Putting Contemplation into Action, Holding Action in Contemplation

By Ryan Pemberton

February 16, 2026

“I no longer believe that we can change anything until we have first changed ourselves.
And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned from this war.”
–Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941–1943

I wasn’t expecting to hear from my colleague, DeSean, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. But when he started speaking, I was immediately overwhelmed with sadness.

The day before our call I had traveled to the Bay Area to take part in an MLK Day retreat hosted by New College Berkeley. Led by Dr. Lisa Marie Bowens—the first tenured African American biblical scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary—our intimate group spent two days together reflecting on the genre of apocalyptic literature and its influence on the preaching, writings, and activism of Dr. King. Following our morning session, one of our group members—Pastor BK from Oakland—cautioned our group to count the cost of nonviolent peacemaking efforts. His voice was sober and heavy, toned with the reality of so many lives lost to this work, and the ripple effects on their loved ones.

Just after this reflection, Dr. DeSean Dyson, Telos’ Director of U.S. Programming, shared with me the news that Mark Myles had been shot and killed in Selma. Three months earlier, Myles had led our Mosaic cohort of pastors through a half-day training on Kingian nonviolence at the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth, and Reconciliation. In addition to his esteemed leadership in Selma, his mentorship for the community’s youth, and his commitment to training others in the work of peacemaking, last year, Mark became the proud father to his first son.

I was speechless. Moving through the kitchen as if in a dream, I shared the news with my fellow retreatants. They were all similarly affected. Hands were placed on shoulders. Heads were lowered. After a time of silence, Dr. Bowens asked Pastor BK if he would be willing to say a prayer. BK lowered himself to his knees in the living room where we were all gathered, and he offered his prayers for Mark Myles’ family, his community, and our nation.

This is what we do in such times, as the body of Christ: we acknowledge our grief with honesty, we offer up to God that which we cannot carry on our own, and we link our hands in the work of nonviolent peacemaking—recognizing that we are not alone, but we are already and always united in this work.

Entering 2026, our Mosaic cohort has been learning about integrating contemplation and action, reminded that the work of peacemaking is both internal and external. To this end, we’ve been reading two books together: Finding Peace Here & Now: How Ignatian Spirituality Leads Us to Healing and Wholeness, by Eric Clayton, and Blessed Are the Others: Jesus’ Way in a Violent World, by Andrew DeCort. Both books are deepening our understanding that peacemaking requires our inner attention as much as our external action.

“We want to respond. We want to fix. We want to do,” Clayton writes in Finding Peace Here & Now. “But too often, all we can do is be present to that suffering” (44). Being present with suffering means being grounded in a rooted, resilient peace ourselves, one that exceeds our present circumstances.

As we turn to a new year, the violence of the past continues to haunt us. Reports from across our country and around the world crackle and spark with disturbing accounts of more violent deaths. Here in the U.S., our neighbors face rising rates of kidnapping, separation, and violent attacks from ICE agents, including the shooting and killings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE agents, spurring increased fear and outrage. Abroad, reports continue to reveal more incidents of West Bank residents being removed from their land and their homes by armed colonial settlers. In response, we hear those in power blame victims of this violence for their own deaths. Our own President boasts of his achievements in peacemaking.

The Prophet’s words resound down through the centuries, resonating in our hearts and minds: “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace” (Jeremiah 6:14).

This is no time to boast of peace.

The temptation, for me, in moments like this is twofold. I’m tempted to look away, to distract myself—in an effort toward self-care and maintaining my own equilibrium. I cannot, after all, care for others if I am not taking care of myself. Or, I’m tempted to jettison my spiritual practices in my hurry to respond. How can I make time for morning reading and prayer when so much is unfolding so quickly? But our Lord calls us to something different: to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. This “as” in our Lord’s command is key. To live into this call, I’m realizing, requires relying on the wisdom of our faith practices and traditions: to integrate my contemplation practices with faithful action.

When my mind is spiraling at the news of violence in our streets and federal agents terrorizing our neighbors, I am grounded by setting aside time each morning to read and reflect silently on scripture. By sitting in silent prayer, whether the words come this day or not. By borrowing the prayers of others when my own feel weak or thin.

Likewise, I am grounded by reaching out to loved ones to ask how they are doing—as I am honest with how I am doing. Seated around my friend Chris’s dinner table with his family, invited to stay for dinner after a spontaneous stop on a Sunday evening, we hold hands and I’m invited to pray. The words come, surprisingly, from somewhere deep within. Sharing a meal of cellentani pasta and broccolini, our conversation moves seamlessly from travels and food to tragic headlines and mental health. Weeks earlier, Chris had witnessed the court case for a longtime friend who had been surrounded by several unmarked vehicles and forcibly removed from his jobsite by a group of ICE agents. When I leave their home in the cold dark night, after a hug and an exchange of gratitude, I feel noticeably lighter, more grounded, clear-eyed. And not because we avoided disturbing news events, but precisely because we engaged them together: in prayer and honest, mutual conversation, around a table.

When our Mosaic pastors cohort gathers virtually each month, we intentionally take the first five minutes or so of our call to ask everyone how they’re doing, giving everyone an opportunity to seriously consider the question, and to respond honestly. From there, this group of church leaders are invited to close their eyes, to turn off their cameras if they like, and to get comfortable for a reading of scripture. The passage is read aloud several times, following the practice of Lectio Divina, offering a prompt before each reading to pay attention to what words they notice, what they feel in their body, what invitation they might hear. This practice, too, centers and grounds us, when we are feeling overwhelmed.

My pastor friend Seth has a weekly practice of walking the neighborhood surrounding his parish and praying for his community. This embodied practice of bathing his neighborhood in prayer does something important for him, too, I expect—putting him in touch with the needs and even the joys of his community, rather than remaining at a distance.

This importance of attending to and loving others as we attend to and love ourselves was brought home for me in reading Etty Hillesum’s words. Remarkably, Hillesum maintained a generous, abiding inner peace even as she was forced to register as a Jew at Gestapo offices in Amsterdam in 1942—prepared for what she knew was coming. “The rottenness of others is in us, too,” she writes.

“…I really see no other solution than to turn inward and root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything until we have first changed ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned from this war” (Hillesum, An Interrupted Life, 84, as quoted in Blessed Are the Others, 71).

Coming to terms with her own capacity for evil, Etty was able to have compassion for others when they enacted evil—even in the thick horrors of the Holocaust. This seemingly superhuman capacity for compassion is not reserved for the few; it is available for all. But it begins with the work of internal peacemaking: paying attention to and being honest about our own capacity for evil, acknowledging how our own words and actions have harmed others, receiving God’s gift of grace and transformative love, and being filled by the Spirit to have compassion for ourselves. Then we can offer compassion to others.

The cost of peacemaking is real, and we do well to count the cost. Two days after teaching our Mosaic cohort last month, Andrew DeCort was zip-tied and loaded onto a police bus alongside a hundred clergy members protesting ICE’s violence and escalating deportations in sub-zero temperatures outside the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. The costs of this work are significant. We must not lose sight of the critical importance of undergirding our visible efforts toward peace with the work of internal peacemaking—especially when creating enemies out of our neighbors is so tempting.

While violence and conflict continues to demand our attention and faithful action, may we not jettison our regular practices of contemplation and internal peacemaking in our eagerness to respond. May our spiritual exercises, readings, and prayers ground us in the creative wisdom and transformative love of Jesus. And may the Holy Spirit meet us here amidst our own needs for compassion, and then move us into the work of nonviolent peacemaking with and for our neighbors, in all the particularities that our moment and our contexts require, for the embodied Shalom of all people.

Get Connected

Couldn’t make it to Good Shepherd NYC’s Lighting the Way workshop recently? You can now watch the recording by following the link!
Save the Date and plan to join us in D.C. for Telos’ Christian Leaders Gathering: “Advocating for Peace & Justice in the Fierce Urgency of Now,” June 10–12, 2026, Culture House, Washington, D.C.
Reminder! Our next Mosaic cohort applications open in April. Keep an eye out for more information coming soon!