Money and Soul

Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Richard Rohr articulates an opportunity for each of us to rediscover a “soulful” relationship with money.  

I’m convinced that money and soul are united on a deep level. This truth is reappearing from the deep stream of wisdom traditions after centuries of almost total splitting and separation at the conscious level. There is un río mas profundo, a river beneath the river. The upper stream has always been money in all its forms, beginning with trading and bartering. The deeper stream is the spiritual meaning such exchanges must have for our lives. Money and soul have never been separate in our unconscious because they are both about human exchanges, and therefore, divine exchange, too.  

From my perspective, when money and soul are separated, religion is the major loser. Without a vision of wholeness that puts money in its soulful place, religion “sells out.” Religion has allowed itself to lose the only ground on which awe and transcendence stand—the foundation of totally gratuitous and “amazing grace.” [1] 

Lynne Twist, founder of the Soul of Money Institute, understands the impact that our culture’s disintegrated view of money has made:  

For most of us, this relationship with money is a deeply conflicted one, and our behavior with and around money is often at odds with our most deeply held values, commitments, and ideals—what I call our soul…. I believe that under it all, when you get right down to it and uncover all the things we’re told to believe in, … what deeply matters to human beings, our most universal soulful commitments and core values, is the well-being of the people we love, ourselves, and the world in which we live. 

We really do want a world that works for everyone. We don’t want children to go hungry. We don’t want violence and war to plague the planet…. We don’t want torture and revenge and retribution to be instruments of government and leadership. Everyone wants a safe, secure, loving, nourishing life for themselves and the ones they love and really for everyone….  

Each of us experiences a lifelong tug-of-war between our money interests and the calling of our soul. When we’re in the domain of soul, we act with integrity. We are thoughtful and generous, allowing, courageous, and committed. We recognize the value of love and friendship….  

In the grip of money, those wonderful qualities of soul seem to be less available. We become smaller…. We often grow selfish, greedy, petty, fearful, or controlling…. We see ourselves as winners or losers, powerful or helpless, and we let those labels deeply define us in ways that are inaccurate….  

In a world that seems to revolve around money, it is vital that we deepen our relationship with our soul and bring it to bear on our relationship with money…. We can have our money culture both balanced and nourished by soul. [2] 

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Sarah Young Jesus Calling

In order to hear My voice, you must release all your worries into My care. Entrust to Me everything that concerns you. This clears the way for you to seek My Face unhindered. Let Me free you from fear that is hiding deep inside you. Sit quietly in My Presence, allowing My Light to soak into you and drive out any darkness lodged within you.
      Accept each day just as it comes to you, remembering that I am sovereign over your life. Rejoice in this day that I have made, trusting that I am abundantly present in it. Instead of regretting or resenting the way things are, thank Me in all circumstances. Trust Me and don’t be fearful; thank Me and rest in My sovereignty.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

1st Peter 5:6-7 (NLT)
6 So humble yourselves under the mighty power of God, and at the right time he will lift you up in honor. 7 Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.

Additional insight regarding 1st Peter 5:6: We often worry about our position and status, hoping to get proper recognition for what we do. But Peter advises us to remember that God’s recognition counts more than human praise. God is able and willing to bless us according to his timing. Humbly obey God regardless of present circumstances, and in his good time – either in this life or the next – he will honor you.

Additional insight regarding 1st Peter 5:7: Carrying your worries, stresses, and daily struggles by yourself show that you have not trusted God fully with your life. It takes humility, however, to recognize that God cares, to admit your need, and to let others in God’s family help you. Sometimes we think that struggles caused by our own sin and foolishness are not God’s concern. But when we turn to God in repentance, he will bear the weight even of those struggles. Letting God have your anxieties calls for action, not passivity. Don’t submit to circumstances but to the Lord, who controls circumstances.

Psalm 118:24 (NLT)
24 This is the day the Lord has made.
    We will rejoice and be glad in it.
Additional insight regarding Psalm 118:24: There are days when the last thing we want to do is rejoice. Our mood is down, our situation is out of hand, and our sorrow or guilt is overwhelming. We can relate to the writers of the psalms who often felt this way. But no matter how the writers felt, they were always honest with God. And as they talked to God, their prayers ended in praise. When you don’t feel like rejoicing, tell God how you truly feel. You will find that God will give you a reason to rejoice. God has given you this day to live and to serve him – be glad!
1st Thessalonians 5:18 (NLT)
18 Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.

Additional insight regarding 1st Thessalonians 5:18: Paul was not teaching that we should thank God for everything that happens to us, but in everything. Evil does not come from God, so we should not thank him for it. But when evil strikes, we can still be thankful for God’s presence and for the good that he will accomplish through the distress.

Mammon Illness

Fr. Richard considers Jesus’ challenging statement that we cannot serve both God and money.   

Many of us, myself included, have a confused, guilt-ridden, obsessive attitude about money. There’s hardly anybody who can think in a clear-headed way about it. At the end of Luke’s parable of the so-called dishonest steward, Jesus creates a clear dualism between God and wealth, or what he calls “mammon”: “You cannot serve God and mammon” (Luke 16:13). Mammon was the god of wealth, money, superficiality, and success. Jesus says, in effect, “You’ve finally got to make a choice.” Most of Jesus’ teaching is what I call nondual, but there are a few areas where he’s absolutely dualistic (either-or), and it’s usually anything having to do with power and anything having to do with money.  

Jesus is absolute about money and power because he knows what we’re going to do. Most of us will serve this god called mammon. Luke’s Gospel even describes mammon as a type of illness, as Jesuit John Haughey explained: “Mammon is not simply a neutral term in Luke. It is not simply money. It connotes disorder…. Mammon becomes then a source of disorder because people allow it to make a claim on them that only God can make.” [1] “Mammon illness” takes over when we witness all of life through the lens of short-term practical gains. We have to acknowledge that money does have the ability to serve—or solve—many of our short-term problems, but once we begin hoarding it, collecting it, multiplying it, and saving it, we become preoccupied with it. Let’s be honest about that. 

In this Gospel, I hear Jesus inviting us to think of a long-term solution. To participate in the reign of God, we have to stop counting. We have to stop weighing, measuring, and deserving in order to let the flow of forgiveness and love flow through us. The love of God can’t be doled out by any process whatsoever. We can’t earn it. We can’t lose it. As long as we stay in this world of earning and losing, we’ll live in perpetual resentment, envy, or climbing. 

Religion cannot work from a calculator without losing its very method, mind, foundation, and source. Surely this is what Jesus meant by his statement in Luke’s Gospel. Perhaps if we say it a bit differently, we can all get the point: “You cannot move around inside the world of infinite grace and mercy, and at the same time be counting and measuring with your overly defensive and finite little mind.” It would be like asking an ant to map the galaxies. St. Thérèse of Lisieux put it much more directly to a nun worried about God keeping track of her many failings: “There is a science about which [God] knows nothing—addition!” [2] The reign of God is a worldview of abundance. God lifts us up from a worldview of scarcity to infinity. Remember every part of infinity is still infinite! God’s love is nothing less than infinite. 

Redefining Security

[The rich man] said, “I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”
—Luke 12:18–19 

Brian McLaren reflects on Jesus’ Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:15–21) as a critique of our reliance on money for security:   

This man epitomizes the confidence and narcissism of a civilization…. He talks to himself about himself, and neither listens to nor thinks of anyone else…. He asks himself what to do to maintain stability, to keep the system going, to keep the growth in GDP flowing, so he can take it easy, party, and chill. He tells himself the answer (wealth is the ultimate echo chamber): Grow! Build bigger barns to hoard more stuff…. 

A collapse in the rich man’s health interrupts his schemes for wealth…. He was rich, yes, filthy rich in a certain selfish sense. But rich toward God? Rich in wisdom to remember that he is a candle, that life is a gift, and that his flame will someday go out? Rich in caring about others, especially the poor and vulnerable, so beloved of God? He proves utterly bankrupt in all these departments. He is forever known as the rich fool…. 

Every system of self-centered civilization with its barns and banks for hoarding will inevitably collapse, the story of the rich fool reminds us. Meanwhile, … the divine ecosystem of interdependence and sharing, the holy and harmonious arrangement of life in which wildflowers and ravens live and thrive … it goes on. That’s where to put your heart. That’s where to invest your inner energies:  

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also [Luke 12:32–34]….

So, Jesus says, liquidate your capitol in the fragile, failing human system. Reinvest your energies in the larger-than-human system of life. That’s why loving your neighbors, especially your poor neighbors, is so important. Better to have less stored in your bank account and more given to those in need. Better to be poor in money and rich in generous relationships…. If you love God and neighbor, you love what matters … unlike the rich fool, who loved only himself and his money….  

If your heart is fully invested in the rich fool’s economy, the judgment that is passed upon that system is passed upon you…. But if you withdraw your consent from the rich man’s human system of wealth, if you transfer your trust to the larger system, if you seek first and foremost the divine ecosystem, you will end up with everything you need.  

Freedom for a Fuller Life

Friday, October 3, 2025

Richard Rohr explores how Francis of Assisi understood the meaning of words like “sin” and “penance”:  

For St. Francis of Assisi, “penance” was not some kind of avoidant asceticism but a proactive, free leap into the problem. It’s the same freedom that we see in Jesus when he says, “You are not taking my life from me; I am laying it down freely” (John 10:18). In the opening words of his Testament, Francis brilliantly says:  

The Lord gave me, Brother Francis, thus to begin doing penance in this way: for when I was in sin, it seemed too bitter for me to see lepers. And the Lord himself led me among them and I showed mercy to them. And when I left them, what had seemed bitter to me was turned into sweetness of soul and body. And afterwards I delayed a little and then left the world. [1]  

Francis’ phrase, “left the world,” didn’t mean leaving creation. It meant leaving what we might call the “system.” Francis left business as usual, and he began an alternative lifestyle, which at that time was called “a life of penance” or abandoning the system. He decided to focus on alleviating the needs and the suffering of others instead of self-advancement. Most of our decisions are usually based on personal, egoic preference and choice. This is the life that we are called to “leave,” the self that Jesus says must “die” to fall into our Larger Life or True Self. Freedom for both Jesus and Francis was purely and simply freedom from the self, which is precisely freedom for the world. This is so utterly different than our Western notion of freedom. In order to be free for a full and authentic life, we must quite simply be free from our smaller selves. 

Francis knew that Jesus was not at all interested in the usual “sin management” task that many clergy seem to think is their job. He saw that Jesus was neither surprised nor upset at what we usually call sin. Jesus was upset at human pain and suffering. What else do all the healing stories mean? They are half of the Gospels! Jesus did not focus on sin. Jesus went where the pain was. Wherever he found human pain, there he went, there he touched, and there he healed.  

Francis, who only ever wanted to do one thing—imitate Jesus—did the same. We can’t do that, or even imagine it, unless our first question is something other than “What do I want?” “What do I prefer?” or “What pleases me?” In the great scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter what I want. We are not free at all until we are free from ourselves. It is that simple and that hard.  

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John Chaffee 5 On Friday

1.

“Do not be discouraged. The Holy Spirit is not asleep.”

– Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk

There are days when I am optimistic, and others when I am more pessimistic.  This week has been a mix of both.

When I think about the Spirit/Holy Spirit/Holy Ghost/etc, what comes to mind most often are the words: life, movement, growth, and wind.

On my more pessimistic days, it is helpful for me to look around and be grateful for life, for the movements that are going on, for the growth I am choosing (or being subjected to), and for the gentle (or firm) breeze that reminds me that most things are utterly out of my control.

Even when I fail to notice these things, they never stop happening, and keep going about their work until I can get out of my anxious thoughts and be present to the Mystery “moving the Spheres,” as Dante writes so poetically.

2.

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”

– Jane Goodall, British Primatologist and Anthropologist

Jane Goodall passed away this week at the age of 91.

I remember growing up and watching the occasional documentary or recent update from the forests of the world about her work with primates, specifically, with chimpanzees.

It is remarkable to me that by such close observation of primates, she was also honing her thoughts and insights about anthropology.  I wonder what it is that working with animals helps people become so very wise about how we humans live, move, and interact.

Initially, this spot was taken by another quote, but it felt right and appropriate to highlight a quote from the good doctor Jane.

3.

“A religion that professes a concern for the souls of men and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr., Civil Rights Activist

There is no “conservative” or “progressive” Gospel.  There is not an “evangelical” one or a “social” one.  There is one Gospel that has much to say about our inner soulscapes as well as what is happening in the world around us.  To separate the two from one another is to cause a diabolical and unfortunate split where there was never supposed to be one.

4.

“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen (θεαθηναι/theathenai) by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”

– Jesus in Matthew 6:1

The Greek word Θεαθηναι (theathenai) is connected to the same etymological root as the English word “theater.”

This adds a whole other side to this verse for me from the Sermon on the Mount.  Jesus tells the crowds and the disciples to “not practice your righteousness in front of others as if putting on a theater production.”

Dang, that’s quite a punch, isn’t it?

Jesus is not in favor of people who practice their piety, their religion, or their “faith” in a way that is applauded for their “acting the part.”  Perhaps this is the cynical side of me, but when I read these words of Jesus, I think of social media influencers and YouTube celebrities (which are our modern-day equivalent to televangelists).  I struggle with the fact that when I watch them (and yes, I sometimes do), my BS meter sounds off, and I can’t watch anymore.  Then, I can just as easily turn the microscope on myself and ask if I am ever doing performative religion as well.

My God, is there any truth in any of us?

Of course, there is truth in all of us; it is just that we have to protect it, become devout stewards of our own sincerity, honesty, and vulnerability.

5.

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.

This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.“

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Gospel to Life and Life to Gospel

Thursday, October 2, 2025

Michele Dunne is the Executive Director of the Franciscan Action Network, an organization that seeks to embody Franciscan values in their work for justice for the earth and the poor. [1] In a recent issue of CAC’s the Mendicant donor newsletter, Dunne describes her deepening understanding of Franciscan witness:  

“From gospel to life and life to gospel” is a phrase from the Rule of the Secular Franciscan Order that puzzled me when I first read it. I felt called to join the Order in 2013, at a time of failure and crisis in my life. [2] As I studied the Rule, I thought I understood “from gospel to life.” I was to read the gospel of Jesus and apply what I found there to how I lived my life. But “life to gospel”? What might that mean? 

As I worked on those words from the Rule, those words worked on me over several years. Through his writings and example, St. Francis taught me about living in kinship with all humanity and all creation. My new spiritual path urged me to make time to study more deeply and practice contemplative prayer more consistently.  

My new Franciscan path also seemed to break open my heart. Hearing the growing calls for racial and economic justice, care for the earth, and many other issues during 2017–2021, I could no longer ignore them or believe they didn’t concern me. As I stepped out of my comfort zone to show solidarity—sometimes accepting legal or safety risks in doing so—certain scriptural passages glowed for me in a new way, resonating with my real-life experiences of activism and advocacy.  

For example, while I had always understood Jesus’s teaching to “take up your cross and follow me” simply as a call to bear patiently with the suffering inherent in daily life, I came to a totally different understanding after a long, frigid day spent at a climate protest in December 2019. Rereading the story (in Mark 8, Matthew 16, and Luke 9) at the urging of my friend and teacher the Rev. John Dear, I suddenly understood that Jesus was not speaking about patience with everyday suffering. As he faced escalating pressure—including from his friends—to stop speaking out against injustice, Jesus made it crystal clear that following him would require self-sacrifice, inconvenience, and possibly danger. How could I have missed that before? Maybe this new way of hearing was what “life to gospel” meant. 

The Franciscan path keeps the challenges coming but also supplies companions for the way. In 2021, I left a longtime career to join the Franciscan Action Network, where we are building an intergenerational movement for justice, peace, and creation rooted in the gospel and the examples of St. Francis and St. Clare. Our dozens of Franciscan Justice Circles across the country meet monthly in small groups, where we pray and take action together, discovering over and over again what it means to go from gospel to life and life to gospel.  

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Jesus Calling Sarah Young

Worship Me only. I am King of kings and Lord of lords, dwelling in unapproachable Light. I am taking care of you! I am not only committed to caring for you, but I am also absolutely capable of doing so. Rest in Me, My weary one, for this is a form of worship.
     Though self-flagellation has gone out of style, many of My children drive themselves like racehorses. They whip themselves into action, ignoring how they exhausted they are. They forget that I am sovereign and that My ways are higher than theirs. Underneath their driven service, they may secretly resent Me as a harsh taskmaster. Their worship of Me is lukewarm, because I am no longer their First Love.
     My invitation never changes: Come to Me, all you who are weary, and I will give you rest. Worship Me by resting peacefully in My Presence.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

1st Timothy 6:15-16 (NLT)
15 For,
At just the right time Christ will be revealed from heaven by the blessed and only almighty God, the King of all kings and Lord of all lords. 16 He alone can never die, and he lives in light so brilliant that no human can approach him. No human eye has ever seen him, nor ever will. All honor and power to him forever! Amen.

Isaiah 55:8-9 NLT
8 “My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the LORD . “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. 9 For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.

Additional insight regarding Isaiah 55:8-9: The people of Israel were foolish to act as if they knew what God was thinking and planning. His knowledge and wisdom are far greater than any human’s knowledge and wisdom. We are foolish to try to fit God into our mold – to make his plans and purposes conform to ours. Instead, we must strive to fit into his plans.

Revelation 2:4 NLT
4 “But I have this complaint against you. You don’t love me or each other as you did at first!

Additional insight regarding Revelation 2:4: Paul had once commended the church of Ephesus for its love for God and others (Ephesians 1:15), but many of the church founders had died, and many of the second-generation believers had lost their zeal for God. They were a busy church – the members did much to benefit themselves and the community but they were acting out of the wrong motives. Work for God must be motivated by love for God, or it will not last.

Matthew 11:28 NLT
28 Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. (Related scripture = Jeremiah 6:16)

Additional insight regarding Matthew 11:28-30: A yoke is a heavy wooden harness that fits over the shoulders of an ox or oxen. It is attached to a piece of equipment the oxen are to pull. A person may be carrying heavy burdens of (1) sin, (2) excessive demands of religious leaders, (3) oppression and persecution, or (4) weariness in the search for God.

Jesus frees people from all these burdens. The rest that Jesus promises is love, healing, and peace with God, not the end of all labor. A relationship with God changes meaningless, wearisome toil into spiritual productivity and purpose.

Prophetic Living

It has struck me in a recurring way over my lifetime that Francis’ universal social justice agenda was to live a simple life. Otherwise, we’re always a part of the system, pleasing somebody to get some advantage or make more money. 
—Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs (podcast) 

Richard Rohr considers how the prophetic lives of Francis and Clare shaped others through their witness: 

Francis and Clare were not so much prophets by what they said as in the radical, system-critiquing way that they lived their lives. They found both their inner and outer freedom by structurally living on the edge of the inside of church and society. Too often people seek either inner freedom or mere outer freedom, but seldom—in my opinion—do people seek and find both. Francis and Clare did.  

Their agenda for justice was the most foundational and undercutting of all others: a very simple lifestyle outside the system of production and consumption (the real meaning of the vow of poverty), plus a conscious identification with the marginalized of society (the communion of saints pushed to its outer edge). In this position, we do not “do” acts of peace and justice as much as our lives themselves become peace and justice. We take our small and sufficient place in the great and grand scheme of God.  

By “living on the edge of the inside” I mean building on the solid Tradition (“from the inside”) from a new and creative stance (“on the edge”) where we cannot be co-opted for purposes of security, possessions, or the illusions of power. Francis and Clare placed themselves outside the social and ecclesiastical systems. Francis was not a priest, nor were Franciscan men to pursue priesthood in the early years of the order. Theirs was not a spirituality of earning or seeking worthiness, career, church status, moral one-upmanship, or divine favor (which they knew they already had). Within their chosen structural freedom, Francis and Clare also found personal, mental, and emotional freedom. They were free from negativity and ego. Such liberation is full gospel freedom.  

Today, most of us try to find personal and individual freedom even as we remain inside of structural boxes and a system of consumption that we are then unable or unwilling to critique. Our mortgages, luxuries, and privileged lifestyles control our whole future. Whoever is paying our bills and giving us security and status determines what we can and cannot say or even think.  

When Jesus and John’s Gospel used the term “the world,” they did not mean the earth, creation, or civilization, which Jesus clearly came to love and save (see John 12:47). They were referring to idolatrous systems and institutions that are invariably self-referential and “always passing away” (see 1 Corinthians 7:31). Francis and Clare showed us it is possible to change the system not by negative attacks (which tend to inflate the ego), but simply by quietly moving to the side and doing it better!  

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Shusaku Endo: Jesus Doesn’t Need Your Defense

As a college student, I often participated in events on campus called Open Forums. They were question-and-answer sessions held in a dorm or fraternity house, where I fielded questions about faith and philosophy. Sometimes they were organized as more formal debates between me and an atheist or skeptic. Early on, I viewed myself as a defender of the faith, a next-generation apologist following in the steps of Lewis and Schaeffer.By my senior year, however, I had grown disillusioned with the Open Forums for two reasons. First, I never saw anyone argued into the kingdom of God. Of course, some people had very legitimate intellectual struggles with belief and the claims of Christianity—I had been one of them. While apologetics could lower barriers to faith, I learned that it’s only a genuine attraction to Jesus himself that lures a person in. Second, it occurred to me that my righteous attempts to defend Christ were more often a self-righteous attempt to defend myself. I came to this second realization through reading the novel Silence by Shusaku Endo. The story follows two Portuguese priests who secretly enter Japan in the seventeenth century to search for their lost mentor. Japanese Christians were severely persecuted at the time, and many were martyred. The novel explores the journey of the two young priests who were proud defenders of the faith but became broken men tempted to publicly deny Jesus. It is a beautiful and haunting novel that explores facets of faith never addressed or even acknowledged in many Christian communities today.More than anything, Endo helped me realize that Jesus is not relying upon my defense. His vindication was accomplished when the Father raised him from the dead, and it will be evident to all on a day still to come. Until then, our Lord is quite familiar with being mocked and scorned. Isaiah prophesied that he would be despised and disrespected, and the most enduring image of our faith, the cross, is a symbol of shame and rejection. Jesus was very willing to accept both, but I am not. Through Endo’s novel, I came to recognize that my spirited defense of Jesus through rhetoric and argument was, in fact, an attempt to defend my own honor and reputation on a campus where the Christian faith was largely dismissed and disrespected. There is a place for Christians to speak intelligently about their beliefs, and it is appropriate to answer critics of faith in an often hostile public square, but these efforts should never be divorced from a large dose of self-reflection. As our culture becomes increasingly post-Christian, and we seek to defend our faith, we ought to ask ourselves this essential question—Are we really seeking to defend Jesus’ honor or just our own? DAILY SCRIPTURE ISAIAH 53:1–6 1 PETER 2:19–25 JOHN 15:18-25 WEEKLY PRAYERJohn Stott (1921 – 2011) Our heavenly Father, we commend to your mercy those for whom life does not spell freedom: prisoners of conscience, the homeless and the handicapped, the sick in body and mind, the elderly who are confined to their homes, those who are enslaved by their passions, and those who are addicted to drugs. Grant that, whatever their outward circumstances, they may find inward freedom, through him who proclaimed release of captives, Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.

When brought before the bishop, Francis would brook no delay…. Without waiting to be spoken to and without speaking he immediately put off and cast aside all his garments and gave them back to his father.
—Thomas Celano, First Life of Francis 

The first biography of Francis of Assisi recounts the moment when Francis publicly relinquished his privilege, stripping himself and returning his clothing to his wealthy father in front of the bishop.  

The story of Francis stripping himself naked in the bishop’s courtyard conveys to us an essential moment in his conversion process. As Francis stood there naked, completely vulnerable … he divested himself of much more than just his clothes and belongings. In effect, he relinquished family identity and reputation and the security of his economic status.  

For Francis, divesting himself from privilege was a gospel-inspired action, one that we are invited to consider today. 

Relinquishment as a call and a gift means giving up prestige and privilege, learning to listen and to accept criticism, and learning how to use our power differently and ultimately to share our power. At the very least our task as non-poor is to share the power available to us—our resources of wealth, education, influence, and access—with those who have been denied these things. This is not charity or noblesse oblige. It is a fundamental letting go to allow the very structures that benefit us to be transformed…. 

The way of relinquishment is the lifelong process of removing the obstacles to loving and just relationships with our neighbors on this earth and of moving toward more genuine community among all of God’s children and indeed among all of earth’s creatures and elements, the kind of sisterhood and brotherhood envisioned by Francis. As we help remove the obstacles to the liberation of others, we are simultaneously removing obstacles to our own liberation….  

Francis took the daring leap of faith from a position of privilege into the world of the poor. His renunciation of the world, though radical, was apparently not odious to him. We sense that for Francis the gospel promise was fulfilled, that what one receives in return is far more than what one has given up [see Mark 10: 28–31]. Francis renounced the world only to have it given back with joy…. 

We find ourselves invited by Francis to be fools. Is it really possible that what is given up will be returned a hundredfold? Can we believe that as we lose ourselves, we will find ourselves? Francis, who renounces his claim on all things, is free to enjoy all things as gift. Utterly foolish. Impractical. Subversive. Even dangerous. 

We can neutralize the challenge and promise of Jesus and Francis by elevating [them] into the realm of sainthood and perfection, a realm seemingly far beyond our reach. Or we can ponder their way of living in the world and attempt to follow them, fools though we would be.  

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G.K. Chesterton: Wisdom and Wit

Religion is a serious business. It addresses the most fundamental and consequential questions of life and the cosmos. Therefore, it tends to attract serious people who write serious things and who gather to conduct serious meetings. In seminary, a very influential preacher told us that there is no place for humor in the pulpit. Laughter, he said, promotes an atmosphere of triviality rather than revival. This common religious view would have us believe God is a stern headmaster who favors the scholar and scorns the jester.  Then I discovered G.K. Chesterton. He was a journalist in England in the early twentieth century, and he wrote over 4,000 essays on some of the most important matters facing modern society, as well as many works of theology and defenses of the Christian faith. His writings were instrumental in C.S. Lewis’ journey from atheism to Christianity. Although he died before World War II, Chesterton also recognized the looming evil of Hitler and was outspoken about the dangers of eugenics—the popular “science” of the time that the Nazis used to justify their goal of racial purity. George Bernard Shaw, who often disagreed with Chesterton, called him “a man of colossal genius.” It wasn’t just his prophetic wisdom that people praised, but also his wit. Throughout his writings, Chesterton had the ability to wrap profound Christian truths in dry English humor. For example, when The London Times invited essays on the topic “What’s Wrong with the World?” Chesterton submitted their shortest entry: Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton At other times, Chesterton employed his humor to disarm his many critics—a tactic he shared with Jesus. During World War I, for example, Chesterton made fun of his own obesity to disarm an angry woman who confronted him on the street. “Mr. Chesterton, why aren’t you out at the front?” she asked. “Madam,” he replied, “if you go around to the side, you will see that I am.” Chesterton’s humor was no doubt an intrinsic part of his personality, but that doesn’t explain why he unleashed it so frequently. A better explanation comes from his understanding of the world. Chesterton compared it to a cosmic shipwreck. We are like sailors, he said, waking up on the beach with amnesia. As we wander the shore, we discover gold coins, precious cargo, a compass, and other valuable remnants from a civilization we can barely remember. Similarly, we all—whether we are believers or not—are constantly catching glimpses of another world that we’ve long forgotten. Beauty, joy, love, laughter—these things catch us by surprise and stir our hearts with longings that seem entirely inappropriate if the universe is truly indifferent to our existence, as the atheists assert. Reading Chesterton has helped me come to terms with seemingly contradictory aspects of my own personality. I can be serious, but I can also be silly. I’ve discovered that either tack may be used by God to help others catch glimpses of a world long forgotten. DAILY SCRIPTURE GENESIS 18:9-15; 21:1-7 MATTHEW 9:14–17 MATTHEW 23:23–26 WEEKLY PRAYER John Stott (1921 – 2011) Our heavenly Father, we commend to your mercy those for whom life does not spell freedom: prisoners of conscience, the homeless and the handicapped, the sick in body and mind, the elderly who are confined to their homes, those who are enslaved by their passions, and those who are addicted to drugs. Grant that, whatever their outward circumstances, they may find inward freedom, through him who proclaimed release of captives, Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.

Francis and the Gospel

Father Richard Rohr describes how the teachings of Francis of Assisi became the foundation of Franciscan spirituality. 

St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) began his community with a clear intention: “The Rule and the life of the Friars Minor is to simply live the gospel.” [1] The first Rule (the guide for the community’s way of life) that he started writing around 1209 was little more than a collection of New Testament passages. When Francis sent it off to Rome, the pope looked at it and said, “This is no Rule. This is just the gospel.” You can just hear Francis saying, “Yes—that is the point! We don’t need any other Rule except the gospel!” To be a Franciscan is nothing other than always searching for “the marrow of the gospel” as he called it. [2] Francis believed the purpose and goal of our life is to live the marrow or core of the gospel. Honestly, the core is so simple; it’s the living it out that’s difficult. [3]   

When Francis read the Beatitudes, Jesus’ inaugural discourse, he saw that the call to be poor stood right at the beginning: “How blessed are the poor in spirit!” (Matthew 5:3). From then on, Francis’ reading of the gospel considered poverty to be “the foundation of all other virtues and their guardian.” [4] While other virtues receive the kingdom only in promise, poverty is invested with heaven now—“Theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). Present tense!  

As a result, Franciscan spirituality has never been an abstraction. It is grounded in Jesus’ specific instructions to his disciples, not ideology or denominational certitudes. Francis’ living of the gospel was just that: a simple lifestyle. It was the incarnation of Jesus Christ continuing in space and time. It was the presence of the Spirit taken as if it were true. It was being Jesus more than just worshiping Jesus. At its best, Franciscan life is not words or even ethics. It is flesh—naked, vulnerable flesh—unable to deny its limitations, unable to cover its wounds. Francis called this inner nakedness “poverty.”  

This pure vision of life attracted thousands to a new freedom in the church and in ministry. Religious communities had become more and more entangled with stipends and rich land holdings. Members lived individually simple lives but were corporately secure and even comfortable. Mendicant (begging) orders like the Franciscans were created to break that dangerous marriage between ministry and money. Francis didn’t want his friars to preach salvation (although they did that, too) as much as he wanted them to be salvation. He wanted them to model and mirror the life of Jesus in the world, with all of the vulnerability that would entail. That is why many people often attribute the saying “preach the gospel at all times, and when absolutely necessary use words” to describe Francis’ desire to live the gospel in every moment.

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Franciscan Alternative Orthodoxy

Francis of Assisi paid attention to different things than the Catholic Church of his time. Eventually, his prophetic witness and emphasis on living the gospel became an “alternative orthodoxy” through the Franciscan tradition. Richard writes:   

In one of the earliest accounts of his life, Francis offers this instruction to the first friars: “You only know as much as you do.” [1] His emphasis on action, practice, and lifestyle was foundational and revolutionary for its time and remains at the heart of Franciscan alternative orthodoxy. For Francis and Clare of Assisi, one of his closest spiritual friends, Jesus became someone to actually follow and imitate.     

Up to that point, most of Christian spirituality was based in ascetic and monastic discipline, theories of prayer, or academic theology, which itself was often based in “correct belief” or liturgical texts, but not in a kind of practical Christianity that could be lived in the streets of the world. Francis emphasized an imitation and love of the humanity of Jesus, and not just the worshiping of his divinity. That is a major shift.    

Throughout history, the Franciscan School has typically been a minority position inside of the Roman Catholic and larger Christian tradition, yet it has never been condemned or considered heretical—in fact, quite the opposite. It simply emphasized different teachings of Jesus, called for new perspectives and behaviors, and focused on the full and final implications of the incarnation of God in Christ. For Franciscans, the incarnation was not just about Jesus but was manifested everywhere. As Francis said, “The whole world is our cloister!” [2]    

Francis’ starting place was human suffering instead of human sinfulness, and God’s identification with that suffering in Jesus. That did not put him in conflict with any Catholic dogmas or structures. His Christ was cosmic while also deeply personal, his cathedral was creation itself, and he preferred the bottom of society to the top. He invariably emphasized inclusion of the seeming outsider over any club of insiders, and he was much more a mystic than a moralist. In general, Francis preferred ego poverty to private perfection, because Jesus “became poor for our sake, so that we might become rich out of his poverty” (2 Corinthians 8:9).    

I sincerely think Francis found a Third Way, which is the creative and courageous role of a prophet and a mystic. He basically repeated what all prophets say: that the message and the medium for the message have to be the same thing. And Francis emphasized the medium itself, instead of continuing to clarify or contain the mere verbal message; this tends to be the “priestly” job, one which Francis never wanted for himself.    

Both Francis and Clare saw orthopraxy (“correct practice”) as a necessary parallel, and maybe even precedent, to verbal orthodoxy (“correct teaching”) and not an optional add-on or a possible implication. “Why aren’t you doing what you say you believe?” the prophet invariably asks.   

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Interstellar and the Cosmic Power of Love

Mark Longhurst

A number of weeks ago, I hosted a movie at my beloved local independent cinema, Images. As a small part of a fundraising campaign to renovate and refit the theater, Images Cinema asked a handful of community member superfans to curate a film and invite friends. I chose the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar, starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and others, because it is thrilling and visually stunning, I wanted to see it on the big screen again—and because my twelve-year-old son agreed to watch it with me. Most of all, I wanted to experience the film in community, because it poses a question that has stayed with me ever since my first viewing in a Boston cineplex years ago: what if love is the center of the universe?Watching the film with a packed room of neighbors and friends, including two rows of middle schoolers, I was reminded that the film’s scientific quest is also deeply mystical.

Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper leaves his children Murph and Tom behind on a climate-ravaged Earth to join a desperate mission to save the human race by charting a livable planet to colonize. At first glance, the premise sounds like an Elon Musk space-fantasy project—raising the danger of interpreting the film as if Earth were disposable and the march of colonization could simply continue off-planet. And yet, as I’ve written about many times in this newsletter, apocalyptic, world-ending scenarios for me primarily reckon with how we live now rather than in the future. The film’s powerful themes of love, loss, and space travel inspire me not to escape reality, but to live a more loving life amid it—all while trusting that the universe itself might be guided by love. Cooper is driven by a sense of duty to humanity and by the thrill of adventure to accept a last-ditch mission, but it’s love for his family, and Murph in particular, that fuels his grief and eventual heroic quest to return.

What if love is the center of the universe? 

At first, Cooper remains firmly on the side of reason, convinced that science can save humanity. But as the journey unfolds, the logic of science begins to clash with the boundless quality of love. Their ship, the Endurance, visits one planet, only to lose a crew member, be crushed by 4,000-foot waves, and discover upon return to their base ship that, due to the gravitational pull of a nearby black hole, 23 years have passed though they spent only three hours on the planet. Two more planets remain for the team to visit, but their fuel resources will only last for a trip to one.

A choice needs to be made. Anne Hathaway’s character Amelia Brand wants to visit another planet named “Edmunds,” after an astronaut who traveled there. Edmunds’s planet appears to transmit hopeful data about potential habitability—but Brand is also biased because she is in love with Dr. Edmunds and hopes he might still be alive. Cooper chooses instead to visit a planet where Matt Damon’s character Dr. Mann has been living, but it turns out to be frozen and uninhabitable. When they wake Dr. Mann from decades of cryo-sleep, his behavior quickly becomes murderous. His mission failed, and he has gone insane. Cooper’s love for Murph becomes the thread that connects them across space and time, exemplified in a stunning sequence at the end through a four-dimensional cube called a tesseract. Nolan explores scientifically, on a big-budget adventure screen, what is also inherently a mystical insight: that love might transcend space and time, and connect us even when we feel galaxies apart.

Dr. Brand perceives something that Cooper does not yet: “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends space and time.” Cooper has chosen to leave his family behind hoping to save humanity. Dr. Brand wants to go to Edmunds’s planet because of her love for Edmunds. Cooper, however, chooses logic. Science and love are set as conflicting, yet after the disastrous visit to Dr. Mann’s planet, Brand is vindicated. Now, with fuel reserves low and the mission’s failure imminent, Cooper chooses to sacrifice himself to give Dr. Brand one more chance to reach Edmunds’s planet. Cooper sheds weight from the Endurance ship by detaching himself in the smaller Ranger ship, just in time for Dr. Brand and the Endurance to use the black hole’s gravitational pull to gain the speed needed to continue.

Dr. Brand slingshots toward Edmunds’s planet and Cooper heads into the black hole (along with a robot named TARS). But instead of death, the black hole sends Cooper into a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube with space for Cooper, a three-dimensional being, to communicate across time to Murph. Throughout the film, we’re introduced to a concept of “Them,” future humans who communicate through space-time to guide the characters. “They” constructed the tesseract for Cooper to communicate to Murph. With TARS’s help, he figures out a way to relay NASA’s coordinates, and pass on information retrieved from within the black hole—new codes that will help Murph solve the scientific problem of gravity and save the future of humanity.

The science here is fun and complex. Kip Thorne, the scientist who advised Christopher Nolan, later wrote a book entitled The Science of Interstellar. He explains the idea of a tesseract as a cube in four dimensions, the physics of black holes, the possibility of beings from the future who created the tesseract, and more. I find the science fascinating, but what moves me about this film is that science doesn’t explain everything. In the end, it’s the love that Cooper has for Murph that sets in motion the science to work. It’s the love that Dr. Brand has for Edmunds that convinces her that his planet is the best habitable one. And it’s not love without reason—it’s love and logic combined, with the humility to know the limitations of logic and the transcending power of love.

The Franciscan scientist and theologian Ilia Delio is one of my intellectual heroes, because she boldly insists that our theology must keep pace with science. She insists that the meaning of Christ must be an evolutionary, loving reality. One of Delio’s mystical heroes is the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who affirmed Love as the center of the universe: Love “is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces…. The physical structure of the universe is love.” 

But what could this mean? For Delio, following Teilhard, it is the energy of union amid ever greater complexity within the unfolding universe. I don’t pretend to understand this very well, but if evolution is a process of ever greater complexity and unity—whether adapted traits in animals, consciousness itself, or the ongoing expansion of the universe—then one way to describe that energy is to call it love. Here’s a quote to read slowly from Delio: “If love is the principal energy of life, the whole within every whole, and evolution has direction in the unfolding of consciousness, then it is not difficult to see that evolution is the movement toward greater wholeness and consciousness—that is, the rise of love.” From a mystical perspective, then, it is not too much to say that love is the force that holds the universe together.

Love holding the universe together may seem like a lofty concept, and it is, but we don’t need to survive a black hole to discover it. Instead, it’s as accessible as showing up at my local movie theater on a Monday night, sharing a bowl of popcorn with friends, and experiencing an epic space thriller across generations.

Making Peace with the Earth

Friday, September 26, 2025

It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.  
—Martin Luther King Jr., “I See the Promised Land” 

Theologian Grace Ji-Sun Kim posits efforts for peace on a cosmic scale: 

On a Galilean hillside, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9). To make peace on Earth, the World Council of Churches (WCC) reminds us that we need to make peace with the earth. Dominant cultures in our human family have said that we are the center of creation, positioning the earth and its creatures to be objects for our domination and exploitation. Atop our fictional pinnacle of creation, we are destroying our world’s wealth of gifts faster than the earth can replenish itself. From such human destructiveness we have entered a period of time some are calling the Anthropocene, the era of Earth’s life that is marked by abuse, violence, and destruction caused by humans. The alienation between humanity and creation has been a violent separation, and we must work toward peace in order to heal this divide. [1]  

Longtime nonviolent activist Father John Dear describes his own awakening to the connection between violence in the world and violence against the earth: 

Over the decades, I have witnessed the destruction we humans have done to Mother Earth and her creatures…. I grieve for Mother Earth and the creatures who die because of our systemic greed, violence, and destructive habits. But I never made or felt the connection between my vision of nonviolence and the ongoing destruction of Mother Earth. Until now.  

One day, while sitting in my house studying the Sermon on the Mount, I saw it right there in front of me. “Blessed are the meek,” Jesus says in the Beatitudes. Thomas Merton wrote that “meekness” is the biblical word for nonviolence. “Blessed are the nonviolent,” Jesus is saying, as if he were an ancient Gandhi, an ancient Dorothy Day, an ancient Martin Luther King Jr. “They will inherit the earth.” There it is. Blessed are the meek, the gentle, the nonviolent—they will inherit the earth. A life of nonviolence leads to oneness with creation and her creatures.  

A life of violence, of course, leads to an abrupt discord with creation. In a time of permanent warfare, nuclear weapons, and catastrophic climate change, the message couldn’t be clearer. The God of peace, the nonviolent Jesus, and his Holy Spirit call us to practice nonviolence. In that way, we’ll renounce and stop our environmental destruction, tend our Garden of Eden together, and restore creation to its rightful peace….  

It’s that vision of peace, nonviolence, and the new creation, the vision of the promised land before us, the practice of proactive nonviolence, that offers a way out of environmental destruction, as well as permanent war, corporate greed, systemic racism, and extreme poverty.  

All we have to do is open our eyes to the reality of creation before us, to be present to it, to take it in and honor it, and welcome its gift of peace—and do so within the boundaries of nonviolence. [2]  

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John Chaffee 5 On Friday

1.

“Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.“

– Saul of Tarsus in Colossians 3:11

There are days when I feel as though we barely understand Christianity.  There are specific passages that I believe are completely overlooked because they challenge our conventional understanding of things…

This is one of them.

“Christ is all, and is in all.”

We are all already the body of Christ?

Christ is already in all of us?

The Gentile?

The Jew?

The circumcised?

The uncircumcised?

The barbarian?

The Scythian?

The slave?

The free?

Yep.

“Christ is all, and is in all.”

2.

“To choose the world is to choose to do the work I am capable of doing, in collaboration with my brother, to make the world better, more free, more just, more livable, more human.”

– Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk

To live and breathe and find our being in God and the life of faith does not mean a retreat, shrinking back, escape, or hiding from the world.

Instead, we are called deeper into it.  Not to be a part of it, but to help transform it, to make it better, to be co-redeemers of it, and to say that despite all of its issues, it is still worth valuing and still worth fighting for.

3.

“The issue really is Germanism or Christianity.”

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a 1933 Letter to his Grandmother

Several months ago, the family of Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a public letter that included the names of scholars and preachers from around the world who stood against how people were misinterpreting Bonhoeffer, as if to say that he was in favor of Christian nationalism.

Obviously, he was not.

He witnessed the German Lutheran Church of his day shake hands with political leadership to the extent that it led him to become a vocal opponent of the merger of church and state.

Why?

Because when the church becomes too intertwined with politicians, it loses its prophetic voice, it fails to notice those that the government is crushing, and begins to sacrifice its integrity for some misguided belief that the government will always protect it.  When all of these things happen, there are fewer prophets of the kingdom of God and more chaplains who endorse the empire.

In Bonhoeffer’s own lifetime, he recognized the distinction between being a Christian and being consumed by the false ideology of German exceptionalism.  Germany, despite being overwhelmingly Christian, was not, nor ever will be, the kingdom of God.

And, although I am writing about a Lutheran pastor’s theology and his struggles with being a Christian in a particular nation, I am confident that you can have a profound conversation with your friends and family about the same themes today.

4.

“He who seeks a language in which to utter his deepest concern, to pray, will find it in the Bible.”

– Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jewish Philosopher

Once upon a time, I did a youth Bible study during the summer/early fall of 2020.  If you recall, it was still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we had to maintain at least 6 feet of distance while outside.

We made the best of it.

Everyone showed up with their favorite camp chair and brought food with them.  It was actually not too bad!

Over the course of 5 weeks, we read through the book of Lamentations, which consists of 5 chapters.  Some were skeptical, but it was impressive to see how well the teenagers quickly dove into a conversation about the stages of grief expressed in that short book about the siege and burning of Jerusalem.  We talked about the profound importance of emotional honesty, our (in)ability to articulate what is happening with us internally, and how refreshing it was to see rage, fury, bartering, indignation, and other things in “Scripture.”

The Bible is a profoundly human book, not to say that it is not also inspired, but instead that when we read it, we find people who wrestled deeply with the themes of what it means to be human. 

5.

“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”

– Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian Author

All idols want flattery.  They all want to be addressed as something larger or more than what they actually are.  Idols demand conformity and will do anything necessary to maintain their position as a false god.  Idols will also use language that makes you feel as though they are on your side and that they are working for your best interests.  Ultimately, idols operate the most out of falsehood and deception.  No idol wants to be addressed as what it is: an idol.

And it is for these very reasons that it is difficult to speak truthfully.

Truth does not allow an idol to have the flattery it wants.  Truth demands that we call out the limitations, inconsistencies, and false piety that surround idols.  Truth knocks over idols, no matter how pious or innocuous they seem.  Truth requires us to evaluate if the ethics of the idol aren’t actually divisive, discompassionate, scapegoating, and destructive.  In the words of Augustine, “Truth is like a lion.  You do not need to defend it.  Just let it loose, it can take care of itself.”

God is not a fan of idols, and it is always better for us to smash our idols before God has to do it for us.

Contemplation and Nonviolence

Thursday, September 25, 2025

Activist and organizer Paul Engler connects nonviolence and the contemplative path:  

Jesus was a singular figure in history—a teacher, prophet, and embodiment of the Divine. He offered a path to individual salvation through grace and prayer, a way represented today by the contemplative stream of Christianity. But he also offered something more dangerous: a revolutionary program of nonviolent resistance to empire, practiced by the early Christians and echoed through history by prophetic Christian minorities—those who have embraced strategic, principled nonviolence in the face of systemic evil….  

Jesus stood in a long lineage of Jewish prophets who imagined, for the first time in history, a vision of liberation where the enslaved could exit empire, cross the wilderness, and birth a new society within the shell of the old. This idea—that a promised land could emerge amidst Pharaoh’s rule—would echo through Enlightenment revolutions and democratic uprisings across the globe.  

But unlike secular revolutionaries who sought merely to replace one king with another, Jesus pointed to the roots: to the structures and systems that bear the fruit of institutional sin. He experimented with radical asceticism, wandered with prophetic disciples, and was shaped by desert mystics who mirrored in the first century Judaism, similar traditions found among the Sadhus of India, the Bhakti saints, and countless other holy figures who surrender all to the Divine.  

This inner path—of prayer, ego-death, and mystical union—is a revelation in itself: that the promised land is not only a political reality, but also a psychological and spiritual one. Beneath the false self and reactive emotional programs (as Thomas Keating put it) lies our “original blessing.” Or as Richard Rohr reminds us again and again: the Imago Dei—the divine indwelling—is already within.  

Our Earth, once assumed infinite in its bounty, now groans under the weight of extractive systems that for the first time in history hit their limits of total expansion. Climate change is just the tip of the iceberg. We are entering the sixth mass extinction. Ecosystems are collapsing. The coral reefs are dying, the forests are being cut, and over the last 80 years half of bird, and over half of fish populations have been wiped out. The canary in the coal mine is indeed dying. A third of the planet may soon experience drought annually. And still, the dominant culture accelerates forward—driven by a propaganda machine of individualism and consumerism.  

Even astronauts, peering back at Earth as a blue marble suspended in darkness, speak of a revelation: that Eden is not a myth but a fragile truth we’ve exiled ourselves from.  

Contemplation—whether through the Christian mystics, Buddhist mindfulness, or Indigenous ceremony—reveals this loss. And it invites us into the paschal mystery: a cycle of life, death, and resurrection that Jesus lived, not only as theology, but as cosmic pattern. What if the streams of contemplation and nonviolent resistance merged? What if our movements toward personal healing were also movements toward systemic transformation? To live the Gospel fully is to embrace both.  

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Jesus Calling: September 25th, 2025

Pour all of your energy into trusting Me. It is through trust you stay connected to me, aware of My Presence. Every step on your life – journey can be a step of faith. Baby steps of trust are simple for you; you can take them with almost unconscious ease. Giant steps are another matter altogether: leaping across chasms in semi-darkness, scaling cliffs of uncertainty, trudging through the valley of the shadow of death. These feats require sheer concentration, as well as utter commitment to Me.
    Each of My children is a unique blend of temperament, giftedness, and life experiences. Something that is a baby step for you may be a giant step for another person, and vice versa. Only I know the difficulty or ease of each segment of your journey. Beware of trying to impress others by acting as if your giant steps are only baby ones. Do not judge others who hesitate, in trembling fear, before an act would be easy for you. If each of My children would seek to please Me above all else, fear of others’ judgments would vanish, as would attempts to impress others. Focus your attention on the path just ahead of you and on the One who never leaves your side.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Psalm 23:4 (NLT)
4 Even when I walk
    through the darkest valley,
I will not be afraid,
    for you are close beside me.
Your rod and your staff
    protect and comfort me.

Matthew 7:1-2 (NLT)
Do Not Judge Others
1 “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. 2 For you will be treated as you treat others. The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged.

Proverbs 29:25 (NLT)
25 Fearing people is a dangerous trap,
    but trusting the Lord means safety.

I am not afraid of the word tension. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.
—Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” 

Minister Elle Dowd, an anti-racist white activist, challenges the notion that being a peacemaker means being “nice”:  

We white people love to think of ourselves as nice…. But too often, niceness is about convenience. It’s about our comfort. It’s about control. It is our pathological desire for niceness that leads white people to look at young Black people crying out in the street and say,  

“They should really say #AllLivesMatter.”  

“I’m all for protesting, but do they really have to inconvenience other people?”  

“No one is going to listen to them if they are going to be so rude like that.”  

In other words, “Why can’t they be nice?”…  

We say we value niceness, but this kind of niceness isn’t kindness or compassion or accompaniment or self-sacrifice. It’s not Christ’s example of emptying ourselves for the sake of the other. It’s the opposite—silencing and oppressing the other for the sake of ourselves.  

Dowd reflects on the desire to reduce tension instead of learning what it might have to teach: 

The reason many white people have trouble thinking of nonviolent direct action as truly nonviolent is that it is disruptive by nature, and that doesn’t feel very nice. It’s not supposed to be nice. 

Direct action intentionally interrupts our daily flow and rhythm in an attempt to raise tension. This tension isn’t new. It isn’t being created out of thin air. It has always existed for our siblings of color.  

For people of color and other oppressed people, the tension caused by marginalization is ever present with very real consequences…. Racism is like being force-fed a poison. Direct action is what happens when people refuse to drink that poison and instead bring a bottle of it to the doorstep of those force-feeding them and demand that they gaze upon the reality of it.  

Direct action doesn’t create new tension. It redistributes the tension that is already there and puts it back where it belongs—at the source.  

Many people—white people, in particular—have little tolerance for tension. We have been taught to avoid tension. Our conditioning has trained us to recoil from discomfort, to think of it as an inherently bad thing, something to sidestep and evade at all costs. Instead of leaning into tension to see what we can learn from it, we often avoid it. But when we do this, when we turn away from tension, we fail to see the gift that this tension can be in revealing the truth. We miss out on the clarity it brings with it, the opportunity to move forward.  

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Hey CO few. (Andrew Lang)

Late last week as the Jimmy Kimmel news crashed across my screen and I was still trying to understand who Charlie Kirk really was (which is certainly different from the sanitized version even liberal writers are currently eulogizing), I fell into a bit of an emotional pit.

My partner and I chatted as she was getting ready to leave for work and I felt that familiar sense of overwhelm form in my gut.

But what can we do to actually stop any of this?

It wasn’t quite despair, but I admit it was the closest I’ve come to it in the past few months.

As she walked out the door, I just sat and stared at the wall for awhile reflecting on the week – specifically the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and the presence of ICE at my workplace.

And eventually, my history degree reared its head as if to say from the bottom drawer where it perpetually lives in darkness: look to what others have done.

So below are five ways people and communities have resisted authoritarianism and mass harm – not always enough to end the violence or impact, but enough to maintain a sense of dignity and beauty in the midst of it.

I hope as you read through the examples below, you consider what “safe enough” actions you might take as we continue deeper into this moment.

(And a huge shoutout to the folks I met with on Sunday for our Overwhelm to Action event: people committing to work on countering food insecurity, turning out the vote in the upcoming California election, advocating to our WA state government for trans family members, engaging in mutual aid for Hispanic folks not wanting to leave their homes – it was inspiring!)

1. Community, Community, Community

I’m leading with this one because it is a non-negotiable. Community is the only way we get through this.

It can take many shapes and forms, from the loud and action-centered to the quiet and care-centered, but the question I offer is this: who is holding this moment alongside you?

In Mussolini’s Italy, the activists who lacked networks and communities were neutralized quickly. The “moderates” who had some power and rank, but were not part of communities talking about the danger of the moment, fell into silence.

But those who had some kind of community structure – churches, student groups, labor organizations, underground reading circles – had the resilience to resist longer. They emboldened each other to embrace hope and to identify the small ways to fight back; they kept the conversation and the tending to grief going.

During the HIV/AIDS Crisis of the 1980s, and in the face of governmental inaction, ACT UP began to form small, local groups of friends, partners, and neighbors who would come together in living rooms, church basements, and community centers to care for each other and share resources. These communities, absolutely and intentionally being failed by the government, gathered to survive, together.

Question: Who can you intentionally gather with for the purpose of tending to each other’s needs? (Who might you invite over for dinner to talk with about this?)

2. Protect + Pressure the Press and Academia

Across the board, the first enemies of an authoritarian leader are the free press, universities, and the public school system (if there is one.)

I remember in high school reading about book burnings in Weimar Germany – one of the first acts of the Nazi Party upon taking power. Or of how Pinochet in Chile would order raids on bookstores to terrify storeowners out of business. Or of our own American legacy of McCarthyism and anti-abolitionist book burnings in the South.

And yet – in the midst of each of these examples of censorship, there was resistance.

In Nazi Germany, the White Rose movement formed, a group of students quietly distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. During the McCarthy Era here in the United States, alternative publications like Dissent Magazine were created to hold space for intellectual debate outside the academic mainstream. In the Soviet Union, some would hand-copy books and articles – known as “samizdat” – so the ideas within them would survive and spread. In Pinochet’s Chile, multiple churches made the brave decision to shelter intellectuals and written materials, even hosting small discussion circles, under the protective guise of “religious activity.”

As we look around and see academic institutions, media companies, and publishers under pressure from the Trump Administration to fold or self-censor, one move we can make is to do our best to apply counter-pressure: demand our representatives protect academic institutions, boycott and divest from media companies that submit to Trump’s demands, and amplify and fund local journalists and creators who are pushing back.

Question: How can you apply counter-pressure by contacting representatives, writing letters to the editor, boycotting companies like Meta, Disney, and Target who give in, and/or amplify journalists and creators doing resistance work?

3. Small Acts of Refusal

These are the acts of everyday resistance, often silent and in the shadows, but present and powerful.

In China, where public resistance has a long history of suppression, there is an equally long tradition of silent protests (wearing symbols on clothing, etc.), family-led education to counter state-run curriculum, and “nod-and-deny” tactics, where people fall in line publicly and work behind the scenes to resist. In Nazi Germany, this was true as well: resistance could look like refusing to parrot party slogans or finding ways to quietly support underground resistance networks. Enslaved people in the United States would engage in everyday resistance by slowing down work, feigning sickness when safe-enough to do so, or “accidentally” damaging crops or farm tools.

As we consider what is ours to do to resist authoritarianism, it is worth repeating again and again and again: no action is too small.

Each of these small acts of refusal and resistance and counter-pressure can preserve our sense of dignity and purpose until larger movements take shape.

Question: What are the small ways, perhaps even silent or invisible, you can refuse to accept the Trump Administration’s use of power and story?

4. Create Pockets of Democracy

Democracy is always a threat to those who desire to wield power over others.

That’s why every year, voter suppression bills are lobbied for and passed at all levels of legislature. (79 restrictive voting laws have been passed in the last four years in the United States.) That’s why poll taxes and literacy tests were used to exclude Black folks from voting in the Jim Crow South. That’s why Putin in Russia has jailed and killed his opponents and Orbán in Hungary has stacked the courts and re-written the constitution.

And this is why one of the ways we can resist fascism is by ensuring democracy – and the cultural norms and ideals that support it – continues to exist at all levels of public engagement.

In the Jim Crow South, registering to vote, teaching people to read, and joining organizations like the NAACP could be extremely dangerous as they were radical threats to the anti-democratic system of White Supremacy – and yet, people engaged in these everyday. In South Africa, folks educated each other, literally door-to-door, to make sure neighbors knew and bought into the cultural ideals that would uphold democracy following the transition from Apartheid.

With only 34% of Americans currently satisfied with democracy, we can do similar today.

Attending city council meetings, showing up at school boards, practicing democratic processes in our non-profits and organizations, going door-to-door to talk with our neighbors about local issues – all of these feel small and yet create cultural and institutional resilience to survive the sway of authoritarianism.

Question: How can you can help strengthen democracy – and democratic norms and ideas – in the spaces you already belong to? (Your neighborhood, workplace, or community groups, etc.)

5. Sustain Hope Through Care

Just as Mariame Kaba says, “hope is a discipline,” the work of sustaining hope is not about anything fluffy or sentimental — it is deeply practical, rooted, and embodied.

Throughout history, basic everyday care has been shown to be radical.Whether creating a community garden, making music, ensuring continuing friendship – all of these acts serve as a counterweight to despair and overwhelm, giving up and giving in.

When the Nazis spread across Europe and took over in places like Denmark, Norway, and France, people organized underground poetry readings, musical performances, and religious gatherings. Or in Japanese-American Internment Camps during WWII, families planted gardens and published community newspapers. The Black Panther Party was founded with a mission of care: to support Black folks with self-defense training and eventually breakfast programs, health clinics, and more.

All of these examples sustained hope – all of them centered the community and insisted in the primacy of dignity, beauty, and human value.

Today, we can see this work in mutual aid networks and in communities that focus on building a culture of resilience and care amongst themselves. Through their actions, these spaces build the community strength needed to resist authoritarianism and weave connection amongst people so that nobody has to feel isolated and alone.

Question: What can you do this week to show care (a meal, a phone call, a garden, a story) in a way that builds resilience against despair?