Contemplative by Catastrophe

The MAGA catastrophe gives us another chance to see through our illusions and reckon with the reality of who we are...

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I. My attraction to the contemplative life began in my early thirties, fifty-plus years ago. I was a community organizer in Washington, D.C., focused on issues of racial justice. One day, in a used bookstore, I ran across the work of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose journey inward gave him a prophetic voice on the very issues I was working on, allowing him to see the American dilemma more clearly than those of us on the front lines. Like thousands of young activists who read Merton in the 1950s and 60s, I wanted whatever he was having, tucked away in his monastery.

Unfortunately, there were several obstacles between monasticism and me. I was the married father of three, had a job on which my family depended, was not Roman Catholic, got testy with authority, and could not stand regimentation. So instead of becoming a novice at the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton’s monastery, I ordered one of their famous fruitcakes, which are soaked and aged in fine Kentucky bourbon.

Fortified with fruitcake, I began searching for a way to live a contemplative life in the midst of our wounded world. I learned about the mystical stream that runs through all of the world’s religious traditions. I went on guided retreats and tried several popular contemplative techniques; e.g., chanting a mantra, meditating, and lectio divina. But I never found a formal practice or a path that worked for me.

Then it struck me that being a contemplative does not depend on adopting a particular technique. All such practices have the same aim: to help us see through the deceptions of self and world and listen for what Howard Thurman called “the sound of the genuine” within and around us. So contemplation can be defined in terms of its function, rather than its form. Contemplation, as I understand it, is any way one has of penetrating illusion and touching reality.

II. Life offers endless opportunities to find out how flimsy our illusions are and draw closer to the reality of our lives. That’s what happens, for example, when I fail at something important to me. When I succeed, I rarely learn from the experience. I congratulate myself on how clever I am, firming up one of my favorite illusions in the process. When failure bursts my ego-balloon, I’m forced to ask what went wrong, often learning (or relearning) that the “what” is within me. Failure slams me into hard truths about my limitations, truths I ignore when I’m basking in the glow of the illusions that success can breed.

Likewise, the suffering that comes with being human gives me a chance to practice contemplation, as I learned from spending time in clinical depression. Carl Jung could have used me as Exhibit A for his theory about one source of depression: I had refused to integrate my “shadow" into my understanding of self, which gave fear and shame even more power over my life. When I finally emerged from that deadly darkness, I was glad to embrace my life as the mixed bag every life is, and to find solace in life’s many small daily blessings. I learned that it’s far safer to live in reality, no matter how hard it may be, than in illusions that can do us in.

III. Some folks seem able to get ahead of life’s train wrecks via one of those classic contemplative practices that never worked for me—practices that take them to safe ground before their illusions come crashing down. I call those folks “Contemplatives by Intention,” and I salute them. But most of the time, that’s not me. Instead, I am a “Contemplative by Catastrophe.” My wake-up calls to the reality of self and world come after the wreck has happened and I’m digging out of the debris.

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I don’t recommend this path to anyone. But if you, dear reader, are anything like me, I come as the bearer of glad tidings. Catastrophe can be a contemplative path, pitched and perilous as it may be, a path that can take us from our death-dealing illusions to life-giving realities—if we keep trying to turn experience into insight, whether as individuals or as a nation.

IV. Turning experience into insight is exactly what We the People have failed to do, as demonstrated by the world-class catastrophe we’re living in today. For more than 250 years, we’ve failed to confront, reflect on and learn from on our national shadow, the one cast by white supremacy, refusing to integrate that shadow into our view of ourselves.

Today we have yet another chance to grow beyond our illusions before it’s too late. We live under a MAGA ideology that’s so ugly, ignorant, cruel, nihilistic and in-your-face that we can’t pretend not to see what’s going on. So we have yet another chance to stop spinning self-serving illusions about who we are, illusions that have taken us far from reality to the edge of a cliff where we must get real or die.

Primary among those illusions is the pretense that the U.S.A., above all nations, is the land of the free where all are treated equally. Here’s a very brief sketch of the reality behind that illusion. Let’s call it “The American Recipe for Nation-Building:”

(1) Commit genocide against indigenous peoples and seize the land they live on. (2) Build an economy on the backs of enslaved human beings. (3) One century later, declare the enslaved “free” by “winning” a war that has yet to end. (4) Create Jim Crow laws to keep the “freed slaves” “in their place” and curb their political power. (5) Double down with the New Jim Crow, using racially-biased mass incarceration as a new source of cheap labor and oppression. (6) Pass laws that will make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and finance a massive network of ICE agents and prison camps to “protect” white Americans against immigrants of color except, of course, those whose labor we need. (7) Squash all remnants of DEI, a seditious practice based on the false belief that there are wrongs to be righted in the U.S. (8) Ban books, muffle teachers, defund public media and undermine education from Head Start to Harvard to further stifle the truth about this country. (9) Vilify people who tell the truth as unpatriotic and unworthy to be Americans. (10) Let the few enjoy the spoils.

V. MAGA is a massive illusion machine, led by an authoritarian racist whose life is a tissue of lies. Its followers live in fear of what will become of them if America fulfills its promise of equality for all, and will do anything to whitewash the American story and keep oppressing people of color.

But in the midst of the MAGA catastrophe, the rest of us have a chance to become contemplatives, to see through all the lies, and reach for the Beloved Community found on the other side. Step one is to stop looking at MAGA’s America and saying, “This is not who we are.” This is exactly who we are, and have been from the beginning of this nation.

Yes, America is other things, too—good, true, beautiful, creative and noble things. But until we’re able to weave the dark thread of white supremacy into the fabric of our self-understanding, we will continue to be done in by the lies that gave us the MAGAverse, and keep returning to the murderous motifs of our history. Let’s see through our illusions, get honest about who we are, and get back to work creating “a more perfect Union.”

[NOTES: My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE. I post on Substack every Friday, as time and energy allow. Free as well as paid subscriptions will always have access to everything I post. FINALLY: Soon the Senate will seal the fate of NPR and PBS. PLEASE: call your Senator today urging him or her to protect our public media, an oasis of truth in MAGA’s desert of glorified ignorance and deceit.]