve seen, heard, and been taught. No matter what we might like to think, the front wheel of our tricycle is necessarily our own experience of the world.

The back wheels are scripture and tradition.

One of Richard’s favorite things to do when he teaches this tool is to draw an immediate distinction between Protestants and Catholics.

Catholics have historically tried to ride their tricycle leaning hard on tradition; protestants have done the same with scripture. Because of this, both groups have had a tendency to teach an incomplete understanding of spiritual knowledge and depth. And in general, both have avoided, evaded, or rejected the role of personal experience in the process.

So, we Catholics shouted tradition, but we usually lived in very recent traditions. Many Protestants shouted Scripture, but used Scripture entirely inside of their own culture and their own biases, paying attention to certain texts, absolutely ignoring other texts…

He continues:

There's a more holistic way of knowing that includes the mind, but we would say it includes the heart, it includes the body, it includes the intuition. That's full-access knowing, full-body knowing, full-person knowing. That was the spiritual way of knowing, and ironically, it has more to do with loving that it does with knowing.

✍️ If you grew up Christian or currently consider yourself Christian, what is your relationship with these three wheels? Do you lean to one side or another? How do the three wheels of your tricycle work together or work against each other?