ln 1965, Sr. Antona Ebo joined an interfaith group of 54 priests, nuns, rabbis and lay people going to Selma, Alabama for a protest march. After Dr. King’s assassination in 1968 she helped found the National Black Sisters Conference. In 1989 she earned the conference’s Harriet Tubman Award for her service and leadership and being a “Moses to her people.” She died November 11, 2017 at 93. A seasoned contemplative dissident!

Contemplation can be a vague word, so I’m always eager to find new ways to describe it. Phrases such as “a long, loving look at the Real” and “seeing things as they really are” helped shape my understanding and inform my experience from my early years of monastic formation. John 10:10 includes, “I came that you may have life.” Fullness of life. Vitality. This reminds me of Howard Thurman’s counsel: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Love, vision, reality, vitality. St. John of the Cross uses more traditional, catholic Carmelite description of contemplation: “a secret and peaceful and loving inflow of God, which, if not hampered, fires the soul in the spirit of love,” (Dark Night, chapter 10). And if the word “God” repels you, try something like “Reality” or “Liberation” or “Life.”

But how do we find our way into this fullness? In addition to finding ways to describe contemplation, I love discovering practical descriptions of how we get there. In traditional Christian spirituality, we say we cannot “achieve” contemplation because it’s a gift. But if we use St. John of the Cross’s language, maybe we can learn not to “hamper” the gift. That’s what meditation is for.

So the next question: how can I build a more meditative life? What practices can help plow the soil of my soul so that I receive the seed, the inflow of love?

I recently raised the question of whether today contemplation is simply out of the picture in today’s world of raw power. Then I listened to an interview with writer Gal Beckerman, whose new book is How to be a Dissident, and it struck me that he has a wonderful ten-point practice for coming alive, for plowing our soul-ground to prepare for contemplation. I’m on a waiting list for the book, so I can’t review it yet, but here’s the gist of the interview.

Journalist Anand Giridharadas began by asking Beckerman why religious people promote death rather than vitality, especially when religions enshrine non-violence. Beckerman suggests that some people understand religion as a set of edicts. The believer’s job is to obey the edict. Maybe Jesus says love your enemy, but then in 1095 Pope Urban urges “men of all ranks, knights and foot-soldiers, rich and poor, to hasten to exterminate this vile race from the lands of our brethren,” so we obey.

Beckerman is interested in how some people find their way into a deep, inviolable center, an integral conscience, that allows them to listen to something deeper than an edict from an outside power. Here are his observations:

We’re social creatures, and that’s a great virtue, but it can also slide into habitual conformity, what my own tradition calls “the herd mentality.” We don’t want to stick out; we want to belong. Here’s where Thomas Merton’s “shipwreck” metaphor comes in. When your ship is sinking, do you go down in solidarity with everyone stuck onboard? Or maybe you know how to swim, so you break and swim for help. That breaking away comes at a cost.

But Beckerman notes that while you may feel dumb standing on a corner by yourself or with a couple of other people with protest signs, you may also touch someone’s mind or heart and move them toward a new commitment. Most dissidents go through this “desert,” as did the Jews and Jesus. As did Rosa Parks when she got on the bus. Solitude can transform us toward a deep, courageous solidarity with victims of injustice.

Beckerman distinguishes between pessimism and fatalism. A fatalistic approach insists that the worst will happen: no doubt. Pessimism only claims that the worst is probably going to happen. But it might not. And that gives us a motive to act, to help bend that unruly arc of history toward the good.

His approach reminds me of Miguel de la Torre’s embrace of “hopelessness” as an antidote to a kind of “hope” that passively awaits the world’s “inevitable” evolution toward goodness and justice and freedom. De la Torre says the best we can hope for is to “screw with” the systems that infringe our human dignity. We may not defeat the system, but we can rattle it and maybe hearten and help liberate the people trapped in it or even its managers.

 It occurs to me that Jesus had this kind of pessimism. He doesn’t fatalistically condemn the rich or just assume they’ll keep being as cruel as ever. Instead, he’s aware that it’s tough to get your yacht through a needle’s eye. And impossible without a change of heart. As for himself, he wishes the cup of condemnation and torture would pass from him, but he’s pretty sure it won’t.

Miraculously, this didn’t stop him. Was it because of his union with Abba? His ineffaceable vision of a healed, just, and loving community of all creatures in Love? Or his wildly loving abandonment to total solidarity with human poverty? All of the above?

This one’s tricky because it’s like explaining a joke. Not funny. And we religious and spiritual types have a complicated relationship with reverence. For example, my root teacher was horrified when he saw a food fight in a seminary many years ago. He couldn’t imagine that someone committed to spiritual transformation would desecrate something as sacred as food. I can’t either. Not funny.

On the other hand, Jesus had an eye for the absurdity of our human situation, especially when it came to religious and political leaders who expect us to idolize them. He could call the powerful Herod a fox (Luke 13:32). He had a winsome irreverence because of his mature reverence for God, the poor and lost. My own formation included this teaching: let’s take God (Love, Reality, Compassion) so seriously that we take everything else, including ourselves, lightheartedly. Even that is complex because the world is “charged with the grandeur of God,” bathed in grace. Nothing to laugh at in its goodness. Still, the prophets and Jesus find a little wiggle room for the iconoclastic laughter that posits the irreversible wonder of Resurrection.

Beckerman introduced me to the terms “punching down” and “punching up.” Jesus never punched down. He didn’t belittle “little ones.” He didn’t make fun of the broken. But he really riled the mighty with his barbs, and I imagine he did it with a grin that delighted the lowly.

Beckerman notes how Russian lawyer, anti-corruption activist, and politician Alexei Navalny made jokes in prison. Polish dissident Adam Michnik thanked his menacing jailers during the years of Polish Solidarity because incarceration gave him more time to think and write, which was more powerful than protest in the streets. Irreverence toward the cruel has a way of planting a liberating doubt about their claim to total control and unassailable position.

When Beckerman mentioned this, I thought of an old heresy: fideism. It’s the belief that Truth is disconnected from reason. You don’t need science or logic. You just need to believe. I once heard a politician say that he wasn’t worried about global warming because “we know who’s in charge.” Since God controls the universe, God will take care of it. Either the scientists are lying or God will intervene to make sure we don’t go extinct.

And “God” might intervene in the form of a strongman. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat describes strongmen such as Mussolini, “who damage or destroy democracy, use masculinity as a tool of political legitimacy, and promise law and order rule—and then legitimize lawless behavior by financial, sexual, and other predators.”

That’s a pretty crude summary of fideism, but it feels like that’s the cult many powerful people rely on us to join. So it’s important to ask questions and encourage others to think critically.

But if you know someone in a cult, reason won’t help them exit. Dr. Steven Hassan, who was in the “Moonie” cult in the seventies advises that we try to connect with the cult member’s past, with good memories of family or friends, while seeking agreement where possible and asking thoughtful questions with genuine respect and concern. This is not attacking or debating with scathing logic, but it is a reasonable and effective way to help someone exit the confinement and dangers of a siloed existence.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Harry Potter characters: Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody. His motto: “Constant vigilance!” It also reminds me of the nightly prayer from the Divine Office: “Be sober, be watchful, for your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” Devil talk can be dangerous in itself. St. Teresa of Avila said she was more scared of people who see the devil everywhere than she was of the devil himself. Me, too. But when we look at the headlines, we see that predators prowl about in high places. Fraudsters vie for your money and your vote. Liars defame good people.

So it’s good to be vigilant. And bear witness to what you see. Share your photo of the illegal arrest or use of force.

Being watchful can include learning some history, so we can be prepared for the grifts: we’ve seen them in the past so we’re not too surprised to see them again. When we know something about Jim Crow 1.0, we are alert to the subtler Jim Crow 2.0: new language for the same old snake oil.  As Supreme Court Justice Kagan put it in a recent dissent, “Members of the racial minority can still go to the polls and cast a ballot. But given the State’s racially polarized voting, they cannot hope—in the way the State’s White citizens can—to elect a person whom they think will well represent their interests.”

My own life is pretty safe and secure as long as I don’t have a medical emergency and can keep working. But looking back, it was somewhat reckless to head to Afghanistan at seventeen, take a crash Buddhist meditation course at twenty, and enter a Christian monastery at twenty two.

But Beckerman mentioned a much more dangerous and culture-changing event: the Children’s Crusade of 1963. It happened on May 2, my tenth birthday. I had no idea that while I was running around the back yard fueled by cake and ice cream, kids in Birmingham faced fire hoses and police dogs. Reckless. And effective: the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964.

Lately when I hear about loyalty, I may think of subservience and sycophants. That is, blind loyalty to a boss: obey the edict. Or a tribalism that equates power with violence against the “other.” But Beckerman means the deep solidarity that bonds people who are reckless enough to band together and demand truth and justice.

He mentions the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina who have marched weekly for fifty years, demanding to know what happened to their children and grandchildren who were abducted by the government between 1976 and 1983.

Here in the U.S., I think about Minneapolis. ICE agents came to subjugate citizens, and as writer and activist Rebecca Solnit puts it,

the populace was fearless in its defiance. It was a defiance motivated by a kind of moral beauty — solidarity, care, loving thy neighbor — that this administration has trouble imagining, especially when that solidarity reaches across differences of ethnicity and religion, as it did in Minneapolis.

It’s the power of friendship.

Or, as Wendell Berry put it in his “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” practice Resurrection. Act as if you’ve already won, like the Kingdom has come, and we’re free to live in a community of lovingkindness.

This sums up all the above. Beckerman emphasizes that much of life is “pre-political,” and effective dissidents tap into this basic humanity that can cut across alienating barriers—of race, class, gender, and status. For example, whether I’m black or white, Christian or Muslim, employed or not, I would like to live where I can earn a living wage by working forty hours a week. And wouldn’t it be lovely if we could help take good care of each other? Maybe have affordable health care?

Basic, universal human dignity means no one may be dehumanized. “Every human person possesses an infinite dignity, inalienably grounded in his or her very being, which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter,” as a recent Vatican document puts it.

Only contemplation makes enough room for this kind of openheartedness.

Dissidents have an intuition of eternal values. They sense that Reality is bigger than this time right now. They know that although they may seem crazy today, as abolitionists once seemed loony, they anchor themselves in a transcendent, liberating power. Today we have poverty abolitionists. As the rueful title of Omar al Akkad’s recent book puts it, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Not yet. But one day.

Contemplation and meditation are usually described in religious terms, rife with dogmatic assumptions and checkered histories. But we now understand that just as contemplative practices can move out of the monastery and into our daily lives of work and family, the language may also leave the cloister. That’s what people like Beckerman help make possible. If you are aiming for a more meditative life oriented to becoming more alive and contemplative, more human in my own understanding, I hope these ten qualities will help you on your way.