When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the first person that comes to mind and why?
The measure of a successful life is meaning. There may be other, more popular ways of “measuring” success; after all, “successful” is a subjective accolade. My standard rests on person’s sensed and shared meaning.
Using this criteria, I think immediately of Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan friar and spiritual teacher. He lives his sense of meaning through simplicity, humility, and wisdom-sharing. His life invites others to seek out the path he is following. His way is practicing Presence and teaching contemplation as “a long loving look at the Real.” Through his books, his daily teaching through email devotions, and his lectures, Richard models what it means to be awake and alive.
Thirty-five years ago, Fr. Richard founded the Center for Action and Contempation (CAC) to teach activists to appreciate and find motivation for their work in love rather than anger and/or hate. While these latter two burn hot, they also tend to burn out. Love is a renewable, sustainable motivation for action in the world.
I speak from my own experience in saying that reading and studying with Richard through the Living School changed my life. For me, that is marked by a more spacious, less reactive way of engaging the world. I receive and view the world differently because of how the core faculty including Richard modeled practice and embodiment of Love; through practice, each can learn to approach life with more both-and and less either-or. It is a contemplative spirituality.
I suspect everyone admires the ones who opened their eyes and invited them to see differently. It is even through my practice of what I learned in the Living School that my understanding of success became less about the material and more about the intangible.
Infinitely Precious 