Progressive Christianity embracing Contemplative Christianity?

Richard Rohr (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Not that this hasn't happened before, although many contemplative Christians are rightly worried about being labeled into any kind of theological or political pigeon hole. After all, folks like Fr. Richard Rohr who focus on the contemplative dimensions of Christianity sure sound somewhat progressive; but he and others are concerned about the danger of labels as rough description becoming labels as ideological straightjackets.

In any case, it can only be a good thing for those who espouse post-modernist, liberal, or progressive Christianity to seriously embrace contemplative prayer, meditation, and the like. The big danger for the progressives is to try to make everything into an intellectualized symbol or metaphor in opposition to a literalized interpretation. It reduces the power of wonder and mystery to the neurological correlates and psychological effects of wonder and mystery.

In other words, it's just the progressive counter-point to the fundamentalist view but is still based primarily or entirely on "left-brain consciousness". The idea of simply being with the poetic imagery, the mythical narrative, and the like, being immediately open to it and within it and experiencing it directly, becomes unavailable. The fact that you may at one instance react to a scriptural passage or hymn or prayer on a literal level, and at another instance symbolic, or at other times seeing it with both perspectives at once, and at still other times the experience is so direct there is no discrimination or analysis at all, is only available when the intuitive, holistic, or "right-brain consciousness" is also honored and permitted.

The result is that the religious elements are cleaned up to strictly secular, modernistic standards, with nothing that sounds like superstition or supernaturalism, which is basically how left-brain consciousness mixed with cynicism sees the spiritual--as full of idiotic or ignorant woo. This is because the fundamentalists, who try to take the spiritual seriously but do so in a left-brain way, turn the spiritual into idiotic or ignorant woo. To outsiders, it's all assumed to just be the same, and progressive Christians are tempted to disavow the whole lot and make their religious heritage into harmless little stories that no one should really take too seriously.