A Knowledge of Difference

Tuesday, February 10, 2026 

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Dr. Brian Bantum reflects on the story of Adam and Eve as one that initiates us into the freedom of individuality and difference, for good and for ill: 

When I come back to the story of humanity’s fall I still see some of the pride and hubris I was taught to see when I was a young Christian. Adam and Eve desire to be like God and seek something that is not meant for them. They violate God’s law, God’s justice. But even more than that in the story of the Fall I see our propensity to mistake freedom for individuality. I see us estranged from our bodies, hiding the very aspects of ourselves that make us different than one another….

When God created us, God created us to be like God. God wanted us to love and to be loved. But when you love someone you have to choose them. You have to choose them in the big things and in the small things. To love someone you have to see how they are like you and how they are not like you, and you have to see how their differences are gifts, ways of helping you to see yourself and God and the world in new ways….

In the garden … God did not hide the tree [of the knowledge of good and evil] away or place it behind impenetrable walls. It grew among the many other trees. It bore fruit and grew like any other and in this way it stood before Adam and Eve, before us as a mark of their freedom. We could choose not to eat and in not eating we would confess God as our creator, the one whom we cannot be without.

In our freedom and knowledge, we enact a terrible cost:

But in our freedom we, Eve and Adam, did not rest in this relationship. We did not enjoy the trees given to us. We take, cut, tear, beat, consume, enslave what we believe is ours to know. Our eating was the slightest tilt of that beautiful freedom, away from God, and away from one another.

In our disobedience a new world opened up. We could see. The serpent was not lying in some respects; we human beings continued to breathe and think and love. But something had changed…. With this new knowledge we could no longer see the blessed significance of our bodies, of our lives together. The knowledge we gained drove us into hiding, hiding our bodies from one another and hiding ourselves from God.…

Yet, Adam and Eve remained God’s children, unique creatures with whom God desired to dwell, to love and be loved by. In this moment we did not lose the image of God. God did not withhold God’s animating Spirit and love toward us, but something changed nonetheless.

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Praying with the Seguaros Mark Longhurst

If you drive about twenty minutes southwest at sunrise from the Redemptorist Renewal Center monastery in Tucson, Arizona, you’ll find yourself in the barren, beautiful heart of Saguaro National Park. On a June morning like the one I experienced, the dry desert heat will not have yet begun its ascendant day-reign. A coolness mixes with the warm expanse. The group I traveled with broke off from each other, pursuing intentional solitude. Our morning practice: an hour of prayerful walking in the desert, accompanied only by the sturdy presence of saguaro cacti.

We learned the night before our early saguaro trek that the Tohono O’odham tribe views the saguaros as friends and even persons. Hia-Ced O’odham member Larraine Eiler writes about her place-based beliefs in a community of beings that “includes the Saguaro, and the mud turtles, the onion and the spinach, numerous species of migrating birds.” One of our retreat guides, a longtime desert hermit-mystic named Tessa Bielecki, spoke to us about how she encounters Christ in the saguaros. She evocatively described contemplating Christ and saguaros during Lent, and even experiencing the cacti embodying scenes from the Stations of the Cross. (Read her invitation to gospel, cacti-inspired reflection here). After all, in a well-known hymn in the letter to the Colossians, Christ is before all things, the firstborn of creation, and holding all things together (Colossians 1:15–19). That means that we know Christ through creation itself and not only through the biblical text. Nature also is a sacred “book” through which God speaks, as Augustine and many other theologians affirmed.

The first thought I had upon entering the national park was that it is so populated. There are no people, at least at the hour we chose, but there are saguaros in every direction. A city filled with two million of them, according to the National Park Service. And if the saguaros are friends, I thought, then I am not alone at all. I’m surrounded by other bodies in Christ. So, this being my first time ever to Arizona, and first time ever meeting saguaros, my prayer time included me pouring my heart out to God—and introducing myself to them. I slid a finger in between the sharp spines to touch the cool, cucumber-like body. I tried to listen to what each new friend might have to tell me, what stories and histories they held. After all, since a saguaro’s life span ranges from 150-175 years, most of them had been there long before me and, God willing, will still be there after I die. They have much to teach us. View this photo gallery to experience the saguaro’s sparse dignity.

The O’odham affirmation of a saguaro’s personhood has even galvanized activists to save imperiled cacti. If nature has being or “personhood,” then maybe nature has legal rights, some are suggesting. If we treat nature as our friend, we are much less likely to destroy it.

My desert companions and I are all part of a “new monastic” community hosted by the Long-Island-based Center for Spiritual Imagination. We are like-spirited seekers who have banded together to commit to a life of contemplative rhythm amidst our busy lives of work and family. We meet online once a week, go on retreats every year, and share a so-called “rule of life” that involves daily meditation, morning and evening prayer, days of solitude, and more. We converged on the Redemptorist Renewal Center in Tucson to experience the prophet Hosea’s words: “The desert will lead you to your heart where I will speak” (2:14, paraphrase). During a year dedicated to learning Carmelite spirituality and reading the famous Spanish mystics Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, we also sought to discover the roots of the Carmelite order—that of Elijah and the desert.

I wrote in this book about some things the Bible has to say about spirituality and the desert (146): The desert is the archetypal and literal place where we meet God, the place of what writer and speaker Jacqui Lewis calls “fierce love.” Deserts of loss, grief, pain, and literal sand strip down our pretensions, as if to say that preparing for God’s way requires abandonment of all our prior ways. The ways that we are in the world are all too often directed by addiction and a desire for more. The desert demands us to be emptied rather than filled, to show up and be tested, for divine fire to refine our desire, to face inner barrenness head-on, just as Jesus faces down the devil in the wilderness/desert.

We are confronted with our naked selves in the desert. There’s no place for our pride, lust, anger, resentment, or need for approval to hide. No amount of posturing will shield us from the desert sun’s unremitting glare. Its clarity may even stir us to long once again, as the Israelites did, for the seemingly safe oppression of Egypt. Or the truth that the desert peels away may cause us to plunge headlong in love with God, to say with the poet of the Song of Songs, “Who is that coming up from the wilderness/desert, leaning upon her beloved?” (Song of Songs 8:5).

After the Fall

A Story for All Time

Sunday, February 8, 2026 

Father Richard Rohr identifies how the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 is a metaphor for the loss of innocence that we all experience: 

The Bible presents us with stories in “little theater” to prepare us for the Big Theater, teaching us, in effect, that whatever is happening in the Bible is not just there, it’s everywhere; it’s not just this person, it’s every person. For too long, it has been common for Christians to read the Bible complacently, often observing, “That was the problem with Jewish religion back then.” Thus, we cleverly avoid acknowledging that the exact same problem applies today, in our own lives and communities. If the text is truly inspired, it reveals the patterns that are always true—even and most especially here and now, in me and you, not just back there in them.  

When we read Genesis 3 and look at “the Fall” itself, the Fall is not simply something that happened to Adam and Eve in one historical moment. It’s something that happens in all moments and all lives. It must happen and will happen to all of us. In fact, as the English mystic Julian of Norwich said, “First the fall, and then the recovery from the fall, and both are the mercy of God.” [1] It’s in falling down that we learn almost everything that matters spiritually. 

In Genesis, the Evil One, imaged as a snake, makes Eve suspicious. That starts the disconnection, an unraveling between Eve, Adam, and God. Suspicion does that in all relationships. Someone tells us one critical thing about another person, and that gets our minds going, fitting all sorts of pieces into a nicely constructed pattern. Suspicion almost always finds evidence for what it suspects. It inevitably moves toward states of resentment and an inability to trust outside myself. That’s the psychology of what’s happening in this simple story line.  

The text states, “the eyes of both of them were opened” (3:7). What they were opened to was a split universe. Teachers of prayer call it the “subject-object split.” This happens whenever we stand over and against things, apart and analytical, and can no longer know things by affinity, likeness, or natural connection. Instead, we merely know them as objects out there, subject to our suspicion and doubt.  

This move of “leaving the garden” begins in all human beings somewhere around seven years of age. Before that time, like Adam and Eve in the garden, we exist in unitive consciousness. It’s where we all begin, when “the father and I are one” (John 10:30), or my mother and I are one—as many of us enjoy in the first years of life.  

Eventually the split happens. It has to happen. We will eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and suffer the “wound of knowledge.” We will get suspicious of ourselves and of everything else. We will doubt. That’s called the state of alienation, and many live their whole lives there.  

God Tends to Our Wounds

Monday, February 9, 2026 

Father Richard reflects on God’s tenderness towards us, even when we make decisions that harm ourselves or others:

Alienated people stop trusting that reality is good, that we are good too, and that we belong — to God and to one another. By eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, Adam’s and Eve’s eyes were opened to a split universe of suspicion and doubt.  

Adam and Eve offer the perfect metaphor for this new split universe, this intense awareness of themselves as separate and cut off. Today, we might call it their encounter with primal shame. Every human being seems to have it in some form: that deep sense of being inadequate, insecure, separate, judged, and apart. It’s almost the human condition, yet it takes a thousand disguises, showing up uniquely in each of us. It’s this sense of disconnection, however, that creates the yearning for divine re-connection and re-communion.  

While Adam and Eve “sewed fig leaves together to make themselves loincloths” (3:7) in response to their newly discovered “nakedness,” there really is no medicine for this existential shame, apart from Someone who possibly knows all of us and loves us anyway. That can only be God! Perhaps that’s what’s meant when we say, “God alone can ‘save’ you.” God says to them, “But who told you that you were naked?” (3:11), undoing their doubt. God creates a doubt in the opposite direction and in their favor.  

When the Significant Other says we are good, then we are good indeed. That’s what it means, psychologically speaking, to be liberated and loved by God. Other people can say it, but we will always doubt it, even though it feels good and may temporarily work. It is often the necessary “bottle opener.”

This safe and protective God, the one who does not reject humanity, is illustrated in a most tender way: God is presented as a divine seamstress: “God sewed together clothes for them out of the skins of animals and they put them on” (3:21).  

Surely this is a promise from a protective and nurturing God who takes away their shame and self-loathing. That will become the momentum-building story of the whole Bible, which gradually undoes the common history of fearsome and threatening deities.  

God takes away the shame we have by giving us back to ourselves—by giving us God! It doesn’t get any better than that.  

Human love does the same thing. When someone else loves us, they give us not just themselves, but for some reason, they give us back our own self—now a truer and better self. This dance between the Lover and the beloved is the psychology of the whole Bible.  

Once humans are outside of union—symbolized by the garden—the whole pattern of fear, hatred, violence, and envy begins. Much of the rest of the Bible will reveal the conflicts of living outside the garden—in other words, in the dualistic mind of disunion—and yet with the constant invitation back into union.

Jubilee Action on Wall Street

Friday, February 6, 2026

What does love require of us, and how can we provoke that spirit of Jubilee that God was up to?
—Shane Claiborne, The Francis Factor

At CAC’s 2015 conference The Francis Factor, activist Shane Claiborne told a story about how his community’s study of Jubilee and their unexpected receipt of $10,000 in a legal settlement led to a creative action on Wall Street:

We thought, “Wow, this money isn’t just for our nonprofit. This should go to folks on the street, because we were literally fighting anti-homeless legislation.” We said, “Let’s use that money…. Let’s have a Jubilee party and let’s do it on Wall Street.” We invited a bunch of homeless folks from all over New York, many of them friends, and we said, “Hey, we’re going to go to Wall Street and we’re going to give away the money that we won in a lawsuit. We need to be peaceful, but it’s going to be beautiful.” We didn’t want it to be too crazy, so we broke it up in small change…. We had hundreds of us that had it divvied up everywhere. We had people on bikes and people with backpacks, people with coffee mugs that were filled with money.

When we got to Wall Street, you could see folks from the street trickling in wondering, “Is this really happening?” The police are all already there … and they’re insisting, “This is not happening. If anyone’s here for this money distribution, it’s not happening.” What they didn’t know is we were already there…. As soon as the bell was about to drop on Wall Street, … we announced, “We believe another world is possible, another world where everybody has what they need and there’s not this deep inequity.”

We preached it that morning and then Sister Margaret [a Catholic sister] announced the Jubilee, blew the ram’s horn, and money started pouring out everywhere. I mean, we had people on the balconies with paper money. They start pouring it out…. It was beautiful. They’re singing. This one … street sweeper, he’s got his dustpan filled with money. He’s like, “It is a good day at work. Hallelujah!” Another guy grabs some money off the street and he said, “Now I can get the prescription I needed. Thank you.” We even had folks from inside Wall Street that heard about what was happening. They said, “We heard that there’s more fun happening out here, so we’re here.” One guy just said, “I want to start getting bagels and giving them out,” and he did. It was contagious….

I think that in the end, our goal is not to create enemies but is actually to courageously proclaim the vision of God that is so big that everyone is welcome. But it also means, as Desmond Tutu says, that those who have been oppressed are free from oppression, and those who have done the oppressing are free from being the oppressor, that everyone is set free. [1] That’s the invitation for us.

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5 On Friday John Chaffee

1.

“Love itself is a kind of knowing.”

– Gregory the Great, 6th Century Bishop

The whole of Christian tradition highlights Love as the main virtue and as a description of what God is.  That said, it is fascinating how the tradition also holds that Love is a form of epistemology, it is a way of learning and therefore of knowing.

It is one thing for me to read a book about being married; it is another thing entirely to be taught by the school of love what marriage is supposed to be.

I can read 400 biographies about a person, but I could learn so much more about a person if I were to love them and be loved by them.

For all these reasons and more, as Gregory the Great teaches us, Love is a kind of knowing.

2.

“God leads into the dark night those whom He desires to purify from all these imperfections so that He may bring them farther onward.”

– John of the Cross, Spanish Monk & Reformer

When I first read the Dark Night of the Soul, it did not make sense to me.  Then, after enormous heartbreak and disillusionment with the institutional church, the Dark Night of the Soul made the most sense of all the approaches of Christian spirituality.

Over the years, I have met people at various stages of the Dark Night of the Soul.  Many of them felt a sense of relief to know that their path had been walked before by others, and that rather than being lost, they are on the same old journey of being found.

I think that one of the reasons the Dark Night of the Soul can feel so painful is that it is almost never a chosen path.  It is a path forced upon us, or one that chooses us.

In the wisdom of John of the Cross, the Dark Night of the Soul is God stripping away every single crutch, support, or idol that gets in the way of the Beloved Soul and God…

And that even includes the experience of faith itself.

Think about that.

God allows us to experience a type of “atheism” or “lack of faith” in order to teach us that our experience of faith is not the thing we should be after.  That is very much like being in love with the feeling of being in love without loving the Beloved right in front of us!

3.

“This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God.”

– Thomas Aquinas, Dominican Monk

Aquinas wrote the most impressive systematic theology in Church history.  It has towered rather supremely over other works of theology.  It is known as the Summa Theologiae.

Even still…

Despite writing such an impressive tome.

Aquinas still maintained the mystery that God is something beyond our comprehension.

I find that absolutely lovely.

4.

“That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.”

– Pete Rollins, Irish Philosopher

We have a problem, a predicament, a difficulty that we must overcome.

God is utterly beyond human language, symbols, ceremonies, and concepts.  Every potential thought we might have about God is immediately infinitely less than the reality of what God actually is.

And yet…

We can’t not say something.

God is such a profound mystery that encompasses and penetrates everything we say or do to such a degree that we still have to say something.

This paradox could make some people despair, while others might bend the knee before the mystery.

5.

“I pray God rid me of God.”

– Meister Eckhart, 14th Century German Preacher

Years ago, I preached a Good Friday service where the main point of the sermon was this quote from Eckhart.

At some level, we need the help of God to rid us of every smaller, limited, misguided, idolatrous view of God.

It is probably true for each of us that at the end of our ropes, there is an understanding of God that we would rather die than give up.  The strange reality is that that view of God is far less than what God actually is, and therefore, we need God’s help to “cleanse our palate” or “clean the slate” and to help us come to God with as few hindrances as possible.

On the surface, this quote sounds like a preacher requesting to become an atheist.  On a deeper level, it is a prayer of profound insight and devotion to this mystery we all call “God.”

Funny enough, I did not preach a Good Friday service at that church again.  Oh well.  I still think it was a sermon that Meister Eckhart would have approved of.

There Is More Than Enough

Thursday, February 5, 2026

In a homily on the miracle of the loaves and fishes, Father Richard Rohr encourages us to pray for a worldview of abundance instead of scarcity:

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey observed that one of the most universal patterns of highly effective people was that they had a worldview of abundance, while much of the world has a worldview of scarcity.

We tend to get these worldviews very young, and they underlie almost everything. I, myself, tend to have a worldview of scarcity, growing up as I did as a child of parents who were born in the Depression and the Kansas dust storms. A worldview of scarcity tells us to protect what we have, because there’s never enough to go around. It’s a competitive, win/lose worldview. It moves us toward anxiety, toward consumerism, and toward possessiveness, because we don’t want to lose what “little” we have—even if what we have is really more than enough.

But there’s another worldview, the worldview of abundance. Sooner or later, we have to choose it, because it doesn’t come naturally. I’m convinced that it’s the worldview of the gospel. It’s a big world out there. There are a lot of options and opportunities. There’s always another creative way to look at things. Let’s be honest. Do we remember to look at life that way?

Most people are afraid that they don’t have enough. Of course, if we’re dependent upon a finite source—one limited amount of money, one limited intellect, one limited life—it’s easy to look at life in terms of scarcity, convincing ourselves that there isn’t enough. There isn’t enough of goodness. There isn’t even enough of God.

The worldview of abundance depends upon us recognizing that we are in touch with an Infinite Source. If we’ve never made contact with our Infinite Source, we will be stingy, even selfish. We will guard and hoard the portion we have. This affects much of our politics and policies in this country. We’re always afraid that someone else is taking what we have earned, as if we had earned it entirely by ourselves. Most of it has been given to us, yes, by our work, but also by grace and freedom, and the choices of many other people, almost despite ourselves.

Jesus represents the worldview of abundance in every one of his multiplication miracles and stories. There’s always the making of much out of little and there are always baskets left over. That’s the only possible message: There’s plenty! If we learn to be creative, if we learn to be imaginative, if we learn to be a little less selfish, there’s always another way to look at it and another way to make sure all are fed.

Maybe a worldview of abundance is something we’ll only fully experience when we learn to draw upon an Infinite Source. If the Source is Infinite, we are infinite. If our source is finite, of course we are finite too.

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Daily Bread Is Enough
(Adapted from Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey)

“Give us this day our daily bread.”
— Matthew 6:11

We often want bread for the next year, the next decade, the rest of our lives. We want guarantees. We want reserves. We want control.

But Jesus teaches us to ask only for today.

Daily bread is the spiritual discipline of trust. It invites us to believe that what we are given is sufficient — not because it is large, but because it is enough.

Scarcity is not always about lacking resources. Often it is the fear that tomorrow will not come with grace. We hoard because we are afraid. We compete because we are anxious. We grasp because we do not trust the Source.

The prayer for daily bread is a refusal to live in fear of tomorrow.

It is a quiet rebellion against the myth that survival depends solely on accumulation. It reminds us that life flows from gift, not possession.

Those who trust daily bread become generous people. When we believe there is enough for today, we are freed to share today. When we believe tomorrow will come with mercy, we no longer need to clutch what we have.

Abundance is not measured by how much we store, but by how freely we can give.

The miracle is not that we have everything.
The miracle is that what we are given is enough.

Wednesday, February 4, 2026 

The jubilee mandate helps us to imagine what a community living life in all its fullness could look like when living justly, loving compassion and walking humbly.
—Cheryl Haw and Caitlin Collins, Jubilee, God’s Answer to Poverty

Author Kelley Nikondeha describes how Jesus encouraged his disciples to practice jubilee actions in their daily lives: 

Under the Galilean sun Jesus taught his disciples to pray about their most tangible concerns—bread for today, no debts for tomorrow, and the end of violence forevermore. [1] The structure of the prayer itself followed an ancient rubric regarding the worries of the poor. Even under Rome’s heavy hand, the hope of the have-nots was for ample food for their families and debt relief on the horizon. The matters that pressed upon the population most were central to Jesus.…

The prayer Jesus offered his disciples ushered them into the economic work of debt remission in real time. They did not need to wait for this empire, or a subsequent one, to proclaim justice in order for their debts to fall away. As they began to pray this revolutionary prayer day after day, their worldview could shift toward a jubilee-centered reality. And as their sight line changed, so could their own practice. Debt forgiveness in this landscape would begin with the disciples releasing their neighbors from debts owed to them, and vice versa. Releasing one another from debts would begin breaking the cycle of indebtedness that plagued them all.

Maybe a disciple’s prayer for debts to be forgiven would be first answered when a neighbor cancels the debt owed him. Maybe the first surge of economic freedom would happen at a microlevel, among neighbors refusing to accept debt as necessary. Neighborliness meant, among other things, not ensnaring your neighbor into debt….

When Jesus said jubilee begins today, it was not an unrealistic ideal. He intended it to begin with his disciples. Breaking the wheel would start with those with the least structural power as they reached for tools from other nations, and other times. Jesus empowered his followers to enact jubilee now—no need to wait for a king’s proclamation or the sound of the shofar.

Nikondeha points to the good news when we engage in jubilee practices ourselves:

The Lord’s Prayer, with its tangible economic language and intent, has also been called the Jubilee Prayer…. Imagine if all of us who know this prayer by heart took the challenge embedded in it seriously? It would start a groundswell of jubilary motion and economic reform…. This revolutionary prayer is a place to begin, now, wherever you are, whoever you are, in the larger movement of jubilee. 

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From Don Love. Pray Through It. ministries

Testimony of the Month

We all have words we use to help us to downplay our situation. For me, I convince myself that I am not “worried,” but “concerned.” That way, I can continue to view myself as far from the sin of anxiousness or from failing to trust God in times of fear. Once, as I was praying through my fears, I saw my “concerns” as a stone. This stone was so much more than I could handle & I could feel myself struggling to maintain all of the juggling, shifting, weight-bearing, sleep-interrupting weight that I was trying my best to manage.​ And so I prayed:”Lord, what is this stone?’His answer: Future weight.“What am I believing about this?” That If You keep holding it, You are affecting it. That you are actually doing something to solve it.“Lord, is this true?”No. All your worry is just making today heavier. ​This all happened in such a simple exchange but began to unravel my strategies. What could I give the Lord that I had absolutely no control over?  Events or outcomes to happen in the future, mostly to be made by others (which I have NO control over). It was eye-opening just to realize I was trying to control things I have no control over. That is freeing to release to the Lord. It was not meant to be my weight.There was a lie there too in my life strategy I could break up with – wresting with fear is NOT doing something about it or affecting it. It was probably doing the opposite – making me anxious, irritable, controlling of others, & wasting my energy on future problem-solving instead of resting before the Lord.  And the last statement just felt so true. Holding my fear was just making my today heavier. I could then see & feel the foolishness of my thinking & release the lies, strategies, & future concerns to the Lord. The stone was a good visual for me. When I start to feel the weight of that stone, I am reminded not to “…be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Matthew 6:34)I was not actually helping myself as I thought I was. But the relief felt in entrusting Him with these things did help me to deal better with what I could control & make decisions with more peace. And that is more effective.

Tip of the Month 

To uncover any lies or strategies about fear or worry in your life (or with others), work through something like this conversation with the Lord. Write down what you are sensing so you can reflect on it & act upon it. “Lord, what is my fear or worry like in my life? Where is this coming from? Or when did it start? What am I believing about this? Is this true? What is the truth? Can I give You my fear/worry, lie, & strategy to handle it now? What would You give me in exchange to deal with my fear/worry? How do I share this with You instead of carrying it on my own?”

Personal Jubilee Practice: Nikondeha says Jubilee “begins with the disciples” in small, neighborhood-level acts of release. Where in your life right now might you be called to practice “micro-level” freedom—releasing someone from a debt (literal or metaphorical), or being released yourself?

The Weight of Tomorrow: Don Love describes his worries as a “future weight” stone that made “today heavier.” What are you carrying that belongs to tomorrow? What would it look like to release that stone and live in today’s sufficiency—your “daily bread”?

From Prayer to Practice: The Lord’s Prayer asks for daily bread and debt forgiveness. How does praying this “revolutionary prayer” day by day actually begin to change not just our worldview, but our practice toward our neighbors?

Communal Shalom

Tuesday, February 3, 2026 

The consequences of justice and righteousness are shalom, an enduring Sabbath of joy and well-being. But the alternative is injustice and oppression, which leads inevitably to turmoil and anxiety, with no chance of well-being.
—Walter Brueggemann, Peace: Living Toward a Vision

Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley describes God’s vision of shalom, which is the ancient Hebrew vision of communal peace and universal thriving:

Shalom is communal, holistic, and tangible. There is no private or partial shalom. The whole community must have shalom or no one has shalom…. Shalom is not for the many, while a few suffer; nor is it for the few while many suffer. It must be available for everyone. In this way, shalom is everyone’s concern…. Shalom produces change for the good of all….

Shalom is not a utopian destination; it is a constant journey. One does not wait on shalom; one actually sets about the task of shalom. In other words, people need to be going about the business of shalom and living out shalom. This active, persistent effort takes place at every level, from personal relationships to societal and structural transformation. [1]

Woodley writes about Sabbath and Jubilee as practices that support God’s shalom: 

Jubilee was good news for the poor. Sabbath, and especially Jubilee, was the awaited opportunity for new starts among marginalized people. The Acceptable Year of the Lord was the chance the oppressed needed in order to find new hope. Paradoxically, while the Year of Jubilee was good news to the poor, it might have felt like bad news to the rich and prosperous. Jubilee was good news to the oppressed but bad news to the oppressor. Certainly Mary, the mother of Jesus, understood the implications at the announcement of her pregnancy when she sang in Luke 1:51–53…. Mary, and those during Jesus’ time, understood well the radical implications of a Jubilee Year. Why were such radical social measures needed? The answer according to Isaiah 61 was because God “loves justice” and [God] “hates robbery and wrongdoing” [61:8].

God’s will and cosmic design is that no one suffer unjustly, but because human beings create unjust systems, shalom-type social parameters must serve as a social safety net to offset human disobedience. In order to create a shalom system of social harmony, no person could be oppressed for too long without hope of ease and eventual release; no family could remain in poverty for generations; no land could be worked until it was depleted and useless; no animals could go hungry for too long. Any of these violations of shalom that were left unmitigated for too long would upset the natural order of reciprocity fixed in all creation.

The Year of Jubilee ensured God’s sense of justice for everyone, just in case justice was not being enacted by God’s people in the way it was supposed to be done. Put in proper perspective, Sabbath days, Sabbath years, and Jubilee years were simply rehearsals for the real “game day,” and in the understanding of Jesus, who had the final playbook, “game day” was to live out shalom every day.

Story From Our Community

I was blessed to have grown up with parents who lived their faith by making Sundays a quiet celebration. When I left home, I carried the Sunday traditions with me, and when I had children of my own, we created our own ways of practicing the Sabbath. Like Renita J. Weems wrote in her meditation, I learned how necessary it is to have at least one day of freedom from the world’s system. I am surrounded by people who have never known the joy of practicing Sabbath, and I am so grateful to have grown up in a home where the Sabbath was a delight.
—Constance F.

A Hymn to Certainty

ODDS AND ENNS FEB 1

Did you know I was a hymn writer? I’m not, though I did write one once.

I bring this up because many years ago, perhaps when I was no more than 20 or 21, I wrote a hymn for apologist Josh McDowell. I was an avid reader at the time of The Wittenburg Door Magazine (note misspelling), a Christian satire and humor magazine. (Please comment if you’ve ever read it. We can go to therapy together.) Josh was a hot item back in the day and low hanging fruit for satire, so I gave it a shot.

Why am I putting this out in the world? Why not? Also, I’m struck by how 45 or so years ago I was beginning to articulate a brand that has been with me ever since—snark and issues with people who are cocky about their faith–which is to say, I never really had a chance at normalcy.

I was also beginning to read some philosophy, namely the Spanish essayist, novelist, philosopher, etc., Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), who penned such devotional lines as:

“Orthodoxy is often the grave of living faith.”

“It is not that I resign myself to uncertainty; it is that I live by it.”

“Faith which does not doubt is dead faith.”

“Christ did not come to teach a doctrine, but to awaken souls.”

“The Cross is not a solution; it is a problem.”

“I do not want to die; no, I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die.”

I was hooked.

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Anyway, I digress. So, now, finally, I give you “Hymn for Josh McDowell” (sung to the tune of “On Christ the Solid Rock I Stand). And I think we can all agree that I am a little less sarcastic and slightly more mature 45 years later. Right? RIIIIGHT?!

Verse: My hope is built on nothing less

Then pure objective evidence.

I will not trust what others say,

I know I’m right, so what the hay.

Chorus: On intellect alone I stand.

All other ground is sinking sand.

All other ground is sinking sand.

Verse: My books prove God’s eternity,

There is no faith but certainty.

Though I may teach “trust Christ for all,”

I push my books, talks, tapes, et al.

Verse: I’ve only read a book or two,

But still I know much more than you.

These cogent arguments abound,

My reasoning goes round and round.

Verse: I’m so important can’t you see

To present Christianity.

And if you can’t think just as I,

I pray God opens up your eyes.

I know. “Don’t quit your day job.”

Sabbath and Jubilee Economics

The Forgiveness of Debts

Sunday, February 1, 2026 

Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven those who are in debt to us. —Matthew 6:11–12

Father Richard Rohr points to the economic emphasis present in the prayer of Jesus: 

These phrases in the prayer of Jesus or the “Our Father” on bread and debts are clearly a prayer given to the poor. Bread and debt are the preoccupations of the peasant class. How do I have food for tomorrow and how do I pay my bills? In the Old English of the King James Bible, the word “debts” was rendered as “trespasses.” It seems unchangeable now because we’ve said it for so long, but without doubt, the word in the original text is clearly an economic word.

We have spiritualized this petition, as we did most of the gospel. We made this petition refer to private, individual forgiveness—you trespassing against me. Surely it does have that meaning, but on the first level this petition really refers to economic indebtedness. The power of this petition lies in the Jubilee year, described in Leviticus 25.

You shall hallow the fiftieth year, and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a Jubilee for you: you shall not sow or reap the aftergrowth or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a Jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces. In this year of Jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property…. You shall not cheat one another, but you shall fear your God, for I am the Lord your God. You shall observe my statutes and faithfully keep my ordinances, so that you may live on the land securely. The land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and live on it securely.
—Leviticus 25:10–13; 17–19

In ancient Israel, in the fiftieth year, everything went back to its original owner. Ideally, all debts were forgiven. It was the great equalizer, a sign of the largess and magnanimity of God. This is the teaching Jesus is drawing upon when he quotes from Isaiah in his inaugural address and throughout his ministry (Luke 4:18–19, 21).

If people had lived by the law of Jubilee, communism would never have been necessary, and capitalism would have never been possible. The spirit behind this jubilee thinking lasted for the first 1,000 years of Christianity, when one could be excommunicated for taking an interest on a loan. (They called it the sin of usury.) The prayer of petition Jesus teaches still raises questions about economics: How does the burden of debt—the personal debt people carry in our consumer society, the national debt carried, particularly by Global South countries—keep people imprisoned in their own history?

Justice Requires Rest for All

Monday, February 2, 2026 

Observe the sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. 
—Deuteronomy 5:12–14

Theologian Cindy Lee explains how Moses and the Israelites practiced Sabbath as a liberating rhythm of life:

Work and rest are justice issues that affect our everyday spiritual formation…. We cannot rest well unless we unform our distorted practices of work. We also cannot truly find rest as individuals until all in the community can also find rest. In the Old Testament Scriptures, the commandment to keep the Sabbath was not just an order to rest. Rather, the Sabbath establishes a liberative spiritual practice to address our unjust and unethical systems of work….

The Sabbath laws establish a new rhythm of life for the Israelites after they are freed from Egypt. The Sabbath laws counteract the unjust and abusive economic system of slavery. The way of Sabbath is detailed in the fourth commandment in Deuteronomy 5:12–15….  

In this passage, Moses explains to the Israelites that they can rest now because they’ve been saved from the economic oppression of slavery. They no longer have to live according to that violent rhythm of production. Sabbath breaks the nonstop, violent cycle of production and consumption. It breaks our greed by forcing us to stop continually trying to do more and gain more. The Sabbath system is a just and equal system because all—animals, land, landowners, servants, and foreigners—enjoy the same rest. None of us has ever truly experienced a Sabbath, however, because we still live in a world where foreigners, servants, land, and animals do not get sufficient rest. Imagine a world where we all had equal rest.

The healing power of the Sabbath comes when we embrace it as a collective practice:

The Western church has taught Sabbath keeping as an individual practice of taking a day off and missed the understanding of Sabbath as a collective posture that orients us toward a just society where all can find rest. Therefore, even as our individual rest is important, we also need to help others in our communities to rest. Keeping the Sabbath rhythm requires everyone in the community, including those with privilege and power, to participate so that all can rest. The practice of communal rest is meant to train us into a way of living as a society. As someone who is privileged to take days off and go on retreats, I need to look at my community. These are questions I’ve found helpful to ask myself: Who can I free to rest? Who is exhausted? Who is not getting enough rest? And what little part can I do to help lessen their load so they can rest too? 

Truth Beyond Literalism

Friday, January 30, 2026

Writer Liz Charlotte Grant describes how she has moved beyond the literal and “inerrant” way she was taught to read the Bible through her religious upbringing:

I used to read the Bible in binary terms—inerrant versus errant, fallible versus infallible. This led me and many American Christians to believe that the whole of our spirituality could be slotted into binaries. We could read a passage either rightly or wrongly. Our interpretation could be true or false. We ourselves could be classed as good or bad, damned or redeemed, friend or enemy. Reading the Bible like this also encouraged us to believe in one single interpretation, … the “plain reading,” because God would not try to keep Godself from us. We flattened the Bible for the sake of simplicity.

Grant discovered a way to reapproach the Bible with curiosity and respect for its history:

I believe this book still deserves our attention—even when it refuses to submit to our age’s demand for historicity, even if we readers leave literalism behind. Truth is not the same as fact. To refuse ourselves these stories is a death by starvation. These spiritual stories sustained our spiritual forebears; without these stories, I suggest that we cannot maintain the imagination required to nurture belief….

I am returning to the Scriptures … but I am reading it slant. I attend to the sky and the ground with free-ranging curiosity, comingling origin stories from science and art with the Bible’s account of God’s first encounters with humanity in the book of Genesis.… Rather than flat-footed rejection, I encourage wandering. Our best questions often sound like doubts, yet I believe curiosity is the most reverent stance a human can take. Wandering itself is a spiritual discipline. Far from losing faith, I have found that wandering has allowed me to find it.

I believe the Bible does have the power to tell us what God is like, even to introduce us to the Creator. But I read the Bible differently than I used to. I move more cautiously, listening closely to a variety of careful scholars—theologians, archaeologists, philologists, linguists, and manuscript critics. I am determined to be patient and humble. I myself am a learner, not a scholar….

You too have permission to question the sacred without fearing a backslide into unbelief. Knock loudly. Listen to your gut and let your tears run. Reject answers that do not admit complication. Seek the resonance at the base of the story. The seeking is the point. Because there, in your wandering, God is.

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1.

“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more than they are doing now. Christians should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.”

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran Pastor

I am not afraid to say that Bonhoeffer was the first theologian I seriously studied in my early 20s.  His whole life and work are utterly inspiring to me.

One thing most people do not know about Dietrich Bonhoeffer is how adamantly he opposed Christian nationalism in Germany.  If you go back and read his famous book, Discipleship, you will see that throughout he makes comments against fascism and totalitarianism.

If Bonhoeffer were to travel through time and have the opportunity to give a prophetic and pastoral sermon to our current cultural moment in America, I wonder what he would say.  He clearly did not agree with the Church shaking hands with those in power, and believed that the ethics of Christ always sided with the poor, the outcast, the foreigner, the oppressed.

2.

“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.“

– Matthew 26:52

It feels appropriate to reflect on this quote from Jesus.

It happens in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus is arrested by the Roman guard with the Temple leadership’s approval.  Peter, believing it is finally time to start fighting back and overthrow the Romans by force, is corrected by Jesus about his tactics…

Jesus tells Peter to put away his sword, and heals the cut off ear of Malchus.

Rather than endorsing violence, Jesus tells his followers to put away their weapons and then heals the wounds of his enemies.

No wonder there are whole books written about this single verse, and it has become one of the most discussed passages on a Christian approach to conflict management, violence, and enemy-love!

3.

“As the ‘imperial mind’ took over, religion had less to do with Jesus’ teachings on nonviolence and forgiveness, and instead became fully complicit in power, war, and greed.”

– Fr. Richard Rohr, Franciscan Friar

“Imperial Christianity” is a term for that false interpretation of Christianity that believes in the use of empire tactics for the sake of influence and expansion.  This means using force, might, power, and/or intimidation.

However, true Christianity is always a grassroots movement that primarily uses the tools of compassion, welcome, gentleness, and hospitality.

4.

“Do not give yourselves up to party spirit. . . . To live for a political party is unworthy of a man who professes to be a Christian.”

– Charles Spurgeon, Baptist Preacher

Charles Spurgeon is not a figure I am familiar with.

What strikes me about this quote is that he is often quoted by conservative-leaning pastors.  And yet, Spurgeon refused the push/pull of American politics and knew that the ethics of the Kingdom of God utterly transcend bipartisan politics.

The Christian is not allowed to bow to any ideology whatsoever, even if that supposed ideology claims to be more “Christian” than the opposing side.  To profess oneself as a Christian means that one is beholden to Christ alone and not any group or collective in particular.

This reminds me of something else, a basic principle from Soren Kierkegaard…  “If you can’t critique it, then it is already an idol.”  I fear that we all have the tendency to hold our group identities above critique. which means our political parties are almost certainly idols.

5.

“We must not mind insulting men, if by respecting them we offend God.”

– St. John Chrysostom, Early Church Father

John Chrysostom died in 407.  This is just a generation after Christianity was legalized as a religion in the Roman Empire and became its official religion.

At no point in the New Testament does it mandate that Christians are to be “nice.”

The New Testament does tell Christians to be “gentle,” but one can be “gentle” while saying things that others do not consider “nice.”

As we can see here, John Chrysostom seems to endorse insulting/offending people.  As we look back at the words of the Hebrew Prophets, I sincerely doubt their original audiences thought their sermons were “nice.”  No, they poked and prodded and tipped over the “sacred cows.”

Let us not “respect men” if by doing so we “offend God.”

More than One Meaning

Thursday, January 29, 2026

Father Richard recounts how Christians received the wisdom of Scripture through hearing it discussed in many different ways:

Most Christians today don’t know that the early centuries of Christianity—through authoritative teachers like Origen, Cyril of Alexandria, Augustine, and Gregory the Great—encouraged as many as seven “senses” of Scripture. The literal, historical, allegorical, moral, symbolic, eschatological (the trajectory of history and growth), and “primordial” or archetypal (commonly agreed-upon symbolism) levels of a text were often given serious weight among scholars. These levels were gradually picked up by the ordinary Christian through Sunday preaching (as is still true today). Multiple interpretations of Scripture came to be expected by those who heard them.

 These different senses of Scripture were sometimes compared to our human senses of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, and touching, which are five distinct ways of knowing the same thing, but in very different “languages.” After both the Reformation and the Enlightenment, Western Europeans reduced the multiple ways of knowing to one way for all practical purposes—the supposedly rational/literal/historical. At this point, we have largely compacted and limited the Bible to this single sense for several centuries, in both its Catholic and Protestant forms.

Our bandwidth of spiritual access to the Bible was consequently severely narrowed, it seems to me—and as many would say—to the least spiritually helpful level. That something supposedly literally happened in one exact way, in one moment of time, does not, of itself, transfer the experience to now, me, or us. I believe that such transference is the transformative function of any spiritual text.

The narrow, rational/literal/historical approach largely creates an antiquarian society that prefers to look backward instead of forward. In my experience, it creates transactional religion much more than transformational spirituality. It idealizes individual conformity and group belonging over love, service, or actual change of heart.

Actually, literalism was discredited from the beginning of the New Testament by the inclusion of four Gospel accounts of the same Jesus event, which differ in many ways. Which is the “inerrant” one?

Jesus repeatedly chose to teach through story and parable, revealing what God was “like”:

The earlier centuries of Christianity were much closer to the trans-rational world of Jesus and his storytelling style of teaching (which does not lend itself to dogmatic or systematic theology). The Gospel says, “He would never speak to them except in parables” (Matthew 13:34). The indirect, metaphorical, symbolic language of a story or parable seems to be Jesus’s preferred way of teaching spiritual realities.

Almost all of Jesus’s parables begin with the same phrase: “The reign of God is like….” Jesus fully knows he is speaking in simile, metaphor, story, and symbol. But in recent centuries, many Christians have not granted him that freedom, and thus we miss or avoid many of his major messages. We are much poorer for it.

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Jesus Calling: January 29th, 2026

Jesus Calling: January 29

Keep your focus on Me. I have gifted you with amazing freedom, including the ability to choose the focal point of your mind. Only the crown of My creation has such remarkable capability; this is a sign of being made in My image. Let the goal of this day be to bring every thought captive to Me. Whenever your mind wanders, lasso those thoughts and bring them into My Presence. In My radiant Light, anxious thoughts shrink and shrivel away. Judgmental thoughts are unmasked as you bask in My unconditional Love. Confused ideas are untangled while you reset in the simplicity of My Peace. I will guard you and keep you in constant Peace, as you focus your mind on Me.

RELATED SCRIPTURE: 

Psalm 8:5 NLT

5 Yet you made them only a little lower than God

    and crowned them with glory and honor.

Genesis 1:26-27 NLT

26 Then God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us. They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.”

27 So God created human beings in his own image.

    In the image of God he created them;

    male and female he created them.

Additional insight regarding Genesis 1:27: God made both man and woman in his image. Neither man nor woman is made more in the image of God than the other. From the beginning, the Bible places man and woman at the pinnacle of God’s creation. Neither sex is exalted, and neither is depreciated.

2nd Corinthians 10:5 NLT

5 We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people from knowing God. We capture their rebellious thoughts and teach them to obey Christ.

Additional insight regarding 2nd Corinthians 10:5: Paul uses military terminology to describe this warfare against sin and Satan. God must be the commander in chief – even our thoughts must be submitted to his control as we live for him. Spirit-empowered believers must capture every thought and yield it to Christ. When exposed to ideas or opportunities that might lead to wrong desires, you have a choice. You can recognize the danger and surrender, or you can allow unhealthy thoughts to take you captive. You capture your fantasies and desires when you honestly admit them to the Lord and ask him to redirect your thinking. Ask God to give you the spirit of discernment and conscious acts of surrender to keep your thoughts focused on his truth.

Isaiah 26:3 NLT

3 You will keep in perfect peace

    all who trust in you,

    all whose thoughts are fixed on you!

Additional insight regarding Isaiah 26:3: We can never avoid strife in the world around us, but when we fix our thoughts on God, we can know the perfect peace even in turmoil. As we focus our mind on God and his Word, we become steady and stable. Supported by God’s unchanging love and mighty power, we are not shaken by the surrounding chaos (see Philippians 4:7 – “Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.”). Do you want peace? Keep your thoughts on God and your truth in him!

Wednesday, January 28, 2026 

READ ON CAC.ORG

Father Richard identifies some of the paradoxes we encounter when reading the Bible: 

After reading and studying Scripture for decades, my assumption is that the biblical text mirrors the nature of human consciousness. It includes within itself passages that develop certain great themes and universal patterns, as well as passages that fight and resist those very advances. We might even call it faith and unfaith—both are locked into the text.

The journey into the mystery of God is necessarily a journey into the unfamiliar. While much of the Bible is merely a repetition of familiar terrain, where nothing new is asked of history or nothing new given to the soul, there are also those frequent breakthroughs, which we would rightly call “revelations” from the Spirit (because we would never come to them by our own small minds).

Once we observe the trajectory, we are always ready to be surprised and graced by the Unfamiliar, which is why it is called “faith” to begin with. It might at first feel scary, new, or even exciting, but if we stay with the unfolding texts, we will have the courage to know them also as our own deepest hopes or intuitions. Such is the dance between outer authority and inner authority, the great Tradition and inner experience. This is the balance we seek.

I believe the prime ideas of Scripture are already revealed in capsulated form at the beginning in the Hebrew Scriptures. From that early statement of the theme, the whole middle part of the Bible is something akin to character or theme development. By the end, especially in the Risen Christ of the Gospels and in Paul’s theology of the Risen Christ, we have the crescendo, the full revelation of One we can trust to be a nonviolent and thoroughly gracious God, who is inviting us into loving union.

It takes all the Bible—and sometimes all our lives—to get beyond the punitiveness and pettiness that we project onto God and that we harbor within ourselves. We have to keep connecting the dots of God’s wisdom and grace. Remember, how we get there determines where we will arrive. The process itself is important and gives authority to the outcome. The Bible’s “three-steps-forward, two-steps-back” texts give us a deeper urgency to go forward and a deeper understanding when we get there.

I love the clear continuities between the two Testaments and clearly see Jesus as a Jewish man and rabbi, who brilliantly gave us a wonderful lens by which to love the Jewish tradition and keep moving forward with it in an inclusive way (which became its child, Christianity).

The ecumenical character and future of Christianity become rather obvious when understood in this way. We cannot avoid one another any longer, and we do so only at our own loss (1 Corinthians 12:12–30), and the loss of the gospel.

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JAN 28, 2026 Jesus’ Death Exposed the Failure of the Second Temple

The first temple in Jerusalem was built by King Solomon. When it was finished, God’s presence filled the temple and his glory dwelt in the innermost chamber, the Holy of Holies (see 1 Kings 8:10-11). However, after generations of injustice, idolatry, and ignoring the warnings offered by the Lord’s prophets, God’s presence left the temple as a sign that the people had broken their covenant with him. Shortly after, the temple was destroyed by the Babylonian invaders in 586 BC, and the people were carried into exile. When they returned to Jerusalem 70 years later, the people began rebuilding after the destruction. This included erecting a new temple. Despite the resumption of worship and sacrifices, there is no record of God’s presence ever returning to the second temple. Over the following centuries, the second temple was expanded, its furnishings upgraded, and its decor enhanced, yet there was no sign that God’s glory filled the Holy of Holies. Nonetheless, the temple became the centerpiece of Jewish identity, religion, and hope for political liberation. And those who served in the temple—the priests and religious leaders—used their status to exalt themselves and maintain control over the people.The importance of the second temple, but the absence of God’s presence within it, is a tension we see throughout the gospels. On the one hand, Jesus repeatedly criticized the religious leaders for abusing his “Father’s house,” but on the other hand, Jesus also dismissed the temple as irrelevant. Instead, he identified himself as the real temple and the true presence of God on earth. In fact, it was Jesus’ criticism of the temple and his exaltation of himself as greater than the temple which ultimately led the religious leaders to seek his arrest and execution. By challenging the temple, Jesus undermined the foundation on which the religious leaders based their authority.In this reading of the gospels, Jesus’ judgment of the temple and its leaders reaches its climax when he dies on the cross. Matthew, Mark, and Luke each recorded that “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom,” exposing the inner chamber, the Holy of Holies, where God’s presence was supposed to dwell. Of course, God’s glory was not there. It never was. The torn curtain revealed that the second temple, and all of the men who drew their power from it, were frauds. They said they arrested and executed Jesus to defend the temple, the house of the Lord. In truth, they had destroyed the actual temple and murdered the Lord to protect their fragile religious authority. In other words, they were guilty of the very thing they had accused Jesus of.The scene is reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, when Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal the truth. The giant, frightening wizard whose presence was surrounded by smoke and fire, turned out to be a little man talking into a microphone and pulling levers. It was all a charade. Likewise, the second temple and the religious hierarchy it produced were built on an illusion. God’s presence was not there. No smoke or holy fire filled the Most Holy Place behind the curtain, because God’s true glory was to be found somewhere else—on the cross .DAILY SCRIPTURE LUKE 23:44-49 2 CHRONICLES 7:1-3 WEEKLY PRAYER. from Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1875) O God, grant that looking upon the face of the Lord, as into a glass, we may be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory. Take out of us all pride and vanity, boasting and forwardness; and give us the true courage which shows itself by gentleness; the true wisdom which shows itself by simplicity; and the true power which shows itself by modesty. Amen.