Dear friends, I’m going to be quick to the point, and then make a bigger point.   The point:  This Thursday night through Saturday I’m going to be participating in The Justice Conference in Philadelphia with World Relief, to be with a few dear dear friends and joining 7,000 others to consider again God’s heart for justice.  Starting Thursday night, I’ll be blogging quite a bit here on Coracle’s blog and I hope you’ll check in regularly to share what I’m seeing.

The larger point, and why I’m taking this opportunity to be a bit more explicit and personal:  Coracle’s tag line is ‘Spiritual Formation through Kingdom Action’.  While it’s demonstrably clear that Coracle is offering many things for spiritual formation through retreats and spiritual direction etc, we are just as committed to the ministries of justice and compassion for the ‘least of these’ who Jesus loves so much and identifies with (Matthew 25.31-46).   This aspect of Coracle’s ministry is less coherent at this point than others, but it’s still very much a part of it and we’re finding our way.

Still we’re already providing food for hungry folk and children in the Shenandoah Valley through a variety of efforts, going overseas on mission to places like South Sudan and Congo, Israel/Palestine, southeast Asia, and maybe China in 2014 and writing about it on our blog, offering retreats for the leadership teams of socially active Christian ministries,  ministering to the local homeless in Harrisonburg through Tara’s work (see more about this on TV last night), our other spiritual directors like Lucas Koach and Margot Eyring are neck deep in trying to bless and be blessed by the poor, and creation care is a deeply important though yet to be fully articulated part of what we’re about.  There’s more to come, and as it does we’ll find more words to articulate it in a way that makes sense and offers ways for others to join in.

The point is, in our heart of hearts we hope and see that Coracle is not just a ‘contemplative’ effort, but one that is ‘active’ as well.  When I was being trained as a spiritual director a few years ago now, my ‘thesis’ paper was on the marriage of contemplation and action, titled, “Two Wings for the Body:  On Contemplation and Action” and there I wrote

Despite the inherent tension between the two, particularly felt when one tries to integrate contemplation and action on a daily basis, the proper balance must be sought, for contemplation and action need each other. 

Writing in Compassion, Henri Nouwen’s insights regarding prayer are to be applied to contemplation: “Prayer and action can never be seen as contradictory or mutually exclusive.  Prayer without action grows in a powerless pietism, and action without prayer degenerates into questionable manipulation.  If prayer leads us into a deeper unity with the compassionate Christ, it will always give rise to concrete acts of service.”

Thomas Merton used a more graphic illustration of “the spring and the stream” to make the same point.  “Unless the waters of the spring are living and flow outward, he said, the spring only becomes a stagnant pool.  And if the spring loses contact with the spring which is its source, it dries up.  In this image of Merton’s, contemplation is the spring of living water, and action is the stream that flows out from it to others; it is the same water.”

Another helpful metaphor is that of two wings of the same bird.  Obviously, both wings are needed for a bird to fly, to function as a bird.   The two wings enable its body to fly, to live into its essence.  It could be said that contemplation and action are both needed for a Christian to live into his or her essence, to be who they are, the Body of Christ.