Father Richard, drawing on the wisdom of Scripture and tradition, urges respect and recognition of God’s presence in the natural world:
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), a Doctor of the Church, wrote: “Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.” [1] Grace brings nature to a sense of its own sanctity, and it evokes this sacredness within the human heart.
This is the reason St. Francis could speak of animals as “brother” and “sister.” This manifold and diverse world is held together in a uni-verse, which means a reality turning around one thing. Our common name for that one thing is “God,” but the word is not necessary to appreciate the reality. Aquinas explained this theologically; Francis knew it experientially.
Aquinas continues with “The whole universe in its wholeness more perfectly shares in and represents the divine goodness than any one creature by itself.” [2] Paul said the same thing long before Aquinas: “What can be known about God is perfectly plain, since God has made it plain. Ever since God created the world, God’s everlasting power and divinity, however invisible, has been there for the mind to see in the things that God has made” (Romans 1:19–20).
How could humans think we were the only or even the main event?Not only did we think that Earth was the center of the universe; we were certain our human species was the only one that God really cared about. All of creation was just a stage set for the human drama. Normally that is called narcissism. We extracted the soul from everything else. Nature was simply here for our utilitarian purpose, to be used for our consumption. With this belief system, we entered into a state of profound alienation from our own surroundings. We no longer belonged to this world because there was nothing worth belonging to. It was no longer naturally sacred, deserving our reverence or respect. We could rape, plunder, and misuse the earth. We could torture animals and destroy ecosystems because we thought they had no inherent value. We acted as though we were fully in charge.
Every day we have opportunities to reconnect with God through an encounter with nature, whether an ordinary sunrise, a starling on a power line, a tree in a park, or a cloud in the sky. This spirituality doesn’t depend on education or belief. It almost entirely depends on our capacity for simple presence. Often those without formal education and “unbelievers” do this better than many educated, religious people. I have met many like this who put me to shame.
Keep your eyes on Me, not only for direction but also for empowerment. I never lead you to do something without equipping you for the task. That is why it’s so important to seek My will in everything you do. There are many burned out Christians who think more is always better, who deem it unspiritual to say no. In order to know My will, you must spend time with Me–enjoying My Presence.This is not an onerous task but a delightful privilege. I will show you the path of Life; in My Presence is fullness of Joy; at My right hand are pleasures forevermore.
RECOMMENDED BIBLE VERSES:
Psalm 141:8 NLT 8 I look to you for help, O Sovereign LORD. You are my refuge; don’t let them kill me.
Psalm 16:11 (NLT) 11 You will show me the way of life, granting me the joy of your presence and the pleasures of living with you forever.
Additional insight regarding Psalm 16: 8-11: This psalm (16:10 – “For you will not leave my soul among the dead or allow your holy one to rot in the grave.”) is often called the messianic psalm because it is quoted in the New Testament as referring to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Both Peter and Paul quoted from this psalm when speaking of Christ’s bodily resurrection (see Acts 2:25-28, 31; 13:35-37).
The earth was entrusted to us in order that it be mother for us, capable of giving to each one what is necessary to live.… The earth is generous and holds nothing back from those who safeguard it. The earth, which is mother of all, asks for respect, not violence. —Pope Francis, Our Mother Earth
We can learn to drop down into the sweet current of deep grief that helps us appreciate—to know, to praise, and more fully to love—all that we are losing, all that may soon be lost. —Brian McLaren, Life After Doom
Brian McLaren describes a favorite place in nature from his childhood. He honors the grief that arises when the places we have known and loved change:
I think of a wetland I used to explore as a boy growing up in Maryland, part of the Rock Creek watershed. I spent hours exploring that wetland in every season, sometimes barefoot, sometimes in boots that nearly always overflowed and filled with cold water because I ventured in a little too deep. How could I stay dry when trilling toads and wriggling tadpoles moved among cattails in the spring? How could I stay away in summer and miss a chance to see that single great blue heron or mammoth snapping turtle who both hunted there, resident dinosaurs to my boyhood imagination? How could I not search for newts and crayfish in its cold waters in autumn, its sky-mirroring surface dappled by yellow tulip poplar, red maple, and orange-amber sweet gum leaves?… How could I not return again as soon as the ice melted to search among the brown soggy layers of decomposing leaves where spotted salamanders gathered for mysterious, slow-motion mating rituals, while red-winged blackbirds called conk-la-ree! from the nearby willows?
Several years ago, I was in the old neighborhood again…. The trail was still there, but now it was broad and paved for bicycles. The wetland had disappeared…. As I sat on one of the benches and looked around, I was overcome by sweet grief for the delight I once enjoyed as a boy, a lost magic boys and girls today will never know, at least, not there….
I’m returning to this precious place in my memory, this sacred swampy ground. I’m appreciating it, praising it for what it was, all the more because it has been lost…. You have your lost places unknown to me. I have mine unknown to you. We could not protect them. But we do not let these good creations disappear only to be forgotten, unappreciated, unpraised, unlamented. Our love for them outlasts their existence. So together, we remember them in grief. We feel them more fully revealing themselves to us in their passing away….
Stay with grief long enough to feel its sweetness, long enough for the sweetness and grief to deepen our sensitivity to the exquisite agony and ecstasy that we call appreciation, praise, love … and life.
Jesus Calling: February 24
Be still in the Light of My Presence, while I communicate Love to you. There is no force in the universe as powerful as My Love. You are constantly aware of limitations: your own and others’. But there is no limit to My Love; it fills all of space, time, and eternity.
Now you see through a glass, darkly, but someday you will see Me face to Face. Then you will be able to experience fully how wide and long and high and deep is My Love for you. If you were to experience that now, you would be overwhelmed to the point of feeling crushed. But you have an eternity ahead of you, absolutely guaranteed, during when you can enjoy My Presence in unrestricted ecstasy. For now, the knowledge of My loving Presence is sufficient to carry you through each day.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
1st Corinthians 13:12 NLT
12 Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
Ephesians 3:16-19
16 I pray that from his glorious, unlimited resources he will empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. 17 Then Christ will make his home in your hearts as you trust in him. Your roots will grow down into God’s love and keep you strong. 18 And may you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. 19 May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully. Then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.
A Special Note from Father Richard: Healing for a Hurting World
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
Dear Friend,
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on something so simple that it almost feels obvious: Nearly everything that Jesus does in his ministry is to heal broken people.
He did not heal people so they could go to heaven; he healed people so they could live fully in this world now. It’s obvious. How did we miss that?
The healing focus of the gospel became corrupted when we made it about securing a “ticket” for the next world, rather than experiencing aliveness in this one. Many of us are tempted to seek an escape from this moment instead of trusting that God’s healing is possible for us now — that even this moment can be good. We have treated “repentance” as the price of our heavenly ticket, when it actually means “a change of mind” — a transformation for the better.
We are living in a time that is crying out for healing. We see the tears of personal and collective grief flowing. We see the anger over injustice, understandably boiling. We see people tempted toward despair and cynicism. At the same time, we see so many people meeting this moment with courage and compassion, as instruments of God’s universal ministry of love, healing, and peacemaking. Geri, a Daily Meditations reader, shares her own story of healing with us:
I had my world fractured last year after my husband passed away from cancer. I have been grieving his loss and at the same time grieving what’s been going on in our country. Sometimes the sadness and anger I feel are overwhelming. But every day, I pray for healing for myself and the world around me. I want to be an instrument of Christ’s peace, whatever that entails. Thank you, Father Richard Rohr, and staff of CAC, for helping me through these uncertain and painful times!
At the Center for Action and Contemplation, we are committed to sharing Christian contemplative wisdom that heals lives for today and inspires action now. Everything we offer is designed to nurture authentic spirituality that brings divine love, healing, and justice into the present world.
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Tomorrow, the Daily Meditations will continue exploring this week’s topic of “For Love of the Earth.”
Thank you for being part of this community of people who are willing to face the suffering of the world, while trusting that healing is still possible if love remains at the center.
Peace and every good,
______________________________________________
Sarah Young
Heaven is both present and future. As you walk along your life-path holding My hand, you are already in touch with the essence of heaven: nearness to Me. You can also find many hints of heaven along your pathway, because the earth is radiantly alive with My Presence. Shimmering sunshine awakens your heart, gently reminding you of My brilliant Light. Birds and flowers, trees and skies evoke praises to My holy Name. Keep your eyes and ears fully open as you journey with Me. At the end of your life-path is an entrance to heaven. Only I know when you will reach that destination, but I am preparing you for it each step of the way. The absolute certainty of your heavenly home gives you Peace and Joy, to help you along your journey. You know that you will reach your home in My perfect timing; not one moment too soon or too late. Let the hope of heaven encourage you, as you walk along the path of Life with Me.
RECOMMENDED BIBLE VERSES: 1st Corinthians 15:20-23 (NLV) 20 But it is true! Christ has been raised from the dead! He was the first one to be raised from the dead and all those who are in graves will follow. 21 Death came because of a man, Adam. Being raised from the dead also came because of a Man, Christ. 22 All men will die as Adam died. But all those who belong to Christ will be raised to new life. 23 This is the way it is: Christ was raised from the dead first. Then all those who belong to Christ will be raised from the dead when He comes again.
Additional insight regarding 1st Corinthians 15:20: Jesus as the first part of the harvest was brought to the Temple as an offering (Leviticus 23:10-44). Christ was the first to rise from the dead and never die again. He is our forerunner, the proof of our eventual resurrection to eternal life.
Additional insight regarding 1st Corinthians 15:21: Death came into the world as a result of Adam and Eve’s sin. In Romans 5:12-21, Paul explained why Adam’s sin brought sin to all people, how death and sin spread to all humans because of the first sin, and the parallel between Adam’s death and Christ’s death.
Hebrews 6:19 (NLV) 19 This hope is a safe anchor for our souls. It will never move. This hope goes into the Holiest Place of All behind the curtain of heaven.
Additional insight regarding Hebrews 6:19: God embodies all truth; therefore, he cannot lie, and we can be secure in his promises. We don’t need to wonder if he will change his purposes and plans. Our hope of heaven stands secure and immovable, anchored in God, just as a ship’s anchor holds firmly to the seabed. To someone truly seeking who comes to God in belief, God gives an unconditional promise of acceptance. When you ask God with openness, honesty, and sincerity to save you from your sins, he will do it. If this truth gives you encouragement, assurance, and confidence, grasp it. Don’t let go no matter what happens around you.
Today’s Prayer:
Lord,
As I journey with You, I’m reminded of heaven’s nearness. Your presence fills me with Peace and Joy, reassuring me that You’re leading me to my heavenly home. Help me keep my eyes and ears open to Your guidance along the way. Amen.
Father Richard encourages us to recognize how the soul of nature mirrors our own:
The modern and postmodern selves largely live in a world of their own construction and react for or against human-made ideas. While calling ourselves intelligent, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. As a result, we’ve lost touch with our own souls. I believe we cannot access our full intelligence and wisdom without some real connection to nature.
My spiritual father Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) spent many days, weeks, and even months walking the roads of Umbria and letting nature teach him. Francis knew and respected creation, calling animals, sun, moon, and even the weather and the elements his brothers and sisters. Through extended time in nature, Francis became intimately connected with non-human living things and came to recognize that the natural world was also imbued with soul. Almost all initiation rites—including those of Jesus and John the Baptist (see Matthew 3:13–17)—took place in nature, surely for that reason.
Without such soul recognition and mirroring, we become alienated from nature and from ourselves. Without a visceral connection to the soul of nature, we will not know how to love or respect our own soul.Instead, we try various means to get God and people to accept us instead of experiencing radical belonging to the world itself. We’re trying to say to ourselves and others, “I belong here. I matter.” Of course, that’s true! But contrived and artificial means will never achieve that divine purpose. We are naturally healed in this world when we know things center to center, subject to subject, and soul to soul. [1]
When God manifests spirit through matter, then matter becomes a holy thing. The material world is the place where we can comfortably worship God just by walking in it, loving it, and respecting it. Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be? When we can enjoy all these things as holy, “we experience the universe as a communion of subjects, not as a collection of objects,” as the “geologian” Fr. Thomas Berry said so wisely. [2]
When we love something, we grant it soul, we see its soul, and we let its soul touch ours. We must love something deeply to know its soul (anima). Before the resonance of love, we are largely inattentive to the meaning, value, and power of ordinary things to “save” us and help us live in union with the Source of all being.In fact, until we can appreciate and even delight in the soul of other things, even trees and animals, we probably haven’t discovered our own souls either. Soul knows soul through love, which Jesus teaches as the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:37–39). [3]
[2] Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker (Columbia University Press, 2009), 86.
Image credit and inspiration: Siska Vrijburg, untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Netherlands. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. We gaze lovingly upon the trees, the light, the deer—appreciating them, then taking steps to protect them.
All that Breathes Gives Praise
Monday, April 20, 2026
I love to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations, through which God speaks to us every day, every hour…. How do I talk to a little flower? Through it I talk to the Infinite. And what is the Infinite? It is that silent, small voice … that still, small voice. —George Washington Carver, The Man Who Talks with the Flowers
Black farmer and author Leah Penniman celebrates the faith of agricultural scientist and inventor George Washington Carver (1864–1943):
Dr. George Washington Carver was a devout Christian and had a practice of waking before dawn to go pray in the forest. He believed that nature was God’s broadcasting system and credited his conversations with plants as informing his numerous scientific breakthroughs and patents. He explained, “Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.”
In conversation with Penniman, Chris Bolden-Newsome,co-founder of Sankofa Community Farm in Pennsylvania, shares:
I am a practitioner of in-cultured African (American) Catholic Christianity…. So much of Catholic Christianity has its origins within an earth-based African context that existed way before its settling and redefinition in central Europe. The Catholic Church as a whole is catching up to its origins. Starting in 1971, with Pope Paul VI, the church has expressed ecological concern, which was amplified to an urgent appeal by 2015, with Pope Francis writing:
If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled. [1]
At its core, Catholicism—and this reflects the African Spiritual ethos in general, I think—is a practice of deep reverence for the intertwining of matter and spirit, and regard for the indispensable role of ancestors, be they blood ancestors, canonized saints, or cultural ancestors like Baba George Carver. At the center of this belief is our understanding that God chooses to connect with creation in Yeshua (Jesus). This essential unity of spirit and matter means that I can’t do anything earthly that does not have a spiritual ramification, and vice versa. I show the same respect for the spider and the snake as I do for people. They are valued friends….
When I see a snake in my garden, I feel so blessed, so I greet them in one of their ancient names and thank them. All creatures bring us God’s wisdom—they are agents and living sacramentals of the guardian spirits of the land.
Brian McLaren reflects on how contemplation and community enable him to live according to the values of the kingdom of God:
During my years as a news junkie, I found myself getting a strange high from the latest ugliness report. Each time I indulged, I fanned the flames of something unhealthy … my moral superiority, or resentment, or fear, or despair, or desolation, or us-versus-them hostilities….
The internal realities we construct in our minds actually exist in our minds, ugly or beautiful, false or true. They shape our internal values which influence our external behavior. We tend to make the world around us resemble the world within us. Based on our focus, ugliness is everywhere or beauty abounds.
Alexis Wright is an Aboriginal writer from Australia. As an indigenous person, she understands that the end of the world has been happening for centuries for indigenous people. She understands that both colonizers and colonized need to be liberated from the mindset of colonization. The first step toward freedom, she says, is to decolonize or de-capitalize the mind, so you can “develop strengths that will not be defined by how others believe you should think.” She calls this liberation “sovereignty of mind” [1] ….
The journey to sovereignty of mind requires an inward migration, where we in a sense become refugees from our external nation, culture, economy, and civilization, even though we still live within itsborders. We withdraw inwardly….
When I heard Alexis Wright speak of this inward migration, I felt I gained a new insight into Jesus and his oft-quoted but rarely understood term “kingdom of God.” “The kingdom of God is within you,” he said (Luke 17:21). He described the innermost room of your consciousness (Matthew 6:6), where you go to think differently, to sort out your desires and hopes authentically. When you learn how to do that inward migration, that spiritual migration, you find yourself looking for others who have also gone there, who have discovered a freedom and sovereignty of mind….
[Jesus said,] “Wherever two or three of you gather in my name, there I am,” and [we] might understand him to say, “Listen, I understand that you are outnumbered. I understand that so many people around you have been sucked into the story of ugliness. I understand that you are learning to live by a different story where beauty abounds. You don’t need me physically present to tell the beautiful story. You can tell it yourselves. Even just two or three of you can gather together, embodying my way of being in theworld. You can be cells of resistance, outposts of transformation, seedbeds of beauty.”
That is the best future I can imagine for organized religion in these dangerous times. Instead of helping nostalgic people inhabit bubbles of the past, religious communities can help people go forward on thisinward migration toward sovereignty of mind, where in defiance of a rising level of ugliness, people cultivate beauty… seeing it, creating it, savoring it. Savoring beauty within will lead to beautiful outward action.
_______________________________________________
5 On Friday John Chaffee
1.
“It’s impossible to learn that which you think you already know.”
– Stoic Principle
It is a strange thing that in order to learn, one must admit that they do not know everything.
In my younger years, I was insecure but did not know it. The way that I protected myself from my own insecurities was to put on a persona that “already knew” about things. I am sure I rubbed people the wrong way, including myself, over time.
One of the most liberating things to do is to give up assuming you are an expert about anything and admit that there is always more you can learn about any topic.
2.
“As long as we are sheep, we overcome and, though surrounded by countless wolves, we emerge victorious; but if we turn into wolves, we are overcome…”
The implications of it are profound when you think about it.
It reminds me of aspects of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Then, non-violent resistance was mandatory for most protests. To fight back was to lose the movement’s witness.
This past week, I heard a firsthand account of how Martin Luther King Jr. would dismiss young people from his rallies if they were not committed to nonviolence. It was of utmost importance to him that everyone attending his events was fully committed to the movement’s ethos. To put it bluntly, they all had to be willing to be beaten with fists or clubs.
I cannot imagine the courage that would take.
In a world that often operates on violence, oppression, and chaos, it is spiritually important for the sheep to remain sheep and not give in to the temptation to “fight fire with fire” and act like wolves.
3.
“Only without the sword can the Christian wage war: the Lord has abolished the sword.”
Fascinatingly enough, the whole idea of a “Just War Theory” did not even come up until after Christianity was legalized and then made the formal religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century.
Prior to the 4th century, it was a given that Christians were nonviolent and would not participate in violence (whether state-sanctioned or not). Tertullian, the early church theologian, obviously saw much violence in his lifetime, but still maintained that the Christian ethic does not allow one to do harm to someone else.
It was after the legalization of Christianity and through the works of Ambrose, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas that Just War Theory began to formalize.
And, just for the record, Just War Theory mandates that war is “allowable” if it is in self-defense and if it has exhausted all other potential options of peacemaking. It also states that if a war is motivated at all by anger, retribution, or greed, it is immediately invalidated as a “Just War.”
4.
“Faith is a decision. We cannot avoid that. ‘You cannot serve two masters’ [Matt. 6:24], from now on either you serve God alone or you do not serve God at all. Now you only have one Lord, who is the Lord of the world, who is the Savior of the world, who is the one who creates the world anew. To serve God is your highest honor.
But to this Yes to God belongs an equally clear No. Your Yes to God demands your No to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and the poor, to all godlessness and mocking of the Holy. Your Yes to God demands a brave No to everything that will ever hinder you from serving God alone, whether it be your profession, your property, your house, your honor before the world.“
I think what I like about it is the usage of Yes and No.
In order to say Yes to some things, we are bound to say No to other things.
Christianity does not allow for mixed allegiances. “You cannot serve two gods,” remember?
Perhaps things were “easier” when humanity was more overtly polytheist. One could pray to the god of peace in the morning, then pray to the god of war in the afternoon. There was no incongruency or inconsistency because you were praying to different deities.
However, in the realm of radical monotheism, to pray for both peace and war from the same God doesn’t quite seem to work.
As the book of Exodus teaches us, the God of the Israelites does not suffer oppressive empires for long and takes up the plight of those at the bottom of society as his own personal mission. God is more on the side of those “with the boot of the empire on their neck” than with the emperor or elite who are stepping on those beneath them.
5.
“Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain.”
This is probably the most important quote of the week.
When Jesus flipped over the tables in the Temple, I believe it was because he was sickened by people who were profiteering off the piety of good people. The Temple was being made into a marketplace for commerce rather than a place for prayer and compassion.
To anyone who uses religion as a means to a selfish end, I think God will have quite stern words to say.
Why?
Because Jesus himself did not see faith as something to manipulate. Rather, Jesus had his harshest words for the religious elite who were making gain after gain after gain while doing very little to help those they were taking from.
As soon as Christianity is co-opted for the purposes of “Us vs Them” ideologies, it has ceased to be Christianity.
The faith does not play those types of games.
Comments Off on Contemplation, Liberation, and Action »
At the Fall 2025 ReVision Conference, Brian McLaren highlighted the contemplative witness of the philosopher Boethius (d. 524), a contemporary of Benedict of Nursia:
Boethius was orphaned at a young age and was raised by a very wealthy aristocrat, which brought him enormous benefits. Because of his privilege he was given an education in the Greek and Roman classics. By the age of twenty-five, he was brought into the government of the violent and unstable King Theodoric, becoming a counselor and advisor to the king at thirty-three. This young Christian man had a great position of privilege. So what did he do with it?
Boethius uses his brilliance to do what he believes needs to be done, seeking to integrate Christian theology and Greek philosophy. He also does some important political work in Theodoric’s kingdom. In the year 520 he takes a dangerous stand, borne of his own integrity and faith, for Christian unity between the East and the West, and he pays for it. In 524, he is imprisoned by King Theodoric for defending one of the king’s critics.
In prison, Boethius is removed from public life, like Benedict in his cave. And like Benedict, people come to see him. He uses his remaining months in prison to teach, and eventually to write a text, The Consolation of Philosophy, that is still studied today as the last great work of the Roman classical period and the first great work of medieval literature.
In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius describes how he is met in his suffering by a female figure who offers him wisdom:
While I was quietly thinking these thoughts over to myself and giving vent to my sorrow with the help of my pen, I became aware of a woman standing over me. She was of awe-inspiring appearance, her eyes burning and keen beyond the usual power of men. She was so full of years that I could hardly think of her as of my own generation, and yet she possessed a vivid color and undiminished vigor. It was difficult to be sure of her height, for sometimes she was of average human size, while at other times she seemed to touch the very sky with the top of her head, and when she lifted herself even higher, she pierced it and was lost to human sight. [1]
Sophia, the feminine figure of wisdom, offers him calm, helps him recenter, and guides him into contemplation you might say. The writing of this book becomes a contemplative practice for him that influences generations of people across the following centuries, through and beyond the decay and complete collapse of the Roman Empire.
Shortly after finishing TheConsolation of Philosophy, Boethius is brutally tortured and executed. The government in which Boethius worked and strived to do good turns on him and executes him.
These two men, Benedict and Boethius, were called to two completely different paths to live out their Christian faith. [Read about Benedict here.] One stayed in the center of power and tried to influence it, holding fast to his faith. The other left the centers of power and went to the margins to build an alternative community where they could keep the way of Christ alive and maintain some sort of wisdom in a world that was obsessed not with truth, but with power and wealth, violence and weapons.
Jesus Calling – Sarah Young
This is a time in your life when you must learn to let go: of loved ones, of possessions, of control. In order to let go of something that is precious to you, you need to rest in My Presence, where you are complete. Take time to bask in the Light of My Love. As you relax more and more, your grasping hand gradually opens up, releasing your prized possession into My care. You can feel secure, even in the midst of cataclysmic changes, through awareness of My continual Presence. The One who never leaves you is the same One who never changes: I am the same yesterday, today, and forever. As you release more and more things into My care, remember that I never let go of your hand. Herein lies your security, which no one and no circumstance can take from you.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Psalm 89:15 (NLT) 15 Happy are those who hear the joyful call to worship, for they will walk in the light of your presence, Lord.
Hebrews 13:8 (NLT) 8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Isaiah 41:13 (NLT) 13 For I hold you by your right hand— I, the Lord your God. And I say to you, ‘Don’t be afraid. I am here to help you.
This is a time in your life when you must learn to let go: of loved ones, of possessions, of control. In order to let go of something that is precious to you, you need to rest in My Presence, where you are complete. Take time to bask in the Light of My Love. As you relax more and more, your grasping hand gradually opens up, releasing your prized possession into My care. You can feel secure, even in the midst of cataclysmic changes, through awareness of My continual Presence. The One who never leaves you is the same One who never changes: I am the same yesterday, today, and forever. As you release more and more things into My care, remember that I never let go of your hand. Herein lies your security, which no one and no circumstance can take from you.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Psalm 89:15 (NLT) 15 Happy are those who hear the joyful call to worship, for they will walk in the light of your presence, Lord.
Hebrews 13:8 (NLT) 8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Isaiah 41:13 (NLT) 13 For I hold you by your right hand— I, the Lord your God. And I say to you, ‘Don’t be afraid. I am here to help you.
Today’s Prayer:
Dear Jesus,
In this season of our lives, You call us to let go – of loved ones, possessions, responsibilities, and the illusion of control. Yet, in the midst of these transitions, You invite us to find completeness in Your perfect and loving presence with peace that surpasses all of our understanding.
Help us, Lord, to rest in the light of Your love, knowing that in Your arms, we lack nothing. As we surrender our grip on what we hold dear, teach us to trust in Your care.
We find security in Your unchanging nature. You are the same yesterday, today, and forever. Your continual presence is our anchor amidst the storms of life that can bring sudden and unrelenting change.
Just as You hold us by our right hand, assuring us not to fear, help us to release our burdens into Your loving embrace. Grant us the grace to trust that You never let go of us, no matter the circumstance.
May we find the overflowing joy in worshipping You as we walk through life in the light of Your presence. Knowing that You are always with us, guiding us, and sustaining us. You are good, Father.
In the perfect name of Jesus, our constant and faithful companion, we pray. Amen.
Rev. Cameron Trimble connects the monastic wisdom of Saint Benedict with the desert ammas and abbas who were his spiritual ancestors:
St. Benedict told his communities to stay: to root themselves in place, in relationship, in shared life. Stability, he taught, is how love survives collapse. You do not run every time the world shakes. You commit. You tend. You remain.
But long before Benedict organized communities that stayed, another stream of elders stepped away for a time—the Desert Mothers and Fathers—because they wanted to learn how to live in the world without becoming shaped by its distortions.
At first glance, these look like opposite instructions: Go versus stay. Leave versus root. Desert versus monastery.
But underneath, they answer the same spiritual problem: How do you remain faithful when the surrounding culture is losing its moral center?
The desert elders left noise to recover clarity. Benedictine communities built structure to protect clarity. Both traditions understood that without intentional spiritual formation and maturity, power, fear, and spectacle will train the soul faster than truth will.
The desert was never the final destination. It was a training ground for perception.
One elder taught that the first task of spiritual life is learning to see your own reactions clearly: how quickly anger justifies itself, how easily fear pretends to be wisdom, how often ego disguises itself as courage. Silence exposed all of that, not to shame people, but to free them.
Benedict took the next step. He asked: Once you learn to see clearly, how do you live faithfully in community over the long haul? His answer was not intensity but rhythm—prayer, work, shared meals, mutual care, accountability, humility, repair.
So the question for us is not whether to leave or stay. Most of us are not called to geographic withdrawal. We are called to interior non-cooperation with corruption while remaining deeply committed to one another.
You can stay without surrendering your soul. But it takes practice.
It takes boundaries around attention. It takes rhythms that interrupt outrage. It takes communities that tell the truth to one another gently and directly. It takes prayer, or silence, or honest reflection that clears emotional distortion before it hardens into identity.
Right now many people feel spiritually flooded, saturated with alarm, analysis, reaction, and dread. The nervous system never powers down. The moral imagination never gets quiet enough to hear wisdom instead of impulse.
The elders would recognize this immediately.
They would not tell you to disappear. They would tell you to build inner ground. They would tell you to create small deserts of clarity inside daily life—spaces where truth can speak without competition—so that when you act, you act from depth instead of reactivity.
Benedict would agree. Stay. But stay awake. Stay rooted. Stay practiced in humility and courage. Stay shaped by love more than by fear.
The goal is never escape.
The goal is freedom—the kind that lets you remain fully human when systems forget how.
Sarah Young – Jesus Calling
Rest in My Presence, allowing Me to take charge of this day. Do not bolt into the day like a racehorse suddenly released. Instead, walk purposefully with Me, letting Me direct your course one step at a time.Thank Me for each blessing along the way; this brings Joy to both you and Me. A grateful heart protects you from negative thinking. Thankfulness enables you to see the abundance I shower upon you daily. Your prayers and petitions are winged into heaven’s throne room when they are permeated with thanksgiving. In everything give thanks, for this is My will for you.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Colossians 4:2 NLT
An Encouragement for Prayer
2 Devote yourselves to prayer with an alert mind and a thankful heart.
1st Thessalonians 5:18 NLT
18 Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.
Lyrics for today’s song. If you don’t see the song, please hover over “Lyrics” and click to launch YouTube video:
God’s resplendent glory full On display for all to see God creator, God of hope Beautiful redeeming grace
Healer of the broken down Of the orphans and oppressed Find Him dining with the poor Find Him here surrounding
Hallelujah, God is near Hallelujah, God is near
From oceans depth to cedar trees Fields of wheat along the plains Praise to God from all the earth Praise Him from the mountaintops
Hallelujah, God is near Hallelujah, God is near Hallelujah, God is near Hallelujah, God is near
His radiance is greater than Anything on earth and sky Stars and moon will guard the night Shining to the God on high
Tuesday, April 14, 2026
CAC faculty members Carmen Acevedo Butcher and Brian McLaren opened the CAC’s Fall 2025 ReVision conference by asking: “What do you do with Christianity when it has become enmeshed with authoritarian politics and corrupted by violence?” While the question may sound contemporary, they turned to earlier models of contemplative response in times of political crisis, reflecting on the lives of Benedict of Nursia (ca. 480–547) and the philosopher Boethius (ca. 480–524). Today, we share some of their reflections on Benedict. McLaren begins:
It’s not hard to imagine a world that seems to be falling apart with political division and corruption, economic instability, and different ethnic groups clashing for power and resenting one another. It’s not hard to imagine a world where religious leaders make deals with political leaders and vice versa, for mutual benefit. It’s not just our world; it was the world Benedict of Nursia lived in.
Benedict saw what the Christian religion was becoming, and he recalled Jesus’s life of simplicity, love, and nonviolence. And something deep within him called him to do something new. Benedict believed that it was possible to live by the path of Jesus, rather than by the standards and norms of the crazy system that was operating around him. I can imagine him thinking:
I’m going to leave the city and my privilege. I’m going to go out and establish an alternative community, a little island of sanity in a world that seems to be going nuts. I’m going to try to create a place where we seek to live by the law of love in the kingdom, kin-dom, or sacred ecosystem, of God. We will care for the sick and the dying. We will welcome the stranger and create an order of life that has dignity. We will preserve learning, writing down ancient wisdom. Every day, all day, we will enter into deep listening with God and with one another to keep Jesus’s wisdom alive.
Carmen Acevedo Butcher describes the fruit of Benedict’s contemplative withdrawal as an active renewal of community:
Benedict’s world was on fire. There was a war, invaders, cruelty, a volcanic winter, people were homeless and starving. In the midst of that, Benedict felt a sole desiring to please God alone, so he gave up his privileged way of life and headed out to a cave for three years, where his food was lowered to him on rope. People heard about this holy hermit and would go to him for spiritual advice, seeking a “word” in the tradition of the desert mystics.
If I had been Benedict, I might have waited a few years to set out, just until things calmed down a little bit. But instead of staying in his cave, Benedict decides he needs to house the people who have been coming to him. He builds thirteen monasteries near Subiaco, becoming the superior of the last one to stay close to the brothers who need extra attention.
Those monasteries, as Dr. Mike Petrow says, were the bomb shelters, time capsules, laboratories, and protected cultivators of the contemplative tradition in a world falling apart.
Sarah Young – Jesus Calling
“Beloved, there are indeed many measures of success in the world, and most of them are meaningless. To avoid confusion, you need a rule of thumb: Seek to please Me.” – Matthew 22:37-38
“Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.'”
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Give me a place to stand, and I will move the whole earth with a lever. —Archimedes
Father Richard Rohr uses the images of a lever and a place to stand to explain why social transformation needs both action and contemplation:
Archimedes, a third-century BCE Greek philosopher and mathematician, noticed that a lever balanced in the correct place, on the correct fulcrum, could move proportionally much greater weights than the force actually applied. He calculated that if the lever stretched far enough and the fulcrum point remained fixed close to Earth, even a small weight at one end would be able to move the world at the other.
The fixed point is our place to stand. It is a contemplative stance: steady, centered, poised, and rooted.To be contemplative, we have to have a slight distance from the world to allow time for withdrawal from business as usual, for contemplation, for going into what Jesus calls our “private room” (Matthew 6:6). However, we have to remain quite close to the world at the same time, loving it, feeling its pain and its joy as our pain and our joy. Otherwise, our distance can become a form of escapism.
True contemplation, the great teachers say, is really quite down to earth and practical, and doesn’t require life in a monastery. It is, however, an utterly different way of receiving the moment, and therefore all of life. In order to have the capacity to “move the world,” we need some distancing and detachment from the diversionary nature and delusions of mass culture and the false self. Contemplation builds on the hard bottom of reality as it is without ideology, denial, or fantasy.
Unfortunately, many of us don’t have a fixed place to stand, a fulcrum of critical distance, and thus we cannot find our levers, or true “delivery systems,” as Bill Plotkin calls them [1], by which to move our world. We do not have the steadiness of spiritual practice to keep our sight keen and alive. (COFew?) Those who have plenty of opportunities for spiritual practice—for example, those in monasteries—often don’t have an access point beyond religion itself from which to speak or to serve much of our world.We need a delivery system in the world to provide the capacity for building bridges and connecting the dots of life.
Some degree of inner experience is necessary for true spiritual authority, but we need some form of outer validation, too. We need to be taken seriously as competent and committed individuals and not just “inner” people.Could this perhaps be what Jesus means by being both “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16)? God offers us quiet, contemplative eyes; God also calls us to prophetic and critical involvement in the pain and sufferings of our world—both at the same time.This is so obvious in the life and ministry of Jesus that I wonder why it has not been taught as an essential part of Christianity.
Father Richard considers how Jesus calls us to be liberated from the agendas of our inflated egos:
What was Jesus liberating us from? This probably won’t seem too different from what we would now call the ego or the false self. As Jesus put it, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). Buddhists tend to describe this process with much greater clarity, but Jesus didn’t have access to psychological language. He just spoke in a straightforward way that his contemporaries could understand.
Scholarship today is discovering a much more radical and demanding Jesus than either Catholicism or Protestantism was ever ready for. We distorted the message so it wasn’t primarily about a transformation of the ego but freedom from the body self. We largely transferred everybody’s guilt concerns toward the body. We concentrated on repressing and punishing the body, not giving the body too much pleasure, freedom, or delight. It’s not that there aren’t issues there, but the ego, in my opinion, has gotten away scot-free in the Western church. We allowed egos to get out of control while being quite anxious to appear chaste, self-disciplined, and not too greedy.
Christianity has largely paid little attention to the real things Jesus talked about. Instead,we tend to be preoccupied with things that Jesus never talked about. But who can reform Christianity except Jesus?
Understanding Jesus’steachings on power is the key to reforming Christianity and other power structures:
Jesus tells his followers that they should never have what we would call dominative power. He calls it “lording it over others”: “You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them … but not so with you” (Matthew 20:25–26). How did so many Christians come to believe that exercising power over others is what religion is all about? There’s no indication that Jesus ever intended there to be a head church office somewhere, with upper, middle, and lower management. As a priest, I’m lower management—and even we expected the laity, the people in the pews, to be passive followers. This is so contrary to what Jesus taught and expected. He clearly gives power to people by giving them an inner authority.
Liberation from the ego self is liberation from the world of forms and images. Jesus’s word for that was mammon: “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Matthew 6:24). If we’re playing the game of appearance and power, prestige, and possessions, Jesus says we cannot know God. That’s pretty absolute! There’s a correlation between our preoccupation with image and how much—or how little—we’ve experienced the inner life.
Jesus also liberates us from the ego self by his constant warnings against negativity and oppositional thinking. In general, his word for that liberation is forgiveness. Two thirds of Jesus’s teaching is directly or indirectly about forgiveness.To live oppositionally is to be holding some degree of resentment or unhealed negative energy that we have not brought to the divine presence for transformation.
Give me a place to stand, and I will move the whole earth with a lever. —Archimedes
Father Richard Rohr uses the images of a lever and a place to stand to explain why social transformation needs both action and contemplation:
Archimedes, a third-century BCE Greek philosopher and mathematician, noticed that a lever balanced in the correct place, on the correct fulcrum, could move proportionally much greater weights than the force actually applied. He calculated that if the lever stretched far enough and the fulcrum point remained fixed close to Earth, even a small weight at one end would be able to move the world at the other.
The fixed point is our place to stand. It is a contemplative stance: steady, centered, poised, and rooted. To be contemplative, we have to have a slight distance from the world to allow time for withdrawal from business as usual, for contemplation, for going into what Jesus calls our “private room” (Matthew 6:6). However, we have to remain quite close to the world at the same time, loving it, feeling its pain and its joy as our pain and our joy. Otherwise, our distance can become a form of escapism.
True contemplation, the great teachers say, is really quite down to earth and practical, and doesn’t require life in a monastery. It is, however, an utterly different way of receiving the moment, and therefore all of life. In order to have the capacity to “move the world,” we need some distancing and detachment from the diversionary nature and delusions of mass culture and the false self. Contemplation builds on the hard bottom of reality as it is without ideology, denial, or fantasy.
Unfortunately, many of us don’t have a fixed place to stand, a fulcrum of critical distance, and thus we cannot find our levers, or true “delivery systems,” as Bill Plotkin calls them [1], by which to move our world. We do not have the steadiness of spiritual practice to keep our sight keen and alive. Those who have plenty of opportunities for spiritual practice—for example, those in monasteries—often don’t have an access point beyond religion itself from which to speak or to serve much of our world. We need a delivery system in the world to provide the capacity for building bridges and connecting the dots of life.
Some degree of inner experience is necessary for true spiritual authority, but we need some form of outer validation, too. We need to be taken seriously as competent and committed individuals and not just “inner” people. Could this perhaps be what Jesus means by being both “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16)? God offers us quiet, contemplative eyes; God also calls us to prophetic and critical involvement in the pain and sufferings of our world—both at the same time. This is so obvious in the life and ministry of Jesus that I wonder why it has not been taught as an essential part of Christianity.
Instead of trying to figure everything out, I want to focus my energy on trusting and thanking You. I’m learning that nothing is wasted when I walk close to You.
“My blessing is on those people who trust in me, who put their confidence in me.” —Jeremiah 17:7
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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