Father Richard considers how dualistic thinking is at the root of our illusions of human perfection:
Some Navajo traditional weavers include an intentional imperfection in their weaving pattern—a space sometimes called a “spirit line.” It is said to be the place where the Spirit moves in and out of the design. The Semitic mind, the Indigenous mind, the Eastern mind (which, by the way, Jesus would have been much closer to) understands perfection in precisely that way. Eastern thought is much more comfortable with paradox, mystery, and nondual thinking than the Western mind which has been much more formed by Greek logic, which is very clear, very consistent, and very helpful by also being dualistic. It seems to me that we first have to succeed at good dualistic thinking before we can also experience its limitations. But many in the West just stop at dualism and then find themselves struggling to deal with death, suffering, the illogical nature of love, any honest notion of God, Mystery, orinfinity.
In conversation with Tami Simon on her Insights at the Edge podcast, Quaker teacher and activist Parker Palmer shared:
It’s been a long time since I imagined that I would ever arrive at perfection in this aspect of my life or any other aspect of my life. I actually think that perfection is a kind of nightmarish wish dream. If you think of it socially, the people who promise perfection on earth are actually the totalitarian dictators who want to run everything themselves and are offering a false promise in order to seduce people into some sort of political or social pathology. And I feel the same way about spiritual teachers who promise perfection. I have never felt that wholeness, that human wholeness, a word that has meaning for me, had anything to do with perfection. Wholeness has to do with embracing the whole of who you are, which includes your shadow as well as your light. It includes the broken parts of you as well as the whole parts of you. [1]
Richard emphasizes:
Perfection is not the elimination of imperfection, as we think. Divine perfection is, in fact, the ability torecognize, forgive, and include imperfection!—just as God does with all of us. Only in this way can we find the beautiful and hidden wholeness of God underneath the passing human show. This is the pearl of great price (see Matthew 13:45–46) in my opinion. Nondual thinking and seeing is the change that changes everything. It makes love, mercy, patience, and forgiveness possible.
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Sarah Young: Jesus Calling: July 31st
Trust Me in the depths of your being. It is there that I live in constant communication with you. When you feel flustered and frazzled on the outside, do not get upset with yourself. You are only human, and the swirl of events going on all around you will sometimes feel overwhelming. Rather than scolding yourself for your humanness, remind yourself that I am both with you and within you. I am with you at all times, encouraging and supportive rather than condemning. I know that deep within you, where I live, My Peace is your continual experience. Slow down your pace of living for a time. Quiet your mind in My Presence. Then you will be able to hear Me bestowing the resurrection blessing: Peace be with you.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Colossians 1:27 (NLT) 27 For God wanted them to know that the riches and glory of Christ are for you Gentiles, too. And this is the secret: Christ lives in you. This gives you assurance of sharing his glory.
Additional insight regarding Colossians 1:26-27: Through Christ, God’s “message” was made open to all. God’s secret plan is “Christ lives in you” – God planned to have his Son, Jesus Christ, live in the hearts of all who believe in him – even Gentiles like the Colossians. Do you know Christ? He is not hidden if you will come to him.
Matthew 28:20 (NLT) 20 Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
Additional insight regarding Matthew 28:20: How is Jesus “with” us? Jesus was with the disciples physically until he ascended into Heaven and then spiritually through the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4). The Holy Spirit would be Jesus’ presence that would never leave them (John 14:26 – “But when the Father sends the Advocate as my representative—that is, the Holy Spirit—he will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I have told you.”). Jesus continues to be with us today through his Spirit.
John 20:19 (NLT) Jesus Appears to His Disciples 19 That Sunday evening the disciples were meeting behind locked doors because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders. Suddenly, Jesus was standing there among them! “Peace be with you,” he said
Richard Rohr explains the necessity of moving beyond a relationship with God that is based on morality and law:
Religion is ultimately not a moral matter; it’s a mystical matter. While most of us begin focused on moral proficiency and perfection, we can’t spend our whole lives this way. Paul calls this first-half-of-life approach “the law”; I call it the performance principle. We think, “I’m good because I obey this commandment, because I do this kind of work, or because I belong to this group.” That’s the calculus the ego understands. The human psyche, all organizations, and governments need this kind of common-sense structure at some level. But that game has to fall apart, or it will kill us. Paul says the law leads to death (see Romans 7:5; Galatians 3:10). Yet many Christians are still trapped inside the law, believing that by doing the right things, they’re going to somehow attain worthiness or acceptance from God. The ways in which we’ve defined ourselves as successful, moral, right, good, on top of it, number one … haveto fail us! [1]
Pastor Juanita Campbell Rasmus describes how having a rules-based approach to religion left her feeling hollow and out of touch with God’s love:
As a child, rules kept me safe from judgment and harm, safe from breaking any of God’s do-not-cross-this-line rules. I thought the rules worked: I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t steal, I didn’t gamble, I didn’t … and so on, my little checklist of righteousness went. And yet I was aware that my life had a certain quality of hollowness to it….
Understanding began to come to me one day while I was lying on the sofa in the living room…. The room was filled with the warm midday sun. As I lay there, the Lord said, You have built a life filled with rules. Your rules have boxed you in, and they have boxed me out.
I didn’t get it. Wasn’t the God-life all about following rules? Isn’t Christianity rooted in Thou shalt not? Had I gotten what it meant to be a Christian totally wrong? If it wasn’t about the rules, then what had I wasted my time and life doing all these years? And if I had gotten this all wrong, what else had I gotten wrong about God? Even more, what would it take to get it right?…
Rules alone had left me hollow inside, but the sense that the Spirit was freeing me to be in relationship was so life-giving that all I could call it was joy. Something about this new awareness began to fill some of the emptiness that I had been feeling…. I have found that relationship with God and my practice of abiding with God, being joined with God, are what make me solid inside and out…. Perhaps the word love best describes what seemed to be flowing into me; yes, a deep knowing that I was loved.
From Andrew Lang, a guy who shows up occasionally in my email box.
Hey CO few, A couple days after Heather and I got back from our mini-moon (mini-honeymoon), I stumbled upon the beautiful poem below from Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.In a very personal way, it speaks to what I’m feeling as I try to hold the big emotions of our wedding and re-enter my workplace with its spreadsheets, meetings, and silly little emails.But in a more expansive way, it reminds me of the ongoing challenge of living in the both/and of what it means to be an informed human in a globalized world right now:Of witnessing the joys of my kids running around while knowing Palestinian children are being intentionally starved to death in Gaza; of enjoying dinner with friends while knowing many folks five blocks away can’t afford even a portion of the meal we’re enjoying; of having hope for the future while not yet seeing how we might possibly get there.Or, to borrow a phrase from the poem, being absolutely “devastated and stunned with joy” at the same time…and maintaining a tender connection with each.
As you read, I invite you to feel for how it connects with your story and how you’re experiencing the tension of the both/and in your own life and communities.
For When People Ask I want a word that means okay and not okay, more than that: a word that means devastated and stunned with joy. I want the word that says I feel it all all at once. The heart is not like a songbird singing only one note at a time, more like a Tuvan throat singer able to sing both a drone and simultaneously two or three harmonics high above it—a sound, the Tuvans say, that gives the impression of wind swirling among rocks. The heart understands swirl, how the churning of opposite feelings weaves through us like an insistent breeze leads us wordlessly deeper into ourselves, blesses us with paradox so we might walk more openly into this world so rife with devastation, this world so ripe with joy.
It is in the process of embracing our imperfections that we find our truest gifts: courage, compassion, and connection. —Brené Brown
Father Richard shares how the teachings of the 19th-century French nun Thérèse of Lisieux have supported his own spiritual journey:
Thérèse humbly trusted her own experience and taught the spirituality of imperfection which was so radical in her time (and our own). Thérèse may be one of my favorite saints because I tend to be a perfectionist. In the popular personality typing system known as the Enneagram, I’m a Type One. [1] The trap for the One is the ideal of perfectionism (for which we are responsible). This makes us dissatisfied and disappointed by nearly everything, starting with ourselves.
Thérèse has helped me to embrace my own imperfection and that of others. When her sister Céline was saddened by her own faults, Thérèse advised her to seek peace even when she felt displeasing to herself as she “hits against the stones in the night.” [2] If we pay attention even for an hour, we observe how hard it is to be “displeasing” to ourselves! To resolve this problem, Thérèse teaches us to let go of the very need to “think well of ourselves” to begin with! That’s our ego talking, not God. [3]
Worthiness is not the issue; the issue is trust and surrender. As Thérèse understood, “Jesus does not demand great actions from us but simply surrender and gratitude.” [4] Let’s resolve this once and for all: You’re not worthy! None of us are. That worthiness road is a game of denial and pretend. We’re all saved by grace. We’re all being loved in spite of ourselves. That’s why I can also say, “You’re all worthy!” But your worthiness has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the goodness of God. [5]
Author Dr. Brené Brown teaches about the gifts that come with embracing our imperfection:
When we can let go of what other people think and own our story, we gain access to our worthiness—the feeling that we are enough just as we are and that we are worthy of love and belonging. When we spend a lifetime trying to distance ourselves from the parts of our lives that don’t fit with who we think we’re supposed to be, we stand outside of our story and hustle for our worthiness by constantly performing, perfecting, pleasing, and proving….
There is a line from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” that serves as a reminder to me when … I’m trying to control everything and make it perfect. The line is, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”… This line helps me remember the beauty of the cracks (and the messy house and the imperfect manuscript and the too-tight jeans). It reminds me that our imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together. Imperfectly, but together.
I caught this image at Westminster Abbey in London. I thought it was wonderful that the seat of the Church of England can also have technical issues. They chided me for taking this picture.
One Sunday, the slides didn’t work. Or, more accurately, there was no one to run the slides. I watched from the back as the congregation fumbled for their phones, squinting at tiny screens to find the second verse to “How Great Thou Art.” A few people just sang from memory, their voices carrying the melody while others hummed along uncertainly. It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t seamless. It was beautifully, messily human. And it was exactly what needed to happen. A Theology of Imperfection”Let there be gaps” has become one of my core ministry philosophies—a deliberate choice to prioritize people over performance, souls over systems. It can sound nearly heretical in a church culture obsessed with ✨excellence✨, where we’ve bought into the lie that God’s love somehow depends on our ability to deliver a flawless Sunday morning experience. But ministry is too precious, too holy, too sacred to treat volunteers like cannon fodder. As my old boss Pastor John Messer used to say, “We don’t throw people into the breach—and yet that’s exactly what happens when we prioritize institutional perfection over human dignity. We create a system where the same faithful few run slides every single week, make coffee every single Sunday, staff the nursery until they’re running on nothing but fumes and resentment.We might tell ourselves it’s for the good of the congregation. We convince ourselves that gaps would hurt people’s experience. But what we’re really doing is participating in a consumerist theology that says the church exists to be purveyors spiritual goods and services rather than to form a community of mutual care and shared responsibility. The Crisis of False Abundance. Here’s what I’ve learned: when the same two people handle the slides every week without fail, the congregation assumes everything is fine. They hear announcements about needing volunteers, but their eyes tell them a different story. The slides are up. The coffee is hot. The nursery is staffed. Clearly, they don’t really need help.This is where some HBR change management wisdom intersects with Gospel truth—sometimes you have to let the status quo reveal its own unsustainability. When people show up and there are no slides, when the coffee station sits empty, when childcare isn’t available because we’re giving our volunteers the sabbath they deserve, suddenly the invisible labor becomes visible. The need becomes real. Sometimes you have to let the status quo reveal its own unsustainability. I’m not talking about manufactured crises or manipulatively withholding care. I’m talking about an honest acknowledgment that we cannot and should not expect a handful of people to carry the entire burden of communal worship. When gaps appear, they create space for new voices, new hands, new hearts to join the work. Beyond the Consumer Church The resistance to this philosophy reveals how deeply we’ve internalized a consumer model of faith. We’ve divided our communities into producers and consumers, where a dedicated few work tirelessly to provide a five-star spiritual experience for everyone else. It’s Burger King theology. Have it your way—fast, convenient, consistent, and utterly devoid of the messy beauty of authentic community.But the early church looked nothing like this. In those house churches scattered across the Roman Empire, everyone contributed something. Everyone brought their gifts, their resources, their presence to the common table. The community’s wellbeing was a shared responsibility, not the burden of a pastoral staff and a small group (usually 20% of the congregation) of the loyal volunteers.This is koinonia—the kind of fellowship that says we are all producers and consumers simultaneously. We all contribute to and benefit from the community’s life together. It’s a radically different vision from the church-as-vendor model that has infected so much of American Christianity.The Art of Sacred DisruptionLetting gaps show can be an (albeit risky) act of prophetic imagination. It disrupts the fantasy that churches run on pastoral magic and volunteer martyrdom. It forces us to confront the question: what are we actually here for? Maybe folks aren’t coming for your artisanal coffee or your perfectly timed slide transitions. Maybe they’re coming for something deeper—connection, meaning, a place to wrestle with the holy mysteries. When you strip away the non-essentials— what my Old Testament professor called the “butt-naked essentialism”—you discover what actually matters to your community.I’ve seen churches panic about nursery coverage, only to discover that families are (occasionally!) happy to worship together, children included. I’ve watched congregations survive electricity failures and realize that singing together, voices mingling without the crutch of perfect technology, actually created more intimacy than any polished presentation ever could. Sabbath for the Servants At its foundation, this philosophy is about extending sabbath rest to those who serve. It’s recognizing that everyone—including your most dedicated volunteers—deserves to sit in the pew, to receive rather than give, to be ministered to rather than always ministering.If I as the pastor refuse to let the gaps show, I’m essentially saying that the comfort of the many matters more than the wellbeing of the few who serve. I’m prioritizing institutional appearance over individuals. I’m perpetuating a system where faithfulness is rewarded with endless obligation. Ew.But what if I trusted that God’s work doesn’t depend on my ability to maintain perfect systems? What if I believed that the Spirit moves just as powerfully—maybe more powerfully—in the spaces between our carefully planned programs? The Beautiful Breakdown. That Sunday when there was no one behind the iMac keyboard, something beautiful happened in the breakdown. People looked up from their phones and made eye contact. They listened more carefully to the words they were singing. They helped each other find the page numbers in hymnals we hadn’t used in months.And by Tuesday, three people had volunteered to join the tech team.The gap had done its work—not through manipulation or manufactured crisis, but through honest acknowledgment of our limitations and trust in the community’s capacity to respond. It was a tinsy-tiny resurrection, the kind that happens when we stop trying to control every outcome and start believing in the church’s ability to be the church.What gaps might your community need to see? What would happen if you trusted your congregation with the truth about your needs rather than maintaining the illusion of perfect systems? Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is admit we can’t do it all—and create space for others to discover their own calling in the work of love.
Father Richard Rohr dispels the long-lasting myth that our efforts to be perfect make us more loveable or valuable to God.
There is a common misperception that deeply distorts the reading of the Scriptures and much spirituality. I call it “spiritual capitalism,” which centers around a common philosophy of “I can do it, and I must do it, and I will do it.” This is the mindset of early-stage ego consciousness. It puts all the emphasis and total reliance on “me,” my effort, and my spiritual accomplishments. It has little active trust in God’s grace and mercy. Unfortunately, the driving energy is fear and more effort, instead of quiet confidence and gratitude. It becomes about climbing instead of surrendering. The first feels good, while the second feels like falling, failing, or even dying. Who likes that? Certainly not the separate self. The ego always wants to feel that it’s achieved salvation somehow. Grace and forgiveness are always a humiliation for the ego.
The movement known as Jansenism in the 17th and 18th centuries is one theological distortion that emphasized moral austerity and fear of God’s justice more than any trust in God’s mercy. God was understood to be wrathful, vindictive, and punitive, and all the appropriate Scriptures were found to make these very points. It’s hard to find a Western Christian—Catholic or Protestant—who has not been formed by this theology. Most mainline Christians pay sincere lip service to grace and mercy, but in the practical order believe life is almost entirely about performance and moral achievement.
The common manifestation of this ever-recurring pattern might simply be called perfectionism. The word itself is taken from a single passage in Matthew 5:48, where Jesus tells us to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Of course, perfection as such is a divine or mathematical concept and has never been a human one. Jesus offers it as guidance for how we can love our enemies, of which he has just spoken (5:43–47). He is surely saying that we cannot obey this humanly impossible commandment by willpower, but only by surrendering to the Divine Perfection that can and will flow through us. In other words, we cannot be perfect of ourselves—but God can. Yet we used this one passage to give people the exact opposite impression—that they could indeed be perfect in themselves!
In his proclamation of St. Thérèse of Lisieux as a Doctor of the Church, Pope St. John Paul II said, “She has made the Gospel shine appealingly in our time…. She helped to heal souls of the rigors and fears of Jansenism, which tended to stress God’s justice rather than [God’s] divine mercy.” [1]
Thérèse rightly named this spirituality her “Little Way.” It was nothing more than a simple and clear recovery of the pure gospel message! It was she (and Francis of Assisi) who gave me the courage as a young man to read the Scriptures through this primary lens of littleness instead of some possible bigness.
Perfectionism: The Enemy of Goodness and Grace
The greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection. —Richard Rohr, Eager to Love
Richard Rohr discovered the writings of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) during his first year as a Franciscan. Richard describes Thérèse’s teaching as “a spirituality of imperfection”:
Thérèse of Lisieux was a French Carmelite nun with minimal formal education, who in her short, hidden life of only twenty-four years captured the essence of Jesus’ core teachings on love. Thérèse was declared a Doctor of the Church, which means her teaching is seen as thoroughly reliable and trustworthy. She “democratized holiness,” as Brother Joseph Schmidt said, “making it clear that holiness is within the reach of anyone willing to do God’s will in love at each successive moment as life unfolds.” [1]
Thérèse came into a nineteenth-century Catholic Church that often believed in an angry, punitive God, perfectionism, and validation by personal good behavior—which is a very unstable and illusory path. In the midst of this rigid environment, Thérèse was convinced that her message, taught to her by Jesus himself, was “totally new.” [2] The gospel of radical grace had been forgotten by many Christians so much so that Thérèse had to call it “new.”
Thérèse called this simple, childlike path her “little way.” It is a spirituality of imperfection. In a letter to priest Adolphe Roulland, she writes: “Perfection seems simple to me, I see it is sufficient to recognize one’s nothingness and to abandon oneself as a child into God’s arms.” [3] Any Christian “perfection” is, in fact, our ability to include, forgive, and accept our imperfection. As I’ve often said, we grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That might just be the central lesson of how spiritual growth happens, though nothing in us wants to believe it.
If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially in ourselves. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble, “little,” and earnest will find it! A “perfect” person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than the ones who think they are totally above and beyond imperfection. It becomes rather obvious once we say it out loud. [4]
Near the end of her life, Thérèse explained her little way to her sister, and this became part of her autobiography Story of a Soul. In contrast to the “big way” of heroic perfectionism, she teaches, in essence, that as a little one “with all [her] imperfections,” God’s love is drawn toward her. God has to love her and help her because she is “too small to climb the rough stairway of perfection.” [5] With utter confidence, she “believed herself infinitely loved by Infinite Love.”
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What Does it Mean to Do “Greater Works” than Jesus? Skye Jethani
During his farewell discourse with his apostles, Jesus makes one of the more shocking—and misunderstood—promises found anywhere in the gospels. He said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12). This verse provokes an obvious and important question—what are the “greater works” Jesus’ followers will do?We’ve already looked at our culture’s fixation on all things spectacular and the way it causes us to mistakenly focus on Jesus’ power rather than on Jesus himself. This same cultural bias has also warped the way many have misunderstood this verse. For those shaped by pop consumer Christianity, “greater works” is automatically assumed to mean more spectacular works. This view believes that because Jesus walked on water, healed the sick, and calmed storms, then to do greater works means the true disciples of Jesus will accomplish even more astonishing signs and wonders. In a culture drawn to the spectacular, and in church traditions dedicated to attracting crowds, it’s obvious why this interpretation is appealing. However, there are a few problems with understanding “greater” to mean more astonishing. First, it is plainly obvious that most of those who follow Jesus are not doing more spectacular works than he performed. It’s hard to be more spectacular than raising the dead, which Jesus did on multiple occasions, and the last time I checked, most Christians were not emptying the cemeteries. Therefore, this interpretation would immediately call into question the authenticity of the faith of nearly every Christian alive, and indeed the faith of every Christian who has ever lived. Second, throughout the history of the church, most have not interpreted this verse to mean we would do more spectacular miracles than Jesus. This is a rather late interpretation that gained traction with the arrival of the charismatic movements—particularly in the United States and in the global south—in the twentieth century.Rather than understanding “greater works” to mean more spectacular, most throughout Christian history have understood Jesus to mean his followers would do more works. In this case, “greater” means greater in quantity, scale, and influence. Remember, Jesus’ public ministry was amazingly brief—approximately three years, and it was confined to a geographic area about the size of New Jersey. Before they died, the apostles Jesus was speaking to in John 14 would preach the gospel and start churches throughout the ancient world from the Iberian peninsula to the Indian subcontinent. Even in the Book of Acts, we see more people put their faith in Christ through the ministry of the apostles than ever responded to the preaching of Jesus himself. In this regard, their works were greater than Jesus’.Later generations of believers would go on to invent hospitals, educate countless millions, and mobilize efforts to feed, clothe, and comfort more people than any movement in history. Although it may sound blasphemous it is nonetheless true that today alone the followers of Jesus will impact more lives than Jesus impacted during his entire earthly ministry. We lose sight of this remarkable fact when we focus only on the method of our works rather than on their outcome. We assume that to be “greater works” than Jesus’ they must be accomplished through some supernatural agency rather than human ingenuity. This is, of course, ridiculous.In the end, what matters is that we feed a hungry child—not whether the food appeared miraculously or arrived on the back of a truck. And maybe we need to rethink what qualifies as a miracle to begin with. After all, which is the greater wonder—Christ’s power to transform water into wine, or his power to transform hearts to be generous, merciful, and loving? We should remember that God desires to do a great work in us, not merely through us.
O God, who has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth, and sent your blessed Son, Jesus Christ, to preach peace to those that are far off, and to those that are near; grant that all peoples of the world may feel after you and find you; quicken, O God, the fulfillment of your promise to pour out your Spirit upon all flesh, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Rabbi Or Rose tells of the prophetic witness and spiritual audacity of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), one of the great religious leaders of the 20th century.
Heschel came to the United States in 1940 under great duress, narrowly escaping the brutal Nazi onslaught in Europe…. Tragically, many of Heschel’s family members—including his mother and three of his sisters—were murdered by the Nazis in the following months and years…. After acculturating to life in the United States and establishing himself as a respected academic and gifted religious writer, Heschel became increasingly involved in public affairs….
Heschel gave his first major address on civil rights in March 1963 at the National Conference on Religion and Race in Chicago. In his remarks, he compared the plight of African Americans in the United States to the ancient Israelite slaves in Egypt. In one particularly dramatic moment, he stated, “It was easier for the children of Israel to cross the Red Sea than for a Negro to cross certain university campuses.” [1] He went on to challenge listeners—including many Jewish audience members—to choose between the legacies of Pharoah or Moses.
Heschel embodied the wisdom of the Hebrew prophets at a critical time in history. His Jewish faith inspired hiscommitment to justice for those on the margins:
In fine prophetic fashion, Heschel rails against ritual observance divorced from social responsibility…. He wrote, “Prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action.” [2] While Heschel was an eloquent spokesperson for a life of disciplined religious praxis—including prayer and other traditional observances—he was steadfast in his call for a holistic approach to spirituality and ethics….
Heschel joined Dr. King and other civil rights leaders in the famous Selma to Montgomery March. Upon returning from that protest, he wrote the following words:
For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was about protest and prayer. Legs are not lips, and marching is not kneeling, and yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying. [3]
For Heschel, marching for voting rights was a holy act, an embodied devotional response to God’s ongoing call for dignity and equality…. Rather than turn away in rage or despair from engagement with non-Jews, Heschel became a champion of racial justice and interreligious cooperation. He used his ownexperiences as a victim of bigotry and hatred to work to stamp out these destructive phenomena in his new homeland and throughout the world….
[Heschel] played a vital role in healing racial, religious, and political wounds in America and beyond…. Rather than retreating and insulating himself from the aches and pains of the world, he cultivated relationships with a diverse set of colleagues and organizations and set out to help transform it.
May Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s memory continue to serve as a source of inspiration and challenge to all those who seek to participate in the healing of our shared civilization.
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1.
“God is self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love.”
Brad is one of the most relatable theologians today. I get the sense from him that he is a well-rounded person who has navigated the deconstruction process well, emerged on the other side, and become one of the more grounded and self-aware educators on the Christian faith.
This definition of God from him is something I muse over occasionally when I am driving in my Jeep.
2.
“People ruin their lives by their own foolishness and then are angry at the Lord.”
I guess we all do it. We often want to find someone else to blame for our problems rather than taking responsibility ourselves.
Like any loving parent, God does not protect us from the consequences of our actions. Remember in Galatians? Where Paul says that we will “reap what we sow”? God is not some cosmic being who protects us from hitting rock bottom. If anything, it might be the best thing for us in the long run to hit that rock bottom.
(And, at that point, how interesting that some people thank God that they are finally able to take ownership of their actions and turn their life around!)
3.
“It is through our fulfilling of the commandments that the Lord makes us dispassionate; and it is through His divine teachings that He gives us the light of spiritual knowledge.”
The early Church had an understanding of “dispassion” as a virtue.
It is a word that we do not use much today, but it carries within it some profound wisdom. Dispassion is a certain detachment from our desires that bring us suffering. (Dis- meaning against, and Passio- meaning suffering). The early Church quickly came to understand that it is our disordered loves/passions that cause us suffering.
For this reason, we must practice this virtue or habit of dispassion, to learn to have the right kind of detachment from outcomes and to allow our ego the humiliation of not always getting its way.
The Ten Commandments, then, are simply the starting point for us to learn how to cultivate dispassion and to come to realize that it is in our best interests not always to get our way.
4.
“Those who would know much, and love little, will ever remain at but the beginning of a godly life.”
I am slowly re-reading Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. It is his treatment and analysis of Christian love, examining “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” from every possible angle.
When I first read Works of Love, it was a punch in the face. As a head-oriented person who loves to read and think deeply about things, it was a shock to realize that even reading a book about love does not necessarily translate to loving other people. It was a safe way to engage my brain without having to interact with others. It was in that moment that I realized my tendency to avoid feelings by going into academic thought.
I want to think that, over time, I have become a little less head-oriented as a person and have been able to grow a little bit past “beginner Christianity” and actually love people.
Martin Buber’s work has been an influence on me for some time, ever since I discovered his book, I and Thou.
The dichotomy of Sacred and Profane is something that makes sense during one stage of faith, but not so much in another stage. We treat Sacred things as special and as things to be protected or revered, but then treat Profane things as things to be avoided, discarded, and the like. But at a later stage of faith, it’s more so that there are things that are Sacred and other things that need to be made Holy Again.
The possibility of making something Holy Again is exciting to me. It is not a passive sitting back, and it is not the flippant discarding of something “profane.” To make things Holy Again is a mission, it is a calling, it is to join God in the Christ Project of the Reconciliation of All Things.
Theologian Meggan Watterson describes the source of what she calls “sacred rage”:
There’s a rage that gives us clarity about when our boundaries are being crossed, a rage that gives us critical information that we’re in danger, that someone is harming us or someone we love. There’s a rage that demonstrates to us how interconnected we are, for example when we feel rage while witnessing an injustice….
Seeing George Floyd murdered was something we all witnessed collectively because seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier refused to leave his side, refused to listen to the police officers who told her to move on, and instead remained, and filmed on her iPhone the murder that would reignite social justice movements all over the globe. This form of rage is sacred. It’s a rage that clarifies what we care most about in this world, about what we will put our bodies on the line to stand up for. The distinction is that we let this sacred rage motivate us into action, but when we act we move from love.
Watterson compares sacred rage with rage that seeks to cause harm.
It’s the rage of revenge. The rage of trying to get even. It’s the rage of an endless cycle of retaliation. It’s the rage that can compel us to act in ways we will regret for the rest of our lives, or that will cost us our lives or someone else’s. It’s the rage that refuses mercy. It’s the rage that keeps us up at night locked in ahorrific egoic struggle going over again and again a betrayal, a terrible wrong someone has caused us.
And it’s a rage that thinks it’s right…. That we have every right to cause harm to someone who has harmed us. That we have every right to get all caught up in the ego, in our own tiny window of perception about some person, that we get to take our rage out on them.
Watterson affirms our inherent goodness as the source of both rage and healing:
Rage and goodness are not mutually exclusive. Rage is often necessary in order to draw fierce boundaries when we or those we love or those we feel connected to are being harmed. And rage is necessary to remind us of our innate goodness. We’re angry because we are good, because we recognize, we know innately, what is good. Rage, like a slow controlled burn, can fuel and inform us….
Rage is information. Rage is not an action plan. Rage holds no answers for what’s next. And it can quickly galvanize action. Yet, if we act only from that rage, if we move the way rage wants us to move, we will cause harm to ourselves and others. So when we go to take action, we must first intentionally return to love. Rage informs us about what we love, and love moves us to act in ways only love knows.
There’s something absolutely beautiful about the way God loves, and it’s perfectly captured in Jesus’s parable of the sower in Mark 4. Picture this farmer who just throws seeds everywhere—on the path, in the rocks, among the weeds, on the good soil. His agricultural technique is questionable at best. Any farming instructor would probably give him an F for seed conservation.
But that’s exactly the point.
The sower doesn’t pre-select which ground gets the good seed. He’s not running soil samples first or checking pH levels. He’s just flinging the grace of God around like confetti at a wedding. This is what theologians call prevenient grace—God’s love reaching everyone before they even know they need it. Not just the elect, not just some chosen few, but literally everyone gets seeds.
In a world where we’re constantly sorting people into categories—worthy and unworthy, deserving and undeserving, insiders and outsiders—God’s approach is radically different. Divine love isn’t parceled out based on merit or predetermined worthiness. It’s broadcast indiscriminately, extravagantly, almost wastefully.
But Jesus doesn’t stop there. He explains that The Satan—the accuser, the one who lies and deceives—immediately swoops in to steal this good word from some people. How many of us have heard the good news and then had thoughts creep into our minds: “Nah, that’s not me. I’m too messed up.” Or maybe we’ve been taught lies that God is actually a vengeful cosmic killjoy just waiting to smite us. That’s the work of the accuser.
These lies are insidious because they sound so reasonable. They masquerade as humility or theologicalsophistication. But they’re actually theft—stealing away the very grace that God has freely scattered in ourdirection.
Jesus makes an especially pointed comment about the thorny ground, where money and the pursuit of it actively chokes out spiritual growth. In a culture that treats bank accounts like report cards from heaven, Jesus says wealth is actually a spiritual hazard, an active impediment to spiritual flourishing.
You simplycannot serve both God and money, as Jesus says elsewhere. The thorns don’t just coexist with the good seed; they actively strangle it.
Grace That Multiplies
So what separates the people who get the parable from those who don’t? Jesus makes it clear that the differentiating factor is curiosity. The disciples get closer to Jesus. They ask questions, they lean in, they want to understand. The people on the outside are those who think they already know everything.
Certainty kills curiosity, and curiosity might just be one of God’s love languages. The moment we think we have God figured out, we stop listening. The moment we assume we understand how grace works, we stop marveling at its wildness.
The beautiful thing about good soil isn’t some sort of genetic spiritual lottery. It’s about staying curious, asking questions, and being willing to let God’s ridiculous, indiscriminate love take root in your life.And when it does, grace becomes reproductive.
When God’s love takes hold in your life, it doesn’t just sit there like a trophy on a shelf. It multiplies. Grace creates more grace, more love, more fruit that feeds others. The whole point of grace being received is that it becomes grace that’s given.
In a world obsessed with scarcity and competition, God’s economy operates on abundance and multiplication. The more grace we give away, the more we have. The more love we share, the more love grows. It’s the only investment strategy that’s truly bulletproof—because it’s backed not by market forces, but by the inexhaustible generosity of God.
A prophet has a responsibility for the moment, an openness to what the moment reveals. He is a person who knows what time it is. —Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets
TheTears of Things Reader’s Guide describes the message of the prophet Jeremiah:
The prophet Jeremiah is known for his tears and his rage. He said, “Whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout ‘Violence and destruction!’” (Jeremiah 20:8). He’s known as a prophet of wrath but, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “It would be more significant to say that,” like us, “Jeremiah lived in an age of wrath.” [1]
The son of a priest from Anathoth, a small town near Jerusalem, Jeremiah railed against the religious and political establishments in the seventh century BCE. He proclaimed an agonizingly unpopular message of his people’s imminent destruction by the Babylonian empire, a message “like a burning fire shut up in [his] bones” (Jeremiah 20:9). He foretold famine, plunder, exile, and captivity while his friends and family abandoned him and the royal court imprisoned him.…
Somehow, this heartbroken prophet held fast to a vision of collective renewal through relationship with God: “I will give them a heart to know that I am the Lord; and they shall be my people and I will be their God, for they will return to me with their whole heart” (Jeremiah 24:7). [2]
Richard Rohr considers Jeremiah’s message of faithfulness for our time:
If we believe God is angry in the way that humans are, then it’s too easy for us to end up being angry “without limit.” In fact, if we believe the Creator is always critiquing, judging, and punishing everything, it should be no surprise that our entire world is bathed in rage and resentment. Isn’t this, in fact, much of our experience today? Someone must show us the way through. It cannot be done by law or order, but with a remembering of the great and divine pity modeled and taught by saints and prophets.
I surely believe some form of projection of our anger onto others is at the heart of the nonstop world wars of “Christian” nations. It’s at the center of those cultures that encourage punitive or emotionally withholding parents or people with “stiff upper lips.” Crying, at its best, teaches us to hold the emotion instead of projecting it elsewhere.
In Jeremiah’s prophecies, all hopes for the future of the Jewish people lie in those who endured a three-stage process of transformation: first, those who entered into exile; second, those who retained hope and did not turn bitter during that exile; and third, those who returned from exile with generativity and praise in their hearts instead of self-pity.
These people are the change agents for culture, paralleling the classic three stages of purgation, illumination, and union. Each of these stages operates as a change agent in different ways. Into, through, and back home could well be the necessary movements for any of us.
“Pastor, I have to confess something,” Alika said, fidgeting with her coffee cup during our meeting. “I’m not sure I believe in God anymore. Or maybe I do? I don’t know if the resurrection actually happened, and honestly, half the Bible feels like ancient mythology to me.” She paused, looking almost guilty. “But here’s the weird part—I still love going to church. I get goosebumps during worship, I look forward to small group, and your sermons still move me sometimes. What’s wrong with me?”Nothing, I told her. Absolutely nothing. Alika’s confession isn’t unique. In my years of pastoral counseling, I’ve heard variations of this story so many times—people wrestling with doubt while simultaneously finding themselves drawn to religious community and practice. They’ve been told that faith is primarily about believing the right things, so if their belief wavers, they assume they have to pack up and leave.But here’s what I’ve learned—there are at least three profound reasons people continue to connect with religion that have nothing to do with whether they think every doctrine is literally true. And understanding these reasons might just save us from the exhausting binary of “believer” versus “non-believer. “Beauty: When Truth Comes Through Your Senses The first reason people stay connected to religion is beauty. Not Instagram-pretty beauty, but the kind that stops you in your tracks and makes you forget to breathe for a moment. Think Gregorian chant echoing through stone arches, or the way light filters through stained glass, or how Bach’s Mass in B Minor can make an atheist weep.Unfortunately, American evangelicalism has largely fumbled this ball. We’ve traded Gothic cathedrals for big-box church buildings that look suspiciously like defunct Sam’s Clubs. Our worship music, while well-intentioned, often sounds like it was focus-grouped to death—radio-friendly but about as aesthetically transcendent as a commercial jingle. On the other hand, string the right four chords together, repeat the bridge, and you just might find yourself moved to tears.Step outside evangelicalism and beauty abounds. The architecture of Anglican cathedrals. The poetry of Hindu devotional texts, the austere elegance of Zen gardens, the intricate calligraphy of Islamic art—these traditions understand that humans don’t just think their way to the sacred; they feel their way there too. Beauty matters because it bypasses our analytical minds and speaks directly to something deeper. When Alika gets goosebumps during worship, her body is responding to something her brain hasn’t fully processed yet. That’s not a bug in the system, it’s a feature.
Tradition: Finding Your People Across Time. The second draw is tradition—the sense of being rooted in something larger than your individual life span. Religion can connect you to a people, a culture, a story that extends backward and forward through generations.American evangelicalism, with its colonizing imperative, has tried its best to strip away cultural particularity in favor of a bland homogeneity. But look at the Black church, with its unique fusion of liberation theology and musical innovation. Look at Latino Catholicism, with its vibrant blend of indigenous and European traditions. These are not watered-down versions of so-called “real” Christianity. They’re Christianity made flesh in specific cultural contexts. (Sidenote: In my conversations with Asian Christians, Asian American Christianity has often struggled to develop its own distinct cultural expression, partly because of the model minority myth that granted Asians a kind of honorary whiteness. This prevented the necessity [and opportunity] that other marginalized communities had to create their own religious aesthetic—a curse disguised as a blessing.)But tradition isn’t just about ethnicity. It’s about continuity, about knowing that the words you’re speaking have been spoken by millions before you, that the rituals you’re participating in have carried people through joy and grief for centuries. There’s comfort in that continuity, even if you’re not sure you agree with every theological detail.This is why I know people who retain some of their Irish/Polish/Slavic Catholic traditions or who seek out African traditional religions after generations of colonization tried to erase them. They’re making identity claims about belonging.
Helpfulness: The Practical Magic of Community. The third reason is pragmatic: religion can simply be helpful. When my wife Emily and I move to a new city for pastoral work, we instantly have a community of people ready to help us unpack the U-Haul. We have a built-in social network.Religious communities offer resources that would otherwise require a small army of social workers: food pantries, financial literacy classes, grief counseling, addiction recovery programs, childcare, elder care. Churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues often function as de facto community centers, filling gaps that government and private sector can’t or won’t address.But the helpfulness goes beyond social services. The practices themselves are beneficial. People who regularly participate in religious communities tend to live longer and report higher levels of happiness. Prayer is essentially meditation with a theological frame. Meditation supports healthy brain development. Regular community involvement combats loneliness, which has genuine health consequences.Confession and forgiveness rituals provide structured ways to process guilt and shame. Sabbath practices offer permission to rest in a productivity-obsessed culture. These spiritual disciplines do double-duty as psychological tools that promote well-being.
Truth: The Double-Edged Sword. Finally, there’s Truth with a capital T—the belief that your religion most accurately describes reality, the supernatural, the meaning of existence. In our post-Enlightenment, empirically-obsessed era, Western Christianity has made this the primary (sometimes only) reason to be religious.I don’t want to dismiss the importance of truth. I’m a critical realist—I believe there is such a thing as reality, and that we can know something meaningful about it, even with all our human limitations. Truth matters.But when Truth becomes the only emphasis, it becomes dangerous. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter if your religious expression causes harm in the world, because “it’s true, so we have to do it anyway.” This logic has been used to justify encouraging abuse victims to stay with their abusers, to support genocide because “God commanded it,” to dismiss the suffering caused by religious institutions because doctrine matters more than people.On the other hand, if what we’re really after is Truth, if “all truth is God’s truth,” then I get to be open to finding truth everywhere—in other religions, in secular philosophy, in scientific discovery, in lived experience. The moment I claim my particular religious expression has cornered the market on all truth for all time, I’ve stopped seeking truth and started hoarding power.
The Freedom in Multiplicity. So where does this leave Alika, sitting in my office with her coffee and her complicated faith? It leaves her free.Free to find beauty in Gregorian chant and also in Buddhist meditation bells. Free to appreciate the way her Irish Catholic grandmother’s rituals shaped her while also learning from Jewish practices of mourning. Free to participate in a community that feeds her soul without having to sign off on every line of the doctrinal statement.The dirty little secret that many religious institutions don’t want you to know is that most people throughout history have related to religion through some combination of these four reasons, not just through intellectual assent to propositions. The medieval peasant wasn’t going to mass because she’d thoroughly considered the theological implications of transubstantiation—she was going because it was beautiful, because it connected her to her community, because it helped her make sense of her life, and yes, because she thought it was true, but not primarily in an analytical way.We’ve created a false binary that says you’re either “all in” or “all out,” that doubt disqualifies you from participation. But what if doubt is actually an invitation to explore the other dimensions of religious experience? What if questioning the truth claims opens up space to appreciate the beauty, embrace the tradition, and receive the practical help that religious communities offer?This realism acknowledges that humans are complex beings who connect to the sacred through multiple pathways, not just through the intellect. It recognizes that a religion’s value can’t be measured solely by its factual accuracy, any more than a poem’s worth can be determined by whether it contains scientifically verifiable statements.Alika doesn’t need to choose between her doubts and her spiritual life. She gets to learn that there are more ways to be religious than she’s been told. And maybe, in embracing that complexity, she’ll find something richer and more honest than the brittle, fragile “certainty” she’s been taught to value.Faith and belief is less about having the right answers and more about staying curious about the right questions.
Valarie Kaur describes how the Sikh faith teaches the difference between rage stirred from personal frustration and rage that fights against injustice:
In the Sikh tradition, rage, or krodh, is one of the five thieves, a destructive impulse that can hijack who we want to be. Krodh is often paired with the word kaam, which refers to unhealthy desire. Kaam krodh suggests that vengeful wrath is tied to desire: When the world denies what we want, rage rises in us. Guru Nanak calls it a corrosive salt that destroys the gold in us. At the same time, Guru Nanak spoke in fiery language against injustice. Rage, when consciously harnessed, is a force that connects us with our power to fight for others, and for ourselves. [1]
Kaur offered this wisdom during a CAC virtual gathering:
When we bottle up our rage, it can go in two different places. One is to go inward, and that leads to all of the damage it can wreak inside of our nervous systems, our psychological health, our spiritual health. We’re basically severing ourselves off from parts of our own hearts. We make ourselves sick. That is what so many women in particular have been forced to do in this culture. The other direction it can go is out to explode, creating harm, creating violence, the rage that drives the hatred and cruelty. We only have to look at the headlines to see what world that creates.
My invitation is to honor our rage, to name it, to find safe containers to process it, because it’s also a way that we love ourselves. In Sikh wisdom, the very heart of the Sikh cosmic vision is Ik Onkar, oneness ever unfolding. It’s an invitation to look at anyone or anything and say, “You are a part of me I do not yet know.” Separateness is an illusion….
The true nature of reality is that we are one, but that oneness is both inward and outward. My invitation to see no stranger also begins within. Oh, my pain! Oh, my shame! Oh, my rage! You are a part of me I do not yet know. Instead of banishing you or exiling you or suppressing you, can I be curious about you? Can I love you like a mother would?
Even the hardest, potentially most shameful parts of ourselves have the potential to give us insight for healing, growth, and transformation. The more we are able to build our capacity to love all parts of ourselves, the deeper our capacity to love all parts of the world around us, the beloved within and without. That is the shift in consciousness and culture that I believe we desperately need in order to birth a new world, a way of seeing, a way of being that leaves no one outside of our circle of care. What we need is a revolution of the heart. This is why I believe revolutionary love is the call of our times. [2]
Why did God call Israel? What purpose did he give to his covenant people? In Genesis, the Lord told Abraham that all nations would be blessed through his descendants (Genesis 22:18). In Exodus, the Lord said Israel would be a “royal priesthood” (Exodus 19:6). In other words, the nation would serve as a representative and mediator between God and the world. Through Israel, all other nations would come to know who God truly is.Later through the prophets, God said Israel was to serve as a light to the nations and that people would come to her seeking healing from the Lord (Zechariah 8:23). And even the Temple in Jerusalem was to be a house of prayer for both Israelites and foreigners (Isaiah 56:7). Dozens of Old Testament texts repeat this same message—Israel exists to reveal God’s glory, power, love, and healing to the nations.
That is what makes the king of Israel’s response to Naaman so tragic. Here was a foreigner, having heard about the power of Israel’s God, genuinely and humbly seeking his healing. What’s more, he carried a letter from the king of Syria also seeking the aid of Israel’s God. This was a slam dunk! This was a golden opportunity served on a silver platter for the king of Israel to fulfill his nation’s God-given calling. But the king didn’t see it that way. Instead, he viewed Naaman as a threat and the king’s letter as a trick. Fear trumped calling.
A few months ago, I traveled with a group to the border between the U.S. and Mexico to learn more about the migrant crisis and speak to government officials and church leaders on both sides. The trip was heartbreaking and everyone agreed the only real solution had to come from Washington. Until then, thousands of legal asylum-seekers must rely on the kindness of volunteers for food, water, and shelter—precisely the kind of love Jesus commanded his followers to display (see Matthew 25:31-46). We spoke with one American pastor who helps organize these efforts in his city. Thankfully, many Christians have joined him, but he also said a surprising number of churches that helped in years past are now refusing. “Helping immigrants is now seen as political,” he said, “and some churches are scared to get involved.” Holding back tears, the pastor explained that he wasn’t advocating for any policy or telling Christians how to vote. He was simply inviting them to provide meals and blankets to children.
When we become afraid, we will quickly exchange our God-given calling to bless others for a self-centered calling to protect ourselves. But like ancient Israel, the church has not been given a mission of self-preservation but one of divine revelation. The defense and growth of the church is in God’s hands, not ours. Instead, we are called to open our hands as Jesus did and reveal the love of God by caring for the sinner, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan.
WEEKLY PRAYER. Ambrose of Milan (340 – 397) Preserve your work, Lord. Guard the gift you have given even to those who pull back. For I knew I was not worthy to be called your servant, but by your grace I am what I am. And grant that I may know how with genuine affection to mourn with those who sin. Grant that as often as I learn of the sin of anyone who has fallen, I may suffer with them, and not scold them in my pride, but mourn and weep with them, so that in weeping over another I may also mourn for myself. Amen.
Father Richard Rohr explores how getting in touch with our grief allows us to transform our anger:
Anybody who’s on the edge, disadvantaged in some way, or barred from a position of hegemony or power will naturally understand the tears of the prophets, with their gut-level knowledge of systemic evil, cultural sin, and group illusion. Black Americans might have seen white people act nice or speak of human equality, for example, but they knew we lived behind a collective lie. Collective greed is killing America today. We make everything about money—everything—and injustices like these will naturally leave us exasperated and ultimately sad. How can we look at the suffering taking place in Gaza, Ukraine, or Sudan and be anything but sad? It’s sad beyond words or concepts. Only the body can know.
I recently turned eighty and the older I get, the more it feels like I must forgive almost everything for not being perfect, or as I first wanted or needed it to be. This is true of Christianity, the United States, politics in general, and most of all myself. Remember, if we do not transform our pain and egoic anger, we will always transmit it in another form. This transformation is the supreme work of all true spirituality and spiritual communities. Those communities offer us a place where our sadness and rage can be refined into human sympathy and active compassion.
Forgiveness of reality—including tragic reality—is the heart of the matter. All things cry for forgiveness in their imperfection, their incompleteness, their woundedness, their constant movement toward death. Mere rage or resentment will not change any of these realities. Tears often will, though: first by changing the one who weeps, and then by moving any who draw near to the weeping. Somehow, the prophets knew, the soul must weep to be a soul at all. [1]
Spiritual teacher Mirabai Starr describes the compassion that can arise as we experience both our anger and our grief:
Anger is a natural response when we let the pain of the world into our hearts. It is not the only appropriate response, of course. However, when we can welcome the fire of the Prophets into our own lives, we tap into the true nature of righteousness and draw the vigor necessary to step up in service to that which is greater than ourselves. We remember our essential interconnectedness with all that is and we are motivated to act on the impulse to protect the web of inter-being with all our might.
Personal and planetary grief are inextricable. Our encounter with the manifold losses that characterize the human experience can till the soil of our hearts so that we are more available to the suffering of other beings and the earth we share. When we have been broken, we recognize the brokenness around us and compassion naturally grows. Sorrow can be paralyzing at first, but compassion, which can sometimes take the form of anger, is a wellspring that offers infinite sustenance.
The Wisdom of Rage
Sikh activist Valarie Kaur traveled to Guatemala to learn about the 20th-century genocide of Mayan Indigenous peoples. While there, she joined CAC teachers in an online event to explore how we might honor and learn from our anger.
I’m speaking to you all from Guatemala City. I have been here for a week to study the state-sponsored genocide of Mayan Indigenous peoples that happened in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996. It was important to me to be here at a moment when the United States is undergoing such catastrophic crisis. I’ve gone from gravesite to gravesite. I’ve looked at so many skeletons…. I’ve been reeling, I’ve been feeling grief, I have been feeling rage.
The U.S. government was complicit in carrying out the genocide that happened here, and I was taught by an elder Mayan woman, a sage elder, Rosalina, who was still searching for her father and her husband. As I held fast to her, I realized that the world has ended many times before and the world has been rebirthed many times before. This is simply our turn in the cycle. In every turn through human history, people have been thrown into the darkness, and we have a choice: Do we retreat into our despair, into the smallest parts of our hearts, or do we dare to lift our gaze and reach out through the dark, holding fast to one another and standing in love?
What I learned from these Mayan women, as I’ve learned from so many Indigenous elders, is that in order to show up with our whole hearts, we must not be ashamed of any part of ourselves. Oh, my grief! Oh, my anger! Oh, my rage! You are a part of me I do not yet know. You have information to teach me.
This brings me to why I use the word rage in my work. I want us to be able to confront the fiercest and perhaps most terrifying parts of our own hearts, to feel angry about something. To feel rage is the fiercest form of anger and I didn’t want to shy away from that. I use rage as both a noun and a verb. To rage is how we can process that vital fiery energy inside of us just like our wisest ancestors did.
The solution is not to suppress our rage or to let it explode. The solution is to process our rage in safe containers like the Mayan elders I’ve been with all week, dancing and drumming, singing, screaming, wailing, shaking. We have to move those energies. Once we rage, once we move that energy through our body, we can ask ourselves: What information does my rage carry? What does it say about what’s important to me? What does it say about what I love and what I wish to fight for? How do I wish to harness this energy for what I do in the world? I call that harnessed energy divine rage. The aim of divine rage is not vengeance; its aim is to reorder the world.
Praying While Haunted. (from Mark Longhurst. RR’s assistant and curator of the daily devos)
To pray these days is a type of haunting. That’s how I’m experiencing it, at least.
That doesn’t mean I don’t experience the benefits of my Christian-based meditation practice. They are real and continue to provide me with necessary grounding, skills for riding emotional waves, and a persistent awareness of divine presence. God is here, now—when I’m sipping seltzer with my wife by the river near our house, taking a sick kid to the doctor, or tapping fingers on the steering wheel in the Dunkin’ Donuts line—and for you, too, in the “holy ordinary.”
But even while that’s true, the consolations of contemplative prayer share space with haunting. That’s because I’ve started caring about Palestine—and once I’ve seen, I can’t look away.
“The consolations of contemplative prayer share space with haunting. Once I’ve seen, I can’t look away.”
Why Gaza Haunts My Prayer
I’ve mentioned the Palestinian genocide numerous times in past Substack posts, but I haven’t taken a step back to explore why this particular horror haunts me. This is the beginning of a series to share what I’m learning—and to invite you to consider what it might mean to not look away.
The first fact to confront is this: We are living in a time of genocide. The Palestinian people are being—have already been—systematically destroyed by Israel’s military and America’s weapons.
I’m not sharing an opinion. I’ve simply been listening to international human rights lawyers and genocide scholars—often ignored in the U.S.—who’ve been sounding the alarm for over a year. Their framework is based on the United Nations’ Genocide Convention. One of the clearest summaries I’ve found is from Palestinian Christian theologian Munther Isaac in his powerful book Christ in the Rubble: Faith, the Bible, and the Genocide in Gaza.
An essential theological resource from Palestine
What Genocide Means
According to the UN’s Genocide Convention (Article 2), genocide includes acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group—such as:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm
Deliberately inflicting life conditions to bring about destruction
Imposing measures to prevent births
Forcibly transferring children to another group
What the Experts Are Saying
“There are reasonable grounds that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.” —Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, “Anatomy of a Genocide”(March 2024)
“Yes, it is genocide. It is so difficult and painful to admit it, but despite all that, and despite all our efforts to think otherwise, after six months of brutal war we can no longer avoid this conclusion.” —Amos Goldberg, Holocaust and genocide researcher, Hebrew University
“Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed… Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.” —Raz Segal, Holocaust scholar, Stockton University
“I’m a genocide scholar. I know it when I see it… My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people.” —Omar Bartov, genocide scholar and former IDF soldier, in The New York Times
In addition to these voices, reputable human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the independent Palestinian human rights NGO Al-Haq in Ramallah, and more, detail the facts in chilling, systematic ways.
Take a breath. These realities have come to haunt me, and they may you, too.
The most devastating and comprehensive documentation I’ve seen is Francesca Albanese’s UN Human Rights report. In March 2024, she filed her “Special Rapporteur Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967.” It is sobering, haunting reading—and this, too, is not an opinion piece. It is a meticulously documented, carefully reasoned report rooted in international law.
Just from the introduction:
After five months of military occupation, Israel has destroyed Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the population has been forcibly displaced. Thousands of families have lost loved ones or have been wiped out. Many could not bury and mourn their relatives, forced instead to leave their bodies decomposing in homes, in the street, or under the rubble. Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to severe ill-treatment. The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come.
The Unwillingness to Face Reality
With voices like these concluding what is happening is genocide, what’s been remarkable to me is to witness the collective unwillingness to face reality in the West.
Instead of acknowledging and working to stop ongoing Palestinian suffering, we turned just criticism of genocidal violence into weaponized charges of antisemitism. That’s not to deny real antisemitism, which of course exists and must be opposed rigorously. But how did critiquing hate-filled violence itself become cause for charges of hate?
“How did critiquing hate-filled violence itself become cause for charges of hate?”
“Accusing Israel’s critics of antisemitism is the single best way to avert one’s eyes… It’s more effective than questioning death tolls, invoking human shields, or comparing Israel’s bombing to other wars, because those arguments require discussing Gaza. Accusations of antisemitism change the subject entirely.”
What About Hamas’s October 7th Attack?
This is a critical question. And for folks drawing attention to Israel’s genocide, there is no moral equivalence that somehow justifies Hamas’s brutal attack on children, families, and people enjoying life dancing at the Nova music festival.
“We danced with joy and then hid among the dead,” festival goers recalled in a BBC documentary.
It is important for the left to recognize the dehumanizing horror that Hamas fighters unleashed when they launched rockets, breached defenses, attacked civilians indiscriminately, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 more.
Initially after the October 7 attack, the left in the United States failed to condemn or look at the impact of such violence. Journalist and author Peter Beinart remembers unsuccessfully scouring antiwar messages in the U.S. looking for condemnation of Hamas’s attack. He writes:
“Again and again I heard the slogan ‘Resistance is justified when the people are occupied,’ as if October 7 had not just happened… as if Hamas… had not just murdered and tortured more than a thousand souls.”
“I don’t know the solution to the conflict in Israel and Palestine, but I do know the starting point: to grieve ‘their’ children as our children.”
Jesus’s exhortations to love our neighbors as ourselves—and even to love our enemies—invite us to recognize our inherent unity with one another. Refusing to dehumanize the other keeps our hearts awake and keeps us human.
Understanding the Broader History
It’s also important to understand the wider history of Israel’s occupation of Palestine to understand that Hamas’s hatred has a context—and that Israel is not an innocent victim of Hamas’s evil. Israel created the conditions for evil through evil by sustained systemic oppression and injustice.
Others know and articulate the history far better than me, but here are the basics.
Israel created the conditions for evil through evil by sustained systemic oppression and injustice.
Israel stole Palestinian land and ethnically cleansed up to 750,000 indigenous Palestinians in 1948, called the “Nakba” or catastrophe. A while back I wrote about the founder of Palestinian liberation theology Naim Ateek and his boyhood experience of losing his family home and land. Israel has occupied Gaza and the West Bank since 1967, which by all international legal standards is considered an illegal military occupation. Israel, the U.S., and the West looked the other way while Israel encouraged the building of settlements in the occupied territories and erected an apartheid state treating Palestinians as unequal.
The Language of Apartheid
The word “apartheid,” like “genocide,” seems strong until one does the work of learning about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians—and the consensus that international legal bodies share. Here’s a quote from a UN Special Rapporteur report from 2022:
“There are pitiless features of Israel’s ‘apartness’ rule… such as segregated highways, high walls and extensive checkpoints, a barricaded population, missile strikes and tank shelling of a civilian population… Israel has imposed upon Palestine an apartheid reality in a post-apartheid world.”
This is just the surface. Here’s the report. See this post, too, for how the state of Israel mirrors the violence of ancient biblical empires:
In the meantime, let us pray and act, haunted. Next week: Evangelical and mainline forms of Christian Zionism.
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Father Richard describes how both knowing and not-knowing can be trustworthy paths on the spiritual journey:
Each of us must strive for the internal spiritual balancing act between knowing and not-knowing. Perhaps the most universal way to name these two spiritual traditions is light and darkness. The formal theological terms are kataphatic (affirmative way)—employing words, concepts, and images—and apophatic (negative way)—moving beyond words and ideas into silence and beyond-rational knowing. I believe both ways are good and necessary. Together, they create a magnificent form of higher consciousness called biblical faith.
The apophatic way, however, has been largely underused, undertaught, and underdeveloped since the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment. In fact, Westerners became ashamed of our “not-knowing” and tried to fight our battles rationally. For several centuries, Christianity in the West has been in a defensive mode—a “siege mentality,” where we needed certainty and clarity, and where there was little room for not-knowing and the mystical tradition. Christians are still often in that regressive position today. It is crucial that we reintegrate these two streams of knowing and not-knowing in our time.
If we are going to talk about light, then we must also talk about darkness, because they only have meaning in relation to one another. In much of the world’s art, the sun and the moon are pictured together as sacred symbols. The solar light gives glaring brightness but paradoxically creates defined shadows. It can sometimes be so bright and clear that it actually obscures or blinds. Patriarchal religions usually preferred “sun” gods and the worship of fire, light, and order. While order and clarity are good, they also give us an arrogance about that very order and clarity.
Lunar light is much more subtle, filtered, and indirect, and in that sense, more clarifying and less threatening. Note that when God first divided light from darkness, God did not call it “good” (Genesis 1:3). From the very beginning, we are warned that we cannot totally separate light from darkness, or thetwo have no meaning. The whole of Creation exists inside of one full cycle: “Evening came and morning came and it was the first day” (Genesis 1:5). Separating them is apparently not good! All things on earth are a mixture of darkness and light.
I hope we can recognize how Jesus is more of a “lunar” teacher, patient with darkness and slow growth. He says, “The seed is sprouting and growing but we do not know how” (Mark 4:27). He seems to be willing to live with not-knowing, surely representing the cosmic patience and certain freedom of God. When we finally know we are not in charge, we do not have to nail everything down along the way. We can work happily and even effectively with “mustard seeds” (Mark 4:31).
Of course, the first question that arises is: “What is love?”
One person might define an action as loveless, and another person might call the same act something done out of love for the other.
Throughout church history, loving someone else means seeking and wanting the Good for them. Notice, I put the “G” in “Good” in capital letters. We are talking about the Highest Good for people.
A loving theology does not include a pervading permissiveness that says “anything goes.” However, a loving theology also does not include a wholesale damning of the other person if they do not shape up.
In St. Paul’s words, love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:7)
2.
“The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.”
For me, the classical definitions of theist and atheist fell apart once there was the possibility of being a “theist” and believing in a false image of God, and being an unbelieving “atheist” to that same false image of God.
If we can stop seeing theist and atheist as binaries, and more as a continuum that we all move back and forth along, I think we all might end up with a more healthy spirituality.
3.
“Concepts create idols; only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.”
When I read quote #2 this past week, I was immediately reminded of this classic from Gregory of Nyssa. He is considered an “apophatic theologian” because he emphasized the mystery of God more than attempting to describe or even explain God.
As long as we are all beholden to our mental concepts of God, then we are still dealing with an image of God that is infinitely less than what God actually is.
This is why wonder is more necessary to a healthy expression of faith than certainty. Certainty about God takes away our humility before this mystery we call “God,” and leads us into violent forms of fundamentalism.
Again, this is why I love the wisdom of the early Church. It is almost as if they figured out everything in the first six centuries of Church history, and we do ourselves a disservice by not learning from them and standing upon their grand shoulders.
4.
“Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire.”
I am not as familiar with Catherine of Siena. She is one of the female Christian mystics whom people I look up to, look up to.
So, I really should do my homework and get around to studying her.
The teaching of the True Self/False Self is perennial. Every tradition in the world has its version of the teaching. Although Jesus himself does not use the vocabulary of the True Self/False Self, it is precisely what he is referencing when he calls people hypocrites.
What the world most needs are people who have undergone the long journey of deconstructing their False Selves, egoic needs, and narcissistic endeavors, so that there can finally be enough room for their True Selves to become manifest.
The world is in desperate need of people who are their True Selves in God in the here and now.
5.
“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees,
to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.”
This section of Scripture is nearly THREE THOUSAND years old, and yet it still speaks to today.
Many people unknowingly reduce the Hebrew Prophets to merely being individuals who prophesied about Jesus of Nazareth. While it is true that some passages they wrote could be seen as pointing toward the Carpenter of Galilee
I once got into a lot of trouble for giving a Sunday sermonette using a few passages, including this one.
Man, oh man. That Monday morning, I opened my email to find almost 50/50 emails of people who loved it and people who hated it, and thought that I was “being political, and politics should never enter a sermon.”
For the record, in my Sunday sermonette, I did not refer to a political candidate; people just made connections on their own in light of their own life experiences and conscience.
Here’s the thing: God is always on the side of the oppressed, the poor, and the marginalized. In the world of academic theology, this is referred to as the “preferential option for the poor.”
Or, in Jesus’ vernacular, the “least of these.”
It was so fascinating to get in trouble with congregants and even leadership for teaching the Bible. It’s almost as if, for me, it proved that nearly 50% of those who chose to respond to my sermonette did not come to church to learn how to practice their faith better. Instead, coming to church was for an altogether different reason, of which I am not aware.
The Scriptures are unique because they force us to confront ourselves, the world around us, and our current value systems. They demand that we reflect on whether or not we are looking at the world through the same eyes and with the same heart as God.
This CO2- (Church Of 2) is where two guys meet each day to tighten up our Connections with Jesus. We start by placing the daily “My Utmost For His Highest” in this WordPress blog. Then we prayerfully select some matching worship music and usually pick out a few lyrics that fit especially well. Then we just start praying and editing and Bolding and adding comments and see where the Spirit takes us.
It’s been a blessing for both of us.
If you’d like to start a CO2, we’d be glad to help you and your partner get started. Also click the link below to see how others are doing CO2.Odds Monkey
Steve Harvey Introduces Jesus To A Secular Audience
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During his farewell discourse with his apostles, Jesus makes one of the more shocking—and misunderstood—promises found anywhere in the gospels. He said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12). This verse provokes an obvious and important question—what are the “greater works” Jesus’ followers will do?We’ve already looked at our culture’s fixation on all things spectacular and the way it causes us to mistakenly focus on Jesus’ power rather than on Jesus himself. This same cultural bias has also warped the way many have misunderstood this verse. For those shaped by pop consumer Christianity, “greater works” is automatically assumed to mean more spectacular works. This view believes that because Jesus walked on water, healed the sick, and calmed storms, then to do greater works means the true disciples of Jesus will accomplish even more astonishing signs and wonders. In a culture drawn to the spectacular, and in church traditions dedicated to attracting crowds, it’s obvious why this interpretation is appealing.
