Jesus Heals Our Shame

Friday, March 20, 2026

After living with a violent father, psychotherapist James Finley found himself retraumatized by an abusive priest as a young man. Finley shares how Jesus met him in his deep shame and suffering:

I was now a young man living at the edge of a precipice of knowing that if God loved me and cherished me as real and lovable in his eyes, I could not pretend that I was not the real person God loved and called me to be…. 

It was in the midst of this road to nowhere that I began to sense that God was inviting me to give up trying to overcome my fear and to instead bring my feelings of fear and shame to Jesus. I was already committed in my heart to follow the directive of Saint Benedict in his Rule that the monk should “prefer nothing to Christ.” But at this point I needed to go beyond a theological understanding of the universality of Christ by praying my way into the deathless presence of Jesus. 

The felt need to pray in this way led me to imagine, as in a kind of waking dream, that I was alone on a moonlit night in the garden where the Gospels tell us Jesus would go to spend whole nights alone in prayer. In my mind’s eye I could see and feel myself searching here and there, looking for Jesus so that I might share with him how powerless I was to be true to who I sensed he was calling me to be….

Then suddenly, looking this way and that, I saw Jesus sitting alone in the moonlight at the edge of a clearing. I walked across the clearing and knelt at his feet. I could feel his hand on my shoulder as I leaned in close to whisper in his ear, revealing the burdens of my shame-based weakness and fear. 

Having poured out all that my wounded and hurting heart was moved and able to say, Jesus drew me in close and whispered in my ear three words that set me free, words that still echo inside me to this day. I heard him whisper: “I love you!” 

Dazed and amazed in being so unexplainably loved, the spirit within me let me know what both Jesus and I were waiting to hear me say. So I leaned in close and whispered my secret “I love you” to Jesus. And there in that instant there was the realization between us that the matter was settled once and for all. The matter being that the good news of God’s love for us is never measured by our ability to be true to who we know in our heart God is calling us to be. For the sole measure of God’s love for us is the measureless expanse of God’s merciful love, permeating us and taking us to itself in the midst of our faltering and wayward ways. 

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1.

“God is self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love.”

– Brad Jersak, Theologian and Author

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.”

– Proverbs 19:3 NLT

Now that is just funny.

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.”

– Maximus the Confessor, in Four Hundred Texts on Love (1.77)

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.”

– Mechthilde of Magdeburg, Medieval Christian Mystic

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.

5.

“Everything is waiting to be hallowed by you.”

– Martin Buber, Jewish Philosopher

We heard this quote last week in Church.

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.

May we each make things around us Holy Again.

Systems of Honor and Shame Today

Thursday, March 19, 2026

Richard Rohr points out how honor-and-shame systems play out around and within us today:

One of the best ways to study Scripture is to use the lens of cultural anthropology; in other words, to learn about the social setting in which Jesus lived and the problems with which he was dealing. What we find is that the culture of his time was overwhelmingly dominated by an honor-and-shame system largely based on externals. In truth, we still live that way in the United States and Western Europe, although we pretend we don’t.

Honor and shame are what we would call ego possessions, personal commodities that we can lose or gain. We don’t have them naturally, so we have to work for our honor and then show it off and protect it. We have to deny our shame, which is now what we would call the shadow self. At Jesus’s time in history, and frankly with many today, there is no inherent sense of the self, no sense of natural dignity that comes from within.

Religion at its best and most mature is exactly what is needed for this problem. Without healthy religion and psychology, we will have no internal or inherent source for our own dignity and positive self-image, no “stable core.” Instead, we are driven to find our status and our dignity externally—by what we wear, our job title, by how much money we have, what car we drive, or even by how much “good” we do. That’s a pretty fragile way to live. We are constantly evaluating, “How am I doing? How am I looking?”

A transformed believer knows that their stable core dignity is something that God gratuitously gives from the moment of conception. Each of us is inherently, objectively, totally, and forever a child of God. We cannot gain or lose that by any achievement or failure whatsoever. God doesn’t participate in the honor-and-shame system.

In most honor-and-shame systems, which are almost always grounded in culturally male values, a “true man” always seeks the best, the top, and the most in terms of roles, power, status, and possessions. Jesus tried to free us from all these traps. Throughout the Gospels, we find numerous teachings promoting downward mobility. The most familiar of these may be, “The last shall be first, and the first shall be last” (Matthew 20:16), and Jesus’s consistent honoring of the least, the outsider, the sinner, and the physically or mentally challenged.

Some form of the honor-and-shame system is seen in almost all of history. In such a system, there is immense social pressure to follow “the rules.” If a person doesn’t follow the rules, they are not honorable and no longer deserve respect. And anyone who shows such a “shameful” person respect is also considered dishonorable.

Jesus frequently and publicly showed respect to “sinners” (see John 8:10–11) and even ate with them (see Luke 19:2–10; Mark 2:16–17). In doing so, he was openly dismissing the ego-made honor-and-shame system of his time—and ours.

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The Freedom of Hiddenness

by Henri Nouwen

Adapted excerpt (from Nouwen’s writings on hiddenness and humility):

“Our greatest temptation is to do good in order to be seen.
But Jesus calls us to a different way—the way of hiddenness.

In a world that rewards visibility, recognition, and success,
we are invited to live from a place where we do not need to prove anything.

When we can act without needing affirmation,
we begin to trust that we are already loved.

The question is not ‘How am I perceived?’
but ‘Am I resting in the love of God?’”

______________________________________________

Jesus Calling: March 19

    I speak to you from the depths of your being. Hear Me saying soothing words of Peace, assuring you of My Love. Do not listen to voices of accusation, for they are not from Me. I speak to you in love-tones, lifting you up. My Spirit convicts cleanly, without crushing words of shame. Let the Spirit take charge of your mind, combing out tangles of deception. Be transformed by the trust that I live within you.
    The Light of My Presence is shining upon you, in benedictions of Peace. Let My Light shine in you; don’t dim it with worries or fears. Holiness is letting Me live through you. Since I dwell in you, you are fully equipped to be holy. Pause before responding to people or situations, giving My Spirit space to act through you. Hasty words and actions leave no room for Me; this is atheistic living. I want to inhabit all your moments–gracing your thoughts, words, and behavior.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Romans 8:1-2 (NLT)
Life in the Spirit
8 So now there is no condemnation for those who belong to Christ Jesus. 2 And because you belong to him, the power of the life-giving Spirit has freed you from the power of sin that leads to death.

Colossians 1:27 (NLT)
27 For God wanted them to know that the riches and glory of Christ are for you Gentiles, too. And this is the secret: Christ lives in you. This gives you assurance of sharing his glory.
1st Corinthians 6:19 (NLT)
19 Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself,

Silenced by Shame

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

Author and CAC team member Cassidy Hall reflects on the cost of making choices out of shame and the “toxic silence” it creates: 

For over five years, I actively participated in one of the most toxic silences of my life. I was in a romantic relationship with someone who wouldn’t publicly date me because they weren’t open about their sexuality. At the mercy of someone else’s comfort—or lack thereof—I participated in a silencing of myself in public places, around family members, with friends, at work, even at the grocery store…. This kind of silence, brought on by shame, creates long-lasting damage and knots to be untied for years to come. Silence where love cannot prevail is a place of toxicity, a place of stunted existence.

Hall describes the positive effects of “loving silence” cultivated through contemplative practice:

We need to name toxic silence as the silence that causes harm, shame, minimization, and damage to our world. And we need to name loving silence as the silence that is generative and creative, a silence that deepens our unity with self and others—the kind of silence that cultivates a more expansive and loving world….

When I finally stepped away from that relationship’s hamster wheel of toxic silence, I began to see how I had silenced other parts of myself. Beyond the ways I was hiding my sexuality, I also hid parts of myself informed by intuition—places of creativity and aliveness, places of openness and community, places of clarity and calm—ultimately the places where a loving silence thrived….

In the Christian context, the toxicity of silent bystanders creates and feeds countless acts of violence: the sexual abuse in many church settings and its continuation through empty apologies; Christianity’s lack of reckoning with its history of colonization; denominations’ refusal to honor and elevate the leadership and dignity of women, people of color, refugees, people with disabilities, and people from other marginalized communities; churches filling with Christian nationalism and white supremacy culture; the countless times the silent acceptance of bad theology has caused an LGBTQIA+ person to hate or harm themselves; and more. This is the silence of harm, violence, shame, and toxicity….

Toxic silence is embedded in the fabric of our daily lives…. Yet a [contemplative] loving silence can also be pursued, and we can seek and find it even in the chaos of our days. Sometimes it seeps in with our efforts to repeat an internal mantra or take an intentional pause, and other times it pours in like the colorful morning light through the east-facing window. This is the contemplative silence I continually seek and practice. This silence regenerates, regulates, allows for the emergence of loving presence and action. The more we engage in the silences that aren’t toxic—the beautiful, loving, and infinite possibilities of silence—the more we encounter silence as a creative, generative force and not a destructive one.

Is Jonah a historical book? Does it need to be? 

BRADLEY JERSAKMAR 18

I was grateful for another fascinating discussion with Pete Enns in my “Peace and Violence in the Old Testament” class today at SSU/JFI. One intriguing topic was around legend vs. history in books such as Jonah. 

Jonah is a wild ride. I love that book and have some opinions.

Let’s start with a caveat, echoing Pete’s humility. I’m fairly convinced of many things I don’t actually know for a fact to be true. Convictions I don’t feel the need to prove to myself or others with certainty. When it comes to biblical interpretation, I certainly don’t require my friends, colleagues, or students to agree with me. So I won’t impose a theory of Jonah on others as dogma. So I present these thoughts as a thoughts and as a fellow learner. 

Is the Person or Book of Jonah History?

One common question: When the NT preachers or authors (Jesus and Paul especially) reference OT characters like Adam or Jonah, did they think they were historical figures? And if they weren’t historical stories, does that negate their argument? And when Jesus associates his resurrection with ‘the sign of Jonah,’ what if Jonah didn’t literally rise from the dead? Even if the story were historical, the prayer from the sea creature still seems obviously poetic. In fact, I don’t know any conservative scholar (even literalists) who argue that Jonah died and was resurrected—even though the song reads that way.

Here is the text from Jonah to which Jesus refers:

Jonah 2:3, 7 “I cried in my affliction to the Lord, my God, and He heard my voice; out of the belly of *hades* [not just the sea creature]: You heard the cry of my voice. I descended into the earth, the bars of which are *everlasting barriers* [supposedly!]; YES let my life ascend from corruption, O Lord, my God.”

Jesus calls this the sign of Jonah. That he would descend to hades and ascend again, puked out from its embittered belly, its so-called *everlasting* [αιώνιοι!!] barred gates be damned… a great text to show how ‘eternal hades’ is undone by the Resurrection). 

I don’t think Jesus needs to take Jonah’s poetry literally to make his point about the resurrection. And if Jesus doesn’t need to take Jonah 2 literally, do we need to read the book historically? 

Some go so far as to say that if Jonah (or Eden, or Noah, etc.) is a Jewish moral legend, that undercuts my belief in Jesus’ actual resurrection. Does it? 

The More-than-Literal Point

I was once very into apologetics (mistaking it for evangelism) and this was all very troubling. I wasted a lot of time trying to find biological evidence of a fish that could swallow a man and spit him out alive for three days. Meanwhile, I missed the more- than-literal point that God is making through Jonah. Which is? That the Jewish revelation that God is gracious, compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness extends even to our most hated enemy. And at the time, Assyria was at the top of the list. I was inclined to play my apologetics games far more than taking up the cross of loving my enemy. Just like Jonah. 

Now, whether to read the story as literal history… we can. But I don’t think we need to be faithful. Whatever Jesus thought about the story, he was already reading the song creatively as poetic prefigurement (foreshadowing his resurrection) to make his point. I see no problem with that. Could Jesus’ point be this simple? 

“Just as in the Jonah story, where the song from the sounds like a resurrection, 
that language anticipates something surprising I’m about to do in real life.”

It would be a little like me saying to my son (a big Lord of the Rings fan), 

“I am going to be at your apartment next month, on this date, for sure. Count on it. Just as Gandalf showed up at dawn for the Battle of Helm’s Deep, expect me to arrive at your place Tuesday morning.”

I’m symbolically referencing a fictional story my son knows and loves. I’m doing so symbolically to illustrate my assured and actual arrival. 

• He gets the reference. 
• He does not feel the need to remind me that the LOTR is not historical.
• The reference does not raise any doubt that my arrival will happen as promised. 
• Whether the Jonah is history or legend has no impact on the promise. 
• But neither would I feel any need to prove Jonah IS fictional. 

This is where we could learn from Jewish rabbis today. Those I’ve engaged roll their eyes at Christian modernists (liberal or conservative) who obsess over what ‘really happened.’ At last, the right use of the phrase “moot point.”

On Shrines 

One student wisely brought up shrines. They are an excellent illustration.

Yes, there is a tomb of Jonah. My student had been there. I haven’t. But I have been to the tombs of the patriarchs at Hebron (Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, and Leah). And I’ve also been to the resting place of Mary the Mother of Jesus… both shrines (Gethsemane and Ephesus). I felt the holiness of accumulated devotion in those spaces. But I’m not at all sure that they were buried there. And I don’t need to be. As shrines to their memory, they tell a story. And over time, they have become sacred space where we can experience the beauty and power of their lives (or at least their story). 

My Shift

So a shift happened in me along the way. It didn’t occur overnight. But as a young Evangelical with a modernist bent toward literalism, I feared (and was taught to fear) that if I discovered the earth was over 7000 years old, or if the Garden of Eden isn’t somewhere in Iraq, or if Noah’s ark didn’t actually sit on Ararat, or if Job and Jonah were legends, I would diminish or even lose my faith. The motto was, “If the waters did not cover Everest, Christ is not risen.” 

No. That doesn’t follow. And weirdly, I didn’t lose my faith—only my ill-gotten certitude. Even better, God got bigger and more mysterious and filled me with more and more wonder … and the Bible became a more intriguing adventure and far richer treasury … and my trust grew dramatically when I didn’t have to believe God slaughtered all those people across the Bible’s pages. The barriers to experiencing Scripture as a place of encounter and communion with God were removed.

And just as importantly to me, when my dear Baptist mom sits in her armchair reading these stories for strength, comfort and encouragement, believing she is immersed in the Word of God, now I know she is. I don’t have to mess with that experience because that IS how the Bible is to be read—as a venue for encounter and communion with and by the Spirit of Christ. 

Did Jonah happen? I don’t know. 
Is Jonah true? Absolutely.

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Individual Reflection Hall talks about how stepping out of one silence revealed other places she’d been hiding. Where have you been living in a silence that feels like safety but is actually a slow shrinking — and what part of yourself has been waiting on the other side of it?

Group Discussion Jersak says he didn’t lose his faith when he loosened his grip on literalism — he lost his “ill-gotten certitude,” and God got bigger. Where has your own faith required you to give something up that you thought was holding it together — and what did you actually find when you let it go?

Grieving Systems of Shame

Tuesday, March 17, 2026

READ ON CAC.ORG

Theologian Yolanda Pierce grew up in a church that offered her a sense of belonging. She grieves that churches often fail to follow Jesus’s example of welcoming and including everyone:

I grew up in [a Holiness-Pentecostal] church, and in the space of those wooden pews, which were lovingly dusted and polished by the church mothers, my gifts were affirmed and room was made for my talents….

It is only with an adult’s deep gratitude that I can appreciate a space that never shamed me for what I couldn’t do well, never humiliated me for my failures, and also managed to extract gifts I didn’t even know I had. Not a single soul told me that I sounded like a hoarse frog when I sang. No one told me that I missed a line in my Easter speech.… I was simply aware that I could try anything in this church and it would be a safe space to land.

So it grieves my spirit that so many churches, so many religious spaces, have been sites of humiliation and shame for individuals and groups. I mourn that a place that taught a little Black girl that she could go to a college no one had ever seen before is the same place that tells someone else they are going to hell for who they love or who they marry. I lament the private and public humiliations suffered by those whose truths and identities are mocked from the pulpit. I grieve with those whose humanity, vocational calling, or salvation seems under debate by way of narrow-minded sermons and poor biblical exegesis….

These hierarchies, in which those with power and privilege—or those who simply wield the microphone—shame and blame others and reinforce their “superior” social standing, diminish the radical equality God promises in places like Galatians 3:28. These hierarchies fail to recognize that we are all one in Christ Jesus and that our work as Christians is to exalt God, not to shame our neighbors….

I grieve that a place that loved me and propelled me to a rich, full life has been a space of condemnation and castigation for others.

By relinquishing the tools of shame, we become God’s beloved community:

Here is the holy lesson that I have learned: there is no progress unless the wounded among us—those broken in heart and bruised in spirit—have space to tell their stories and share their burdens. Justice is only possible if the ones cast outside of the camp, the city, or the church are lovingly brought back into a changed and transformed community. The discarded and forsaken must be given the lead if we are to move forward in building God’s beloved community…. We build a new foundation for justice and love by releasing the power of the tools of shame and humiliation used by those who try to break our souls. After all, is it progress if we leave the most vulnerable behind?

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Thoughtful faith, progressive theology, and a gospel that’s still good news.

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Silence in a Culture of Hot Takes

Part 5 of the Lenten Series: The Season We’d Rather Skip

BEAU STRINGERMAR 17

Everybody has an opinion about everything now. And not just an opinion but an urgent, fully formed, publicly stated opinion that needs to be shared within the first fifteen minutes of any event happening anywhere in the world. A politician says something controversial and within seconds your feed is a wall of hot takes. A celebrity makes a statement and suddenly everyone you know is a cultural commentator. A tragedy happens and before the facts are even clear there are already a thousand threads telling you exactly what it means and who is to blame and what you should think about it.

We are drowning in words. And I don’t think most of us realize how much it’s costing us.

I read somewhere recently that the average American consumes somewhere around thirty-four gigabytes of information per day. I don’t even know what that means exactly but it sounds like way too much. We wake up and reach for the phone before our feet hit the floor. We fill the car with podcasts. We scroll through lunch. We fall asleep to Netflix. Every available moment of silence gets stuffed with content and noise and opinion and commentary until there is literally no space left in the day where we are just quiet. Just still. Just existing without someone else’s words in our heads.

And the church has bought into this completely. Pastors feel the pressure to make public statements about every cultural moment within hours of it happening. If you don’t post your take fast enough, people assume you either don’t care or you’re on the wrong side. Social media has turned ministry into a never-ending press conference where silence is interpreted as complicity and thoughtfulness is mistaken for cowardice. The hot take has replaced the sermon as the primary unit of pastoral communication and I think we’ve lost something enormous in the exchange.

My Commute

This Lent I made a commitment that sounded simple and turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve done in a while. I decided to drive to and from work in complete silence. No podcasts. No music. No phone calls. No audiobooks. Just me and the road and thirty minutes of nothing each way.

The first few days were brutal. I’m not exaggerating. The silence felt physically uncomfortable, like an itch I couldn’t scratch. My hand kept reaching for the phone. My brain kept racing to fill the gap with something, anything, because apparently I have trained myself over the years to be incapable of sitting in a quiet car without external stimulation. That realization alone was worth the experiment.

But somewhere around the end of the first week something started to shift. The noise in my head began to quiet down. Not all at once and not completely, but enough that I started to notice things I hadn’t noticed before. Ideas I didn’t know I was carrying. Convictions I’d been too busy to feel. Creative thoughts that had been waiting patiently for a gap in the noise to slip through. Some mornings the Holy Spirit showed up in that silence in ways that genuinely surprised me. Not in a dramatic, clouds-parting kind of way. More like a quiet nudge. A thought I didn’t generate on my own. A gentle correction I probably would have missed if I’d had a podcast filling the space instead.

Five hours a week. That’s what an hour of silence a day during the work week adds up to. And I can tell you honestly that those five hours have been more formative than most of the content I’ve consumed in the last year, because it turns out you can’t hear much of anything when you never stop talking.

The Ministry of Shutting Up

James 1:19 might be the most ignored verse in the entire New Testament. “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.” Quick to listen. Slow to speak. Read that again and then open any social media platform and notice how completely we’ve inverted that instruction. 

We are quick to speak, slow to listen, and angry about everything all the time.

We have built an entire culture around the exact opposite of what James is telling us to do and then we wonder why everything feels so exhausting and fruitless.

Henri Nouwen understood this. He wrote that “silence is the home of the word” and that “without silence, the word loses its power.” I’ve been sitting with that idea during these quiet commutes and I think he’s right in a way that goes deeper than just personal devotion. Our words have lost their power because we’ve multiplied them beyond all reason. We speak so much and so fast and so constantly that nothing we say carries weight anymore. Everything is content. Everything is a take. Everything is noise piled on top of noise until the signal is completely buried.

Nouwen spent significant time living in monastic communities and what he discovered there wasn’t that monks had figured out how to escape the world. It was that they had figured out how to be present in it. Silence wasn’t just the absence of something, it was the presence of something. It was the space where God’s voice could actually land because someone had finally stopped talking long enough to hear it.

What Silence Isn’t

I want to be careful here because I don’t want to over-spiritualize this. Not every silent commute ends with a divine revelation. Some mornings I just drove to work and thought about what I was going to have for lunch. And that’s fine. Silence doesn’t have to be productive. It doesn’t have to result in a spiritual breakthrough or a creative epiphany or a moment of profound clarity. Sometimes silence is just silence. And in a world that demands constant output and constant engagement and constant noise, just being quiet for thirty minutes is a radical act all by itself.

But I will say this. The days when something does break through are the days that remind me why this matters. There is a version of my life where I fill every available second with sound and stimulation and never once create enough space for God to get a word in. I’ve lived that version. Most of us have. And it’s exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with physical tiredness and everything to do with spiritual depletion. 

You can be busy for God and completely deaf to God at the same time.

I know because I’ve done it.

Try This

This week, find your silence. You don’t have to join a monastery or go on a retreat or sit cross-legged on a cushion for an hour. Just pick one space in your day that you normally fill with noise and leave it empty. The commute. The morning coffee. The walk to pick up the kids. Whatever it is, let it be quiet. Don’t fill it. Don’t optimize it. Just sit in it and see what happens when you give your soul a few minutes without words.

You might hear nothing. You might hear everything. Either way, you’ll be practicing something the church has known for two thousand years that our culture has almost entirely forgotten. 

Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is close your mouth and open your ears.

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Individual reflection: Think of a space in your life — a relationship, a community, a season — where you were free to fail without being shamed. What did that freedom make possible in you that you couldn’t have accessed otherwise?

Group discussion: Pierce grieves that the same community that made space for her has shut others out. Stringer suggests we’re often too noisy to hear the people we’ve marginalized. Where do you see those as the same problem — and what would it actually cost us to practice the silence that makes room for those Pierce calls “the discarded and forsaken”?

Jesus Did Not Play by the Rules

Sunday, March 15, 2026

READ ON CAC.ORG

Father Richard Rohr identifies how Jesus challenged the strict laws of his day that governed what was “honorable” and what was not:

In Jesus’s time, the very architecture of the temple revealed in stone what Jesus was trying to reform. The actual design of the building seemed to protect degrees of worthiness, as immature religion often does. At the center stood the Holy of Holies, which only the high priest could enter on one day a year. This was surrounded by the court of the priests and the Levites, which only they could enter. Outside that was the court for ritually pure Jewish men.

Jewish women had access only to the outermost court of the temple, although during their childbearing years, their entrance to that court would be limited because of religious beliefs about blood and ritual purity (see Leviticus 15:19–30). Outside the entrance to this court, a sign warned any non-Jewish people that to enter would be punishable by death.

In the temple, we find structured in stone something all religions invariably do: create insiders and outsiders. Jews defined all non-Jews as “gentiles”; some Catholics still speak of “non-Catholics.” Almost everybody seems to need some kind of sinner or heretic against which to compare themselves. Judaism is an archetypal religion, and illustrates a pattern that is replicated in almost all religions.

On some level, we all create “meritocracies” or worthiness systems and invariably base them on some kind of purity code—racial, national, sexual, moral, or cultural. This material makes up much of Leviticus and Numbers, and also is the compulsion of almost every Christian denomination after the Reformation. The pattern never changes because it’s the pattern of the fearful and over-defended ego.

Jesus was a radical reformer of religion, in large part because he showed no interest in maintaining purity systems or closed systems of any kind. They only appeal to the ego and lead no one to God. Jesus actively undercut these systems, even against his own followers when they wanted to persecute others (see Luke 9:49–56). He showed no interest in the various debt and purity codes of ancient Israel, which are the religious forms of power and exclusion. In fact, Jesus often openly flouted many of the accepted purity codes of his own religion, especially the Sabbath prohibitions, rules about washing hands and cups, and the many restrictions that made various people “impure.” Jesus’s attempts at reform comprise half of the Gospel text directly or indirectly (see Matthew 15:1–14).

I sometimes jokingly say that Jesus appears to relax from Saturday night until Friday at sunset, and then goes out of his way to do most of his work on the Sabbath! It’s fairly obvious that he is provoking the religious system that puts customs and human laws before people

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A Divine Identity

Monday, March 16, 2026

Father Richard describes how the early church followed Jesus’s practice of honoring universal human dignity:

There is a telling phrase used in the Acts of the Apostles to describe this new Jewish sect that is upsetting the old-world order in Thessalonica. Christians there were dragged before the city council and referred to as “the people who have been turning the whole world upside down…. They have broken Caesar’s edicts” (Acts 17:6–7). No one is called before the city council for mere inner beliefs or new attitudes unless they are also upsetting the social order. Almost all of Jesus’s healing and nature miracles were a rearranging of social relationships and therefore of social order. By eating with the underclass, touching the untouchables, healing on the Sabbath, and collaborating with upstarts like John the Baptist down at the river, he turns the traditions of his society upside down.

Jesus refuses to abide by the honor-and-shame system that dominated the Mediterranean culture of his time. He refuses to live up to what is considered honorable and refuses to shame what people consider shameful. This does not gain him many friends. It’s perhaps the thing that most bothers the priests and the elders. In response to his ignoring the debt codes and purity codes, they decide to kill him (see Mark 3:6, 11:18; Matthew 12:14; Luke 19:47; John 11:53). [1]

In an honor-and-shame system, a person’s status, self-image, and meaning are primarily achieved through how others see them. The system around Jesus didn’t ask individuals to think in terms of “Who am I really before God?” (as Jesus did), or “What do I feel about myself?” (as our culture might), but rather, “How does my village see me?” Many cultures to this day are built on some kind of honor-and-shame system. A person’s meaning is almost entirely tied up in how their family and friends see them. It’s a highly effective means of social control.

In New Testament times, shame and honor were in fact moral values that people felt compelled to follow. If a situation called for retaliation, one must retaliate. Not to retaliate would have been considered immoral, because it would have meant abandoning the honor of the individual, their family, and maybe their entire village. For Jesus to say, “Do not retaliate,” was to subvert the whole honor-and-shame system. It is one of the strongest arguments people can make that Jesus taught nonviolence.

Once challenged to live outside their cultural systems, Jesus’s listeners were given a new place to find their identity: in God. Who we are in God is who we are. That’s the end of ups and downs. Our value no longer depends upon whether our family or village likes us, whether we’re good-looking, wealthy, or obedient to the laws. Jesus’s message is incredibly subversive in an honor-and-shame society. Yet, as he takes away their old foundations, he offers a new, more solid one: neither shame-based nor guilt-based, but based in who they—and we—are in God. [2]

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For personal reflection:

Rohr says Jesus offers a new identity foundation — not shame-based, not guilt-based, but grounded in who we are before God. Sit quietly with this question: “Who am I really before God?” What comes up — relief, emptiness, unfamiliarity, something else?

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For group discussion:

The early church was dragged before city councils not for new beliefs, but for disrupting social order — Jesus’s movement was visibly, practically subversive of honor-and-shame systems. Where do you see his followers today genuinely turning things upside down in that way — and where do you see us (including ourselves) quietly reinforcing the same systems he was dismantling?

Collective Sin and Evil

Friday, March 13, 2026

Richard Rohr describes how moving beyond an emphasis on personal sin allows us to focus on larger forces at play that create systemic harm:

For some reason, the word “sin” now seems old-fashioned and no longer helpful or even clarifying in most discussions. It can send any conversation down a rabbit hole of side comments, judgments, and clarifications that derail the original direction of the conversation.

Perhaps so many of us stopped using the word because we located sin inside of our own small, cultural categories, with little awareness of the true subtlety, depth, and importance of the broader concept. As each culture and religion defined sin in its own idiosyncratic way, the word itself ceased being helpful. Instead, we simply used it to designate various taboos and cultural expectations, usually having to do with bodily purity codes. (Some Christians are into dancing and drinking, whereas others consider it almost obscene).

My assumption and conviction are that sin became a less useful idea for many of us because we needed to move around in a different field to regain our notion of the deadly nature of true evil. No one can deny that evil is very real, but what many of us now observe as the real evils destroying the world—such as militarism, greed, scapegoating of other groups, and abuses of power—seem very different from what most people call sin, which has mostly referred to personal faults or guilt, or supposed private offenses against God. These did not actually describe the horrible nature of evil very well at all. So, we lost interest in sin.

We also lost interest because we usually heard the concept of sin being used to judge, exclude, or control others, or to shame and control ourselves, but seldom to bring discernment or deeper understanding, much less compassion or forgiveness, to the human situation. In my observation, the more sin-obsessed a religion or culture became, the more unloving and cognitively rigid its people tended to be.

If we are honest and perceptive, we surely see that actual evil often seems to “dominate the very air” (a phrase found in Pauline texts such as Ephesians 2:2) and is more the norm than the exception. In fact, evil is often culturally agreed-upon, admired, and deemed necessary, as is normally the case when a country goes to war, spends most of its budget on armaments, admires luxuries over necessities, entertains itself to death, or pollutes its own common water and air. Evil seems to be corporate, admired, and deemed necessary before it becomes personal and shameable.

Sin and evil must be more than personal or private matters. Convicting people of individual faults does not change the world. I believe the apostle Paul taught that both sin and salvation are, first of all, corporate realities. Yet, we largely missed that essential point, and thus found ourselves in the tight grip of monstrous evils in Christian nations, all the way down to the modern era.

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1.

“Be persecuted, rather than be a persecutor. Be crucified, rather than be a crucifier. Be treated unjustly, rather than treat anyone unjustly. Be oppressed, rather than be an oppressor. Be gentle rather than zealous. Lay hold of goodness, rather than justice.”

– Isaac of Nineveh, 7th Century Syrian Bishop

The early Church understood goodness better than we do today.

It would be an interesting thought experiment to go through human history and catalogue all the evil that was done in the name of trying to be the distributors of justice.

The first mention of the word “sin” in the Hebrew Bible is in Genesis 4, when Cain kills Abel.  It is as if to say that the first true sin was when humanity turned to violence against fellow man.

2.

“He who busies himself with the sins of others, or judges his brother on suspicion, has not yet even begun to repent or to examine himself so as to discover his own sins.”

– Maximus the Confessor, 6th Century Monk

My lovely wife got me a daily devotional that goes through the sayings of the early desert mothers and fathers of the Church.

Some of the stories are fanciful.

Some are just plain odd.

But one thing is for sure: a constant theme is awareness of one’s own faults.  The path to humility, the path to compassion for others, the path to forgiving others for their sins begins with remembering your own capacity for sin.  If we are able to gently and consistently remind ourselves of our own past follies, we will be less likely to get too high up on our horses and succumb to the proud condescension of others.

I am feeling rather humbled this week, just thinking about the mistakes that I have since learned from.

You know that old saying, right?  “If you don’t look back and cringe at who you used to be, then you haven’t grown as a person.”

The way forward for all of us is humility, humility, humility.

3.

“I never so much as take a step onto the ladder of spiritual progress without placing death before my eyes.”

– Amma Sarah of the Desert, 5th Century Desert Mother

This past December, I turned 42.

In addition, I began serving as a pastor at a retirement community.

I’m not sure if I have thought about or talked about death as much as I have in this season of life.

My time is limited.  I want to make good use of it.

And it seems that for Amma Sarah of the Desert, remembering one’s mortality is a sure foundation for making spiritual progress in the life of faith.

This actually pairs rather well with the reflection from quote #2.  Remembering our faults and remembering that our time is limited are both spiritually beneficial things to keep at the forefront of our minds.

4.

“For if we all took only what was necessary to satisfy our own needs, giving the rest to those who lack, no one would be rich, no one would be poor, and no one would be in need.”

– Basil the Great, 4th Century Cappadocian Theologian

I think that conservative Christians misunderstand sayings like this.

It sounds too much like Marxism.

However, as I understand it, Marxism demands the equal distribution of goods.  Meanwhile, Christian charity leaves it to free will.

I wonder what God thinks about our scarcity mindsets.  I admit that I struggle with a fearful mindset toward scarcity.  God must look at our stockpiling, at all our various types of wealth, and wonder why we keep goods under lock and key from people who need food to feed their children.  God must weep that there are kids who do not have school lunches.  God must grieve that there are elders in our communities who may not have heat or running water.

God designed the universe to operate on abundance rather than scarcity, yet here we are, keeping more than we need.

Again, I struggle with a scarcity mindset myself, so I am not trying to throw anyone under the bus with this.

Lord, have mercy.

5.

“The sages of Israel teach that those who would be wise must aim, not at power, but at goodness.”

– Scot McKnight, New Testament Theologian

This one packs a punch.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said something similar, that Christendom has acclimated itself too quickly to those with power.

If the focus is on being good rather than on power, that is absolutely more in line with the teachings of Jesus.

Missing the Mark

Thursday, March 12, 2026

Author Danielle Shroyer shares how the Scriptures in Hebrew and Greek frequently define sin as “missing the mark”:

Though original sin has told us a story of being stuck in our sin, when we turn to scripture, we actually find a very different story. Though modern science has just come to realize how amazingly malleable people are, the wisdom of scripture has told us this all along.…

The most predominant word for sin in both the Hebrew [hatta] and the Greek [hamartia] assumes in its very definition our ability to hit the mark. We can’t miss the mark unless we assume the mark is where we’re aiming, right? In 768 instances of the word “sin” in the Bible, we are described as people who are standing with a bow and arrow, aiming at a target that we miss. That’s not a sin nature, and it’s definitely not total depravity. That’s novice, or perhaps distractedness, or bad aim. It could be any number of things. But the idea that we are not designed to hit the target set before us would be completely antithetical to the way sin is put forth in the vast majority of scripture.

When scripture calls us to goodness, to repentance, to grace, it’s not like telling a fish to ride a bicycle. It’s not something so contradictory to who we are and what we can do that it’s an impossible notion. Salvation is available to us because God has offered it, but also because God has designed us to be capable of responding to it. We can take aim at the target simply because God chose to make us that way. Yes, we miss the mark … but that doesn’t mean we are without any ability to play the game.

In Scripture, sin is often described as an error or mistake, not a condition of our being:

The Bible talks about sin as something that ought to be called out, but not something that ought to be condemning to the point of shame…. Sin is an action, a choice, or if we’ve made a number of them in a row, a path or a habit. There is nothing irreversible or determinate about it. Sin is not a state of being. It is a way of being in the world that is always and every moment in flux, based on our choices. It’s a growth mindset, not a fixed one.

To put this another way, there is a difference between having fallen and being fallen. Sin (hamartia, hatta) means that we have fallen. It doesn’t mean we are fallen. We may be in flux depending on our last action and our next intention, but we aren’t simply tossed around on the waves of our own competence. We reside in the boat of blessed grace, which holds us steady even as we falter and sway from day to day. We may have fallen, but we can get up.

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Returning to the Center
Inspired by the writings of Henri Nouwen

The spiritual life is not a straight line toward perfection. It is a continual process of wandering and returning.

We often think of sin as something that separates us permanently from God, but the deeper truth is that sin is usually forgetting who we are. We lose sight of our identity as God’s beloved and drift into fear, distraction, and self-reliance.

But the good news of the Gospel is that every moment holds the possibility of return.

When we recognize that we have wandered—through impatience, anger, indifference, or pride—we are already standing at the doorway of grace. The awareness itself is an invitation. God is not waiting to condemn but to welcome us home again.

The spiritual journey, then, is not about never missing the mark. It is about learning how to return—again and again—to the One who never stops calling us beloved.

Each small act of turning back—through prayer, repentance, kindness, or humility—re-aims our lives toward love.

We may wander, but we are never abandoned.

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Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Father Greg Boyle considers how many of the evils we witness today reflect the consequences of our painful disconnection from the God of love: 

In the face of senseless gun violence, political treachery and revenge, hate crimes, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks, some people will just say, “Sin and evil are on display.” When we do this, we’ve given up. We’re not even trying. We declare that we will no longer be seeking solutions, because we believe that human beings are somehow stained from the start. Original sin doesn’t explain the terrible. Lots of things do. Original sin is not one of them. There is no sin gene in us. We’re born from love and always invited to love….

I asked a friend to talk to her daughter who had just graduated from a Jesuit [Catholic] university about how she and her peers saw sin. Her daughter said, “We don’t really use the word ‘sin’ or talk about it. Sin is an Old World map.” Now, I suppose some might lament that sin is not on the front burner. It’s actually not even on the back burner. It is nowhere near the stove. And, of course, if you tried to use an Old World map today to get you to, say, Iraq, it would drop you off at Mesopotamia.

We could lament that young folks might see sin this way. Or we could find the invitation in it. Is the love of God looking down on a sinful world in need of salvation, or does our God see a broken world in pain and in need of healing? Scripture has it as “Then your light shall break like the dawn and your wound shall quickly be healed. The light shall rise for you in your gloom. The darkness shall become for you like midday” [Isaiah 58:10]. I endlessly tell gang members that the God of love doesn’t see sin. Our God sees son (and daughter). “I believe that sin has no substance,” Julian of Norwich writes, “not a particle of being.” Then she says, “With all due respect to Mother Church … but this does not line up.” She couldn’t get sin to align with her God of love.

Boyle suggests a shift in emphasis when it comes to behavior:

The moral quest has never kept us moral; it’s just kept us from each other. So maybe we should abandon the moral quest, since it’s an Old World map, and embrace instead the journey to wholeness, flourishing love, and defiant joy. We don’t want to end up in Mesopotamia. Yes, we want to do the next right thing, but what is the next right thing and who is able to choose it? Only the healthy person can. So we help each other, not to make better choices but to walk home to well-being and deeper growth in love.

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BRADLEY JERSAK MAR 10

Ancient Flood Myths as Sociological Theodicies

Definition: Theodicy is the branch of theology that seeks to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world with the belief in a benevolent, omnipotent God. Theodicies aiming to provide a rational explain of why a good God permits the presence of tragedy and injustice.

Recommended Reading:

Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Knopf, 2023). 
Matt Lynch, Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God (IVP, 2023).
Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy(Princeton University Press, 2015)

Theodicies

I am not fan of theodicies. Following Martin Luther and Simone Weil, I believe that every effort to rationalize affliction inevitably calls evil good or good evil, precisely because the premises are flawed. I regard Luther and Weil’s Theology of the Cross as an anti-theodicy that sees goodness and affliction intersect in the Passion of the Christ without trying to harmonize real contradictions.

That said, theodicies are ancient. They express humanity’s authentic lament and our wrestle with the Why? of the absurd inside our fragile belief systems. When I regard that deeply human effort through that lens, I have a lot of patience for what’s going on. As I discovered recently, alongside the particular calamities that trigger our theodicies, we can also identify ongoing social crises that a culture has begun to recognize and weaves with the activity or inactivity of the Divine in the narratives we compose.

Flood Stories as Theodicies

Ancient flood myths are a form of theodicy. The collective memory of a world-ending or catastrophic floods are ubiquitous to human cultures across the world. While they very dramatically, they also share themes including creation, judgment, survival, and renewal. 
A brief web search turned up far more than I expected:

1. Mesopotamian Flood Myths:
   • Epic of Gilgamesh: Utnapishtim survives a divine flood by building a boat, similar to Noah’s Ark.
   • Atra-Hasis: Another Mesopotamian tale where a flood is sent to curb human overpopulation.
2. Jewish Flood Narratives:
   • Noah’s Ark: A global flood sent by God, with Noah saving his family and animals in an ark.
   • Enoch: Noah’s flood sent to drown the Nephilim, who are destroying the world.
3. Greek Mythology:
   • Deucalion and Pyrrha: Zeus floods the earth, and Deucalion and Pyrrha survive by building a chest.
4. Hindu Mythology:
   • Manu and the Fish: A fish warns Manu of a great flood, and he builds a boat to save himself and the seeds of life.
5. Chinese Mythology:
   • Great Flood of Gun-Yu: A flood controlled by Yu the Great, who becomes a cultural hero.
6. Native American Flood Myths:
   • Ojibwe: The Great Flood and the creation of Turtle Island.
   • Choctaw: A flood story involving survival on a raft.
7. Mesoamerican Myths:
   • Maya Popol Vuh: A flood sent to destroy the wooden people, an early creation of the gods.
8. Inca Mythology:
   • Unu Pachakuti: A flood sent by the god Viracocha to destroy giants.
9. Norse Mythology:
   • Bergelmir: A flood caused by the blood of Ymir, the primordial giant.
10. African Myths:
    • Mandingo: A flood story involving divine retribution and survival.
11. Pacific Islander Myths:
    • Hawaiian Flood Myth: Nu’u survives a flood in a canoe, guided by the god Kane.
12. Australian Aboriginal Myths:
    • Floods caused by ancestral spirits as acts of creation or punishment.
13. Zoroastrian Mythology:
    • Yima’s Vara: A divine flood avoided by building an underground refuge.

I’m particularly interested in reading how some of these stories may function as theodicies and what crises they address. While some flood stories focused on how the gods/God created conditions for human habitation (Ojibwe) or disposed of monsters that threatened human life (Enoch, Unu Pachakuti), I’m pondering those that may begin with the memory of a catastrophe that begged the question of why it happened. The story may then function as an archetype and/or warning for the reader.

An additional note: prior to the Enlightenment (including in the Bible), theodicies did not distinguish between natural disasters and human wickedness since both alike were considered sovereignly ordained acts. Whether it was a plague, a famine, an earthquake, or an invading army, God is typically pictured as the active agent (though Jesus handily refutes that inference in the first paragraph of Luke 13).

Gilgamesh via Bohannon

The earliest Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh may be dated as early as 2100 BCE, prior to the composition of Genesis. In that account, Enlil (the chief god) leads the decision to flood the earth. Why? Because the gods (most of them) are irritated by the growing clamor and chaos caused by humanity. The rising din is disruptive—by eliminating humankind in a great flood, peace will be restored. Humanity is saved when Ea (or Enki), god of wisdom, secretly warns Utnapishtim and instructs him to build a boat. Utnapishtim survives the flood, so the human race is preserved.

Previously, I had not given any thought to the meaning of the gods’ aggravation or why our noise assaulted to their ears. But I’ve been captivated by Cat Bohannon’s must-read book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.

Bohannon posits that flood myths such as Atra-Hasis and Gilgamesh were composed to address a human crisis: the problem of explosive population growth in the cities. The gods were annoyed because the people were ‘noisy’ … but why noisy? Because of the rapid expansion of big cities, due in great part, she believes, to practices such as urban wet nursing (and her argument is biologically solid).

Thus, the social foundations for those flood myths (meaning, how they tried to explain the ‘why?’ of a big flood theologically) was a response to overpopulation. In hindsight, they believed that when the big floods came, the gods’ agenda was to depopulate. In other words, an actual sociological crisis was projected into a divine response to address the problem with a flood. It’s an early form of theodicy. OR was the flood a metaphor for the people themselves… a human deluge overflowing the banks of the city!

In either case, the story can function as a theodicy (justifying the gods) at two levels: (1)

The gods are not simply capricious. Their judgments may be destructive, but their acts aren’t simply arbitrary. When bad things happen, if the gods are involved, they are addressing an actual problem (not necessarily sin) relative to human activity. And (2) at least one of the gods was even sympathetic and humane. In polytheistic religions, the various gods represent aspects or attributes of the Most High God or council of gods.

Genesis via Lynch

By way of both comparison and contrast, following Matt Lynch’s, Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and the Shalom of God (2023) describes how the Genesis flood story also addresses a sociological crisis—though a different one: the problem of human violence. As Lynch reads, Genesis 6, he hears echoes of Genesis 1, where we read that “God saw that [what he created] was good”—and specifically, good for people to inhabit.

But in Genesis 6:11, we read, “Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence.” Lynch reads a similar Hebrew construct here, but in reverse. “God saw that the earth was RUINED.” That is, the earth was ruined for human habitation—rendered uninhabitable by human violence such that human extinction would be inevitable. “God saw how corrupt [destined to perish] the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways” (6:12), leading to a ruined creation that would ultimately be uninhabitable and bring about our extinction.

So, in meaning-making a big flood in their oral history or cultural memory, the Jews set their story over against Gilgamesh, by reading Yahweh’s flood not as mitigating overpopulation through human extinction, but rather, restoring an inhabitable world to preserve humankind from extinction. It is a re-Creation story, a reset, a fresh start.

Theodicies as Social Commentary

What the stories have in common is a flood, an act of divine compassion, and a hero who saves the race by building an ark. And to my point, both are theodicies that seek to somehow rationalize a divinely sanctioned apocalyptic flood. But my question is how the stories also function as social commentaries. Gilgamesh deals with cities flooded with or because of extreme overcrowding; Genesis is critiquing with human violence toward one another and its environmental impact.

In the Genesis account, one message is that unlike the Gilgamesh gods, despite the destructive power of the flood, God’s heart is to restore. That’s the theological message. But the story also sends an ongoing ethical message: human violence is so self-destructive that unchecked, it will lead to our extinction. God has provided a way of escape, of salvation—an ark into which all are still being welcomed.

Noah’s ark thus becomes a spiritual archetypes for both Jews and Christians, and a metaphor for readers today. It’s not that God is the agent of divine genocide, nor that God ‘sends’ climate-related disasters as punishment upon humanity. But then what? Historically, a Christian reading was that when the flood comes (e.g., politically, socially, ideologically, etc.), there is an invitation via repentance (admitting we can’t save ourselves) to enter ‘the ark of salvation’ (don’t read that narrowly) to endure whatever comes together as a human family (a every human and every creature with us) that knows God is ultimately the life-giver and not the death-dealer.

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Author Barbara Brown Taylor describes the suffering we experience when we live from a sense of disconnection: 

Deep down in human existence, there is an experience of being cut off from life. There is some memory of having been treated cruelly, and—a little deeper, perhaps—the memory of having treated someone else cruelly as well…. Deep down in human existence there is an experience of reaching for forbidden fruit, of pushing away loving arms, of breaking something on purpose just to prove that you can. Deep down in human existence there is an experience of doing whatever is necessary to feed and comfort the self, because there is no one else to trust, no other purpose to serve, no other god to follow.

For ages and ages, this experience has been called sin—deadly alienation from the source of all life. By some definitions, it implies willful turning away from God. By others, it is an unavoidable feature of being human. Either way, it is a name for the experience of being cut off from air, light, sustenance, community, hope, meaning, life. It is less concerned with specific behaviors than with the aftermath of those behaviors. There are a thousand ways to turn away from the light, after all, with variations according to culture, century, class, and gender. The point is to know the difference between light and darkness, and to recognize the pull when it comes.

Though we may make choices out of a sense of disconnection, we can also choose to return to the original blessing of God’s love:

Repentance begins with the decision to return to relationship: to accept our God-given place in community, and to choose a way of life that increases life for all members of that community. Needless to say, this often involves painful changes, which is why most of us prefer remorse to repentance. We would rather say, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I feel really, really awful about what I have done” than actually start doing things differently.…

“All sins are attempts to fill voids,” wrote the French philosopher Simone Weil. Because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside of us, we try stuffing it full of all sorts of things, but it refuses to be filled. It rejects all substitutes…. It is the holy of holies inside of us, which only God may fill….

I do not believe that sin is the enemy we often make it out to be, at least not when we recognize it and name it as such. When we see how we have turned away from God, then and only then do we have what we need to begin turning back. Sin is our only hope, the fire alarm that wakes us up to the possibility of true repentance.

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Is it Sin or a Style of Coping? 

How Doing The Deep Work of the Heart Requires Both 

CHUCK DEGROAT. MAR 8

“Is it sin or is it survival?” a student of mine asked not long ago. It’s a question I’ve heard repeatedly as I’ve taught called The Christian Interior Life at WTSover the years. 

“All this talk of coping sounds as if we need to have empathy for abusers,” a reader asked, after a recent article.

Indeed, after When Narcissism Comes to Church was released, I heard some critiques that I didn’t use the particular word sin enough. The common hesitation—when we begin to use psychological words, it seems as if we’re veering away from theological ones, and when we veer away from robust words like sin, we’re prone to minimize it.

What’s lost in this, however, is that much of what I and others have written on narcissism, abuse, and trauma describe contexts where strong doctrines of sin were present. And yet, in these very places, there is too often 1) a real minimization of actual sin—hurt, harm, and abuse and 2) a denial of systemic sin, most often impacting women, the socially/racially/economically marginalized, and more, often hidden behind proclamations of a Gospel of grace and freedom.

As I’ve often said about my own writing—sin isn’t a word count. You reveal your actual doctrine of sin through the ways in which you courageously engage not just one-off misdeeds but actual and embedded patterns of harm. And psychology serves us by deepening our understanding of how our patterns develop, how our character forms, even about how the power of sin—in people, in family systems, in communities—can be undone, not through what I’ve called “bandaid theology” (quick fixes) but through the deep work of disentangling a heart from whatever binds it.

Sin and Styles of Coping

“When you talk about the nervous system,” someone says, “it sounds as if you’re just saying we learn to cope and adapt, not that we might actually be engaging sinfully.”

Those of us who are engaged in asking how God-designed physiological and neurobiological processes are involved in human action are profoundly interested in what’s bubbling beneath the surface of our behaviors. And we’ve tapped the well of psychology to affirm and deepen what wise theologians have long taught about what’s happening within.

Like the desert fathers and mothers of the third and fourth centuries, as former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams notes, cartographers of the soul who were not just interested in bad behaviors but in the internal dynamics motivating sin—what they called the “passions.” Williams says that they named a “whole realm of instinct, reaction, coping mechanisms” that drive our outward behaviors, and a “compound of anxiety, defensiveness and acquisitiveness,” all driving us into inner and outer turmoil, robbing us of what God designed us for—connection and communion.

That’s nervous system language. And that’s theological language! 

In other words, they sensed that the story of our patterns and habits is inextricably tied to a churning anxiety within—evidence of the kind of self-protection and survival we experience east of Eden, not the safety and security of Eden.

But here’s a physiological fact: the nervous system does not operate according to a moral code. It does not pause to ask, Is this right or wrong? It asks something much more immediate: Am I safe? And it reflexively responds by adapting and coping in a way that facilitates safety, at all costs.

That’s important.

Here, we lean in with wonder, asking what might actually be going on beneath the surface. Here, our hearts are widened beyond moral judgment and into compassion.

Our hearts grow in compassion for the child raised by a volatile parent who eventually learned to scan every room for subtle shifts in mood. Or the girl who became fiercely self-reliant because no one else was reliable. Or the boy who endured violence only to develop a powerful fight response that now keeps him from being crushed.

All bodies habituated to terror, adapting to survive.

And from the vantage point of survival, these responses make perfect sense. They worked. They helped us endure what might otherwise have been unbearable.

But hear this: survival strategies do not automatically become healthy ways of living. Survival strategies are not merely nervous systems in search of safety—they also become morally consequential.

The fight response that once protected a child may show up decades later as anger or intimidation toward a spouse or colleague. A flight response may turn into anxious perfectionism that keeps an entire household walking on eggshells—everyone bracing for the next sigh of disappointment or the quiet pressure of impossible standards. A fawn response may lead someone to chronically abandon their own voice while quietly resenting the people they work so hard to please. A freeze response may become emotional withdrawal that leaves loved ones feeling shut out.

What once helped us survive can eventually wound us—and the people around us.

Trauma therapist Diane Langberg has spent decades sitting with the aftermath of human harm, and she puts it starkly: “Abuse does terrible damage to the soul. It distorts how we see ourselves, how we see others, and how we see God.” When the soul is distorted in this way, our strategies for survival begin to shape the way we move through the world.

And the cycle can continue. As Langberg observes elsewhere, “The misuse of power devastates people, and those who have been devastated by power are often tempted to wield it in the same destructive ways.”

In other words, wounded people sometimes wound others—not because they intend to, but because survival patterns become ways of living.

“How do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?” wrote Bell Hooks.

This is where the conversation between psychology and theology becomes especially important.

Psychology has helped us see the wisdom of our coping. But theology reminds us that human life is not merely about survival.

It is about love.

Our Stories, Our Sins

Rowan Williams writes that “sin is what happens when we refuse the reality of God’s love and try to construct a life for ourselves on other foundations.”

Seen this way, sin is not merely rule-breaking. It is a life lived in disconnection, east of Eden, and organized around substitutes for love.

And this is where trauma and sin intersect in a deeply human way.

Consider life in these 1,185 chapters between Genesis 3 and Revelation 20. Born into a broken world and wounded by imperfect human beings, we begin constructing lives around strategies that promise safety—control, perfection, power, withdrawal, approval. But the strategies that once protected us can, over time, become the very foundations on which we build our lives.

What began as adaptation slowly becomes orientation.

Centuries before trauma theory, Augustine described this dynamic as disordered love—loving something in the wrong way or giving ultimate weight to things that cannot sustain us.

Modern neuroscience might describe the same process as the nervous system organizing around survival rather than connection.

Different language. Same human story.

For me, what brings it all together is this: trauma is a story about disconnection—disconnection from ourselves, from others, and from God.

And sin is life lived in the tragic reality of disconnection—the trauma of everyday life in these 1,185 chapters filled with heartache as we eagerly await One who will wipe away every tear. 

The reality of life lived in disconnection is seen, too often, among those of us who purport to use the right words and do the right things for God. 

It’s the pastor who talks of grace and kingdom and sin, but isn’t aware of his own lifelong fight response. His own disordered love hurts and harms those he pastors, a confusing dynamic for the ones harmed because he is supposed to be their shepherd, their pastor. Empathy stretches to his early story of pain and the little boy who still resides fearfully within him, while accountability requires that he face his sin—and its relational devastation.

It’s the activist who burns with a righteous passion for justice, who can name the sins of systems with clarity and courage, but who has never slowed long enough to tend to the unhealed wounds that fuel the fire. The cause becomes the place where pain finds expression, and opponents become enemies rather than neighbors. The fight for justice is good and necessary, but when fight is the only gear available, relationships fracture and the very community the work requires begins to thin and fray.

It’s the professor who speaks eloquently about love, formation, and the life of the mind, whose lectures on virtue and humility draw nods from attentive students, but whose interior life is quietly governed by flight—anxious productivity, relentless achievement, the pressure to always prove her worth. Students feel the subtle tension in the room, the sense that nothing less than excellence will do. The very wisdom she teaches about rest, grace, and belonging struggles to find a home within her.

So, while it’s tempting to get entangled in abstract debates about sin and styles of coping, the real work for each of us is to look courageously at ourselves, at the both/and that includes our stories and our self-centered patterns. In the end, psychology—as I see it—doesn’t minimize or evade sin, it deepens and widens the scope. It asks how we’re coping this side of Eden.

And, as I’ve written in Healing What’s Within, the remedy—psychologically and theologically—is introduced right there in Genesis 3, smack dab in a moment of fear and fig leaves, an invitation to reconnection amidst the disconnection, as God’s kind hand extends to us and his words soften our self-protected hearts: “Where are you?”

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Individual Contemplation Prompt

Both readings describe a spectrum — from the wounds we’ve carried, to the coping patterns that formed around them, to the moments we’ve turned away from the light or hurt someone else. Where do you find yourself on that spectrum today? Is there a place in your own story where survival became orientation — where a strategy that once protected you is now distancing you from love?

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Group Discussion Prompt

DeGroat writes that “what began as adaptation slowly becomes orientation” — our survival patterns quietly becoming the foundations we build our lives on. Where have you seen this dynamic at work — in your own life, in communities you’ve been part of, or in the people DeGroat describes (the pastor, the activist, the professor)? And where have you experienced — even glimpsed — what it feels like when God’s “Where are you?” reaches through the hiding?

What Do We Do with Sin?

Sunday, March 8, 2026

Father Richard Rohr explores a broad definition of the word “sin”:  

The great illusion we must all overcome is the illusion of separateness. It’s almost the only task of religion—to communicate not worthiness, but union; to reconnect us to our original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls that state of separateness “sin,” and its total undoing is stated frequently as God’s clear job description: “My dear people, we are already the children of God; it is only what is in the future that has not yet been revealed, and then all we know is that we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2).

The word sin has so many unhelpful connotations in most of our minds that it’s very problematic today. For most of us, it does not connote a state of alienation or separateness. Instead, it connotes naughty behavior and personal moral unworthiness. But these are merely symptoms and not the state itself! Disconnected people will do stupid and harmful things. Instead, the core and foundational meaning of sin is any life lived autonomous and outside “the garden of Eden.” We cannot ever become perfect or “worthy,” but we can become reconnected to our Source.

Sin primarily describes a state of fragmentation—when the part thinks it’s separate from the Whole. It’s the loss of any inner experience of who we are in God. That “who” is nothing we can earn or obtain. It’s nothing we can accomplish or work up to. Why? Because we already have it. 

The biblical revelation is about awakening, not accomplishing. It’s about realization and not performance principles. We cannot get there; we can only be there, but that foundational Being-in-God, for some reason, is too hard to believe and too good to be true. Only the humble can receive it, because it affirms more about God than it does about us.

The ego, however, makes it all about achievement and attainment. At that point, religion becomes a worthiness contest in which everybody loses—which they realize, if they’re honest. Many people give up on the whole spiritual journey when they see that they can’t live up to the performance principle. They don’t want to live as hypocrites.

Yet union with God is really about awareness and realignment, a Copernican revolution of the mind and heart that is sometimes called conversion. (Copernicus, of course, was the first to claim that the world revolves around the sun, not vice versa—a truly shocking revelation in the 16th century!) Following conversion, that deep and wondrous inner knowing, a whole new set of behaviors and lifestyle will surely emerge. It is not that if I am moral, then I will be loved by God; rather, I must first come to experience God’s love and then I will—almost naturally—be moral.

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What About Original Sin?

Monday, March 9, 2026

Father Richard shares his understanding of original sin: 

The “image of God” in us is absolute and unchanging. It’s pure and total gift, given equally to all. But this picture was complicated when the concept of original sin entered the Christian mind.

In this idea—first put forth by Augustine in the fifth century but never mentioned in the Bible—we emphasized that human beings were born into “sin” because Adam and Eve “offended God” by eating from the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” As punishment, God cast them out of the garden of Eden. Original sin wasn’t something we did at all; it was something that was done to us (passed down from Adam and Eve). In this understanding, we’re all off to a bad start.

By contrast, most of the world’s great religions start with some sense of primal goodness in their creation stories. The Jewish and Christian traditions beautifully succeeded at this, with the Genesis record telling us that God called creation “good” five times in Genesis 1:10–25, and even “very good” in 1:31.

But after Augustine, most Christian theologies shifted from the positive vision of Genesis 1 to the more negative vision of Genesis 3—the so-called fall, or what I am calling the “problem.” Instead of embracing God’s master plan for humanity and creation—what we Franciscans still call the “Primacy of Christ”—Christians shrunk our image of both Jesus and Christ. Our “Savior” became a mere Johnny-come-lately “answer” to the problem of sin, a problem that we had largely created ourselves.

In one way, the doctrine of “original sin” was good and helpful in that it taught us not to be surprised at the frailty and woundedness that we all carry.Just as goodness is inherent and shared, so it seems with evil. This is, in fact, a very merciful teaching. Knowledge of our shared wound ought to free us from the burden of unnecessary and individual guilt or shame and help us to be forgiving and compassionate with ourselves and one another.

Yet historically speaking, the teaching of original sin started us off on the wrong foot—with a no instead of a yes, with mistrust instead of trust. We have spent centuries trying to solve the “problem” that we’re told is at the heart of our humanity. But if we start with a problem, we tend to never get beyond that mindset.

To begin climbing out of the hole of original sin, we must start with a positive and generous cosmic vision. Generosity tends to build on itself. I have never met a truly compassionate or loving human being who did not have a foundational and even deep trust in the inherent goodness of human nature. 

The Christian story line must start with a positive and overarching vision for humanity and for history, or it will never get beyond the primitive, exclusionary, and fear-based stages of most early human development. We are ready for a major course correction.

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✍️ Questions

For individual reflection (before the gathering): Think of a time in your spiritual life when you felt like you were working hard to close a gap — to become worthy, to get back to God, to fix what felt broken in you. What were you actually believing about yourself in that season? And when — if ever — did that change?

For group discussion: Rohr says the church has spent centuries “trying to solve the problem that we’re told is at the heart of our humanity” — and that starting with a problem almost guarantees we never get beyond it. Where do you most naturally start — with what’s wrong in you, or with what’s already true about you? And what might it take to actually believe the “yes” before the “no”?