A Broad Wisdom Tradition

Father Richard describes the importance of Tradition, which includes a legacy of wisdom, beliefs, practices, prayers, and rituals:  

I don’t believe that God expects all human beings to start from zero and to reinvent the wheel of life in our own small lifetimes. We must build on the common “communion of saints” throughout the ages. This is the inherited fruit and gift, which is sometimes called the “Wisdom Tradition.” It is not always inherited simply by belonging to one group or religion. It largely depends on how informed, mature, and experienced our particular teachers are.  

Most seminaries, I’m afraid, have merely exposed ministers to their own denomination’s conclusions and don’t offer space or time for much Indigenous, interfaith, or ecumenical education, which broadens the field from “my religion, which has the whole truth,” to some sense of “universal wisdom, which my religion teaches in this way.” If it is true, then it has to be true everywhere.  

There have been countless generations of sincere seekers who’ve gone through the same human journey and there is plenty of collective and common wisdom to be had. There is ongoing wisdom that keeps recurring in different world religions with different metaphors and vocabulary. The foundational wisdom is much the same, although never exactly the same. As in the Trinity, spiritual unity is diversity loved and united, never mere uniformity. [1]  

Here is my succinct summary of this deep and recurring Wisdom Tradition:  

• There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things.  
• There is in the human soul a natural capacity, similarity, and longing for this Divine Reality.  
• The final goal of all existence is union with Divine Reality. [2]  

I trust and hope that my writing and teaching contain more than my own little bit of experience and truth, precisely because I have found some serious validation in both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures, along with the testimonies of many other witnesses along the way.

---

1.

“You cannot follow both Christ and the cruelty of kings.  A leader who mocks the weak, exalts himself, and preys on the innocent is not sent by God.  He is sent to test you.  And many are failing.”

– Pope Leo XIV, Head of the Catholic Church

When I have taught the Scriptures, I enjoy telling people they are timely as well as timeless.

They were written for a particular people, in a particular place, dealing with a particular problem.

Yet, they can be applied to anyone, no matter where they are, dealing with very different situations.

The Scriptures have much to say about leadership today.

Whether people want to admit it or not, the Bible is inherently political.  If the Second Greatest Commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself, we must pay attention to public policies and politicians.  Out of sincere love of neighbor and a call to help them to carry their burdens, a faithful follower of Christ must push back against abuse of power and any attempt from the Top of a society to take advantage of or dehumanize those at the Bottom of a society.

2.

“There was not a single question or doubt I raised for which our good Lord did not have a reassuring response. “I have the power to make all things well,” he said, “I know how to make all things well, and I wish to make all things well.” Then he said, “I shall make all things well. You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well.”

– Julian of Norwich, English Anchoress

Surprisingly, I have been reading Julian of Norwich’s writings. I have read them three or four times before, but this time, they are gripping me and holding my attention in a new way.

It is fascinating that she writes about Christ as our “liberator,” God “one-ing” us to Himself, the need to know ourselves to know God, sin as “nothing,” and the insistence that through God “all things will be well.”

The quote above stood out to me, and it demanded that I reread it aloud.

It is beautiful because it says God has the power, the knowledge, and the wish to make all things well, and we will see it someday for ourselves.

Now that is a bold hope.

Despite all the pain, devastation, fractured relationships, natural disasters, wars, and conflicts, somehow, God will make all things well.

3.

“We can be sure that whoever sneers at [Beauty], as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”

– Hans Urs von Balthasar, Swiss Theologian

Hans von Balthasar was an important theologian of the 20th century. His magnum opus, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, was based on the idea that theology is often built upon logic but can also be built upon beauty. Drawing from the Greek philosophers and their trifecta of “goodness, beauty, and truth,” he sought to frame the Christian faith in a new fashion.

I stumbled upon von Balthasar’s work after reading Bonaventure of Bagnoregio.  Through The Soul’s Journey into God, I learned how Bonaventure saw Christ as an archetypal beauty, through whom all other things derive their own beauty.

Perhaps it is the fact that a large part of my interior life leans toward being an Enneagram 4, but I find a strange poetic comfort in the idea that our beliefs about God can be based on beauty as much as logic.

4.

“Poetry is an invitation to be completely present to the world.”

– Padraig O’Tuama, Irish Poet

My goodness, I feel that we all would benefit from getting out of our heads a bit more often and being more present to the world.

This probably means that all of us would benefit from experiencing more poetry.

5.

“Who, looking at the universe, would be so feeble-minded as not to believe that God is all in all; that He clothes himself with the universe, and at the same time contains it and dwells in it? What exists depends on Him who exists, and nothing can exist except in the bosom of Him who is.”

– Gregory of Nyssa, 4th Century Theologian

One thing that I enjoy about the early Patristics of Church History is how they emphasize the mutual indwelling of God in all things and all things in God.  It is as if God is pregnant with the universe, and the universe is pregnant with God.

Instead, most people have a more Platonic understanding of reality today.  If they are not strict materialists, most people believe we are here on earth and God is up, off, and far away in some other realm that is more perfect than this one.  As I said, this is more of a Platonic way of looking at reality than a Christian one.

The end of the New Testament finishes with a New Heaven and a New Earth that are merged together in a New Jerusalem, a Garden-City.

That is more an eschatology of integration rather than separation.

I am convinced that the realization that God is not far off but is intimately a part of everything we experience with our five senses would completely transform our ethics, mode of being in the world, appreciation for the environment, and love of each other.

Married to the Land

No other place I know speaks simultaneously of meadows and desert

DAVID WHYTEMAY 23

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Married to the Land

It’s as if the solid green
of the valley
were an island
held and bound
by the river flow
of stone
and when
in summer rain
white limestone
turns black
and the central green
is light-wracked
round the edges,
that dark
reflective gleam
of rock
becomes
an edging brilliance
that centers
each field
to deep emerald.

No other place
I know
speaks
simultaneously
of meadows
and desert,
absorbing dryness
and winter wet,
the ground
porous and forgiving
of all elements,
white and black,
wet and dry,
rich and barren,
like a human marriage,
one hand
of welcome
raised,
the other
tightened
involuntary
on a concealed
knife in the
necessary
protections
of otherness.

As if someone
had said, you will
learn
in this land
the same welcome
and the same exile
as you do in your
mortal vows
to another,
you will promise
yourself
and abase yourself and find yourself
again
in the intimacy
of opposites,
you will pasture yourself
in the living green
and the bare rock,
you will find
comfort in strangeness
and prayer
in aloneness,
you will be proud
and fierce
and single minded
even
in your unknowing
and you will
carry on
through all the seasons
of your living and dying
until
your aloneness
becomes equal
to the trials
you have set yourself.

Then this land
will become again
the land
you imagined
when you saw it
for the first time
and these vows
of marriage
can become
again and again
the place you
make your
residence
like
this same
rough
intimate
and cradled
ground
between
stone horizons,
embracing
and also,
like the one
to whom
you made the vows,
always beyond you,
both utterly
with you
and both
strangely beautiful
to know
by their distance.


-from The Seven Streams: An Irish Cycle, originally published as The Vows at Glencolmcille in Everything is Waiting for You

A Broad Wisdom Tradition

Father Richard describes the importance of Tradition, which includes a legacy of wisdom, beliefs, practices, prayers, and rituals:  

I don’t believe that God expects all human beings to start from zero and to reinvent the wheel of life in our own small lifetimes. We must build on the common “communion of saints” throughout the ages. This is the inherited fruit and gift, which is sometimes called the “Wisdom Tradition.” It is not always inherited simply by belonging to one group or religion. It largely depends on how informed, mature, and experienced our particular teachers are.  

Most seminaries, I’m afraid, have merely exposed ministers to their own denomination’s conclusions and don’t offer space or time for much Indigenous, interfaith, or ecumenical education, which broadens the field from “my religion, which has the whole truth,” to some sense of “universal wisdom, which my religion teaches in this way.” If it is true, then it has to be true everywhere.  

There have been countless generations of sincere seekers who’ve gone through the same human journey and there is plenty of collective and common wisdom to be had. There is ongoing wisdom that keeps recurring in different world religions with different metaphors and vocabulary. The foundational wisdom is much the same, although never exactly the same. As in the Trinity, spiritual unity is diversity loved and united, never mere uniformity. [1]  

Here is my succinct summary of this deep and recurring Wisdom Tradition:  

• There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things.  
• There is in the human soul a natural capacity, similarity, and longing for this Divine Reality.  
• The final goal of all existence is union with Divine Reality. [2]  

I trust and hope that my writing and teaching contain more than my own little bit of experience and truth, precisely because I have found some serious validation in both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures, along with the testimonies of many other witnesses along the way.

---

Married to the Land

No other place I know speaks simultaneously of meadows and desert

DAVID WHYTE. MAY 23

Married to the Land

It’s as if the solid green
of the valley
were an island
held and bound
by the river flow
of stone
and when
in summer rain
white limestone
turns black
and the central green
is light-wracked
round the edges,
that dark
reflective gleam
of rock
becomes
an edging brilliance
that centers
each field
to deep emerald.

No other place
I know
speaks
simultaneously
of meadows
and desert,
absorbing dryness
and winter wet,
the ground
porous and forgiving
of all elements,
white and black,
wet and dry,
rich and barren,
like a human marriage,
one hand
of welcome
raised,
the other
tightened
involuntary
on a concealed
knife in the
necessary
protections
of otherness.

As if someone
had said, you will
learn
in this land
the same welcome
and the same exile
as you do in your
mortal vows
to another,
you will promise
yourself
and abase yourself and find yourself
again
in the intimacy
of opposites,
you will pasture yourself
in the living green
and the bare rock,
you will find
comfort in strangeness
and prayer
in aloneness,
you will be proud
and fierce
and single minded
even
in your unknowing
and you will
carry on
through all the seasons
of your living and dying
until
your aloneness
becomes equal
to the trials
you have set yourself.

Then this land
will become again
the land
you imagined
when you saw it
for the first time
and these vows
of marriage
can become
again and again
the place you
make your
residence
like
this same
rough
intimate
and cradled
ground
between
stone horizons,
embracing
and also,
like the one
to whom
you made the vows,
always beyond you,
both utterly
with you
and both
strangely beautiful
to know
by their distance.


-from The Seven Streams: An Irish Cycle, originally published as The Vows at Glencolmcille in Everything is Waiting for You

In the Living School: Essentials of Engaged Contemplation course, Brian McLaren explores the value of our inherited faith traditions, inviting students to both honor and wrestle with them: 

When we begin exploring the contemplative life, we discover a rich heritage, an ancient Tradition. For millennia, scholars, mystics, theologians, our ancestors, and people of faith in general have been blazing the trail we are now walking. We don’t have to figure out everything on our own. But being part of a tradition brings both blessings and challenges.  

For example, our tradition can be the ground on which we build, or it can be the ceiling above which we aren’t allowed to grow. It can be a greenhouse that protects us from certain dangers … but that also deprives us of needed challenges.  

My original tradition was a very conservative wing of the Protestant movement called the Plymouth Brethren. There were blessings in my inherited tradition to be sure, but it didn’t provide much breathing room for someone like me. I found it confining and problematic as I grew older. I was so relieved to discover there were wider and deeper Christian traditions that I could explore.  

I realized that there’s a difference between a living tradition and a dying or dead one. A living tradition is still learning and growing. Yes, it looks back to celebrate its many discoveries, lessons, wisdom, and gifts from the past, but it doesn’t act as if it already has all the answers. It uses its blessings from the past to prepare participants in the present for new discoveries, new lessons, new wisdom, and new gifts.  

If we’re part of a tradition over time, we realize it can change, for the better or for the worse. It can become narrower and more rigid or wider and more flexible. It can become more argumentative and arrogant or more curious and humble. It can become deeper or shallower, more self-centered or generous, more ingrown or expansive, more loving or cruel, more stagnant and complacent, or more vibrant and alive. Every tradition is “in the making,” constantly growing and changing, just as we do as individuals. Even resisting change changes a tradition!  

I think what we are all really seeking is a living and healthy tradition, something that isn’t just about words or arguments, but that is about life in all its fullness and about deep, deep love—a love for this earth, a love for each other, and a love for God who we experience both within us and all around us. When we find a way into a tradition like that, a tradition of love and growth and wisdom and humility and respect—what an honor and blessing! What a waste to only live your life for something small and self-centered when you have a chance to be part of a bigger story and a deeper Tradition.  

---

Telephone Poles & Crosses. Skye Jethani

Jesus had a reputation for healing on the Sabbath, which the religious leaders saw as a violation of the Torah forbidding work on the seventh day and definitive proof that Jesus could not be a true prophet, let alone the Messiah. God’s chosen Savior, after all, would not break God’s laws. Jesus’ reputation may have been why a Pharisee invited him to his home on the Sabbath for a meal. Luke tells us that “they were watching him carefully” when a very ill man came before him. The whole scene feels like a setup. They were trying to catch Jesus breaking the law, but he deftly turned the trap back on them.“Which of you,” Jesus asked, “having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” Recognizing the trap, the Pharisees didn’t answer. Jesus proceeded to miraculously heal the sick man as the self-righteous dinner guests remained silent. Why didn’t the Pharisees answer Jesus? Why didn’t they object to his “work” of healing on the Sabbath? They knew the Jewish law made an exception on the Sabbath if someone’s life was in danger. In Jesus’ scenario of a son or ox falling into a well, death was not an immediate risk, but the Pharisees knew they would each have pulled them out in violation of their own strict reading of the law. Jesus was showing his hosts that there is no law of God forbidding compassion. In fact, our devotion to God should promote, never prevent, merciful actions toward those in great need. The real sin was not healing on the Sabbath, but failing to recognize the inherent value of a person burdened by illness.True religion will never allow the first part of the Great Commandment (“Love the Lord your God with all of your heart…”) to become an excuse for not obeying the second part (“…and love your neighbor as yourself”). Sadly, separating these two things has always been a common error made by religious people. Yet, throughout both the Old and New Testaments, the Lord makes it abundantly clear that the primary way we honor, serve, and worship him is by loving those created in his image. For example, in the book of Isaiah, God’s people were engaged in religious rituals of worship, including fasting, to express their deep devotion to the Lord, but he utterly rejected these religious activities. Why? Because they their worship of God did not translate into compassion and justice toward the poor and oppressed (see Isaiah 58).David French has referred to this narrow focus on God while overlooking the needs of others as “telephone pole” Christianity. In our recent podcast conversation, he explained to me that people who only focus on their vertical relationship with God are like telephone poles—they are one-dimensional and “siloed in this personal relationship with Jesus.” But we are called to a two-dimensional faith. Our vertical connection to God is supposed to support and empower our horizontal engagement with our neighbors which is cross-shaped Christianity. In French’s view, that means engaging the gospel’s call to “ameliorate injustice in the world.”It’s a simple but useful metaphor that also explains the core conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders. The Pharisees in Luke’s story practiced a telephone pole faith in which the Sabbath was about honoring God and nothing more. Jesus, however, represented a cross-shaped faith in which his devotion to the Father was always, always, always revealed through his love and compassion for others. Therefore, healing a suffering man was also a way of worshipping God on the Sabbath despite the Pharisees’ objections. Likewise, we shouldn’t be surprised today when those who insist on uniting their Christian faith to justice and compassion are accused, like Jesus was, of being unfaithful to God’s law. In today’s religious landscape, telephone poles are everywhere—but it’s the cross that heals the world.

What Is Scripture to Me?

In conversation with Randy Woodley in the Essentials of Engaged Contemplation course, CAC faculty member Carmen Acevedo Butcher shares her relationship with Scripture:  

Scripture can be many things to many people. We have the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in the Christian tradition, and Jesus had the Tanakh [1] and quoted from its Torah, Prophets, and Psalms, with special love for Isaiah and the Psalms. We have nature. We have other scriptures from other faiths and wisdom traditions. I always like to stay really open when we use the word scripture and not assume that I know what it might mean for someone else.  

For me, Scripture was first the Hebrew Bible and then the New Testament—and in my childhood, I experienced it as mostly learning about what it said so I could pass some imaginary test on being good that some imaginary policeman installed in me. But eventually, Scripture for me became about transformation, about finding out who am I and how I can be more loving and self-aware.  

The Christian Scriptures are an anthology written by human beings. They contain the good, the bad, and the ugly. We should wrestle with them. In the end, what I’m supposed to walk away with from reading the Christian Scriptures is a sense of astonishment about God’s love. If they’re not coming across as astonishing, then I need to take another run at it…. My hope always, for my own path of growth and transformation, is to try to read the Scriptures as Jesus did.   

CAC affiliate faculty member Randy Woodley shares his perspective that written Scriptures are a “late arrival” to the broader story of creation:  

There are a lot of Indigenous perspectives, but I believe the written Scriptures are a late arrival. What Creator first gave us is creation. It’s amazing that when the written Scripture does come along it wonders at, and is in awe of, all of creation and what it has to teach us, including what the animals and the ants have to teach us. Jesus did the same thing. He reveled in the flowers and trees, the seeds and the soil. In a way, Scripture verifies creation as Creator’s first story.   

The other thing we have, besides creation, is our conscience. Human beings have always had their own hearts to go by. In a way, Scripture reflects that as well. It tells us stories about how we should and shouldn’t act. We learn those things from the stories…. 

Scripture is one of the tools we have to understand the right way to live. I appreciate it, not as a rule book, but as stories that align with creation. The teachings and creation align with our hearts and align with good solid communities whose values are soaked in love and caring. When I see something in Scripture that looks like the opposite of that, then I have to say, “Well, I’m supposed to learn something about that. I’m supposed to learn how not to do that or not to act that way.”  

====================

Ask a Sober Oldster #23: Nadia Bolz-Weber

“Not only do I reliably know where I am when I wake up, I never wake up in pools of vodka vomit anymore. It’s so bad for your skin, you know…very corrosive.”

This monthly interview series is a collaboration between Oldster Magazine and The Small Bow, A.J. Daulerio’s excellent newsletter about recovery and mental health, and will appear in both newsletters. Learn more about this collaboration in this Oldster podcast/videocast episode

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Nadia Bolz-Weber is an ordained Lutheran Pastor, founder of House for All Sinners & Saints in Denver, Co, and author of three NYT bestselling memoirs: Pastrix; The Cranky, Beautiful Faith Of A Sinner & Saint (2013 and re-released in 2021), Accidental Saints; Finding God In All The Wrong People (2015) and SHAMELESS; A Sexual Reformation (2019).

She writes and speaks about personal failings, recovery, grace, faith, and really whatever the hell else she wants to. She always sits in the corner with the other weirdos. Nadia can be found a couple days a week inside the Denver women’s prison where she is a volunteer chaplain.

You can subscribe to The Corners to receive her writing in your inbox weekly.

—

How old are you, and how long have you been in recovery?

I’m 56 years old and have been clean and sober for 33 years.

How did you get there? 

Back in 1991 there was a protective bravado to my drinking. I was proud to be such a drunk, but since I mostly kept company with other drinkers, it all seemed normal.

My main drinking buddy at the time was named Alice and after a particularly messy night that involved a lot of vodka and a brief confession that she had been in and out of AA and thinks it’s time to go back, she looked at me and said, “Nadia, you know that you’re an alcoholic, right?” To prove her wrong, I stumbled into a church basement off 14th street in Denver. I remember not taking my sunglasses off even though it was already dark out. And I remember being glad since I cried the whole time.

It was the first time in my life I had heard anyone speak honestly about what it felt like to not be able to control your drinking. And the honesty of it all just sort of broke me down. I’ve been sober ever since.

What are the best things about being in recovery?

Not only do I reliably know where I am when I wake up, I never wake up in pools of vodka vomit anymore. It’s so bad for your skin, you know…very corrosive.

Truthfully, living life every single day for years on end without any chemical escape hatches, without ever blunting the pain, without checking out when it’s hard or painful, turns you into a pretty solid human. I guess they call it resilience. Or reliability. It just feels like having emotional core strength to me.

I always assumed I’d be dead by 30, so at times it has felt disorienting to still be standing while my closest drinking buddy, and my ex-boyfriend, and my cousin, and my nephew, and so many fellow addicts that I love are buried in the ground. And just to be clear, I have never found a satisfying answer to why them and not me. No one can convince me that the reason I am alive and Jimmy, who I loved with my whole heart, and who I ran with for years, and who was in and out of AA, drank himself to death is because I worked the steps harder than he did, or because he didn’t want sobriety as much as I did, or because “God wanted another angel in heaven” or anything equally facile.

What’s hard about being in recovery?

Nobody tells you when you get sober that if you have the grit and grace to stay that way, to accumulate not just days, but weeks, months, years and even decades of sobriety, just how many people you will bury. Not every addict and alcoholic gets to have and keep this gift. And so the cost of having it myself is that my heart has broken over and over again watching people I love die. The cost of long term sobriety is something akin to … survivor’s guilt, I guess. I always assumed I’d be dead by 30, so at times it has felt disorienting to still be standing while my closest drinking buddy, and my ex-boyfriend, and my cousin, and my nephew, and so many fellow addicts that I love are buried in the ground. 

And just to be clear, I have never found a satisfying answer to why them and not me. No one can convince me that the reason I am alive and Jimmy, who I loved with my whole heart, and who I ran with for years, and who was in and out of AA, drank himself to death is because I worked the steps harder than he did, or because he didn’t want sobriety as much as I did, or because “God wanted another angel in heaven” or anything equally facile.

As a theologian, I also want to say that even while I find the words, “There but for the grace of God go I” on my tongue, I find it “problematic”, as the kids say. While I can attribute my sobriety to God doing for me what I cannot do for myself, the extension of that same thought is less helpful; that somehow God bestowed grace upon me and not Jimmy makes me want to never stop slapping God, so it might not (theologically) be the most sound sentiment.

How has your character changed? What’s better about you? What do you still need to work on? What “character defects” do you still wrestle with?

I’m more honest. I have tons more integrity. I try to be of service to others and trust me, that was in no way a priority for me before getting sober.

But to be clear, it’s not some sort of “I once was blind but now I see” story – it’s more of a “I once was blind, and now I just have really bad vision” sort of story.

(I once heard Dan Harris [founder of the meditation app, 10% Happier] say that his wife likes to call it 90% Still An Asshole)

My first reaction to almost everything is “fuck you.” I almost never stay there but I almost always start there. That hasn’t changed, which for a long time I found really disappointing. Like, how in the world do I still think such consistently horrible things after all these years of WORKING ON MYSELF. But in my case, progress doesn’t look like receiving a personality transplant. It looks like the fact that yeah, I still start with “fuck you,” I just very seldom STAY there. The time between my reaction (which is still pretty shitty) to my response has gotten real short. Progress is seen in the speed at which I move out of “fuck you.”

I was at a meeting recently where a guy said, “I’m not responsible for my first thought.” I liked that. I’m responsible for my actions; my thoughts might never get cleaned up enough to take to anyone’s mother’s house.  

Truthfully, living life every single day for years on end without any chemical escape hatches, without ever blunting the pain, without checking out when it’s hard or painful, turns you into a pretty solid human. I guess they call it resilience. Or reliability. It just feels like having emotional core strength to me.

What’s the best recovery memoir you’ve ever read? Tell us what you liked about it.

I loved Whip Smart by Melissa Febos for several reasons.

1. I love that she was a dominatrix while high on heroin AND simultaneously an honors student at The New School. Febos, like the rest of us, is not just one thing.

2. Her writing is funny and visceral. I’ll never forget the way she describes how we addicts separate ourselves from ourselves.
3. For three years in the 1990s I was Febos’ Summer Camp counselor. Now we are just friends.

What are some memorable sober moments? 

Too many to list, but the one that stands out for me is the first time I bought toilet paper BEFORE running out.

Are you in therapy? On meds? Tell us about that.

I’ve been on Wellbutrin for 30 years. Praise God. Alleluia.

For the last 16 years I’ve met regularly with a spiritual director; someone who pays attention to how I speak about myself and my life. I’m too close to see myself sometimes. Jane is in her 80s now and I can’t imagine anyone else being for me who she has been for me.

Sometimes I’ll be talking for a while and she’ll say, “That’s different than how you used to feel/act/respond,” and I trust her so much that I am willing to believe her. She is a reliable narrator in my life.

My first reaction to almost everything is “Fuck you.” I almost never stay there but I almost always start there. That hasn’t changed, which for a long time I found really disappointing. Like, how in the world do I still think such consistently horrible things after all these years of WORKING ON MYSELF. But in my case, progress doesn’t look like receiving a personality transplant. It looks like the fact that yeah, I still start with “Fuck you,” I just very seldom STAY there. The time between my reaction (which is still pretty shitty) to my response has gotten real short. Progress is seen in the speed at which I move out of “Fuck you.”

What sort of activities or groups do you participate in to help your recovery? (i.e. swimming, 12-step, meditation, et cetera)

I am still to this day, an old school Twelve-Step girl. God help me, I love a group of drunks in a church basement. I know there are a lot of folks who are critical of it, but for me, I am who I am today because of relying on a power greater than myself, attempting rigorous honesty, having sponsors, taking responsibility for my shit, and trying to be of service to others. Microdosing and navel gazing may work for others but would never work for me. Give me a path toward pawning off my narcissism as a virtue and I’ll for sure take it. As I said, old school.

I am a Sacred Harp singer. It’s the oldest American musical form, and very “anti-excellence, pro-participation.” I sing for 2 ½ hours every Monday with a group of other people who just love singing with and for each other. No auditions, no performances, no commitment, no leader. I love everything about it and you just can’t beat the feeling of gladness that comes from your brain being awash in oxytocin and dopamine. And you know what? That shit is free.

I walk outside for at least an hour every day—sometimes 2 or 3. I feel less neurotic, and less like everything is awful when I am walking through the park by my house. I try to listen closely to see if birds are singing. They usually are and I am usually too in my head to notice. So noticing birdsong is a form of contemplation for me.

Are there any questions we haven’t asked you that you think we should add to this? And would you like to answer it?

Nah. I’m good. Thanks for allowing me to tell my story as a Sober Oldster!

Authors and activists Alexia Salvatierra and Brandon Wrencher describe how enslaved Africans interpreted the Bible through their experience and found a promise of dignity and liberation.  

By seeing themselves in biblical stories … enslaved Africans engaged the Bible as a living text. They were in relationship with the Bible, talking back to its stories and its God. God was not seen as a distant, malevolent deity. The God of enslaved Africans was ever-present, would deliver them, and would punish their oppressors. The companionship of God was seen especially in how enslaved Africans interpreted Jesus, whom they saw as a friend on the journey with them to survive and be liberated from their oppression. The Spiritual “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” depicts the deep friendship the enslaved had with Jesus:  

I want Jesus to walk with me  
I want Jesus to walk with me  
All along my pilgrim journey  
I want Jesus to walk with me. [1]  

Enslaved Africans demonstrated their resilience and innovation in crafting a folk theology from the Bible in the form of folk songs called Negro Spirituals. They sang the Spirituals in both the hush harbors in the wilderness and the mystical hush harbors of their souls while in the fields and on the plantation. The Spirituals allowed them to put biblical stories in a medium that made them alive, bodily, and thus their own. And it allowed enslaved Africans to offer creative new interpretations of biblical stories. 

The Exodus story of freedom spoke in a powerful and particular way to the experience of the enslaved:  

In the exodus story, Moses gained power from God to part a sea, allowing the Hebrew people he was leading to escape from their oppressors, Pharaoh and the Egyptians. The sea collapsed on and drowned Pharaoh and his army as they chased the Hebrew people. The Hebrew people were set free with God’s help. In step with their radical interpretation of biblical stories, enslaved Africans would weave their own conditions into the biblical story through song…. 

One of these mornings, bright and fair  
Gonna take my wings and cleave the air  
When I get to heaven gonna put on my shoes  
Gonna run around glory and tell all the news 
When I get to heaven gonna sing and shout  
Ain’t nobody there gonna turn me out. [2]  

The message is clear: in the same way that God gave victory to the Hebrews over Egypt and to Jesus and the church over Rome, God will give victory to enslaved Africans over their bondage to white Christian American tyranny. And this victory, just like the victory God gave the Hebrews and Jesus and the disciples, will not be in “the sweet by and by” but in the present world. Enslaved Africans believed God would work through them to bring this deliverance. 

==========================

Why Ask? Brad Jersak

Why pray for gifts God has already given?

“Forgive us our trespasses…”

“Lord, have mercy.”

“Come, Holy Spirit.”

The prayers of God’s people are replete with requests for that which God has already graciously and abundantly provided. So why bother? Is praying for the gifts God has already given an act of unbelief, a confusion of theology or an offence to God? Some seem to think so and in a sense, may be right. But both the question and answer are important and far more nuanced than an either/or knee-jerk reaction. What are the perils and what is the point of asking for what we’ve already been given?

THE PERILS

Two obvious perils accompany requests for forgiveness, mercy and the Holy Spirit—given that all three are among the many examples of God’s outpouring of grace into the world.

The first peril is if we make these requests without understanding or believing that they have happened. It’s a serious omission when our prayers smuggle in the assumption that God has not yet forgiven, not yet been merciful and not yet given the gift of the Spirit. Christ and his apostles could not have been more straightforward: Christ taught that God’s mercy has been given to ALL (“the righteous and the wicked”); on the Cross, Christ forgave ALL (“while we were yet sinners”). And on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit was “poured out on all flesh” (Acts 2). If our prayers imply a negation of these great truths, we’ve made a grave mistake—the main fruit of which is that our invocation devolves into desperate begging and paints God as someone less than our generous heavenly Abba.

The second danger when we ask for what has been given is that in receiving them, we imagine that our prayers actually secured God’s gifts—that praying right or praying long or praying hard somehow caused the forgiveness, mercy or Spirit to come. We then seek to establish a cauldron of correct prayers, incantations or mechanisms to seal the deal. We paint a picture of prayer as an acquisition or transaction rather than a grace-gift from heaven.

Those who become aware of these perils sometimes end up rejecting all such prayers as wrong-headed and develop theologies to avoid them. For example, some of my friends find the Lord’s Prayer offensive because it includes the request for forgiveness. They reason that since the Cross established forgiveness once and for all, that the Lord’s Prayer is inappropriate for New Covenant believers. Some even imagine that all Christ’s instructions to his disciples prior to the Cross should be relegated to the dung heap of the Old Covenant that’s been abolished. Such a leap is shocking and mistaken—I’ll address that misstep in a follow-up post next week.

THE POINT

Still, having noted the perils, we ought to ask, “Then what’s the point? Why pray for that which God has already freely given?”

Again, let’s start with the unwavering conviction that forgiveness is forever and finally established in the “finished work of Christ.” Let’s be unbending in our belief that God’s mercies are a superabundant, infinite spring that never ceases. Let’s acknowledge that the Holy Spirit is everywhere and always present. Then what’s the point of asking? I’m glad you asked.

First, because Jesus said so. He instructs us to pray, “Father, forgive,” invites us to repeatedly ask, seek and knock for mercy and calls us to open our hands to receive Abba’s good gifts, chief of which is the Holy Spirit. As a Christ-follower, I believe no one knows how and why to pray better than our Lord Jesus Christ and his instructions in prayer are the most important ever given—even when I don’t understand the “why?” To think we know better than Christ and explain away his teaching on prayer is, frankly, spiritually silly. But if we need speculate on the “why?” read on:

Second, asking is an act of awareness and belief. Praying, “Father, forgive” reminds us that Abba has indeed done everything necessary to forgive. Praying, “Lord, have mercy” reminds us that “his mercy endures forever.” Praying, “Come, Holy Spirit” reminds us that the Spirit is an indwelling river of living water that flows from within those who believe (John 7:38). Asking asserts our belief that this is who Abba is and what Abba gives.

Third, asking is an orientation of humility and receptivity. It’s not just that we know and believe God is generous—it’s that we posture ourselves to receive the gifts already given. It’s like opening our eyes to see the sun that’s already shining. It’s like opening our mouths to partake of the feast already provided. It’s like turning and opening our hearts to the love that has never once turned from us.

Finally, asking is critical because God is love and love–even God’s love–requires consent. God does not require consent to forgive or show mercy or send the Spirit. God’s unfailing pursuit of his beloved and his relentless wooing continue even without our permission. But at some point,love by nature must wait on our willing “Yes!” or it would be a violation of our God-given freedom. And our love for God is not love if it’s not consensual.

I don’t know where that line falls exactly, and neither do you. I just know that Abba did not even impregnate the Virgin without her willing “Yes.” Mary the mother of Jesus is a beautiful example of perfect surrender to the Father’s love—but so too, in that narrative, Abba demonstrates his commitment to Mary’s consent and ours.

Similarly, prayer, for us, becomes an act of mutual surrender and consent between Christ and his Bride. “Asking prayer” welcomes the goodness of his already-given gifts into our lives. Asking is the Christ-taught means by which we receive those gifts. “Ask and you will receive” forgiveness, you’ll receive mercy and you’ll receive the Holy Spirit. And Abba’s beautiful answer–the answer that Christ voices from the Cross–is simply this: “Consider it done!”

Scripture as validated by experience, and experience as validated by Tradition, are good scales for one’s spiritual worldview.  
—Richard Rohr 

This week we highlight a central theme of Father Richard Rohr’s teaching philosophy in CAC’s Living School. Our personal experience is the filter through which we understand both Christian Scripture and Tradition. 

No matter the religion or denomination in which we are raised, our spirituality still comes through the first filter of our own life experience. We must begin to be honest about this instead of pretending that any of us are formed exclusively by scriptures or our churches or religious traditions. There is no such thing as an entirely unbiased position. The best we can do is own and be honest about our own filters. God allows and invites us to trust our own experience. Then Scripture and Tradition hopefully keep our personal experiences both critical and compassionate. These three components—Scripture, Tradition, and experience—make up the three wheels of what we at the CAC call the learning “tricycle” of spiritual growth. [1]  

Historically, Catholics loved to say we relied upon the great Tradition, but this frequently meant “the way it’s been done for the last hundred years.” What we usually consider “official teaching” changes every century or so. In all honesty, most of our operative images of God come primarily from our early experiences of authority in family and culture, while we interpret those teachings from more recent traditions and Scripture reading to validate them!  

If we try to use “only Scripture” as a source of spiritual wisdom, we get stuck, because many passages give very conflicting and even opposite images of God. I believe that Jesus only quoted those Scriptures that he could validate by his own inner experience. At the same time, if we humans trust only our own experiences, we will be trapped in subjective moods and personal preferences. It helps when we can verify that at least some holy people and orthodox teachers (Tradition) and solid Scripture also validate our own experiences.  

Jesus and Paul clearly use and build on their own Jewish Scriptures and traditions, yet they both courageously interpret them through the lens of their unique personal experiences of God. This is undeniable! We would do well to follow their examples. [2] 

In CAC’s Living School: Essentials of Engaged Contemplation course, Brian McLaren teaches:  

If we only had our own experiences to go by, every generation would have to start from scratch…. But if Tradition and Scripture are used to silence our own ongoing experience—our learnings, discoveries, thinkings and rethinkings, and quests—then … Tradition and Scripture become not the foundation on which we build, but the ceiling above which we cannot grow.   

When we hold all three elements in creative tension, we’re part of an ongoing story, a multi-generational conversation, bringing together the experiences of everyone everywhere, through time, so they can be shared, reflected upon, and reevaluated in community, as a growing bank of wisdom resources for us and for future generations. [3] 

Honoring Experience

Building on the metaphor of the tricycle of faith, Father Richard names that spiritual growth occurs as we pay attention to and learn from our own experiences:    

The two wheels of sacred Scripture and Tradition can be seen as sources of outer authority, while only our personal experience leads to our inner authority. I am convinced we need and can have both. Only when inner and outer authority come together do we have true spiritual wisdom. Christianity in most of its history has largely relied upon official or outer authority, but we must now be honest about the value of inner experience. It was, of course, at work all the time but was not given much credence.   

Information from outer authority does not necessarily lead to transformation, and we need genuinely transformed people today, not just people with answers. I don’t want the words in my books or these meditations to separate anyone from their own astonishment or to provide them with a substitute for their own inner experience. Theology (and authority figures) have done that for too many people and for too long. Instead, I hope my words simply invite readers on their own inner journey rather than become a replacement for it.   

I am increasingly convinced that the word “prayer,” which has become a functional and pious thing for believers to do, was meant to be a descriptor and an invitation to inner experience. When wise spiritual teachers invite us to “pray,” they are in effect saying, “Go inside and know for yourself!” For too long we’ve insisted on outer authority alone, without any teaching of prayer, inner journey, and maturing consciousness. The results for the world and for religion have been disastrous.  [1]  

In our tricycle, experience is constantly balanced and critiqued by Scripture and Tradition. When all three “wheels” work together, we have a very wise person. That’s the easiest way to say it. At the CAC, that’s what we’re interested in doing: raising up not argumentative or righteous people, but compassionate and wise people. That’s our goal. [2] 

Brian McLaren points to the ways that experience created both Scripture and Tradition:  

If we have Scripture, experience, and Tradition around the table, it’s really all experience. Scripture is the experience of a group of people far, far in the past in a very different setting. Tradition is the experience of another group of people who, for a long time, have been interpreting what that first group of people said. Then I come along and with my own experience and a community, which bring all its experience, too. It’s a reminder that we have to be careful if any one person or group tries to edit out anybody else’s experience, because they don’t like it or they find it inconvenient.  

I don’t want to be stuck simply in my own experience. It’s too limited. I need the experience that comes to me from Scripture and from Tradition. At the end of the day, we’re dealing with people’s experiences and interpretations of experience, and we need all the help we can get.

Scripture as validated by experience, and experience as validated by Tradition, are good scales for one’s spiritual worldview.  
—Richard Rohr 

This week we highlight a central theme of Father Richard Rohr’s teaching philosophy in CAC’s Living School. Our personal experience is the filter through which we understand both Christian Scripture and Tradition. 

No matter the religion or denomination in which we are raised, our spirituality still comes through the first filter of our own life experience. We must begin to be honest about this instead of pretending that any of us are formed exclusively by scriptures or our churches or religious traditions. There is no such thing as an entirely unbiased position. The best we can do is own and be honest about our own filters. God allows and invites us to trust our own experience. Then Scripture and Tradition hopefully keep our personal experiences both critical and compassionate. These three components—Scripture, Tradition, and experience—make up the three wheels of what we at the CAC call the learning “tricycle” of spiritual growth. [1]  

Historically, Catholics loved to say we relied upon the great Tradition, but this frequently meant “the way it’s been done for the last hundred years.” What we usually consider “official teaching” changes every century or so. In all honesty, most of our operative images of God come primarily from our early experiences of authority in family and culture, while we interpret those teachings from more recent traditions and Scripture reading to validate them!  

If we try to use “only Scripture” as a source of spiritual wisdom, we get stuck, because many passages give very conflicting and even opposite images of God. I believe that Jesus only quoted those Scriptures that he could validate by his own inner experience. At the same time, if we humans trust only our own experiences, we will be trapped in subjective moods and personal preferences. It helps when we can verify that at least some holy people and orthodox teachers (Tradition) and solid Scripture also validate our own experiences.  

Jesus and Paul clearly use and build on their own Jewish Scriptures and traditions, yet they both courageously interpret them through the lens of their unique personal experiences of God. This is undeniable! We would do well to follow their examples. [2] 

In CAC’s Living School: Essentials of Engaged Contemplation course, Brian McLaren teaches:  

If we only had our own experiences to go by, every generation would have to start from scratch…. But if Tradition and Scripture are used to silence our own ongoing experience—our learnings, discoveries, thinkings and rethinkings, and quests—then … Tradition and Scripture become not the foundation on which we build, but the ceiling above which we cannot grow.   

When we hold all three elements in creative tension, we’re part of an ongoing story, a multi-generational conversation, bringing together the experiences of everyone everywhere, through time, so they can be shared, reflected upon, and reevaluated in community, as a growing bank of wisdom resources for us and for future generations. [3] 

Honoring Experience

Building on the metaphor of the tricycle of faith, Father Richard names that spiritual growth occurs as we pay attention to and learn from our own experiences:    

The two wheels of sacred Scripture and Tradition can be seen as sources of outer authority, while only our personal experience leads to our inner authority. I am convinced we need and can have both. Only when inner and outer authority come together do we have true spiritual wisdom. Christianity in most of its history has largely relied upon official or outer authority, but we must now be honest about the value of inner experience. It was, of course, at work all the time but was not given much credence.   

Information from outer authority does not necessarily lead to transformation, and we need genuinely transformed people today, not just people with answers. I don’t want the words in my books or these meditations to separate anyone from their own astonishment or to provide them with a substitute for their own inner experience. Theology (and authority figures) have done that for too many people and for too long. Instead, I hope my words simply invite readers on their own inner journey rather than become a replacement for it.   

I am increasingly convinced that the word “prayer,” which has become a functional and pious thing for believers to do, was meant to be a descriptor and an invitation to inner experience. When wise spiritual teachers invite us to “pray,” they are in effect saying, “Go inside and know for yourself!” For too long we’ve insisted on outer authority alone, without any teaching of prayer, inner journey, and maturing consciousness. The results for the world and for religion have been disastrous.  [1]  

In our tricycle, experience is constantly balanced and critiqued by Scripture and Tradition. When all three “wheels” work together, we have a very wise person. That’s the easiest way to say it. At the CAC, that’s what we’re interested in doing: raising up not argumentative or righteous people, but compassionate and wise people. That’s our goal. [2] 

Brian McLaren points to the ways that experience created both Scripture and Tradition:  

If we have Scripture, experience, and Tradition around the table, it’s really all experience. Scripture is the experience of a group of people far, far in the past in a very different setting. Tradition is the experience of another group of people who, for a long time, have been interpreting what that first group of people said. Then I come along and with my own experience and a community, which bring all its experience, too. It’s a reminder that we have to be careful if any one person or group tries to edit out anybody else’s experience, because they don’t like it or they find it inconvenient.  

I don’t want to be stuck simply in my own experience. It’s too limited. I need the experience that comes to me from Scripture and from Tradition. At the end of the day, we’re dealing with people’s experiences and interpretations of experience, and we need all the help we can get.

Scripture as validated by experience, and experience as validated by Tradition, are good scales for one’s spiritual worldview.  
—Richard Rohr 

This week we highlight a central theme of Father Richard Rohr’s teaching philosophy in CAC’s Living School. Our personal experience is the filter through which we understand both Christian Scripture and Tradition. 

No matter the religion or denomination in which we are raised, our spirituality still comes through the first filter of our own life experience. We must begin to be honest about this instead of pretending that any of us are formed exclusively by scriptures or our churches or religious traditions. There is no such thing as an entirely unbiased position. The best we can do is own and be honest about our own filters. God allows and invites us to trust our own experience. Then Scripture and Tradition hopefully keep our personal experiences both critical and compassionate. These three components—Scripture, Tradition, and experience—make up the three wheels of what we at the CAC call the learning “tricycle” of spiritual growth. [1]  

Historically, Catholics loved to say we relied upon the great Tradition, but this frequently meant “the way it’s been done for the last hundred years.” What we usually consider “official teaching” changes every century or so. In all honesty, most of our operative images of God come primarily from our early experiences of authority in family and culture, while we interpret those teachings from more recent traditions and Scripture reading to validate them!  

If we try to use “only Scripture” as a source of spiritual wisdom, we get stuck, because many passages give very conflicting and even opposite images of God. I believe that Jesus only quoted those Scriptures that he could validate by his own inner experience. At the same time, if we humans trust only our own experiences, we will be trapped in subjective moods and personal preferences. It helps when we can verify that at least some holy people and orthodox teachers (Tradition) and solid Scripture also validate our own experiences.  

Jesus and Paul clearly use and build on their own Jewish Scriptures and traditions, yet they both courageously interpret them through the lens of their unique personal experiences of God. This is undeniable! We would do well to follow their examples. [2] 

In CAC’s Living School: Essentials of Engaged Contemplation course, Brian McLaren teaches:  

If we only had our own experiences to go by, every generation would have to start from scratch…. But if Tradition and Scripture are used to silence our own ongoing experience—our learnings, discoveries, thinkings and rethinkings, and quests—then … Tradition and Scripture become not the foundation on which we build, but the ceiling above which we cannot grow.   

When we hold all three elements in creative tension, we’re part of an ongoing story, a multi-generational conversation, bringing together the experiences of everyone everywhere, through time, so they can be shared, reflected upon, and reevaluated in community, as a growing bank of wisdom resources for us and for future generations. [3] 

Honoring Experience

Building on the metaphor of the tricycle of faith, Father Richard names that spiritual growth occurs as we pay attention to and learn from our own experiences:    

The two wheels of sacred Scripture and Tradition can be seen as sources of outer authority, while only our personal experience leads to our inner authority. I am convinced we need and can have both. Only when inner and outer authority come together do we have true spiritual wisdom. Christianity in most of its history has largely relied upon official or outer authority, but we must now be honest about the value of inner experience. It was, of course, at work all the time but was not given much credence.   

Information from outer authority does not necessarily lead to transformation, and we need genuinely transformed people today, not just people with answers. I don’t want the words in my books or these meditations to separate anyone from their own astonishment or to provide them with a substitute for their own inner experience. Theology (and authority figures) have done that for too many people and for too long. Instead, I hope my words simply invite readers on their own inner journey rather than become a replacement for it.   

I am increasingly convinced that the word “prayer,” which has become a functional and pious thing for believers to do, was meant to be a descriptor and an invitation to inner experience. When wise spiritual teachers invite us to “pray,” they are in effect saying, “Go inside and know for yourself!” For too long we’ve insisted on outer authority alone, without any teaching of prayer, inner journey, and maturing consciousness. The results for the world and for religion have been disastrous.  [1]  

In our tricycle, experience is constantly balanced and critiqued by Scripture and Tradition. When all three “wheels” work together, we have a very wise person. That’s the easiest way to say it. At the CAC, that’s what we’re interested in doing: raising up not argumentative or righteous people, but compassionate and wise people. That’s our goal. [2] 

Brian McLaren points to the ways that experience created both Scripture and Tradition:  

If we have Scripture, experience, and Tradition around the table, it’s really all experience. Scripture is the experience of a group of people far, far in the past in a very different setting. Tradition is the experience of another group of people who, for a long time, have been interpreting what that first group of people said. Then I come along and with my own experience and a community, which bring all its experience, too. It’s a reminder that we have to be careful if any one person or group tries to edit out anybody else’s experience, because they don’t like it or they find it inconvenient.  

I don’t want to be stuck simply in my own experience. It’s too limited. I need the experience that comes to me from Scripture and from Tradition. At the end of the day, we’re dealing with people’s experiences and interpretations of experience, and we need all the help we can get.

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TODAY IS THE FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

Although not its formal name, I like calling it “New Commandment Sunday.” 

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John 13:31-35

At the last supper, when Judas had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ 

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

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I’m sitting in a bookstore writing this musing. 

Terrible storms swept through my neighborhood last night. Old trees, huge ones, fell in the 70 mph winds and crashed on cars and houses. Two people died. And, of course, we are without power and wifi. 

I woke early, unsure of the time (it was around 6:30), and went outside to survey the damage. I stood on the porch and looked around. Our house and the cottage were unscathed. But buckets and flower pots were tossed, rain-pounded plants lay flat on the ground. Tree debris was everywhere, branches, leaves, whirly-gigs, and scores of brown stringy bits and piles of pollen. 

When I glanced down, I noticed that one of the brown stringy things had landed in a perfect heart shape at my feet. 

And there it was: in the midst of the wet and muddy chaos, a tiny token of love. 

The storm-ravaged world seemed to have conspired with today’s gospel reading: I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 

There’s some contention right now over who is “really” Christian. Some people don’t like the term “Christian nationalism” because they say it isn’t “Christian.” Although I confess to sympathize with this view, it must be said that Christian nationalists don’t think that I am a Christian — nor anyone who holds views like mine or churches that proclaim inclusion or have women pastors. According to them, I’m not a Christian. Then there are those who say like Jesus but don’t like the word, “Christian.” Still others embrace Christianity as a religious tradition, a moral philosophy, or familial identity. 

The truth is all these different sorts of Christians claim to be disciples of Jesus; they all claim to be Christian. 

It can be hard to sort out. And it can get ugly when quarrelsome believers divide themselves into “true” Christians and “fake” ones. Who counts as a Christian? What is the test of real faith? Christians themselves have created a mess of things by name-calling, exclusion, hubris, inquisitions, heresy hunting, and worse. 

Jesus said: By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

Love.

That’s it. 

Seems simple. Crystal clear. 

The odd thing is that even the worst inquisitors knew this. During heresy hunts and witch burnings, they insisted that it was loving to torture one’s neighbor to save them from the fires of hell. Better a bit of pain and a few broken bones now than an eternity with Satan. 

Equating love with coercion is a feature of some forms of Christianity. Coercion might be “soft,” as with some evangelists and missionaries I have known. But, in recent decades, the most gentle forms of corrective love have given way to outright violence — taking a variety of forms from child, domestic, and sexual abuse, denominational take-overs and purges, and political movements to assert Christian supremacy. Entire churches are based on the premise that love-is-coercive violence — of conscience, of social pressure, or actual physical injury. 

These tendencies have, sadly, been with Christianity for centuries. Some historians think that the very first Christian to ever have been executed by other Christians was Priscillian of Avila in 385 C.E. Priscillian was found guilty of heresy by a synod of bishops and, with six of his followers, was put to death. In the 250 years following this event, theologian Harvey Cox claims, “Christian imperial authorities put twenty-five thousand to death for their lack of creedal correctness.” 

I’m sure those imperial bishops and Christian rulers thought they were doing the loving thing. 

The faith that had been born in persecution became the persecutors. As philosopher Rene Girard pointed out, “Beginning with Constantine, Christianity triumphed at the level of the state and soon began to cloak with its authority persecutions similar to those in which the early Christians were victims.” 

Once you start attacking your own, dismissing their humanity, it is very easy to attack others you deem less than fully human. 

Whatever Jesus said, far too many Christians found it easier to redefine love than follow his straight-forward command. His disciples began to constrict the circle of who counted as a “disciple” thereby limiting the sphere of love. Since you are to love “one another,” some speculated, you needn’t love those outside the sphere of Jesus’ followers. Love wasn’t for anyone. Just those who think or look or act like you. 

And yes, this is the exact logic employed recently by J.D. Vance when he commented on the “order of love,” implying that love exists in concentric circles from family outward. First, you love those closest to you and then move out to others. 

Problem is that most people don’t. Because human beings find ways to limit love. 

That’s not what Jesus suggests in his famous command to love. Instead, as Pope Francis clapped back at J.D. Vance, love is a universal principle, “a fraternity open to all without exception.” It moves from the vast and cosmic and is demonstrated in the particular. From one of the Pope Francis’ final letters:

Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris(‘order of love’) that must be promoted is that which we discover….by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.

Jesus didn’t say, “love each other and then love everyone else.” No. He insisted that the love that the disciples had for each other would witness to a larger love, the same love he proclaimed and modeled in his life and death. Jesus didn’t love only a few. Jesus didn’t die for only the church. For God so loved that world that he gave his beloved Child so that everyone…..

Love moves from universal to particular back to universal. It doesn’t move from a particular community to a limited sphere of qualified recipients. If you love only your own, you won’t get much further than that. The history of Christianity is proof enough of the failure of love to expand.

According to Jesus, however, love is the marker, it is the test. If you love each other, you show the love that is the central reality of all creation. You’ve touched the vastness of cosmic love. Love witnesses to truth, dignity, justice, and beauty present in and with all. Human love, love in community, reveals that universal love of God, the very meaning and purpose of everything.

If you hold together in love, Jesus told his followers shortly before he died, you will make it through the coming storm. Because your love for each other will help you remember the truth of love. Love is the foundation, the shelter, the covering. Love is the way. Love is the only thing. It is the beginning and end. It is the guide to traverse the journey ahead. 

And, like the small heart on my porch after the storm, you know it when you see it. It really isn’t that hard to spot love. 

Our Lady of Guadalupe

Friday, May 16, 2025

Listen. Put it into your heart, my youngest and dearest son, that the thing that frightened you, the thing that afflicted you is nothing: Do not let it disturb you…. Am I not here, I, who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms? Do you need something more? 
—Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego, Nican Mopohua  

Father Richard Rohr shares the history of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a profound image of the divine feminine, an archetype of maternal love and protection.   

In 1531, exactly ten years after the Spanish conquest of the Indigenous peoples of Mexico, there was an unprecedented constellation of signs we call the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe. This miraculous event linked the heavens of Catholic Spain and the mythologies of the Indigenous Americans who had lost everything: their land, their freedom, and their gods. Like all ongoing revelation, it has taken us over four hundred years to begin to unravel the depth of loving mystery that was revealed in this encounter between the dear heavenly woman with brown skin (La Morenita) and Juan Diego, a poor Indigenous man. 

God speaks through the “Mother of the true God through whom one lives,” whom the Spanish called María. But she is dressed in the clothes of the Indians, speaks their Nahuatl language and calls Juan Diego, one of the poorest, to “repreach” the gospel back to the Spanish colonizers who thought they had the gospel in the first place. In one generation, under this mother symbol, almost all of the native peoples of Mexico accepted Christianity. People of Indigenous and Spanish ancestry (mestizos) were born, and I might say a new mestizo Christianity unfolds. We are slowly learning that there is no other kind of Christianity. Christ takes on the face and features of all people, whoever they are and no matter their circumstances. In this case God knew that the face and features had to be feminine and compassionate. No other sign could transform both the Spanish machisimo and the matriarchal religion of the Indians at the same time. [1] 

Mirabai Starr describes the ongoing legacy of Our Lady of Guadalupe:  

In a world struggling against senseless violence and growing economic disparity, Our Lady of Guadalupe offers a distinctly feminine antidote to the poisons of poverty and war. Where society demands competition, Guadalupe teaches cooperation. In place of consumerism, she models compassionate service…. She is the radical, powerful, engaged Mother of the People. 

Our Lady is not merely a sociopolitical symbol, however. People of all faiths call her Mother. In times of deeply personal grief, they turn to her for comfort. They turn to her for insight. They turn to her for a reminder of what matters most, what endures when all else seems to be lost, what grace may yet be available when we meet fear with love. [2] 

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5 on Friday; John Chaffee

1.

“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

– St. Francis of Assisi, Founder of the Franciscan Order

About ten years ago, I read The Complete Works of Francis and Clare by Classics of Western Spirituality. It was fantastic and refreshing to see how grounded and thoughtful St. Francis was in his writings to the order he founded and his personal letters to friends.

St. Francis is, in my mind, a person who embodied potential.  He did not seem too concerned with whether or not something was difficult or deemed “impossible.”  Instead, he would get to work in his humble way and became an example for the rest of us that God can do extraordinary things with ordinary people…

2.

“Authentic spirituality is revolutionary. It does not legitimate the world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone.”

– Ken Wilber, American Philosopher

Ken Wilber probably saved my understanding of the faith. Rather than becoming stuck in dogmatism or rigid thinking, he helped me reframe faith and spiritual formation as a deeply incarnational task.  Although he comes from a Buddhist background, he is very open and affirming of all the world’s faith traditions.

I think that Western spirituality is too individualistic (not a shocking thing to say), but it also has difficulty being universal.  Rather than seeing the commonality of the world’s faith traditions, the Western approach is to use logic and dismantle other faiths while not using the same critical thinking toward itself.

My understanding of faith and spirituality is constantly growing, changing, and evolving.  Right now, the only thing that matters to me is whether or not my understanding of the faith helps me to be more whole and more open to other people who are walking out their faith with integrity.

3.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.”

– Matthew 13:45-46

One of the things that I enjoy about parables is that they can be interpreted in various ways.  They are intentionally designed to be symbolic, archetypal, and full of metaphor.  As a result, each of us brings our own life experiences to these parables and can walk away with an equally valid and helpful lesson learned.

I read an interpretation of this parable that shifted everything for me.

Usually, the parable is interpreted so that you and I are the merchant looking for fine pearls.  We stumble upon it and sell everything to buy the “pearl of great price.”  Often, this is given a moralistic bend and is taught to encourage us to give up everything to hopefully get into the kingdom of heaven.

However…

It shifts when the merchant is instead seen as the Christ, who stumbles upon a “pearl of great price” (which is all of known reality), and gives up everything to redeem, restore, reconcile, and renew everything and have it as a glorious treasure.

How beautiful is that?

4.

“Sin is behovable (unavoidable/inevitable), but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

– Juliana of Norwich, English Mystic & Anchoress

This week, I have been revisiting The Revelations of Divine Love by Juliana of Norwich.

Her use of the word “tender” is refreshing to me.  Perhaps it is just where I am right now, but it is really landing well.

The realm of Christian theology is overflowing with male perspectives, and it has not helped us.  When more masculine adjectives define our view of God, other attributes are left off the table.

Tender is just one of them.

I wonder what reformations could happen in Christianity if we also highlighted using words such as “nurturing,” “protecting,” “embracing,” “welcoming,” “warm,” etc.?  But that is just a side note.

When I read Julian, I also get a strong sense of the word “hope.”  For her, the love of God necessitates a hope that is inextinguishable.  It is a hope that never fails.  It is a hope that says, “Despite all the ways that sin has fractured us as individuals and the cosmos as a whole, there is an invincible hope that God is still able and willing to ‘make all things new.'”

5.

“In my early professional years, I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”

– Carl Rogers, American Psychologist

This quote comes back to me often.

If I am being honest, I probably do not think about it every day, but at least every 2-3 days.

It helps me to have proper boundaries.

I can’t care about another person’s problems more than they do.  I cannot do their personal work for them.  I cannot rush them, finally getting around to fixing the parts of their life that feel so blatant or obvious to me.

All I can be is an environment in which others feel safe enough to choose to do their own self-work when they are ready.

And, if I can be honest a second time, that’s also what I want and need.  I am no different than everyone else in the world.  I also need to feel safe enough before I can address my issues head-on.

Fortunately, my understanding of God has become safer and safer, too.