Devotion does not end at a shrine or image. It is only authentic when it reaches all the way into ourselves and into our lifestyle with an utterly transforming power. —David Richo, The Sacred Heart of the World

David Richo is a therapist, author, and teacher who integrates spirituality and psychology. In his book, The Sacred Heart of the World, he seeks to return the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus to its cosmic origins. He writes:

As we look symbolically, the image of a divine open and grace-giving heart shows what our own inmost core looks like. It is a spiritual portrait of our hearts and the heart of the universe: strongly aglow with the divine fire, beaming light in every direction, and at the same time opened because it is wounded. . . .

It is ironic that a symbol of generous love became focused on our need to make reparation, that a powerful divine presence became associated with a saccharine image, that a liberating message became moralistic, that a call to universal compassion became a Jesus-and-I devotion. It is time to remove the past from the Sacred Heart and restore it to the meaning it had for the mystics and can have for us today. . . .

The heart of Christianity is the Heart of Jesus, a passionate devotedness to the well-being of humanity. To be a Christian is to be possessed by that same passionate intention. Indeed, to say that God created the world is to affirm that it vibrates at a pitch identical to the nature of God, who is love. Indeed, the pitch we were meant to live at is love. Life does not ever feel quite right unless love is the best and greatest part of it. . . .

Our heart is the soft center of our egoless self and it has one impelling desire: to open. The heart is the capacity to open. This is the force that complements our other powers. It takes us beyond our limits. It contains our ability to reach out so it is the antidote to despair. We are spiritually coded in ways we have not yet dared even to imagine. The depths of our spiritual capacity are still unplumbed. Contemplation of Jesus’ Heart shows us how deep we really are, how vast our potential for love, how high our aspiration for the light. . . .

An opened heart is boundless; that is, unconditional in its scope. Once we are awakened to love as the lifelong purpose of our hearts, then feeling love for all the world becomes the meaning—and greatest joy—of living. St. John Chrysostom [c. 347–407] says: “If you have found the way to your heart, you have found the way to heaven.” . . .

As we grow in spiritual consciousness, we move away from superstitions that seem to assure a stranglehold on God. The only promise of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is that we have not yet lost nor will we ever lose our capacity to love.

_________________________________________________

Sarah Young

COME TO ME with your gaping emptiness, knowing that in Me you are complete. As you rest quietly in My Presence, My Light within you grows brighter and brighter. Facing the emptiness inside you is simply the prelude to being filled with My fullness. Therefore, rejoice on those days when you drag yourself out of bed, feeling sluggish and inadequate. Tell yourself that this is a perfect day to depend on Me in childlike trust. If you persevere in this dependence as you go through the day, you will discover at bedtime that Joy and Peace have become your companions. You may not realize at what point they joined you on your journey, but you will feel the beneficial effects of their presence. The perfect end to such a day is a doxology of gratitude. I am He from whom all blessings flow!

2 CORINTHIANS 4:6;
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.

MATTHEW 5:3, 6;
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

COLOSSIANS 2:9–10;
For in Him dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily; 10 and you are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power.

PSALM 150:6;
Let everything that hath breath — Either to make a vocal noise, or a sound by blowing into pipes, fifes, flutes, trumpets, Let all join together, and put forth all your strength

Young, Sarah. Jesus Calling Morning and Evening Devotional (Jesus Calling®) (p. 726). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Search inside yourself with your intellect so as to find the place of the heart, where all the powers of the soul reside. —St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Three Methods of Prayer

Many of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, along with thinkers and mystics in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, have described prayer as bringing our thinking down into our heart. It is not the words themselves as much as the rhythmical repetition that localizes one in the heart. It is the same with the rosary. One cannot “think” Hail Mary 50 or 100 times. There is no content to “think” after a few recitations! Chants and repetitive prayers are, in fact, a technology to help you stop thinking! And it works. [1]

Greek Orthodox author Frederica Mathewes-Green describes the practice of the Jesus Prayer, which is the simple repetition of the phrase: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.” She writes:

God doesn’t need [reminders from us] to be merciful; [God] is merciful all the time, even when we don’t ask. But unless we make a habit of asking for mercy, we forget that we need it. . . .

At first the Prayer is just a string of words repeated, perhaps mechanically, in your mind. But with time it may “descend into the heart,” and those who experience this will be attentive to maintain it, continually “bringing the mind” (the nous, that is) “into the heart.” . . . This “descent into the heart” does include reference to the physical heart (or the general region of the heart within the chest). This blending of matter and spirit can be surprising to Western Christians, but it came naturally to the earliest Christians, who inherited from ancient Judaism an expectation that God is present throughout Creation. “Do I not fill heaven and earth? says the LORD” (Jeremiah 23:24).

“Prayer of the heart” occurs when the Prayer moves from merely mental repetition, forced along by your own effort, to an effortless and spontaneous self-repetition of the Prayer that emanates from the core of your being, your heart. You discover that the Holy Spirit has been there, praying, all along. Then heart and soul, body and mind, memory and will, the very breath of life itself, everything that you have and are unites in gratitude and joy, tuned like a violin string to the name of Jesus.

The simplicity of the Jesus Prayer makes it available to anyone at any time. The more we commit to it, the greater our heart’s capacity for God grows. Mathewes-Green continues:

The practice of the Prayer will initially take some serious self-discipline, but it gradually grows sweet, and then irresistible. The hope of protection from your own vicious or self-hating thoughts is alone a strong impetus to persevere. Day by day the healing advances, and continual immersion in Christ’s presence becomes your goal. One day you will find that the Prayer is starting up within you on its own, like a dearly loved melody.

___________________________________________

I AM SPEAKING in the depths of your being. Be still so that you can hear My voice. I speak in the language of Love; My words fill you with Life and Peace, Joy and hope. I desire to talk with all of My children, but many are too busy to listen. The “work ethic” has them tied up in knots. They submit wholeheartedly to this taskmaster, wondering why they feel so distant from Me. Living close to Me requires making Me your First Love—your highest priority. As you seek My Presence above all else, you experience Peace and Joy in full measure. I also am blessed when you make Me first in your life. While you journey through life in My Presence, My Glory brightens the world around you.

PSALM 119:64; The earth is filled with your love, LORD; teach me your decrees.

ISAIAH 50:4; The Sovereign LORD has given me a well-instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being instructed.

REVELATION 2:4; Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.

ISAIAH 60:2; ²See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the LORD rises upon you and his glory appears over you.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Calling Morning and Evening Devotional (Jesus Calling®) (p. 724). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

As we continue in the season of Advent, Father Richard shares why he believes devotion, or heart-centered faith, is essential to the Christian journey. 

I want to encourage the uncovering of what we mean by the word devotion. We have to somehow live a life that’s connected to the heart. Otherwise, we get into head ideology, righteousness, opinionatedness, and insisting on the right or wrong words. All are ways of avoiding the heart and staying in the head!

I have to admit that I’ve learned this kind of devotion from good old-time Catholics and healthy evangelicals. They’re invariably heart-based people who look out at reality with soft eyes. We can usually see it in their calm face or the natural smile on their lips before they even start talking. Trust that first impression, it is seldom wrong.

If our message at the CAC is not heartfelt and creating heartfelt people, I predict it will not last, and it doesn’t deserve to last. It’ll be another head trip that we can argue about. I think it was the gift of the early Franciscans, although I don’t know that we, as the later Franciscan Order, always kept it. Francis and the early friars had a heartfelt quality that made them dear to people. Not everyone always agreed with Francis on things such as not going to war or radical poverty—but authentic, heartfelt, devoted people cannot be dismissed.

Perhaps this is what Jesus was talking about when he taught, “Blessed are the pure of heart” (Matthew 5:8). It’s having achieved a purity of intention, desire, and motivation that isn’t about me—how I look and whether people are going to like me or affirm me. I think we all have to purify our intention several times a day: “Why am I doing what I’m doing?” If we don’t localize our intention in the compassionate space that we call the heart, it all becomes about making an impression that will ultimately benefit ourselves. We are all attracted to those loving people who are concerned about others more than themselves and concerned about us specifically. It’s really quite beautiful. We feel softened, we feel held, we feel more tender around people like that.

We can’t fake devotion but sometimes I do suggest we “fake it till we make it,” as many say. We need to practice some kind of heart-opening prayer and practice being compassionate and kind toward others. Eventually our hearts, as John Wesley said, will surely be “strangely warmed” [1] and no one is more surprised than we are!

This is one of the hardest things in the teaching of spirituality because we cannot manufacture devotion. It is the work of grace, but of course we have to want it and create the conditions that can allow it to happen. Anything that helps us to be less willful, less pushy, less judgmental toward ourselves is a good place to start, because the face we turn toward ourselves is the face we turn toward the world.

Sarah Young….

REST IN ME, MY CHILD, forgetting about the worries of the world. Focus on Me—Immanuel—and let My living Presence envelop you in Peace. Tune in to My eternal security, for I am the same yesterday, today, and forever. If you live on the surface of life by focusing on ever-changing phenomena, you will find yourself echoing the words of Solomon: “Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” Living in collaboration with Me is the way to instill meaning into your days. Begin each day alone with Me so that you can experience the reality of My Presence. As you spend time with Me, the way before you opens up step by step. Arise from the stillness of our communion, and gradually begin your journey through the day. Hold My hand in deliberate dependence on Me, and I will smooth out the path before you.

MATTHEW 1:22–23; All this took place to fulfill what the LORD had said through the prophet: ²³”The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).

HEBREWS 13:8; Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

ECCLESIASTES 1:2; Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless

PROVERBS 3:6; ⁶in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight

Young, Sarah. Jesus Calling Morning and Evening Devotional (Jesus Calling®) (p. 720). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Loving Mother of the Americas

“Listen. Put it into your heart, my youngest and dearest son, that the thing that frightened you, the thing that afflicted you is nothing: Do not let it disturb you. . . . Am I not here, I, who am your mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms? Do you need something more?” —Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego, 1513, Nican Mopohua 

One of the images of Mary that continues to inspire devotion throughout the Americas is Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose feast we celebrate today. In this passage, CAC friend and author Mirabai Starr writes about the transformation that Our Lady of Guadalupe brought to Mexico and the world:

Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared to the Indian Juan Diego [1474–1548] only a few short years after Hernán Cortés conquered Mexico for Spain. The conquistadors had initially presented themselves as friends. The Aztecs believed that Cortés was Quetzalcoatl, the divine savior figure who, legend had promised, would return one day when they needed him most, and so they welcomed him and his entourage with joy. Once the Spaniards had insinuated themselves among the indigenous people, however, they proceeded to destroy them. In a concerted act of genocide and enslavement, the conquistadors swiftly eradicated an ancient culture. . . .

Into this bloody mix of violent cultures, Our Lady of Guadalupe extended the hand of mercy, comfort, and protection. . . . She drew everyone—European and indigenous—under her blanket of love. . . .

Images of Our Lady of Guadalupe are found throughout Mexico, Central and South America, and the southwestern United States. . . . Roadside grottos every few miles hold her image nestled in rock and concrete, a tall glass candle perpetually burning at her feet. She is emblazoned on tee shirts and tattooed onto biceps. She is borrowed to advertise taxi companies and hardware stores, women’s circles and bikers’ gangs. . . . She extends her unconditional love to all who reach for her merciful hand—believers and atheists, Latinos and Anglos, women and men—and they love her back, with equal intensity.

In a world struggling against senseless violence and growing economic disparity, Our Lady of Guadalupe offers a distinctly feminine antidote to the poisons of poverty and war. Where society demands competition, Guadalupe teaches cooperation. In place of consumerism, she models compassionate service. She is not the whitewashed Virgin of the institutional Church. She is the radical, powerful, engaged Mother of the People.

Our Lady is not merely a sociopolitical symbol, however. People of all faiths call her Mother. In times of deeply personal grief, they turn to her for comfort. They turn to her for insight. They turn to her for a reminder of what matters most, what endures when all else seems to be lost, what grace may yet be available when we meet fear with love.

Full-Body Knowing

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. —Ezekiel 36:26

Jesus is our model for what it means to live from our hearts. Father Richard teaches: 

In Jesus, God gave us a human heart we could love. While God can be described as a moral force, as consciousness, and as high vibrational energy, the truth is, we don’t fall in love with abstractions. So God became a person “that we could hear, see with our eyes, look at, and touch with our hands” (1 John 1:1).

Love—God incarnate—always begins with particulars: this woman, this dog, this beetle, this Moses, this Virgin Mary, this Jesus of Nazareth. It is the individual and the concrete that opens the heart space to an I-Thou encounter. Without it, there is no true devotion or faith but only argumentative theories.

This is the simple religious knowing that the West is going to have to rediscover, both on the Right and on the Left. It’s always a whole-body knowing. Since the Enlightenment and argumentative Reformation we have situated our “knowing” in the mind, illustrated by Descartes’ notorious “I think therefore I am.” The mind is good but it’s only a part of what Jesus recommended: “You must love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with your whole mind” (see Matthew 22:37). That’s full-body knowing! That is devotion.

Love lives and thrives in the heart space. It has kept me from wanting to hurt people who have hurt me. It keeps me every day from obsessive, repetitive, or compulsive head games. It can make the difference between being happy and being miserable and negative. Could this be what we are really doing when we say we are praying for someone? Yes, we are holding them in our heart space. Do this in an almost physical sense, and you will see how calmly and quickly it works.

We invite you to pray for the ability to be more loving with modern mystic Howard Thurman (1900–1981):

I want to be more loving in my heart! It is often easy to have the idea in mind, the plan to be more loving. To see it with my mind and give assent to the thought of being loving—this is crystal clear. But I want to be more loving in my heart! I must feel like loving; I must ease the tension in my heart that ejects the sharp barb, the stinging word. I want to be more loving in my heart that, with unconscious awareness and deliberate intent, I shall be a kind, a gracious human being. Thus, those who walk the way with me may find it easier to love, to be gracious because of the Love of God which is increasingly expressed in my living. “I want to be more loving in my heart!” [1]

Hope Beyond Our Lifetimes

Theologian and Carmelite sister Constance FitzGerald identifies hope as a profound freedom to accept God and reality as it is. She takes inspiration from the work of St. John of the Cross (1542–1591):

This dynamic of being able to yield unconditionally to God’s future is what John of the Cross calls hope, a hope that exists without the signature of our life and works, a hope independent of us and our accomplishments (spiritual gifts or ordinary human achievements), a hope that can even embrace and work for a future without us. This theological hope is completely free from the past, fully liberated from our need to recognize ourselves in the future, to survive, to be someone. [1]

This gift of hope is what allows author Victoria Loorz and others to embrace a “post-doom” spirituality [2] which is large enough to face climate crises and not be driven to despair. Grounded in the Gospel, such hope affirms that love is stronger than death. Loorz writes:

Post-doom spirituality . . . accepts the fullness of our reality: the tragedy as well as the beauty. This spirituality moves into—and then eventually beyond—grief and repentance toward a deeper, more courageous, compassionate, and spiritual aliveness. . . .

Facing the reality that we’re standing on a precipice right now, as a species and as a whole planet, is sobering, to say the least. But facing what is real opens the heart to grief, which somehow opens the heart to love even more deeply. . . .

When you reconnect with the alive world in a more compassionate way, and when you realize that the whole world is a living system that can only thrive when death makes room for new life, you may feel a calm settle into you. You may find yourself with the energy that comes from love to embrace the whole story, including the necessary emptiness and loss. . . .

When we look toward what has been lost with the climate crisis or other ecological damage that our species has inflicted, we do still need to strive toward repair, but the cure is within our own mentality. The mentality that love really is as strong as death (like the beloved says to the lover in [the] Song of Solomon) compels us to regard those of us who remain—forests, polar bears, wilderness, people—with fierce love, looking toward how we can all live our highest quality of life together as beloved community, no matter what.

We do not need to minimize or overlook the pain and tragedy we encounter as we live in this time of interwoven crises. Eventually, when we recognize that the pain is directly connected with our love, we can embrace it. We can move into actions of restoration that are firmly planted in love. [3]

The Christ Mystery

Richard writes about how the coming of Christ is far more than the birth of a baby. The Christ Mystery is nothing less than a cosmic hope for history: 

The Second Coming of Christ that history is waiting for is not the same as the baby Jesus or even the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus was one man, and Christ is not his last name. The Christ includes the whole sweep of creation and history joined with him—and us too. We call this the Cosmic Christ. We ourselves are members of the Body of Christ and the Cosmic Christ, even though we are not the historical Jesus. So we very rightly believe in “Jesus Christ,” and both words are essential.

The celebration of Christmas is not a sentimental waiting for a baby to be born, but much more an asking for history to be born! (see Romans 8:20–23). Any spirituality that makes too much of the baby Jesus is perhaps not yet ready for real life. God clearly wants friends, partners, and images, if we are to believe the biblical texts. God, it seems, wants mature religion and a free response from us. God loves us as partners, with mutual give and take, and we eventually become the God that we love. 

All of us take part in the evolving, universe-spanning Christ Mystery. Jesus is a map for the time-bound and personal level of life, and Christ is the blueprint for all time and space and life itself. Both reveal the universal pattern of self-emptying and infilling (Christ) and death and resurrection (Jesus), which is the process we have called “holiness,” “salvation,” or just “growth,” at different times in our history. For Christians, this universal pattern perfectly mimics the inner life of the Trinity in Christian theology, which is our template for how reality unfolds, since all things are created “in the image and likeness” of God (Genesis 1:26–27).

The power of the biblical proclamation is that it clearly invites us into “cooperation” (Romans 8:28), free “participation” (Philippians 3:10), and the love of free and mature persons in God (Ephesians 4:13). We can apparently trust ourselves to grow because God has done it first and foremost. The Christ we are asking for and waiting for includes our own full birth and the further birth of history and creation. Now we can say “Come, Christ Jesus” with a whole new understanding and a deliberate passion!

Franciscan theologian and scientist Ilia Delio affirms the intrinsic hope and loving responsibility of Christian faith in an evolutionary universe:

We must suffer through to something higher, something more unified, more conscious, more being in love. Hope must be born over and over again, for where there is love, there is hope. Christian life is birthing love into greater unity; it is our contribution to a universe in evolution. We point the way to something more than ourselves, something up ahead that we are now participating in, where heaven and earth will be renewed (Revelation 21). [1]

Cosmic Hope

Richard’s love for the Trinity finds inspiration from the Franciscan mystical scholar St. Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274), who viewed all reality as coming from, participating with, and returning to God. Such a cosmic vision is mystical hope at its best!

Bonaventure’s vision is positive, mystic, cosmic, intimately relational, and largely concerned with cleansing the lens of our perception and our intention so we can see and enjoy fully. He shows little interest in a reward/punishment frame for history.

He starts very simply: “For [none] can have understanding unless [they] consider where things come from, how they are led back to their end, and how God shines forth in them.” [1] For Bonaventure, the perfection of God and God’s creation is quite simply a full circle, and to be whole the circle must and will complete itself. He knows that Alpha and Omega are finally the same, and the key holding it all together in unity is the “Christ Mystery,” or the essential unity of matter and spirit, humanity and divinity.

In Bonaventure’s world, the frame of reality was still big, hopeful, and positive. He was profoundly Trinitarian, where the love always and forever flows in one positive and forward direction. That was both his starting point and his ending point. Most of Christian history has not been Trinitarian except in name, I am sad to report. It has largely been a worship of a Jesus who was extracted from the Trinity—and thus Jesus apart from the eternal Christ, who then became more a harsh judge of humanity than a shining exemplar of humanity “holding all things in unity” (see Colossians 1:17–20).

Today the Catholic Tradition celebrates the feast of the “Immaculate Conception” of Mary, who is the feminine archetype of a human woman carrying such wholeness from the very beginning of her life. This is esoteric for many, but it is really quite profound in its declaration!

God, for Bonaventure, is not an offended monarch on a throne throwing down thunderbolts, but a “fountain fullness” that flows, overflows, and fills all things in one exclusively positive direction. Reality is thus in process, participatory; it is love itself. God as Trinitarian Flow is the blueprint and pattern for all relationships and thus all of creation, which we now know from contemporary science is exactly the case.

I regret to say that there has been a massive loss of hope in Western history, a hope still so grandly evident in Bonaventure in the 13th century. His God was so much bigger and more glorious than someone to be afraid of, or the one who punished bad guys—because his cosmos was itself huge, benevolent, and coherent. Did his big God beget an equally big and generous cosmos? Or did his big cosmos imply a very big God? You can start on either side. For many today, awe before the universe leads them to reverence whoever created this infinity of Mystery and Beauty.

The Theological Virtue of Hope

Mystical hope offers us an experience of trust that God’s presence, love, and mercy is in and all around us, regardless of circumstances or future outcome. Father Richard Rohr writes of such hope through our anticipation of Jesus’ coming during Advent:

“Come, Lord Jesus,” the Advent mantra, means that all of Christian history has to live out of a kind of deliberate emptiness, a kind of chosen non-fulfillment. Perfect fullness is always to come, and we do not need to demand it now. The theological virtue of hope keeps the field of life wide open and especially open to grace and to a future created by God rather than ourselves. This is exactly what it means to be “awake,” as the Gospel urges us! We can also use other a words for Advent: aware, alive, attentive, alert are all appropriate. Advent is, above all else, a call to full consciousness and also a forewarning about the high price of consciousness.

When we demand—or “hope for”—satisfaction from one another, when we demand any completion to history on our terms, when we demand that our anxiety or dissatisfaction be taken away, saying as it were, “Why weren’t you this for me? Why didn’t life do that for me?” we are refusing to say, “Come, Lord Jesus.” We are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always still being given by God.

“Why weren’t you this for me? Why didn’t life do that for me?” we are refusing to say, “Come, Lord Jesus.” We are refusing to hold out for the full picture that is always still being given by God.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann views hope as trust in what God has done and will do, in spite of evidence to the contrary: 

Hope in gospel faith is not just a vague feeling that things will work out, for it is evident that things will not just work out. Rather, hope is the conviction, against a great deal of data, that God is tenacious and persistent in overcoming the deathliness of the world, that God intends joy and peace. Christians find compelling evidence, in the story of Jesus, that Jesus, with great persistence and great vulnerability, everywhere he went, turned the enmity of society toward a new possibility, turned the sadness of the world toward joy, introduced a new regime where the dead are raised, the lost are found, and the displaced are brought home again. [1]

Richard continues: 

“Come, Lord Jesus” is a leap into the kind of freedom and surrender that is rightly called the virtue of hope. Hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without full closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves. We are able to trust that Christ will come again, just as Christ has come into our past, into our private dilemmas, and into our suffering world. Our Christian past then becomes our Christian prologue, and “Come, Lord Jesus” is not a cry of desperation but an assured shout of cosmic hope.

The Gift of Confidence

Father Richard describes the gift of confidence, which arises not from our ego or efforts, but from the foundational goodness of God. 

When we are confident, we believe in a deep way that life is good, God is good, and humanity is good. We become safe and salutary people for others. We do exciting and imaginative things because we are confident that we are part of a story line that is going somewhere, and we want to be connected to something good. This is what modern secularism cannot offer us.

Theologically speaking, we identify the virtues of faith, hope, and love as participation in the very life of God. We don’t achieve this by will power; we already participate in it by our deepest nature. It is not occasioned by perfect circumstances. In fact, most of the people I know who have great faith or hope live in difficult circumstances.

True confidence is really a blending of both faith and hope. I don’t understand the alchemy of that union, but I know when it is present and when it isn’t. It often feels like something which I have accidentally discovered, something given from nowhere, something that participates in Someone Else’s life. It is of an entirely different nature than natural virtues like temperance or patience, which we gain through practice. I think that is why we pray for hope, wait for it, and believe in it, leaving the ground fallow until it comes. Those who do such things know that it does come and is always given—and all they can do is thank Someone.

The good news is that there is a guide, a kind of inner compass—and it resides within each of us. As the Scriptures put it, “the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). This Holy Spirit, described in John’s Gospel as an “advocate” (John 14:16), guides all of us from home and toward home. The Holy Spirit is entirely for us, more than we are for ourselves, it seems. She speaks in our favor against the negative voices that judge and condemn us. This gives us all such hope—now we do not have to do life all by ourselves, or even do life perfectly “right.” Our life will be “done unto us,” just as happened with Mary (see Luke 1:38).

Optimism is a natural virtue and a wonderful gift of temperament when things are going well, when we think tomorrow will be better than today. Yet Christian hope has nothing to do with the belief that tomorrow is necessarily going to be better. Jesus seems to be saying that if even one mustard seed is sprouting, or one coin found, or one sheep recovered (see Luke 15)—that is reason enough for a big party! Even a small indicator of God is still an indicator of God—and therefore an indicator of final reason, meaning, and joy. A little bit of God goes a long way. 

Day 6

They said to him, ‘Rabbi, where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ John 1.38−39

Jesus of Nazareth,

You met unlikely people in unlikely places

and joined yourself to them in friendship.

May we be like you in this way,

finding friends at crossroads and bus-stops,

in queues and crises, in kindness and curiosity.

Because we, like you,

need the company of others. Amen.

Tuama, Padraig O. Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community . Hymns Ancient & Modern. Kindle Edition.

God Is Present in All

In keeping with his Franciscan tradition, Father Richard teaches that we can find God’s freely given image in all of creation, beginning with ourselves! 

The purpose of prayer and religious seeking is to see the truth about Reality, to see what is. And at the bottom of what is is always goodness. The foundation is always love. Here is a mantra that we might repeat throughout our day: “God’s life is living itself in me. I am aware of life living itself in me.”

We cannot not live in the presence of God. We are totally surrounded by God, even as we read these words. This not some New Age idea; recall St. Patrick’s (c. 373–c. 463) blessing, “God beneath you, God in front of you, God behind you, God above you, God within you.”

Once I can see the Mystery here, and trust the Mystery even in this piece of clay that I am, then I can also see it in you. We are eventually able to see the divine image within ourselves, in each other, and in all things. Finally, the seeing is one. How we see anything is how we will see everything.

Jesus pushes this seeing to the social edge. Can we recognize the image of Christ in the least of our fellow human beings? That is his only description of the final judgment (see Matthew 25). Nothing about ten commandments, nothing about church attendance—simply a matter of our ability to see. Can we meet Christ in the “nobodies” who can’t play our game of success? In those who cannot reward us in return? When we see the image of God where we are not accustomed to seeing the image of God, then we see with the infinitely tender eyes of God.

Finally, Jesus says we have to love and recognize the divine image even in our enemies (see Matthew 5:44). He teaches what many leaders, spiritual and otherwise, could never demand of their followers: love of the enemy. Logically that makes no sense. Yet soulfully it makes absolute sense, because in terms of the soul, it really is all or nothing. Either we see the divine image in all created things, or we end up not seeing it very well at all. There is a first epiphany, and gradually the circle keeps moving outward, widening its embrace. It is almost the core meaning of a whole and holy life!

The Christian vision is that the whole world is a sacred temple. If that is true, then our enemies are sacred, too. Who else created them but God? The ability to respect the outsider is probably the litmus test of true seeing. And it doesn’t stop with human beings and enemies and the “least of these.” It moves to frogs and water and weeds. Everything becomes enchanting once we have full sight. One God, one world, one truth, one suffering, and one love (see Ephesians 4:4–6). All we can do is participate and enjoy. I love to ask Christians—why would anyone be afraid of that?

God Is beyond Gender

Virtually all Christians are taught to call God “Father,” as Jesus did himself. Yet Richard understands the need for both masculine and feminine images of God. He writes: 

I must invite us all to reclaim and honor female wisdom, which is often qualitatively different from male wisdom. I hope this perspective can invite you to trust your own experiences with the divine feminine as well. For many, it is an utterly new opening, since they always falsely assumed that God is somehow masculine.

Although Jesus was clearly of the masculine gender, the Universal Christ is beyond gender, and so it should be expected that the Big Tradition would have found feminine ways, consciously or unconsciously, to symbolize the full Divine Incarnation and to give God a more feminine character—as the Bible itself often does. [1]

New Mexico friend and mystic Mirabai Starr offers images of God as female and feminine, which is affirming and healing for many people. 

Your God transcends gender. And yet She is also Mother. She is Shekhinah, pillar of holy fire, guiding you through the wilderness. She is Sophia and Al-Hakim, the essence of Wisdom, filling your troubled heart and telling you exactly what needs to be done next. She is Jamal, beauty, and Sakina, serenity. She is Rahim, the merciful source of all life. She is Shakti, coursing through your veins when you cry out for God, infusing you with unbearable longing. She is Guanyin, radiating well-being. She is Tara, formed from the Buddha’s own tears as he gazed upon the suffering of the world and wept. She is Miriam, Mary, Maryam.

You feel Her closest when you are shattered and when you are exalted. She dives into the heart of the tidal wave and scoops you into Her arms, promising that no matter how disastrous the disaster, She will always be with you. She is in the front row clapping too loudly when you get it right. Your God sneaks you in the back door to daven with the learned men in the synagogue. She whispers in your ear when you are trying to control yourself: Go ahead, She says, break the alabaster jar and cover His feet with priceless nard.

Your God transcends form. And yet She also dwells within every created thing. She animates all that is growing and going to seed, all that is ripened and fragrant, all that is raw and undomesticated. She dwells in creativity, in beauty, in chaos. She breathes with the laboring female animals, breathes with the newborn’s first inhalation, breathes with the old ones as they exhale one last time. She is the passion of lovers, the dignity of the queen. She is merciful, but She is not the least bit sentimental.

You do not mean to break the rules and call Her God. You try not to even conceive of God that way. But sometimes you can’t help it. Everything that feels holy feels like Her.