Rabbi Or Rose tells of the prophetic witness and spiritual audacity of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), one of the great religious leaders of the 20th century.
Heschel came to the United States in 1940 under great duress, narrowly escaping the brutal Nazi onslaught in Europe…. Tragically, many of Heschel’s family members—including his mother and three of his sisters—were murdered by the Nazis in the following months and years…. After acculturating to life in the United States and establishing himself as a respected academic and gifted religious writer, Heschel became increasingly involved in public affairs….
Heschel gave his first major address on civil rights in March 1963 at the National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago. In his remarks, he compared the plight of African Americans in the United States to the ancient Israelite slaves in Egypt. In one particularly dramatic moment, he stated, “It was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.” [1] He went on to challenge listeners—including many Jewish audience members—to choose between the legacies of Pharoah or Moses.
Heschel embodied the wisdom of the Hebrew prophets at a critical time in history. His Jewish faith inspired hiscommitment to justice for those on the margins:
In fine prophetic fashion, Heschel rails against ritual observance divorced from social responsibility…. He wrote, “Prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action.” [2] While Heschel was an eloquent spokesperson for a life of disciplined religious praxis—including prayer and other traditional observances—he was steadfast in his call for a holistic approach to spirituality and ethics….
Heschel joined Dr. King and other civil rights leaders in the famous Selma to Montgomery March. Upon returning from that protest, he wrote the following words:
For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips, and marching is not kneeling, and yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying. [3]
For Heschel, marching for voting rights was a holy act, an embodied devotional response to God’s ongoing call for dignity and equality…. Rather than turn away in rage or despair from engagement with non-Jews, Heschel became a champion of racial justice and interreligious cooperation. He used his ownexperiences as a victim of bigotry and hatred to work to stamp out these destructive phenomena in his new homeland and throughout the world….
[Heschel] played a vital role in healing racial, religious, and political wounds in America and beyond…. Rather than retreating and insulating himself from the aches and pains of the world, he cultivated relationships with a diverse set of colleagues and organizations and set out to help transform it.
May Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s memory continue to serve as a source of inspiration and challenge to all those who seek to participate in the healing of our shared civilization.
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1.
“God is self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love.”
Brad is one of the most relatable theologians today. I get the sense from him that he is a well-rounded person who has navigated the deconstruction process well, emerged on the other side, and become one of the more grounded and self-aware educators on the Christian faith.
This definition of God from him is something I muse over occasionally when I am driving in my Jeep.
2.
“People ruin their lives by their own foolishness and then are angry at the Lord.”
I guess we all do it. We often want to find someone else to blame for our problems rather than taking responsibility ourselves.
Like any loving parent, God does not protect us from the consequences of our actions. Remember in Galatians? Where Paul says that we will “reap what we sow”? God is not some cosmic being who protects us from hitting rock bottom. If anything, it might be the best thing for us in the long run to hit that rock bottom.
(And, at that point, how interesting that some people thank God that they are finally able to take ownership of their actions and turn their life around!)
3.
“It is through our fulfilling of the commandments that the Lord makes us dispassionate; and it is through His divine teachings that He gives us the light of spiritual knowledge.”
The early Church had an understanding of “dispassion” as a virtue.
It is a word that we do not use much today, but it carries within it some profound wisdom. Dispassion is a certain detachment from our desires that bring us suffering. (Dis- meaning against, and Passio- meaning suffering). The early Church quickly came to understand that it is our disordered loves/passions that cause us suffering.
For this reason, we must practice this virtue or habit of dispassion, to learn to have the right kind of detachment from outcomes and to allow our ego the humiliation of not always getting its way.
The Ten Commandments, then, are simply the starting point for us to learn how to cultivate dispassion and to come to realize that it is in our best interests not always to get our way.
4.
“Those who would know much, and love little, will ever remain at but the beginning of a godly life.”
I am slowly re-reading Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. It is his treatment and analysis of Christian love, examining “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” from every possible angle.
When I first read Works of Love, it was a punch in the face. As a head-oriented person who loves to read and think deeply about things, it was a shock to realize that even reading a book about love does not necessarily translate to loving other people. It was a safe way to engage my brain without having to interact with others. It was in that moment that I realized my tendency to avoid feelings by going into academic thought.
I want to think that, over time, I have become a little less head-oriented as a person and have been able to grow a little bit past “beginner Christianity” and actually love people.
Martin Buber’s work has been an influence on me for some time, ever since I discovered his book, I and Thou.
The dichotomy of Sacred and Profane is something that makes sense during one stage of faith, but not so much in another stage. We treat Sacred things as special and as things to be protected or revered, but then treat Profane things as things to be avoided, discarded, and the like. But at a later stage of faith, it’s more so that there are things that are Sacred and other things that need to be made Holy Again.
The possibility of making something Holy Again is exciting to me. It is not a passive sitting back, and it is not the flippant discarding of something “profane.” To make things Holy Again is a mission, it is a calling, it is to join God in the Christ Project of the Reconciliation of All Things.
Theologian Meggan Watterson describes the source of what she calls “sacred rage”:
There’s a rage that gives us clarity about when our boundaries are being crossed, a rage that gives us critical information that we’re in danger, that someone is harming us or someone we love. There’s a rage that demonstrates to us how interconnected we are, for example when we feel rage while witnessing an injustice….
Seeing George Floyd murdered was something we all witnessed collectively because seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier refused to leave his side, refused to listen to the police officers who told her to move on, and instead remained, and filmed on her iPhone the murder that would reignite social justice movements all over the globe. This form of rage is sacred. It’s a rage that clarifies what we care most about in this world, about what we will put our bodies on the line to stand up for. The distinction is that we let this sacred rage motivate us into action, but when we act we move from love.
Watterson compares sacred rage with rage that seeks to cause harm.
It’s the rage of revenge. The rage of trying to get even. It’s the rage of an endless cycle of retaliation. It’s the rage that can compel us to act in ways we will regret for the rest of our lives, or that will cost us our lives or someone else’s. It’s the rage that refuses mercy. It’s the rage that keeps us up at night locked in ahorrific egoic struggle going over again and again a betrayal, a terrible wrong someone has caused us.
And it’s a rage that thinks it’s right…. That we have every right to cause harm to someone who has harmed us. That we have every right to get all caught up in the ego, in our own tiny window of perception about some person, that we get to take our rage out on them.
Watterson affirms our inherent goodness as the source of both rage and healing:
Rage and goodness are not mutually exclusive. Rage is often necessary in order to draw fierce boundaries when we or those we love or those we feel connected to are being harmed. And rage is necessary to remind us of our innate goodness. We’re angry because we are good, because we recognize, we know innately, what is good. Rage, like a slow controlled burn, can fuel and inform us….
Rage is information. Rage is not an action plan. Rage holds no answers for what’s next. And it can quickly galvanize action. Yet, if we act only from that rage, if we move the way rage wants us to move, we will cause harm to ourselves and others. So when we go to take action, we must first intentionally return to love. Rage informs us about what we love, and love moves us to act in ways only love knows.
There’s something absolutely beautiful about the way God loves, and it’s perfectly captured in Jesus’s parable of the sower in Mark 4. Picture this farmer who just throws seeds everywhere—on the path, in the rocks, among the weeds, on the good soil. His agricultural technique is questionable at best. Any farming instructor would probably give him an F for seed conservation.
But that’s exactly the point.
The sower doesn’t pre-select which ground gets the good seed. He’s not running soil samples first or checking pH levels. He’s just flinging the grace of God around like confetti at a wedding. This is what theologians call prevenient grace—God’s love reaching everyone before they even know they need it. Not just the elect, not just some chosen few, but literally everyone gets seeds.
In a world where we’re constantly sorting people into categories—worthy and unworthy, deserving and undeserving, insiders and outsiders—God’s approach is radically different. Divine love isn’t parceled out based on merit or predetermined worthiness. It’s broadcast indiscriminately, extravagantly, almost wastefully.
But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He explains that The Satan—the accuser, the one who lies and deceives—immediately swoops in to steal this good word from some people. How many of us have heard the good news and then had thoughts creep into our minds: “Nah, that’s not me. I’m too messed up.” Or maybe we’ve been taught lies that God is actually a vengeful cosmic killjoy just waiting to smite us. That’s the work of the accuser.
These lies are insidious because they sound so reasonable. They masquerade as humility or theologicalsophistication. But they’re actually theft—stealing away the very grace that God has freely scattered in ourdirection.
Jesus makes an especially pointed comment about the thorny ground, where money and the pursuit of it actively chokes out spiritual growth. In a culture that treats bank accounts like report cards from heaven, Jesus says wealth is actually a spiritual hazard, an active impediment to spiritual flourishing.
You simplycannot serve both God and money, as Jesus says elsewhere. The thorns don’t just coexist with the good seed; they actively strangle it.
Grace That Multiplies
So what separates the people who get the parable from those who don’t? Jesus makes it clear that the differentiating factor is curiosity. The disciples get closer to Jesus. They ask questions, they lean in, they want to understand. The people on the outside are those who think they already know everything.
Certainty kills curiosity, and curiosity might just be one of God’s love languages. The moment we think we have God figured out, we stop listening. The moment we assume we understand how grace works, we stop marveling at its wildness.
The beautiful thing about good soil isn’t some sort of genetic spiritual lottery. It’s about staying curious, asking questions, and being willing to let God’s ridiculous, indiscriminate love take root in your life.And when it does, grace becomes reproductive.
When God’s love takes hold in your life, it doesn’t just sit there like a trophy on a shelf. It multiplies. Grace creates more grace, more love, more fruit that feeds others. The whole point of grace being received is that it becomes grace that’s given.
In a world obsessed with scarcity and competition, God’s economy operates on abundance and multiplication. The more grace we give away, the more we have. The more love we share, the more love grows. It’s the only investment strategy that’s truly bulletproof—because it’s backed not by market forces, but by the inexhaustible generosity of God.
A prophet has a responsibility for the moment, an openness to what the moment reveals. He is a person who knows what time it is. —Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets
TheTears of Things Reader’s Guide describes the message of the prophet Jeremiah:
The prophet Jeremiah is known for his tears and his rage. He said, “Whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout ‘Violence and destruction!’” (Jeremiah 20:8). He’s known as a prophet of wrath but, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “It would be more significant to say that,” like us, “Jeremiah lived in an age of wrath.” [1]
The son of a priest from Anathoth, a small town near Jerusalem, Jeremiah railed against the religious and political establishments in the seventh century BCE. He proclaimed an agonizingly unpopular message of his people’s imminent destruction by the Babylonian empire, a message “like a burning fire shut up in [his] bones” (Jeremiah 20:9). He foretold famine, plunder, exile, and captivity while his friends and family abandoned him and the royal court imprisoned him.…
Somehow, this heartbroken prophet held fast to a vision of collective renewal through relationship with God: “I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord; and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they will return to me with their whole heart” (Jeremiah 24:7). [2]
Richard Rohr considers Jeremiah’s message of faithfulness for our time:
If we believe God is angry in the way that humans are, then it’s too easy for us to end up being angry “without limit.” In fact, if we believe the Creator is always critiquing, judging, and punishing everything, it should be no surprise that our entire world is bathed in rage and resentment. Isn’t this, in fact, much of our experience today? Someone must show us the way through. It cannot be done by law or order, but with a remembering of the great and divine pity modeled and taught by saints and prophets.
I surely believe some form of projection of our anger onto others is at the heart of the nonstop world wars of “Christian” nations. It’s at the center of those cultures that encourage punitive or emotionally withholding parents or people with “stiff upper lips.” Crying, at its best, teaches us to hold the emotion instead of projecting it elsewhere.
In Jeremiah’s prophecies, all hopes for the future of the Jewish people lie in those who endured a three-stage process of transformation: first, those who entered into exile; second, those who retained hope and did not turn bitter during that exile; and third, those who returned from exile with generativity and praise in their hearts instead of self-pity.
These people are the change agents for culture, paralleling the classic three stages of purgation, illumination, and union. Each of these stages operates as a change agent in different ways. Into, through, and back home could well be the necessary movements for any of us.
“Pastor, I have to confess something,” Alika said, fidgeting with her coffee cup during our meeting. “I’m not sure I believe in God anymore. Or maybe I do? I don’t know if the resurrection actually happened, and honestly, half the Bible feels like ancient mythology to me.” She paused, looking almost guilty. “But here’s the weird part—I still love going to church. I get goosebumps during worship, I look forward to small group, and your sermons still move me sometimes. What’s wrong with me?”Nothing, I told her. Absolutely nothing. Alika’s confession isn’t unique. In my years of pastoral counseling, I’ve heard variations of this story so many times—people wrestling with doubt while simultaneously finding themselves drawn to religious community and practice. They’ve been told that faith is primarily about believing the right things, so if their belief wavers, they assume they have to pack up and leave.But here’s what I’ve learned—there are at least three profound reasons people continue to connect with religion that have nothing to do with whether they think every doctrine is literally true. And understanding these reasons might just save us from the exhausting binary of “believer” versus “non-believer. “Beauty: When Truth Comes Through Your Senses The first reason people stay connected to religion is beauty. Not Instagram-pretty beauty, but the kind that stops you in your tracks and makes you forget to breathe for a moment. Think Gregorian chant echoing through stone arches, or the way light filters through stained glass, or how Bach’s Mass in B Minor can make an atheist weep.Unfortunately, American evangelicalism has largely fumbled this ball. We’ve traded Gothic cathedrals for big-box church buildings that look suspiciously like defunct Sam’s Clubs. Our worship music, while well-intentioned, often sounds like it was focus-grouped to death—radio-friendly but about as aesthetically transcendent as a commercial jingle. On the other hand, string the right four chords together, repeat the bridge, and you just might find yourself moved to tears.Step outside evangelicalism and beauty abounds. The architecture of Anglican cathedrals. The poetry of Hindu devotional texts, the austere elegance of Zen gardens, the intricate calligraphy of Islamic art—these traditions understand that humans don’t just think their way to the sacred; they feel their way there too. Beauty matters because it bypasses our analytical minds and speaks directly to something deeper. When Alika gets goosebumps during worship, her body is responding to something her brain hasn’t fully processed yet. That’s not a bug in the system, it’s a feature.
Tradition: Finding Your People Across Time. The second draw is tradition—the sense of being rooted in something larger than your individual life span. Religion can connect you to a people, a culture, a story that extends backward and forward through generations.American evangelicalism, with its colonizing imperative, has tried its best to strip away cultural particularity in favor of a bland homogeneity. But look at the Black church, with its unique fusion of liberation theology and musical innovation. Look at Latino Catholicism, with its vibrant blend of indigenous and European traditions. These are not watered-down versions of so-called “real” Christianity. They’re Christianity made flesh in specific cultural contexts. (Sidenote: In my conversations with Asian Christians, Asian American Christianity has often struggled to develop its own distinct cultural expression, partly because of the model minority myth that granted Asians a kind of honorary whiteness. This prevented the necessity [and opportunity] that other marginalized communities had to create their own religious aesthetic—a curse disguised as a blessing.)But tradition isn’t just about ethnicity. It’s about continuity, about knowing that the words you’re speaking have been spoken by millions before you, that the rituals you’re participating in have carried people through joy and grief for centuries. There’s comfort in that continuity, even if you’re not sure you agree with every theological detail.This is why I know people who retain some of their Irish/Polish/Slavic Catholic traditions or who seek out African traditional religions after generations of colonization tried to erase them. They’re making identity claims about belonging.
Helpfulness: The Practical Magic of Community. The third reason is pragmatic: religion can simply be helpful. When my wife Emily and I move to a new city for pastoral work, we instantly have a community of people ready to help us unpack the U-Haul. We have a built-in social network.Religious communities offer resources that would otherwise require a small army of social workers: food pantries, financial literacy classes, grief counseling, addiction recovery programs, childcare, elder care. Churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues often function as de facto community centers, filling gaps that government and private sector can’t or won’t address.But the helpfulness goes beyond social services. The practices themselves are beneficial. People who regularly participate in religious communities tend to live longer and report higher levels of happiness. Prayer is essentially meditation with a theological frame. Meditation supports healthy brain development. Regular community involvement combats loneliness, which has genuine health consequences.Confession and forgiveness rituals provide structured ways to process guilt and shame. Sabbath practices offer permission to rest in a productivity-obsessed culture. These spiritual disciplines do double-duty as psychological tools that promote well-being.
Truth: The Double-Edged Sword. Finally, there’s Truth with a capital T—the belief that your religion most accurately describes reality, the supernatural, the meaning of existence. In our post-Enlightenment, empirically-obsessed era, Western Christianity has made this the primary (sometimes only) reason to be religious.I don’t want to dismiss the importance of truth. I’m a critical realist—I believe there is such a thing as reality, and that we can know something meaningful about it, even with all our human limitations. Truth matters.But when Truth becomes the only emphasis, it becomes dangerous. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter if your religious expression causes harm in the world, because “it’s true, so we have to do it anyway.” This logic has been used to justify encouraging abuse victims to stay with their abusers, to support genocide because “God commanded it,” to dismiss the suffering caused by religious institutions because doctrine matters more than people.On the other hand, if what we’re really after is Truth, if “all truth is God’s truth,” then I get to be open to finding truth everywhere—in other religions, in secular philosophy, in scientific discovery, in lived experience. The moment I claim my particular religious expression has cornered the market on all truth for all time, I’ve stopped seeking truth and started hoarding power.
The Freedom in Multiplicity. So where does this leave Alika, sitting in my office with her coffee and her complicated faith? It leaves her free.Free to find beauty in Gregorian chant and also in Buddhist meditation bells. Free to appreciate the way her Irish Catholic grandmother’s rituals shaped her while also learning from Jewish practices of mourning. Free to participate in a community that feeds her soul without having to sign off on every line of the doctrinal statement.The dirty little secret that many religious institutions don’t want you to know is that most people throughout history have related to religion through some combination of these four reasons, not just through intellectual assent to propositions. The medieval peasant wasn’t going to mass because she’d thoroughly considered the theological implications of transubstantiation—she was going because it was beautiful, because it connected her to her community, because it helped her make sense of her life, and yes, because she thought it was true, but not primarily in an analytical way.We’ve created a false binary that says you’re either “all in” or “all out,” that doubt disqualifies you from participation. But what if doubt is actually an invitation to explore the other dimensions of religious experience? What if questioning the truth claims opens up space to appreciate the beauty, embrace the tradition, and receive the practical help that religious communities offer?This realism acknowledges that humans are complex beings who connect to the sacred through multiple pathways, not just through the intellect. It recognizes that a religion’s value can’t be measured solely by its factual accuracy, any more than a poem’s worth can be determined by whether it contains scientifically verifiable statements.Alika doesn’t need to choose between her doubts and her spiritual life. She gets to learn that there are more ways to be religious than she’s been told. And maybe, in embracing that complexity, she’ll find something richer and more honest than the brittle, fragile “certainty” she’s been taught to value.Faith and belief is less about having the right answers and more about staying curious about the right questions.
Valarie Kaur describes how the Sikh faith teaches the difference between rage stirred from personal frustration and rage that fights against injustice:
In the Sikh tradition, rage, or krodh, is one of the five thieves, a destructive impulse that can hijack who we want to be. Krodh is often paired with the word kaam, which refers to unhealthy desire. Kaam krodh suggests that vengeful wrath is tied to desire: When the world denies what we want, rage rises in us. Guru Nanak calls it a corrosive salt that destroys the gold in us. At the same time, Guru Nanak spoke in fiery language against injustice. Rage, when consciously harnessed, is a force that connects us with our power to fight for others, and for ourselves. [1]
Kaur offered this wisdom during a CAC virtual gathering:
When we bottle up our rage, it can go in two different places. One is to go inward, and that leads to all of the damage it can wreak inside of our nervous systems, our psychological health, our spiritual health. We’re basically severing ourselves off from parts of our own hearts. We make ourselves sick. That is what so many women in particular have been forced to do in this culture. The other direction it can go is out to explode, creating harm, creating violence, the rage that drives the hatred and cruelty. We only have to look at the headlines to see what world that creates.
My invitation is to honor our rage, to name it, to find safe containers to process it, because it’s also a way that we love ourselves. In Sikh wisdom, the very heart of the Sikh cosmic vision is Ik Onkar, oneness ever unfolding. It’s an invitation to look at anyone or anything and say, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.” Separateness is an illusion….
The true nature of reality is that we are one, but that oneness is both inward and outward. My invitation to see no stranger also begins within. Oh, my pain! Oh, my shame! Oh, my rage! You are a part of me I do not yet know. Instead of banishing you or exiling you or suppressing you, can I be curious about you? Can I love you like a mother would?
Even the hardest, potentially most shameful parts of ourselves have the potential to give us insight for healing, growth, and transformation. The more we are able to build our capacity to love all parts of ourselves, the deeper our capacity to love all parts of the world around us, the beloved within and without. That is the shift in consciousness and culture that I believe we desperately need in order to birth a new world, a way of seeing, a way of being that leaves no one outside of our circle of care. What we need is a revolution of the heart. This is why I believe revolutionary love is the call of our times. [2]
Why did God call Israel? What purpose did he give to his covenant people? In Genesis, the Lord told Abraham that all nations would be blessed through his descendants (Genesis 22:18). In Exodus, the Lord said Israel would be a “royal priesthood” (Exodus 19:6). In other words, the nation would serve as a representative and mediator between God and the world. Through Israel, all other nations would come to know who God truly is.Later through the prophets, God said Israel was to serve as a light to the nations and that people would come to her seeking healing from the Lord (Zechariah 8:23). And even the Temple in Jerusalem was to be a house of prayer for both Israelites and foreigners (Isaiah 56:7). Dozens of Old Testament texts repeat this same message—Israel exists to reveal God’s glory, power, love, and healing to the nations.
That is what makes the king of Israel’s response to Naaman so tragic. Here was a foreigner, having heard about the power of Israel’s God, genuinely and humbly seeking his healing. What’s more, he carried a letter from the king of Syria also seeking the aid of Israel’s God. This was a slam dunk! This was a golden opportunity served on a silver platter for the king of Israel to fulfill his nation’s God-given calling. But the king didn’t see it that way. Instead, he viewed Naaman as a threat and the king’s letter as a trick. Fear trumped calling.
A few months ago, I traveled with a group to the border between the U.S. and Mexico to learn more about the migrant crisis and speak to government officials and church leaders on both sides. The trip was heartbreaking and everyone agreed the only real solution had to come from Washington. Until then, thousands of legal asylum-seekers must rely on the kindness of volunteers for food, water, and shelter—precisely the kind of love Jesus commanded his followers to display (see Matthew 25:31-46). We spoke with one American pastor who helps organize these efforts in his city. Thankfully, many Christians have joined him, but he also said a surprising number of churches that helped in years past are now refusing. “Helping immigrants is now seen as political,” he said, “and some churches are scared to get involved.” Holding back tears, the pastor explained that he wasn’t advocating for any policy or telling Christians how to vote. He was simply inviting them to provide meals and blankets to children.
When we become afraid, we will quickly exchange our God-given calling to bless others for a self-centered calling to protect ourselves. But like ancient Israel, the church has not been given a mission of self-preservation but one of divine revelation. The defense and growth of the church is in God’s hands, not ours. Instead, we are called to open our hands as Jesus did and reveal the love of God by caring for the sinner, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.
WEEKLY PRAYER. Ambrose of Milan (340 – 397) Preserve your work, Lord. Guard the gift you have given even to those who pull back. For I knew I was not worthy to be called your servant, but by your grace I am what I am. And grant that I may know how with genuine affection to mourn with those who sin. Grant that as often as I learn of the sin of anyone who has fallen, I may suffer with them, and not scold them in my pride, but mourn and weep with them, so that in weeping over another I may also mourn for myself. Amen.
Father Richard Rohr explores how getting in touch with our grief allows us to transform our anger:
Anybody who’s on the edge, disadvantaged in some way, or barred from a position of hegemony or power will naturally understand the tears of the prophets, with their gut-level knowledge of systemic evil, cultural sin, and group illusion. Black Americans might have seen white people act nice or speak of human equality, for example, but they knew we lived behind a collective lie. Collective greed is killing America today. We make everything about money—everything—and injustices like these will naturally leave us exasperated and ultimately sad. How can we look at the suffering taking place in Gaza, Ukraine, or Sudan and be anything but sad? It’s sad beyond words or concepts. Only the body can know.
I recently turned eighty and the older I get, the more it feels like I must forgive almost everything for not being perfect, or as I first wanted or needed it to be. This is true of Christianity, the United States, politics in general, and most of all myself. Remember, if we do not transform our pain and egoic anger, we will always transmit it in another form. This transformation is the supreme work of all true spirituality and spiritual communities. Those communities offer us a place where our sadness and rage can be refined into human sympathy and active compassion.
Forgiveness of reality—including tragic reality—is the heart of the matter. All things cry for forgiveness in their imperfection, their incompleteness, their woundedness, their constant movement toward death. Mere rage or resentment will not change any of these realities. Tears often will, though: first by changing the one who weeps, and then by moving any who draw near to the weeping. Somehow, the prophets knew, the soul must weep to be a soul at all. [1]
Spiritual teacher Mirabai Starr describes the compassion that can arise as we experience both our anger and our grief:
Anger is a natural response when we let the pain of the world into our hearts. It is not the only appropriate response, of course. However, when we can welcome the fire of the Prophets into our own lives, we tap into the true nature of righteousness and draw the vigor necessary to step up in service to that which is greater than ourselves. We remember our essential interconnectedness with all that is and we are motivated to act on the impulse to protect the web of inter-being with all our might.
Personal and planetary grief are inextricable. Our encounter with the manifold losses that characterize the human experience can till the soil of our hearts so that we are more available to the suffering of other beings and the earth we share. When we have been broken, we recognize the brokenness around us and compassion naturally grows. Sorrow can be paralyzing at first, but compassion, which can sometimes take the form of anger, is a wellspring that offers infinite sustenance.
The Wisdom of Rage
Sikh activist Valarie Kaur traveled to Guatemala to learn about the 20th-century genocide of Mayan Indigenous peoples. While there, she joined CAC teachers in an online event to explore how we might honor and learn from our anger.
I’m speaking to you all from Guatemala City. I have been here for a week to study the state-sponsored genocide of Mayan Indigenous peoples that happened in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996. It was important to me to be here at a moment when the United States is undergoing such catastrophic crisis. I’ve gone from gravesite to gravesite. I’ve looked at so many skeletons…. I’ve been reeling, I’ve been feeling grief, I have been feeling rage.
The U.S. government was complicit in carrying out the genocide that happened here, and I was taught by an elder Mayan woman, a sage elder, Rosalina, who was still searching for her father and her husband. As I held fast to her, I realized that the world has ended many times before and the world has been rebirthed many times before. This is simply our turn in the cycle. In every turn through human history, people have been thrown into the darkness, and we have a choice: Do we retreat into our despair, into the smallest parts of our hearts, or do we dare to lift our gaze and reach out through the dark, holding fast to one another and standing in love?
What I learned from these Mayan women, as I’ve learned from so many Indigenous elders, is that in order to show up with our whole hearts, we must not be ashamed of any part of ourselves. Oh, my grief! Oh, my anger! Oh, my rage! You are a part of me I do not yet know. You have information to teach me.
This brings me to why I use the word rage in my work. I want us to be able to confront the fiercest and perhaps most terrifying parts of our own hearts, to feel angry about something. To feel rage is the fiercest form of anger and I didn’t want to shy away from that. I use rage as both a noun and a verb. To rage is how we can process that vital fiery energy inside of us just like our wisest ancestors did.
The solution is not to suppress our rage or to let it explode. The solution is to process our rage in safe containers like the Mayan elders I’ve been with all week, dancing and drumming, singing, screaming, wailing, shaking. We have to move those energies. Once we rage, once we move that energy through our body, we can ask ourselves: What information does my rage carry? What does it say about what’s important to me? What does it say about what I love and what I wish to fight for? How do I wish to harness this energy for what I do in the world? I call that harnessed energy divine rage. The aim of divine rage is not vengeance; its aim is to reorder the world.
Praying While Haunted. (from Mark Longhurst. RR’s assistant and curator of the daily devos)
To pray these days is a type of haunting. That’s how I’m experiencing it, at least.
That doesn’t mean I don’t experience the benefits of my Christian-based meditation practice. They are real and continue to provide me with necessary grounding, skills for riding emotional waves, and a persistent awareness of divine presence. God is here, now—when I’m sipping seltzer with my wife by the river near our house, taking a sick kid to the doctor, or tapping fingers on the steering wheel in the Dunkin’ Donuts line—and for you, too, in the “holy ordinary.”
But even while that’s true, the consolations of contemplative prayer share space with haunting. That’s because I’ve started caring about Palestine—and once I’ve seen, I can’t look away.
“The consolations of contemplative prayer share space with haunting. Once I’ve seen, I can’t look away.”
Why Gaza Haunts My Prayer
I’ve mentioned the Palestinian genocide numerous times in past Substack posts, but I haven’t taken a step back to explore why this particular horror haunts me. This is the beginning of a series to share what I’m learning—and to invite you to consider what it might mean to not look away.
The first fact to confront is this: We are living in a time of genocide. The Palestinian people are being—have already been—systematically destroyed by Israel’s military and America’s weapons.
I’m not sharing an opinion. I’ve simply been listening to international human rights lawyers and genocide scholars—often ignored in the U.S.—who’ve been sounding the alarm for over a year. Their framework is based on the United Nations’ Genocide Convention. One of the clearest summaries I’ve found is from Palestinian Christian theologian Munther Isaac in his powerful book Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza.
An essential theological resource from Palestine
What Genocide Means
According to the UN’s Genocide Convention (Article 2), genocide includes acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group—such as:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm
Deliberately inflicting life conditions to bring about destruction
Imposing measures to prevent births
Forcibly transferring children to another group
What the Experts Are Saying
“There are reasonable grounds that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” —Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, “Anatomy of a Genocide”(March 2024)
“Yes, it is genocide. It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion.” —Amos Goldberg, Holocaust and genocide researcher, Hebrew University
“Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed… Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.” —Raz Segal, Holocaust scholar, Stockton University
“I’m a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it… My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.” —Omar Bartov, genocide scholar and former IDF soldier, in The New York Times
In addition to these voices, reputable human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the independent Palestinian human rights NGO Al-Haq in Ramallah, and more, detail the facts in chilling, systematic ways.
Take a breath. These realities have come to haunt me, and they may you, too.
The most devastating and comprehensive documentation I’ve seen is Francesca Albanese’s UN Human Rights report. In March 2024, she filed her “Special Rapporteur Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967.” It is sobering, haunting reading—and this, too, is not an opinion piece. It is a meticulously documented, carefully reasoned report rooted in international law.
Just from the introduction:
After five months of military occupation, Israel has destroyed Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the population has been forcibly displaced. Thousands of families have lost loved ones or have been wiped out. Many could not bury and mourn their relatives, forced instead to leave their bodies decomposing in homes, in the street, or under the rubble. Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to severe ill-treatment. The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come.
The Unwillingness to Face Reality
With voices like these concluding what is happening is genocide, what’s been remarkable to me is to witness the collective unwillingness to face reality in the West.
Instead of acknowledging and working to stop ongoing Palestinian suffering, we turned just criticism of genocidal violence into weaponized charges of antisemitism. That’s not to deny real antisemitism, which of course exists and must be opposed rigorously. But how did critiquing hate-filled violence itself become cause for charges of hate?
“How did critiquing hate-filled violence itself become cause for charges of hate?”
“Accusing Israel’s critics of antisemitism is the single best way to avert one’s eyes… It’s more effective than questioning death tolls, invoking human shields, or comparing Israel’s bombing to other wars, because those arguments require discussing Gaza. Accusations of antisemitism change the subject entirely.”
What About Hamas’s October 7th Attack?
This is a critical question. And for folks drawing attention to Israel’s genocide, there is no moral equivalence that somehow justifies Hamas’s brutal attack on children, families, and people enjoying life dancing at the Nova music festival.
“We danced with joy and then hid among the dead,” festival goers recalled in a BBC documentary.
It is important for the left to recognize the dehumanizing horror that Hamas fighters unleashed when they launched rockets, breached defenses, attacked civilians indiscriminately, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 more.
Initially after the October 7 attack, the left in the United States failed to condemn or look at the impact of such violence. Journalist and author Peter Beinart remembers unsuccessfully scouring antiwar messages in the U.S. looking for condemnation of Hamas’s attack. He writes:
“Again and again I heard the slogan ‘Resistance is justified when the people are occupied,’ as if October 7 had not just happened… as if Hamas… had not just murdered and tortured more than a thousand souls.”
“I don’t know the solution to the conflict in Israel and Palestine, but I do know the starting point: to grieve ‘their’ children as our children.”
Jesus’s exhortations to love our neighbors as ourselves—and even to love our enemies—invite us to recognize our inherent unity with one another. Refusing to dehumanize the other keeps our hearts awake and keeps us human.
Understanding the Broader History
It’s also important to understand the wider history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine to understand that Hamas’s hatred has a context—and that Israel is not an innocent victim of Hamas’s evil. Israel created the conditions for evil through evil by sustained systemic oppression and injustice.
Others know and articulate the history far better than me, but here are the basics.
Israel created the conditions for evil through evil by sustained systemic oppression and injustice.
Israel stole Palestinian land and ethnically cleansed up to 750,000 indigenous Palestinians in 1948, called the “Nakba” or catastrophe. A while back I wrote about the founder of Palestinian liberation theology Naim Ateek and his boyhood experience of losing his family home and land. Israel has occupied Gaza and the West Bank since 1967, which by all international legal standards is considered an illegal military occupation. Israel, the U.S., and the West looked the other way while Israel encouraged the building of settlements in the occupied territories and erected an apartheid state treating Palestinians as unequal.
The Language of Apartheid
The word “apartheid,” like “genocide,” seems strong until one does the work of learning about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians—and the consensus that international legal bodies share. Here’s a quote from a UN Special Rapporteur report from 2022:
“There are pitiless features of Israel’s ‘apartness’ rule… such as segregated highways, high walls and extensive checkpoints, a barricaded population, missile strikes and tank shelling of a civilian population… Israel has imposed upon Palestine an apartheid reality in a post-apartheid world.”
This is just the surface. Here’s the report. See this post, too, for how the state of Israel mirrors the violence of ancient biblical empires:
In the meantime, let us pray and act, haunted. Next week: Evangelical and mainline forms of Christian Zionism.
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Father Richard describes how both knowing and not-knowing can be trustworthy paths on the spiritual journey:
Each of us must strive for the internal spiritual balancing act between knowing and not-knowing. Perhaps the most universal way to name these two spiritual traditions is light and darkness. The formal theological terms are kataphatic (affirmative way)—employing words, concepts, and images—and apophatic (negative way)—moving beyond words and ideas into silence and beyond-rational knowing. I believe both ways are good and necessary. Together, they create a magnificent form of higher consciousness called biblical faith.
The apophatic way, however, has been largely underused, undertaught, and underdeveloped since the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. In fact, Westerners became ashamed of our “not-knowing” and tried to fight our battles rationally. For several centuries, Christianity in the West has been in a defensive mode—a “siege mentality,” where we needed certainty and clarity, and where there was little room for not-knowing and the mystical tradition. Christians are still often in that regressive position today. It is crucial that we reintegrate these two streams of knowing and not-knowing in our time.
If we are going to talk about light, then we must also talk about darkness, because they only have meaning in relation to one another. In much of the world’s art, the sun and the moon are pictured together as sacred symbols. The solar light gives glaring brightness but paradoxically creates defined shadows. It can sometimes be so bright and clear that it actually obscures or blinds. Patriarchal religions usually preferred “sun” gods and the worship of fire, light, and order. While order and clarity are good, they also give us an arrogance about that very order and clarity.
Lunar light is much more subtle, filtered, and indirect, and in that sense, more clarifying and less threatening. Note that when God first divided light from darkness, God did not call it “good” (Genesis 1:3). From the very beginning, we are warned that we cannot totally separate light from darkness, or thetwo have no meaning. The whole of Creation exists inside of one full cycle: “Evening came and morning came and it was the first day” (Genesis 1:5). Separating them is apparently not good! All things on earth are a mixture of darkness and light.
I hope we can recognize how Jesus is more of a “lunar” teacher, patient with darkness and slow growth. He says, “The seed is sprouting and growing but we do not know how” (Mark 4:27). He seems to be willing to live with not-knowing, surely representing the cosmic patience and certain freedom of God. When we finally know we are not in charge, we do not have to nail everything down along the way. We can work happily and even effectively with “mustard seeds” (Mark 4:31).
Of course, the first question that arises is: “What is love?”
One person might define an action as loveless, and another person might call the same act something done out of love for the other.
Throughout church history, loving someone else means seeking and wanting the Good for them. Notice, I put the “G” in “Good” in capital letters. We are talking about the Highest Good for people.
A loving theology does not include a pervading permissiveness that says “anything goes.” However, a loving theology also does not include a wholesale damning of the other person if they do not shape up.
In St. Paul’s words, love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:7)
2.
“The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.”
For me, the classical definitions of theist and atheist fell apart once there was the possibility of being a “theist” and believing in a false image of God, and being an unbelieving “atheist” to that same false image of God.
If we can stop seeing theist and atheist as binaries, and more as a continuum that we all move back and forth along, I think we all might end up with a more healthy spirituality.
3.
“Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.”
When I read quote #2 this past week, I was immediately reminded of this classic from Gregory of Nyssa. He is considered an “apophatic theologian” because he emphasized the mystery of God more than attempting to describe or even explain God.
As long as we are all beholden to our mental concepts of God, then we are still dealing with an image of God that is infinitely less than what God actually is.
This is why wonder is more necessary to a healthy expression of faith than certainty. Certainty about God takes away our humility before this mystery we call “God,” and leads us into violent forms of fundamentalism.
Again, this is why I love the wisdom of the early Church. It is almost as if they figured out everything in the first six centuries of Church history, and we do ourselves a disservice by not learning from them and standing upon their grand shoulders.
4.
“Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”
I am not as familiar with Catherine of Siena. She is one of the female Christian mystics whom people I look up to, look up to.
So, I really should do my homework and get around to studying her.
The teaching of the True Self/False Self is perennial. Every tradition in the world has its version of the teaching. Although Jesus himself does not use the vocabulary of the True Self/False Self, it is precisely what he is referencing when he calls people hypocrites.
What the world most needs are people who have undergone the long journey of deconstructing their False Selves, egoic needs, and narcissistic endeavors, so that there can finally be enough room for their True Selves to become manifest.
The world is in desperate need of people who are their True Selves in God in the here and now.
5.
“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.”
This section of Scripture is nearly THREE THOUSAND years old, and yet it still speaks to today.
Many people unknowingly reduce the Hebrew Prophets to merely being individuals who prophesied about Jesus of Nazareth. While it is true that some passages they wrote could be seen as pointing toward the Carpenter of Galilee
I once got into a lot of trouble for giving a Sunday sermonette using a few passages, including this one.
Man, oh man. That Monday morning, I opened my email to find almost 50/50 emails of people who loved it and people who hated it, and thought that I was “being political, and politics should never enter a sermon.”
For the record, in my Sunday sermonette, I did not refer to a political candidate; people just made connections on their own in light of their own life experiences and conscience.
Here’s the thing: God is always on the side of the oppressed, the poor, and the marginalized. In the world of academic theology, this is referred to as the “preferential option for the poor.”
Or, in Jesus’ vernacular, the “least of these.”
It was so fascinating to get in trouble with congregants and even leadership for teaching the Bible. It’s almost as if, for me, it proved that nearly 50% of those who chose to respond to my sermonette did not come to church to learn how to practice their faith better. Instead, coming to church was for an altogether different reason, of which I am not aware.
The Scriptures are unique because they force us to confront ourselves, the world around us, and our current value systems. They demand that we reflect on whether or not we are looking at the world through the same eyes and with the same heart as God.
Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night … the darkness and light are both alike to You. —Psalm 139:11–12
CAC teacher Barbara Holmes (1943–2024) writes about the challenges and healing power of darkness:
As an African American woman, I wear darkness as a skin color that I love. It is a reminder of African origins, hidden in my genes, but not accessible through memory. Without darkness, I would not be! I entered the world from the nurturing darkness of the womb and relied upon a dark and resourceful family, community, and cosmos for my well-being…. We come from the darkness and return to it.
But there are many types of darkness. There is the darkness of determined ignorance and hatred, impenetrable and smothering. There is the tiny microcosm of darkness that gave birth to the universe, its new realities and new worlds. There is the mothering darkness of the womb, and the protective darkness of the “cloud by night.”…
Because I saw my Aunties negotiate darkness as a reality with as much potential as light, I stopped being afraid of the dark. I realized that sight and insight were not dependent upon the glaring light produced by humans, for there was an inner light that glowed and revealed much more….
In my mind, church talk about an association of darkness with evil and goodness with light made no sense. I knew that darkness held and healed me. So, there had to be many types of darkness that I coulddifferentiate, dismiss, or embrace.
Barbara Holmes considers how the darkness of a solar eclipse contains hidden hopefulness:
No matter how fractured things seem to be, no matter how the crisis splinters our delusions, there is a solid foundation within and beneath us, beside and between us. We can depend on this wholeness when it is experienced as a dark night of the soul for individuals, or an eclipse of the ordinary for the community.
An eclipse occurs when one object gets in between us and another object and blocks our view…. We are not permanently blocked from the light. Also, we are not able to rely upon our sight to overcome the obstruction.
Finally, during an eclipse, we have a dimming of the familiar and a loss of taken-for-granted clues that we rely upon every day to remind us of who we are and why we are here. Yet, although we are not always comfortable in darkness, the invitation to come away from life in the spotlight is intriguing. Could there be a blessing in the shadows?
Holmes quotes Linda Anderson-Little:
The eclipse reminds us to linger in the darkness, to savor the silence, to embrace the shadow—for the light is coming, the resurrection is afoot, transformation is unfolding, for God is working in secret and in silence to create us anew. [1]
Most people put Me on hold, rationalizing that someday they will find time to focus on Me. But the longer people push Me into the background of their lives, the harder it is for them to find Me. You live among people who glorify busyness. Even those who know Me as Savior tend to march to the tempo of the world. They have bought into the illusion that more is always better: more meetings, more programs, more activity.Make time alone with Me your highest priority and deepest Joy. As you walk close to Me, I can bless others through you.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Song of Solomon (Songs) 2:13 (NLT)
13 The fig trees are forming young fruit,
and the fragrant grapevines are blossoming.
Rise up, my darling!
Come away with me, my fair one!”
Additional insight regarding Song of Songs 2:12,13: The lovers celebrated their joy in the creation and in their love. God created the world, the beauty of nature, and the gift of love and sex, and he gave us senses to enjoy them. Never let problems, conflicts, or the ravages of time ruin your ability to enjoy God’s gifts. Take time to enjoy the world God has created.
Luke 10:42 (NLT)
42 There is only one thing worth being concerned about. Mary has discovered it, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Additional insight regarding Luke 10:38-42: Mary and Martha both loved Jesus. On this occasion, they were both serving him. But Martha thought Mary’s style of serving was inferior to hers. She didn’t realize that in her desire to serve, she was actually neglecting her guest. Are you so busy doing things for Jesus that you’re not spending any time with him? Don’t let your service become self-serving. Jesus did not blame Martha for being concerned about household chores. He was only asking her to set priorities. Service to Christ can degenerate into mere busywork that is totally devoid of devotion to God.
Reflecting on the wisdom of the mystical traditions, theologian Douglas Christie writes of spiritual darkness:
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” says Theodore Roethke. [1]… This brings us close to the heart of how Christian mystics have long understood the task of seeing, especially the seeing that becomes possible in darkness. Gregory of Nyssa refers to this as the “seeing that consists of not seeing.” [2] Dionysius the Areopagite speaks of the “brilliant darkness” that one enters “through not seeing and not knowing.” [3]… The contemplative gaze nourished in the night is open, receptive, and free. Darkness subverts the all-too-common inclination to determine (or overdetermine) reality to fit our own narrow understanding of things. It invites instead a way of seeing rooted in simplicity, humility, and awe….
Is this perhaps a kind of faith? Not simply a denial of faith or an assertion of faith’s impossibility, but a way of thinking about and struggling with the most difficult questions, especially those arising from fragility, pain, and absence?…. What emerges instead is an awareness that we must let them go and learn, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing put it, to “rest in the darkness.” [4]
This sounds, perhaps, too simple. As if such rest can be found without difficulty, or that all the night asks of us is to let it surround us with its gentle, healing presence. There is little in our experience to suggest that this is so…. The experience of the night can be terrifying, bewildering, less a place to rest and heal than a dispiriting struggle with pain and absence. Still, there is also something about the enveloping darkness, its silence and stillness and depth, its inscrutability and ineffability, that comforts and soothes, that releases us from our compulsive need to account for everything, explain everything. [5]
Translator of the mystics Mirabai Starr guides us in the wisdom of Spanish mystic John of the Cross (1542–1591):
When the dark night descends on the soul, its radiance blinds the intellect. She can no longer formulate concepts; she doesn’t even want to. It is tempting to consider this inability to engage the intellect as a failing. It is easy to assume that you are wasting time.
Do not force it, John wrote. Stop trying to figure it out. Drop down into a state of guileless quietude and abide there. This is no time for discursive meditation, no time for pondering theological doctrines or asserting articles of faith.
Your only task now is to set your soul free. Take a break from ideas and knowledge…. Content yourself with a loving attentiveness toward the Holy One. This requires no effort, no agitation, no desire to taste her or feel her or understand her. Patiently persevere in this state of prayer that has no name.
“Trust in God,” John wrote, “who does not abandon those who seek him with a simple and righteous heart.” By doing nothing now, the soul accomplishes great things
TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO JESUS WAS A LIVING EXPRESSION OF PERFECT THEOLOGY. HIS LIFE, DEATH, AND RESURRECTION REVEALED EXACTLY WHAT GOD IS LIKE.
And God was not like what we thought He was like.
Jesus seemed to do stuff God wouldn’t do. He also often seemed to contradict scripture. He was counter-cultural, challenged cruel ideology, and confronted punishing theology. He was simply better than our best understanding, and often offensively so.
For instance.
He healed people on the Sabbath, something many were convinced God wouldn’t do. “Stretch out your hand,” Jesus said, and the man with a shriveled hand “stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored.” And many of those who believed they knew best what God was like, were murderously offended. They “went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.”(See Mark 3:1-6)
Jesus seemed to value children more than His disciples thought God would. “Let the little children come to me…” He said, confronting His disciples who were in the midst of rebuking parents. “Do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”(See Matt 19:14)
Jesus’ kindness and mercy toward women, especially those most oppressed, was offensively better than what the Pharisees thought about God’s kindness and mercy. “If Jesus were a prophet, he would know that the woman touching him is a sinner!” they thought with their hierarchy of disdain. (Luke 7:39)
Jesus even valued gentile women in a way God surely wouldn’t, “tell her to go away… she is bothering us” the disciples said. But Jesus ignored his disciple’s offense, engaged with the woman’s faith, and released eternal life. He was offensively better than how His followers thought God should be. (See Matt 15:21-28)
And remember when Jesus didn’t call down fire on that village? Remember when He didn’t savagely rain down holy hell on men, women, and children even though His disciples not only believed it was something God would do, they wanted God to do it. They even had biblical precedence to support their malicious offense when Jesus confronted them saying, “you know not what kind of spirit you are of.”(See Luke 9:55)
And Jesus didn’t cruelly punish that woman caught in adultery even though those who had dragged her naked before Him were certain that’s what God would do. They were so convinced that they had already picked up rocks as willing accomplices. They too pointed to scripture to justify the us or them, for or against, punishing spirit they participated in. And yet Jesus said, “where are your accusers” and there were none, not even God. (See John 8:10)
Even on the cross, torn flesh, bones out of joint, a death rattle in His lungs, Jesus just kept offending us with God’s goodness. “Father forgive them, they know not what they do,”He said, even though it sure as shit seemed like they knew what they were doing. (See Luke 23:34)
Jesus constantly did things that were better than how humanity believed God would do them. Even better than how the Bible seemed to describe what God was like. And all along the way, in every act of Greater Love, in every expression of kindness, in every interaction of forgiveness, mercy, and grace, Jesus offended people with how good He believed God was. Especially those who thought they knew God best.
And nothing has changed.
Humanity has always had ‘god-boxes.’ We have often demanded God’s goodness fit within our capacity to comprehend. We measure His forgiveness through our insecurity, fear, and shame. We balance His grace with our often-cruel thoughts about Him and ourselves. We determine the measure of His mercy and kindness based on our finite thoughts about mercy and kindness. And we use the word justice to make God small.
Mankind has been submitting the goodness of God to our broken experiences since the fall. But thankfully, Jesus is the goodness of God revealed, and He climbs inside every god-box we create and blows them up from the inside with His goodness.
Jesus continues to reveal that God is better than our best understanding, even better than our best Biblical interpretations. And He continues to confront our certainties with the Cornerstone of all certainty, Greater Love…
This article is excerpted from my book, Leaving and Finding Jesus. Jason Clark
I will love the light for it shows me the way; yet I will love the darkness for it shows me the stars. —Og Mandino, The Greatest Secret in the World
Sister Joan Chittister describes darkness as a fertile place for our questions with no easy answers:
There is a part of the soul that stirs at night, in the dark and soundless times of day, when our defenses are down and our daylight distractions no longer serve to protect us from ourselves. What we suppress in the light emerges clearly in the dusk. It’s then, in the still of life, when we least expect it, that questions emerge from the damp murkiness of our inner underworld…. These questions do not call for the discovery of data; they call for the contemplation of possibility.
Unable to answer the questions life asks of us, we come to humble clarity and service to others.
There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate. It is the glowing calm that comes over us when we finally surrender to the ultimate truth of creation: that there is a God and we are not it…. The clarity of it all is startling. Life is not about us; we are about the project of finding Life. At that moment, spiritual vision illuminates all the rest of life. And it is that light that shines in darkness.
Only the experience of our own darkness gives us the light we need to be of help to others whose journey into the dark spots of life is only just beginning. It’s then that our own taste of darkness qualifies us to be an illuminating part of the human expedition. Without that, we are only words, only false witnesses to the truth of what it means to be pressed to the ground and rise again. Darkness is a mentor of what it means to carry the light we ourselves have brought to blaze into the unknown parts of life so that others may also see and take hope….
The light we gain in darkness is the awareness that, however bleak the place of darkness was for us, we did not die there. We know now that life begins again on the other side of the darkness. Another life. A new life. After the death, the loss, the rejection, the failure, life does go on. Differently, but on. Having been sunk into the cold night of black despair—and having survived it—we rise to new light, calm and clear and confident that what will be, will be enough for us.
Growth is the boundary between the darkness of unknowing and the light of new wisdom, new insight, new vision of who and what we ourselves have become. After darkness we are never the same again. We are only stronger, simpler, surer than ever before that there is nothing in life we cannot survive, because though life is bigger than we are, we are meant to grow to our fullest dimensions in it.
Learning from the Mystics: Thomas Merton
Quote of the Week: “We make ourselves real by telling the truth. Man can hardly forget that he needs to know the truth, for the instinct to know is too strong in us to be destroyed. But he can forget how badly he also needs to tell the truth. We cannot know truth unless we ourselves are conformed to it.” – from No Man is an Island, p.198.
Reflection There is no freedom where there is no truth. The spiritual traditions of the world, both East and West, value the importance of truth. Why? Because deceit, half-truths, and lies are things that block our ability to live within reality. Within Christianity, there is Christ, the singular person around whom all Christian thought and practice center. It is right there in the title. Christ-ianity. This Christ of faith is spoken of as “the Truth” in the Gospel of John. “Jesus answered them, ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6) Now, there is more than one way to interpret this verse, but for now let us focus on the radical claim that Jesus is “the Truth” in light of Merton’s words. Note the difference, though, that John’s Gospel often capitalizes “Truth” but here Merton does not… Merton reminds us, We are made real by the truth.We need to know the truth.We instinctually need the truth.We can forget that we need to tell the truth.We must conform to the truth to know it. Now, why is the capitalization important? Because all little truths help us to recognize the Truth. As we are made unreal by untruths, seek to know untruths, work against our wiring and pursue untruths, desire to tell untruths, and conform ourselves to untruths… the more and more we insulate ourselves from the Christ. Christ is the Logos, the logic, the reason, the blueprint for everything and everyone everywhere, and even the small truths that appear to be unspiritual or non-religious find their ground of being in the Divine Truth. So all this goes to say, as we acclimate ourselves to small truths, the more and more able we are to be free to live within and to be liberated on a larger scale by the Truth, who is Jesus of Nazareth.
Prayer Heavenly Father, we confess that we are addicted to untruths. We ground and find our being in deceit and we can recognize the slavery that results from it. By your Truth, set us free to become the Children of God. Allow us the ability to notice truth, to value it, to know it, to speak it, and to cherish it, that we might, through those smaller truths, come to know You as our Truth. Amen and amen.
Life Overview: Who is He: Thomas Merton, OCSO (Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Observance)
When and Where: Born in Prades, France on January 31, 1915. Died in Samut Prakan, Thailand on December 10, 1968.
Why He is Important: Merton is one of the clearest examples of action and contemplation of the 20th century.
Most Known For: Merton was a prolific writer and commentator on the contemplative life and global issues. He was good friends with the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, and Thich Nhat Hahn, all while living as a Trappist monk in the cloistered monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Trappist, Kentucky.
Father Richard Rohr reflects on spiritual transformation and the metaphor of moving from darkness to light:
Spiritual transformation is often thought of as movement from darkness to light. In one sense that’s true, while in another sense, it’s totally false. We forget that darkness is always present alongside the light. We know the light most fully in contrast with its opposite—the dark. Pure light blinds; shadows are required for our seeing. There is something that can only be known by going through “the night sea journey” into the belly of the whale, from which we are spit up on an utterly new shore. Western civilization as a whole has failed to learn how to honor the wisdom of darkness. Rather than teaching a path of descent, Western Christianity preached a system of winners and losers, a “prosperity gospel.” Few Christians have been taught to hold the paschal mystery of both death and resurrection.
In many ways, the struggle with darkness has been the church’s constant dilemma. It wants to exist in perfect light, where God alone lives (see James 1:17). It does not like the shadowland of our human reality. It seems that all of us are trying to find ways to avoid the mystery of human life—that we are all a mixture of darkness and light—instead of learning how to carry it patiently through to resurrection, as Jesus did.
There are no perfect structures and no perfect people. There is only the struggle to be whole. It is Christ’s passion (patior, the “suffering of reality”) that will save the world. Jesus says, “Your patient endurance will win you your lives” (Luke 21:19). He shows us the way of redemptive suffering instead of redemptive violence. Patience comes from our attempts to hold together an always-mixed reality. Perfectionism only makes us resentful and judgmental. Grateful people emerge in a world rightly defined, where even darkness is no surprise but an opportunity.
Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer explores the dance between darkness and light in her poem Before Winter Solstice, I Remember:
This, too, is what we are born for, this waking in darkness, unable to see, but still able to hear the shush of wind in bare branches, able to feel the charge of our heartbeat, the swell of our belly as it fills with borrowed air. I have spent my life learning to love these shapeless hours before the light finds us, these shadowsome nights when my whole being seems to stretch beyond the bed, beyond the room, beyond the home, beyond the valley, beyond even the globe, as if I rhyme with the dark all around us, the dark that holds us, the dark that surrounds this whole swirling spiral of galaxy. Sometimes, I feel how that infinite darkness calls to the darkness inside me as if to say, remember, remember where you come from, remember what you are. And the darkness inside me sings back. [2]
Two Sides of Darkness
It is very important, friends, not to think of the soul as dark. We are conditioned to perceive only external light. We forget that there is such a thing as inner light, illuminating our soul. —Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle
Richard Rohr describes periods of darkness, confusion, and struggle as necessary for our transformation and growth:
Experiences of darkness are good and necessary teachers. They are not to be avoided, denied, run from, or explained away. Even if we don’t experience clinical or diagnosed depression, most of us will go through at least one period of darkness, doubt, and malaise in our lives. I hope during these times we can reach out to someone—a therapist, spiritual director, friend—to support us. And when we feel strong, may we be the shoulder someone else can lean on.
There’s a darkness where we are led by our own stupidity, our own sin (the illusion of separation), our own selfishness, by living out of the false or separate self. We have to work our way back out of this kind of darkness with brutal honesty, confession, surrender, forgiveness, apology, and restitution. It may feel simultaneously like dying and being liberated.
But there’s another darkness that we’re led into by God, grace, and the nature of life itself. In many ways, the loss of meaning here is even greater, and sometimes the loss of motivation, purpose, and direction might be even greater too. It really feels like the total absence of light, and thus the saints and mystics called it “the dark night.” Yet even while we may feel alone and abandoned by God, we can also sense that we have been led here intentionally. We know we’re in liminal space, betwixt and between, on the threshold—and we have to stay here until we have learned something essential. It is still no fun—filled with doubt and “demons” of every sort—but it is the darkness of being held closely by God without our awareness. This is where transformation happens.
Of course, the dark night we get ourselves into by our own “sinful” choices can also become the darkness of God. Regardless of the cause, the dark night is an opportunity to look for and find God—in new forms and ways. Neither God nor goodness exist only in the light but permeate all places, seen and unseen. It seems we have to “unknow” a bit every time we want to know in a new way. It’s like putting your car in reverse in the mud and snow so that you can gain a new track and better traction.
Periods of seemingly fruitless darkness may in fact highlight all the ways we rob ourselves of wisdom by clinging to the light. Who grows by only looking on the bright side of things? It is only when we lose our certainties that will we be able to deconstruct our false images of God to discover the Absolute Reality beneath all our egoic fantasies and fears.
As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.
That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed by demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. – Mark 1
Years ago there was an episode of The Simpsons where Homer tries to say something theological, and I’ve always loved it. They are standing around looking at a huge church when he says, Well, I may not know much about God, but I have to say we built a pretty nice cage for Him.
Anyhow, our reading for today starts exactly 26 verses into the book of Mark.
Here’s a little re-cap to catch you up to speed on what’s happened in the previous 25 verses of this Gospel.
It starts with the words, The Beginning of the Good news of Jesus Christ.
Then John the Baptist appears in the wilderness with his questionable wardrobe and dietary choices and baptizes Jesus. Then the heavens torn open and God says This is my beloved. For which Jesus is rewarded with 40 days in the wilderness with the wild beasts and angels.
Repent and believe the good news of the kingdom.
On his way to Capernum he picks up some smelly fishermen.
Then on the Sabbath he’s teaching in the synagogue – and everyone’s like “wow. That Jesus isn’t totally full of it like the other guys”
Finally he casts out an unclean spirit after commanding it to shut the hell up.
And that’s pretty much where we pick up the story today.
As soon as they leave the Synagogue they entered Simon’s house and Simon’s mother in law was sick in bed with a fever. Jesus came and took her by the hand, lifted her up. Then the fever left her and she began to serve them.
For the record: My first reaction to a bunch of young men showing up at the house of one of their mamas who, by the way, is sick, then healing her so that she gets up and “serves them”, was like isn’t that typical – rather than scrounging around for themselves they heal the Woman Of The House so she can make them a snack.
So don’t feel bad if that’s how you heard this story too.
But I started to see the healing of Simon’s mother in law story differently after sitting with it awhile.
It’s true that Mark doesn’t tell us her name so let’s just agree to make one up for her so she has an identity other than mother in law. We’re going to call her Betty.
See, I don’t actually think Jesus healed Betty so she could make them lunch. Because the thing is, for a male Jew in 1st century, it was considered taboo to even touch an unrelated woman. And it was considered ritually unclean to touch someone who was sick. And it was considered a religious violation to do any kind of work on the Sabbath.
So I can’t imagine that Jesus would defile himself on so many levels just so he wouldn’t have to make his own sandwich.
I think this scene with Betty is a demonstration of what Jesus was talking about 11 verses earlier. See, just 11 verses earlier is the point in when Jesus speaks for the very first time in the Gospel of Mark – and his first words were the kingdom of God has come near – repent and believe the good news.
Listen up, friends. “The kingdom of God has come near – repent and believe the good news” is like Jesus is saying “No more cages for God and while I’m at it, no more cages for you either”
Remember what a Etch-a-Sketch is? Now it seems like a Caveman’s iPad, but as kids it was cool. You know, that toy with a screen that you can draw on by turning two knobs—one moves the line up and down, the other side to side. To erase the drawing, you just shake it.
Well, in Mark’s Gospel it’s like Jesus starts his ministry by trying to shake our religious etch a sketch . All those lines we draw between us and God, all those lines that we draw between us and other people and between others and God….all the cages we construct through religion well…Jesus shows up and shakes everything up so that those lines disappear.
Of course I have my hands on the knobs ready to keep drawing more lines so you know…that keeps Jesus pretty busy.
The point is that Jesus starts his ministry by saying forget what you thought you knew because God is near in a whole new way – and then he goes on what is like the weirdest recruiting trip ever.
It kinda looked like this: Jesus starts by gathering up some rank fishermen and then he enters the synagogue with them where his next recruit is a demoniac – a dude with a demon. After which he makes sure he gets a sick old lady on board. Yeah, that’s Jesus dream team.
With most of the characters in scripture who only show up for a verse or two we never find out what really happens after they encounter Jesus, But that’s the cool thing about Betty, see…when Jesus reaches down and touches someone his culture had deemed unclean – when his hand touches a sick old lady – more than just a fever leaves her. The cages of culture and religion fall away and the world according to God bursts through. And the thing I love about Betty is that Betty knew exactly you do with hands which have received the healing touch of God….Betty used those very same hands to serve. She immediately became an agent of what she had just received.
You may have heard the saying that hurt people hurt people. But what is also true is that healed people heal people. Not as an act of obligation, or law or social expectation but as an act of freedom. Which means the boundaries that Jesus transgresses allows the most unlikely and broken people to give what they have received. We see again and again Jesus literally touching the untouchable and giving them a whole new identity. It’s like he was deputizing them. Because Jesus was about more than just healing certain sick people…the gospel tell us that Jesus greatest desire was to restore all that has been broken. So every person who Jesus healed was conscripted into the Kingdom of God so that they may go and do likewise.
This is why the next part of the text is so great. It says that evening they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons and then the next verse literally says this: the whole city was gathered around the door. THE WHOLE CITY.
Which means that there is no separate category of people called the sick and possessed. Jesus knew this. Some people just hide their sickness more than others and as human beings we prefer to have certain people be the identified problems so that we can look healthy or sane or good. But Jesus shook that etch a sketch.
When Betty sees a whole city’s worth of sick and demon possessed outside her door, I like to imagine her pushing up her sleeves and touching and healing and loving and speaking truth to all of them. She transmits what was given to her. She gets up and serves. She’s been deputized.
That’s the thing with the kingdom of God, there is no personal treasure to be had…there are only gifts to be shared. God’s desire for the healing of all creation was inaugurated in a world changing way in the life of Jesus and it continues through you. I’ve seen it in this place. I’ve seen healing happen through your hands on which still rest the waters of your baptism and the hands which, extend here at the Lord’s table, to receive Christ’s own body and blood. Your hands are what God has to work with here. Hands that, no matter what your story is, have as much to receive as they have to give. Just by merit of being here, you’ve been recruited into this beautiful, redemptive story of God’s love for all of humanity along with smelly fishermen, demoniacs and sick old ladies. We, every single one of us here today, we are part of Jesus’ Dream Team.
Because no matter what society says or the church says or prison culture says, there is no ranking system in God’s kingdom –no category of inmate worse than another, no gender or sexual identity worse than another. When here at new Beginnings we say all are welcome, that is what we mean. And just so you know, it is not as a result of our niceness, or our inclusive beliefs. It is a result of Jesus Christ. Everyone without exception is welcome here because Christ has a made it so.
In other words, the kingdom of God has indeed come near. So rethink all the cages and believe the good news. Amen.
This CO2- (Church Of 2) is where two guys meet each day to tighten up our Connections with Jesus. We start by placing the daily “My Utmost For His Highest” in this WordPress blog. Then we prayerfully select some matching worship music and usually pick out a few lyrics that fit especially well. Then we just start praying and editing and Bolding and adding comments and see where the Spirit takes us.
It’s been a blessing for both of us.
If you’d like to start a CO2, we’d be glad to help you and your partner get started. Also click the link below to see how others are doing CO2.Odds Monkey
Steve Harvey Introduces Jesus To A Secular Audience
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