YES! With Thanks by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

"How can we root ourselves in time? By facing, first of all, the problem of our uprootedness."

If we speak about the spiritual work of our time, there are three questions I would like to ask. What characterizes our time? What is the spiritual work for our time? And, how are we to go about it? Of course, each of these questions could be answered in a great variety of ways. I am under no illusion that my way of answering them is the only one, but at least it might work to prime the pump and help your own ideas come forth.

If we ask what characterizes our time, what is typical for our time in contrast to other epochs in history, I offer one word: uprootedness. It’s a very negative aspect, but I’m afraid we’ll have to look at the negative ones in order to see the task, and after all, we are concerned with the spiritual work for our time.

Think, for instance, of the uprootedness that comes as a by-product of mobility. Now, mobility in itself is quite positive – it is very good that we can move quickly and easily from place to place. But there are families in the United States who move more than 20 times while their children are growing up. Think of our uprootedness from our families – how blessed people are nowadays when they still know their grandparents. There are many people who have had little or no contact with their grandparents, who hardly know their names.

Or think of our uprootedness from the Earth. Do you know the garden from which your fruits and vegetables come? How many people in the world know the well from which their water comes? They never give a thought to it, yet this used to be rather important.

We are also uprooted from animals. As children, most of us had very different attitudes towards animals than we do now. In a test recently, children were asked what a world would be like in which there were no people, only animals. The small children didn’t understand the question – for them, animals are people; we all belong together. As adults we have lost that understanding.

Think of our uprootedness from our bodies and what it takes to experience our bodies as the embodiment of spirit and of our lives and to experience ourselves as body-spirits, not spirits or souls that are caught in a body or, as Christopher Fry puts it, “half-witted angels strapped to the back of a mule.”

How many of us can say with conviction that we are really rooted in a tradition, rooted in the sense of getting nourishment from it? Up to now, religious tradition and the forms it brought forth supported faith. In our time, faith supports the religious forms, bears with them. If you have enough faith, you’ll put up with the religion that you belong to. Now we must be rooted in something else in order to support these religious forms.

We are speaking of our time. How rooted are we in time at all? Most of the time, 48 percent of us is clinging to the past, 51 percent is stretching out frantically towards the future and 1 percent is left to be present where we are in this moment. So, even time isn’t ours; it’s just passing us by while we are busy with nostalgic memories or impatient fantasies.

How can we root ourselves in time? By facing, first of all, the problem of our uprootedness; facing the challenge that emerges from it; and therefore facing the task. The task is re-rooting ourselves – in a place, in social structures, in this Earth, in our body, in tradition, in time.

» next page