When brought before the bishop, Francis would brook no delay…. Without waiting to be spoken to and without speaking he immediately put off and cast aside all his garments and gave them back to his father. —Thomas Celano, First Life of Francis
The first biography of Francis of Assisi recounts the moment when Francis publicly relinquished his privilege, stripping himself and returning his clothing to his wealthy father in front of the bishop.
The story of Francis stripping himself naked in the bishop’s courtyard conveys to us an essential moment in his conversion process. As Francis stood there naked, completely vulnerable … he divested himself of much more than just his clothes and belongings. In effect, he relinquished family identity and reputation and the security of his economic status.
For Francis, divesting himself from privilege was a gospel-inspired action, one that we are invited to consider today.
Relinquishment as a call and a gift means giving up prestige and privilege, learning to listen and to accept criticism, and learning how to use our power differently and ultimately to share our power. At the very least our task as non-poor is to share the power available to us—our resources of wealth, education, influence, and access—with those who have been denied these things. This is not charity or noblesse oblige. It is a fundamental letting go to allow the very structures that benefit us to be transformed….
The way of relinquishment is the lifelong process of removing the obstacles to loving and just relationships with our neighbors on this earth and of moving toward more genuine community among all of God’s children and indeed among all of earth’s creatures and elements, the kind of sisterhood and brotherhood envisioned by Francis. As we help remove the obstacles to the liberation of others, we are simultaneously removing obstacles to our own liberation….
Francis took the daring leap of faith from a position of privilege into the world of the poor. His renunciation of the world, though radical, was apparently not odious to him. We sense that for Francis the gospel promise was fulfilled, that what one receives in return is far more than what one has given up [see Mark 10: 28–31]. Francis renounced the world only to have it given back with joy….
We find ourselves invited by Francis to be fools. Is it really possible that what is given up will be returned a hundredfold? Can we believe that as we lose ourselves, we will find ourselves? Francis, who renounces his claim on all things, is free to enjoy all things as gift. Utterly foolish. Impractical. Subversive. Even dangerous.
We can neutralize the challenge and promise of Jesus and Francis by elevating [them] into the realm of sainthood and perfection, a realm seemingly far beyond our reach. Or we can ponder their way of living in the world and attempt to follow them, fools though we would be.
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G.K. Chesterton: Wisdom and Wit
Religion is a serious business. It addresses the most fundamental and consequential questions of life and the cosmos. Therefore, it tends to attract serious people who write serious things and who gather to conduct serious meetings. In seminary, a very influential preacher told us that there is no place for humor in the pulpit. Laughter, he said, promotes an atmosphere of triviality rather than revival. This common religious view would have us believe God is a stern headmaster who favors the scholar and scorns the jester.
Then I discovered G.K. Chesterton. He was a journalist in England in the early twentieth century, and he wrote over 4,000 essays on some of the most important matters facing modern society, as well as many works of theology and defenses of the Christian faith. His writings were instrumental in C.S. Lewis’ journey from atheism to Christianity. Although he died before World War II, Chesterton also recognized the looming evil of Hitler and was outspoken about the dangers of eugenics—the popular “science” of the time that the Nazis used to justify their goal of racial purity.
George Bernard Shaw, who often disagreed with Chesterton, called him “a man of colossal genius.” It wasn’t just his prophetic wisdom that people praised, but also his wit. Throughout his writings, Chesterton had the ability to wrap profound Christian truths in dry English humor. For example, when The London Times invited essays on the topic “What’s Wrong with the World?” Chesterton submitted their shortest entry:
Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely yours, G. K. Chesterton
At other times, Chesterton employed his humor to disarm his many critics—a tactic he shared with Jesus. During World War I, for example, Chesterton made fun of his own obesity to disarm an angry woman who confronted him on the street. “Mr. Chesterton, why aren’t you out at the front?” she asked. “Madam,” he replied, “if you go around to the side, you will see that I am.”
Chesterton’s humor was no doubt an intrinsic part of his personality, but that doesn’t explain why he unleashed it so frequently. A better explanation comes from his understanding of the world. Chesterton compared it to a cosmic shipwreck. We are like sailors, he said, waking up on the beach with amnesia. As we wander the shore, we discover gold coins, precious cargo, a compass, and other valuable remnants from a civilization we can barely remember. Similarly, we all—whether we are believers or not—are constantly catching glimpses of another world that we’ve long forgotten. Beauty, joy, love, laughter—these things catch us by surprise and stir our hearts with longings that seem entirely inappropriate if the universe is truly indifferent to our existence, as the atheists assert.
Reading Chesterton has helped me come to terms with seemingly contradictory aspects of my own personality. I can be serious, but I can also be silly. I’ve discovered that either tack may be used by God to help others catch glimpses of a world long forgotten.
WEEKLY PRAYER John Stott (1921 – 2011) Our heavenly Father, we commend to your mercy those for whom life does not spell freedom: prisoners of conscience, the homeless and the handicapped, the sick in body and mind, the elderly who are confined to their homes, those who are enslaved by their passions, and those who are addicted to drugs. Grant that, whatever their outward circumstances, they may find inward freedom, through him who proclaimed release of captives, Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
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Father Richard Rohr describes how the teachings of Francis of Assisi became the foundation of Franciscan spirituality.
St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) began his community with a clear intention: “The Rule and the life of the Friars Minor is to simply live the gospel.” [1] The first Rule (the guide for the community’s way of life) that he started writing around 1209 was little more than a collection of New Testament passages. When Francis sent it off to Rome, the pope looked at it and said, “This is no Rule. This is just the gospel.” You can just hear Francis saying, “Yes—that isthe point! We don’t need any other Rule except the gospel!” To be a Franciscan is nothing other than always searching for “the marrow of the gospel” as he called it. [2] Francis believed the purpose and goal of our life is to live the marrow or core of the gospel. Honestly, the core is so simple; it’s the living it out that’s difficult. [3]
When Francis read the Beatitudes, Jesus’ inaugural discourse, he saw that the call to be poor stood right at the beginning: “How blessed are the poor in spirit!” (Matthew 5:3). From then on, Francis’ reading of the gospel considered poverty to be “the foundation of all other virtues and their guardian.” [4] While other virtues receive the kingdom only in promise, poverty is invested with heaven now—“Theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:3). Present tense!
As a result, Franciscan spirituality has never been an abstraction. It is grounded in Jesus’ specific instructions to his disciples, not ideology or denominational certitudes. Francis’ living of the gospel was just that: a simple lifestyle. It was the incarnation of Jesus Christ continuing in space and time. It was the presence of the Spirit taken as if it were true. It was being Jesus more than just worshiping Jesus. At its best, Franciscan life is not words or even ethics. It is flesh—naked, vulnerable flesh—unable to deny its limitations, unable to cover its wounds. Francis called this inner nakedness “poverty.”
This pure vision of life attracted thousands to a new freedom in the church and in ministry. Religious communities had become more and more entangled with stipends and rich land holdings. Members lived individually simple lives but were corporately secure and even comfortable. Mendicant (begging) orders like the Franciscans were created to break that dangerous marriage between ministry and money. Francis didn’t want his friars to preach salvation (although they did that, too) as much as he wanted them to be salvation. He wanted them to model and mirror the life of Jesus in the world, with all of the vulnerability that would entail. That is why many people often attribute the saying “preach the gospel at all times, and when absolutely necessary use words” to describe Francis’ desire to live the gospel in every moment.
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Franciscan Alternative Orthodoxy
Francis of Assisi paid attention to different things than the Catholic Church of his time. Eventually, his prophetic witness and emphasis on living the gospel became an “alternative orthodoxy” through the Franciscan tradition. Richard writes:
In one of the earliest accounts of his life, Francis offers this instruction to the first friars: “You only know as much as you do.” [1] His emphasis on action, practice, and lifestyle was foundational and revolutionary for its time and remains at the heart of Franciscan alternative orthodoxy. For Francis and Clare of Assisi, one of his closest spiritual friends, Jesus became someone to actually follow and imitate.
Up to that point, most of Christian spirituality was based in ascetic and monastic discipline, theories of prayer, or academic theology, which itself was often based in “correct belief” or liturgical texts, but not in a kind of practical Christianity that could be lived in the streets of the world. Francis emphasized an imitation and love of the humanity of Jesus, and not just the worshiping of his divinity. That is a major shift.
Throughout history, the Franciscan School has typically been a minority position inside of the Roman Catholic and larger Christian tradition, yet it has never been condemned or considered heretical—in fact, quite the opposite. It simply emphasized different teachings of Jesus, called for new perspectives and behaviors, and focused on the full and final implications of the incarnation of God in Christ. For Franciscans, the incarnation was not just about Jesus but was manifested everywhere. As Francis said, “The whole world is our cloister!” [2]
Francis’ starting place was human suffering instead of human sinfulness, and God’s identification with that suffering in Jesus. That did not put him in conflict with any Catholic dogmas or structures. His Christ was cosmic while also deeply personal, his cathedral was creation itself, and he preferred the bottom of society to the top. He invariably emphasized inclusion of the seeming outsider over any club of insiders, and he was much more a mystic than a moralist. In general, Francis preferred ego poverty to private perfection, because Jesus “became poor for our sake, so that we might become rich out of his poverty” (2 Corinthians 8:9).
I sincerely think Francis found a Third Way, which is the creative and courageous role of a prophet and a mystic. He basically repeated what all prophets say: that the message and the medium for the message have to be the same thing. And Francis emphasized the medium itself, instead of continuing to clarify or contain the mere verbal message; this tends to be the “priestly” job, one which Francis never wanted for himself.
Both Francis and Clare saw orthopraxy (“correct practice”) as a necessary parallel, and maybe even precedent, to verbal orthodoxy (“correct teaching”) and not an optional add-on or a possible implication. “Why aren’t you doing what you say you believe?” the prophet invariably asks.
A number of weeks ago, I hosted a movie at my beloved local independent cinema, Images. As a small part of a fundraising campaign to renovate and refit the theater, Images Cinema asked a handful of community member superfans to curate a film and invite friends. I chose the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar, starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and others, because it is thrilling and visually stunning, I wanted to see it on the big screen again—and because my twelve-year-old son agreed to watch it with me. Most of all, I wanted to experience the film in community, because it poses a question that has stayed with me ever since my first viewing in a Boston cineplex years ago: what if love is the center of the universe?Watching the film with a packed room of neighbors and friends, including two rows of middle schoolers, I was reminded that the film’s scientific quest is also deeply mystical.
Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper leaves his children Murph and Tom behind on a climate-ravaged Earth to join a desperate mission to save the human race by charting a livable planet to colonize. At first glance, the premise sounds like an Elon Musk space-fantasy project—raising the danger of interpreting the film as if Earth were disposable and the march of colonization could simply continue off-planet. And yet, as I’ve written about many times in this newsletter, apocalyptic, world-ending scenarios for me primarily reckon with how we live now rather than in the future. The film’s powerful themes of love, loss, and space travel inspire me not to escape reality, but to live a more loving life amid it—all while trusting that the universe itself might be guided by love. Cooper is driven by a sense of duty to humanity and by the thrill of adventure to accept a last-ditch mission, but it’s love for his family, and Murph in particular, that fuels his grief and eventual heroic quest to return.
What if love is the center of the universe?
At first, Cooper remains firmly on the side of reason, convinced that science can save humanity. But as the journey unfolds, the logic of science begins to clash with the boundless quality of love. Their ship, the Endurance, visits one planet, only to lose a crew member, be crushed by 4,000-foot waves, and discover upon return to their base ship that, due to the gravitational pull of a nearby black hole, 23 years have passed though they spent only three hours on the planet. Two more planets remain for the team to visit, but their fuel resources will only last for a trip to one.
A choice needs to be made. Anne Hathaway’s character Amelia Brand wants to visit another planet named “Edmunds,” after an astronaut who traveled there. Edmunds’s planet appears to transmit hopeful data about potential habitability—but Brand is also biased because she is in love with Dr. Edmunds and hopes he might still be alive. Cooper chooses instead to visit a planet where Matt Damon’s character Dr. Mann has been living, but it turns out to be frozen and uninhabitable. When they wake Dr. Mann from decades of cryo-sleep, his behavior quickly becomes murderous. His mission failed, and he has gone insane. Cooper’s love for Murph becomes the thread that connects them across space and time, exemplified in a stunning sequence at the end through a four-dimensional cube called a tesseract. Nolan explores scientifically, on a big-budget adventure screen, what is also inherently a mystical insight: that love might transcend space and time, and connect us even when we feel galaxies apart.
Dr. Brand perceives something that Cooper does not yet: “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends space and time.” Cooper has chosen to leave his family behind hoping to save humanity. Dr. Brand wants to go to Edmunds’s planet because of her love for Edmunds. Cooper, however, chooses logic. Science and love are set as conflicting, yet after the disastrous visit to Dr. Mann’s planet, Brand is vindicated. Now, with fuel reserves low and the mission’s failure imminent, Cooper chooses to sacrifice himself to give Dr. Brand one more chance to reach Edmunds’s planet. Cooper sheds weight from the Endurance ship by detaching himself in the smaller Ranger ship, just in time for Dr. Brand and the Endurance to use the black hole’s gravitational pull to gain the speed needed to continue.
Dr. Brand slingshots toward Edmunds’s planet and Cooper heads into the black hole (along with a robot named TARS). But instead of death, the black hole sends Cooper into a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube with space for Cooper, a three-dimensional being, to communicate across time to Murph. Throughout the film, we’re introduced to a concept of “Them,” future humans who communicate through space-time to guide the characters. “They” constructed the tesseract for Cooper to communicate to Murph. With TARS’s help, he figures out a way to relay NASA’s coordinates, and pass on information retrieved from within the black hole—new codes that will help Murph solve the scientific problem of gravity and save the future of humanity.
The science here is fun and complex. Kip Thorne, the scientist who advised Christopher Nolan, later wrote a book entitled The Science of Interstellar. He explains the idea of a tesseract as a cube in four dimensions, the physics of black holes, the possibility of beings from the future who created the tesseract, and more. I find the science fascinating, but what moves me about this film is that science doesn’t explain everything. In the end, it’s the love that Cooper has for Murph that sets in motion the science to work. It’s the love that Dr. Brand has for Edmunds that convinces her that his planet is the best habitable one. And it’s not love without reason—it’s love and logic combined, with the humility to know the limitations of logic and the transcending power of love.
The Franciscan scientist and theologian Ilia Delio is one of my intellectual heroes, because she boldly insists that our theology must keep pace with science. She insists that the meaning of Christ must be an evolutionary, loving reality. One of Delio’s mystical heroes is the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who affirmed Love as the center of the universe: Love “is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces…. The physical structure of the universe is love.”
But what could this mean? For Delio, following Teilhard, it is the energy of union amid ever greater complexity within the unfolding universe. I don’t pretend to understand this very well, but if evolution is a process of ever greater complexity and unity—whether adapted traits in animals, consciousness itself, or the ongoing expansion of the universe—then one way to describe that energy is to call it love. Here’s a quote to read slowly from Delio: “If love is the principal energy of life, the whole within every whole, and evolution has direction in the unfolding of consciousness, then it is not difficult to see that evolution is the movement toward greater wholeness and consciousness—that is, the rise of love.” From a mystical perspective, then, it is not too much to say that love is the force that holds the universe together.
Love holding the universe together may seem like a lofty concept, and it is, but we don’t need to survive a black hole to discover it. Instead, it’s as accessible as showing up at my local movie theater on a Monday night, sharing a bowl of popcorn with friends, and experiencing an epic space thriller across generations.
It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. —Martin Luther King Jr., “I See the Promised Land”
Theologian Grace Ji-Sun Kim posits efforts for peace on a cosmic scale:
On a Galilean hillside, Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Matthew 5:9). To make peace on Earth, the World Council of Churches (WCC) reminds us that we need to make peace with the earth. Dominant cultures in our human family have said that we are the center of creation, positioning the earth and its creatures to be objects for our domination and exploitation. Atop our fictional pinnacle of creation, we are destroying our world’s wealth of gifts faster than the earth can replenish itself. From such human destructiveness we have entered a period of time some are calling the Anthropocene, the era of Earth’s life that is marked by abuse, violence, and destruction caused by humans. The alienation between humanity and creation has been a violent separation, and we must work toward peace in order to heal this divide. [1]
Longtime nonviolent activist Father John Dear describes his own awakening to the connection between violence in the world and violence against the earth:
Over the decades, I have witnessed the destruction we humans have done to Mother Earth and her creatures…. I grieve for Mother Earth and the creatures who die because of our systemic greed, violence, and destructive habits. But I never made or felt the connection between my vision of nonviolence and the ongoing destruction of Mother Earth. Until now.
One day, while sitting in my house studying the Sermon on the Mount, I saw it right there in front of me. “Blessed are the meek,” Jesus says in the Beatitudes. Thomas Merton wrote that “meekness” is the biblical word for nonviolence. “Blessed are the nonviolent,” Jesus is saying, as if he were an ancient Gandhi, an ancient Dorothy Day, an ancient Martin Luther King Jr. “They will inherit the earth.” There it is. Blessed are the meek, the gentle, the nonviolent—they will inherit the earth. A life of nonviolence leads to oneness with creation and her creatures.
A life of violence, of course, leads to an abrupt discord with creation. In a time of permanent warfare, nuclear weapons, and catastrophic climate change, the message couldn’t be clearer. The God of peace, the nonviolent Jesus, and his Holy Spirit call us to practice nonviolence. In that way, we’ll renounce and stop our environmental destruction, tend our Garden of Eden together, and restore creation to its rightful peace….
It’s that vision of peace, nonviolence, and the new creation, the vision of the promised land before us, the practice of proactive nonviolence, that offers a way out of environmental destruction, as well as permanent war, corporate greed, systemic racism, and extreme poverty.
All we have to do is open our eyes to the reality of creation before us, to be present to it, to take it in and honor it, and welcome its gift of peace—and do so within the boundaries of nonviolence. [2]
There are days when I feel as though we barely understand Christianity. There are specific passages that I believe are completely overlooked because they challenge our conventional understanding of things…
This is one of them.
“Christ is all, and is in all.”
We are all already the body of Christ?
Christ is already in all of us?
The Gentile?
The Jew?
The circumcised?
The uncircumcised?
The barbarian?
The Scythian?
The slave?
The free?
Yep.
“Christ is all, and is in all.”
2.
“To choose the world is to choose to do the work I am capable of doing, in collaboration with my brother, to make the world better, more free, more just, more livable, more human.”
To live and breathe and find our being in God and the life of faith does not mean a retreat, shrinking back, escape, or hiding from the world.
Instead, we are called deeper into it. Not to be a part of it, but to help transform it, to make it better, to be co-redeemers of it, and to say that despite all of its issues, it is still worth valuing and still worth fighting for.
Several months ago, the family of Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a public letter that included the names of scholars and preachers from around the world who stood against how people were misinterpreting Bonhoeffer, as if to say that he was in favor of Christian nationalism.
Obviously, he was not.
He witnessed the German Lutheran Church of his day shake hands with political leadership to the extent that it led him to become a vocal opponent of the merger of church and state.
Why?
Because when the church becomes too intertwined with politicians, it loses its prophetic voice, it fails to notice those that the government is crushing, and begins to sacrifice its integrity for some misguided belief that the government will always protect it. When all of these things happen, there are fewer prophets of the kingdom of God and more chaplains who endorse the empire.
In Bonhoeffer’s own lifetime, he recognized the distinction between being a Christian and being consumed by the false ideology of German exceptionalism. Germany, despite being overwhelmingly Christian, was not, nor ever will be, the kingdom of God.
And, although I am writing about a Lutheran pastor’s theology and his struggles with being a Christian in a particular nation, I am confident that you can have a profound conversation with your friends and family about the same themes today.
4.
“He who seeks a language in which to utter his deepest concern, to pray, will find it in the Bible.”
Once upon a time, I did a youth Bible study during the summer/early fall of 2020. If you recall, it was still in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we had to maintain at least 6 feet of distance while outside.
We made the best of it.
Everyone showed up with their favorite camp chair and brought food with them. It was actually not too bad!
Over the course of 5 weeks, we read through the book of Lamentations, which consists of 5 chapters. Some were skeptical, but it was impressive to see how well the teenagers quickly dove into a conversation about the stages of grief expressed in that short book about the siege and burning of Jerusalem. We talked about the profound importance of emotional honesty, our (in)ability to articulate what is happening with us internally, and how refreshing it was to see rage, fury, bartering, indignation, and other things in “Scripture.”
The Bible is a profoundly human book, not to say that it is not also inspired, but instead that when we read it, we find people who wrestled deeply with the themes of what it means to be human.
5.
“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”
All idols want flattery. They all want to be addressed as something larger or more than what they actually are. Idols demand conformity and will do anything necessary to maintain their position as a false god. Idols will also use language that makes you feel as though they are on your side and that they are working for your best interests. Ultimately, idols operate the most out of falsehood and deception. No idol wants to be addressed as what it is: an idol.
And it is for these very reasons that it is difficult to speak truthfully.
Truth does not allow an idol to have the flattery it wants. Truth demands that we call out the limitations, inconsistencies, and false piety that surround idols. Truth knocks over idols, no matter how pious or innocuous they seem. Truth requires us to evaluate if the ethics of the idol aren’t actually divisive, discompassionate, scapegoating, and destructive. In the words of Augustine, “Truth is like a lion. You do not need to defend it. Just let it loose, it can take care of itself.”
God is not a fan of idols, and it is always better for us to smash our idols before God has to do it for us.
Activist and organizer Paul Engler connects nonviolence and the contemplative path:
Jesus was a singular figure in history—a teacher, prophet, and embodiment of the Divine. He offered a path to individual salvation through grace and prayer, a way represented today by the contemplative stream of Christianity. But he also offered something more dangerous: a revolutionary program of nonviolent resistance to empire, practiced by the early Christians and echoed through history by prophetic Christian minorities—those who have embraced strategic, principled nonviolence in the face of systemic evil….
Jesus stood in a long lineage of Jewish prophets who imagined, for the first time in history, a vision of liberation where the enslaved could exit empire, cross the wilderness, and birth a new society within the shell of the old. This idea—that a promised land could emerge amidst Pharaoh’s rule—would echo through Enlightenment revolutions and democratic uprisings across the globe.
But unlike secular revolutionaries who sought merely to replace one king with another,Jesus pointed to the roots: to the structures and systems that bear the fruit of institutional sin. He experimented with radical asceticism, wandered with prophetic disciples, and was shaped by desert mystics who mirrored in the first century Judaism, similar traditions found among the Sadhus of India, the Bhakti saints, and countless other holy figures who surrender all to the Divine.
This inner path—of prayer, ego-death, and mystical union—is a revelation in itself: that the promised land is not only a political reality, but also a psychological and spiritual one.Beneath the false self and reactive emotional programs (as Thomas Keating put it) lies our “original blessing.” Or as Richard Rohrreminds us again and again: the Imago Dei—the divine indwelling—is already within.
Our Earth, once assumed infinite in its bounty, now groans under the weight of extractive systems that for the first time in history hit their limits of total expansion. Climate change is just the tip of the iceberg. We are entering the sixth mass extinction. Ecosystems are collapsing. The coral reefs are dying, the forests are being cut, and over the last 80 years half of bird, and over half of fish populations have been wiped out. The canary in the coal mine is indeed dying. A third of the planet may soon experience drought annually. And still, the dominant culture accelerates forward—driven by a propaganda machine of individualism and consumerism.
Even astronauts, peering back at Earth as a blue marble suspended in darkness, speak of a revelation: that Eden is not a myth but a fragile truth we’ve exiled ourselves from.
Contemplation—whether through the Christian mystics, Buddhist mindfulness, or Indigenous ceremony—reveals this loss. And it invites us into the paschal mystery: a cycle of life, death, and resurrection that Jesus lived, not only as theology, but as cosmic pattern. What if the streams of contemplation and nonviolent resistance merged? What if our movements toward personal healing were also movementstoward systemic transformation? To live the Gospel fully is to embrace both.
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Jesus Calling: September 25th, 2025
Pour all of your energy into trusting Me. It is through trust you stay connected to me, aware of My Presence. Every step on your life – journey can be a step of faith. Baby steps of trust are simple for you; you can take them with almost unconscious ease. Giant steps are another matter altogether: leaping across chasms in semi-darkness, scaling cliffs of uncertainty, trudging through the valley of the shadow of death. These feats require sheer concentration, as well as utter commitment to Me. Each of My children is a unique blend of temperament, giftedness, and life experiences. Something that is a baby step for you may be a giant step for another person, and vice versa. Only I know the difficulty or ease of each segment of your journey. Beware of trying to impress others by acting as if your giant steps are only baby ones. Do not judge others who hesitate, in trembling fear, before an act would be easy for you. If each of My children would seek to please Me above all else, fear of others’ judgments would vanish, as would attempts to impress others. Focus your attention on the path just ahead of you and on the One who never leaves your side.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Psalm 23:4 (NLT) 4 Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.
Matthew 7:1-2 (NLT) Do Not Judge Others 1 “Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. 2 For you will be treated as you treat others. The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged.
Proverbs 29:25 (NLT) 25 Fearing people is a dangerous trap, but trusting the Lord means safety.
I am not afraid of the word tension. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. —Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail”
Minister Elle Dowd, an anti-racist white activist, challenges the notion that being a peacemaker means being “nice”:
We white people love to think of ourselves as nice…. But too often, niceness is about convenience. It’s about our comfort. It’s about control. It is our pathological desire for niceness that leads white people to look at young Black people crying out in the street and say,
“They should really say #AllLivesMatter.”
“I’m all for protesting, but do they really have to inconvenience other people?”
“No one is going to listen to them if they are going to be so rude like that.”
In other words, “Why can’t they be nice?”…
We say we value niceness, but this kind of niceness isn’t kindness or compassion or accompaniment or self-sacrifice. It’s not Christ’s example of emptying ourselves for the sake of the other. It’s the opposite—silencing and oppressing the other for the sake of ourselves.
Dowd reflects on the desire to reduce tension instead of learning what it might have to teach:
The reason many white people have trouble thinking of nonviolent direct action as truly nonviolent is that it is disruptive by nature, and that doesn’t feel very nice. It’s not supposed to be nice.
Direct action intentionally interrupts our daily flow and rhythm in an attempt to raise tension. This tension isn’t new. It isn’t being created out of thin air. It has always existed for our siblings of color.
For people of color and other oppressed people, the tension caused by marginalization is ever present with very real consequences…. Racism is like being force-fed a poison. Direct action is what happens when people refuse to drink that poison and instead bring a bottle of it to the doorstep of those force-feeding them and demand that they gaze upon the reality of it.
Direct action doesn’t create new tension. It redistributes the tension that is already there and puts it back where it belongs—at the source.
Many people—white people, in particular—have little tolerance for tension. We have been taught to avoid tension. Our conditioning has trained us to recoil from discomfort, to think of it as an inherently bad thing, something to sidestep and evade at all costs. Instead of leaning into tension to see what we can learn from it, we often avoid it. But when we do this, when we turn away from tension, we fail to see the gift that this tension can be in revealing the truth. We miss out on the clarity it brings with it, the opportunity to move forward.
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Hey CO few. (Andrew Lang)
Late last week as the Jimmy Kimmel news crashed across my screen and I was still trying to understand who Charlie Kirk really was (which is certainly different from the sanitized version even liberal writers are currently eulogizing), I fell into a bit of an emotional pit.
My partner and I chatted as she was getting ready to leave for work and I felt that familiar sense of overwhelm form in my gut.
But what can we do to actually stop any of this?
It wasn’t quite despair, but I admit it was the closest I’ve come to it in the past few months.
As she walked out the door, I just sat and stared at the wall for awhile reflecting on the week – specifically the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and the presence of ICE at my workplace.
And eventually, my history degree reared its head as if to say from the bottom drawer where it perpetually lives in darkness: look to what others have done.
So below are five ways people and communities have resisted authoritarianism and mass harm – not always enough to end the violence or impact, but enough to maintain a sense of dignity and beauty in the midst of it.
I hope as you read through the examples below, you consider what “safe enough” actions you might take as we continue deeper into this moment.
(And a huge shoutout to the folks I met with on Sunday for our Overwhelm to Action event: people committing to work on countering food insecurity, turning out the vote in the upcoming California election, advocating to our WA state government for trans family members, engaging in mutual aid for Hispanic folks not wanting to leave their homes – it was inspiring!)
1. Community, Community, Community
I’m leading with this one because it is a non-negotiable. Community is the only way we get through this.
It can take many shapes and forms, from the loud and action-centered to the quiet and care-centered, but the question I offer is this: who is holding this moment alongside you?
In Mussolini’s Italy, the activists who lacked networks and communities were neutralized quickly. The “moderates” who had some power and rank, but were not part of communities talking about the danger of the moment, fell into silence.
But those who had some kind of community structure – churches, student groups, labor organizations, underground reading circles – had the resilience to resist longer. They emboldened each other to embrace hope and to identify the small ways to fight back; they kept the conversation and the tending to grief going.
During the HIV/AIDS Crisis of the 1980s, and in the face of governmental inaction, ACT UP began to form small, local groups of friends, partners, and neighbors who would come together in living rooms, church basements, and community centers to care for each other and share resources. These communities, absolutely and intentionally being failed by the government, gathered to survive, together.
Question: Who can you intentionally gather with for the purpose of tending to each other’s needs? (Who might you invite over for dinner to talk with about this?)
2. Protect + Pressure the Press and Academia
Across the board, the first enemies of an authoritarian leader are the free press, universities, and the public school system (if there is one.)
I remember in high school reading about book burnings in Weimar Germany – one of the first acts of the Nazi Party upon taking power. Or of how Pinochet in Chile would order raids on bookstores to terrify storeowners out of business. Or of our own American legacy of McCarthyism and anti-abolitionist book burnings in the South.
And yet – in the midst of each of these examples of censorship, there was resistance.
In Nazi Germany, the White Rose movement formed, a group of students quietly distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. During the McCarthy Era here in the United States, alternative publications like Dissent Magazine were created to hold space for intellectual debate outside the academic mainstream. In the Soviet Union, some would hand-copy books and articles – known as “samizdat” – so the ideas within them would survive and spread. In Pinochet’s Chile, multiple churches made the brave decision to shelter intellectuals and written materials, even hosting small discussion circles, under the protective guise of “religious activity.”
As we look around and see academic institutions, media companies, and publishers under pressure from the Trump Administration to fold or self-censor, one move we can make is to do our best to apply counter-pressure: demand our representatives protect academic institutions, boycott and divest from media companies that submit to Trump’s demands, and amplify and fund local journalists and creators who are pushing back.
Question: How can you apply counter-pressure by contacting representatives, writing letters to the editor, boycotting companies like Meta, Disney, and Target who give in, and/or amplify journalists and creators doing resistance work?
3. Small Acts of Refusal
These are the acts of everyday resistance, often silent and in the shadows, but present and powerful.
In China, where public resistance has a long history of suppression, there is an equally long tradition of silent protests (wearing symbols on clothing, etc.), family-led education to counter state-run curriculum, and “nod-and-deny” tactics, where people fall in line publicly and work behind the scenes to resist. In Nazi Germany, this was true as well: resistance could look like refusing to parrot party slogans or finding ways to quietly support underground resistance networks. Enslaved people in the United States would engage in everyday resistance by slowing down work, feigning sickness when safe-enough to do so, or “accidentally” damaging crops or farm tools.
As we consider what is ours to do to resist authoritarianism, it is worth repeating again and again and again: no action is too small.
Each of these small acts of refusal and resistance and counter-pressure can preserve our sense of dignity and purpose until larger movements take shape.
Question: What are the small ways, perhaps even silent or invisible, you can refuse to accept the Trump Administration’s use of power and story?
4. Create Pockets of Democracy
Democracy is always a threat to those who desire to wield power over others.
That’s why every year, voter suppression bills are lobbied for and passed at all levels of legislature. (79 restrictive voting laws have been passed in the last four years in the United States.) That’s why poll taxes and literacy tests were used to exclude Black folks from voting in the Jim Crow South. That’s why Putin in Russia has jailed and killed his opponents and Orbán in Hungary has stacked the courts and re-written the constitution.
And this is why one of the ways we can resist fascism is by ensuring democracy – and the cultural norms and ideals that support it – continues to exist at all levels of public engagement.
In the Jim Crow South, registering to vote, teaching people to read, and joining organizations like the NAACP could be extremely dangerous as they were radical threats to the anti-democratic system of White Supremacy – and yet, people engaged in these everyday. In South Africa, folks educated each other, literally door-to-door, to make sure neighbors knew and bought into the cultural ideals that would uphold democracy following the transition from Apartheid.
Attending city council meetings, showing up at school boards, practicing democratic processes in our non-profits and organizations, going door-to-door to talk with our neighbors about local issues – all of these feel small and yet create cultural and institutional resilience to survive the sway of authoritarianism.
Question: How can you can help strengthen democracy – and democratic norms and ideas – in the spaces you already belong to? (Your neighborhood, workplace, or community groups, etc.)
5. Sustain Hope Through Care
Just as Mariame Kaba says, “hope is a discipline,” the work of sustaining hope is not about anything fluffy or sentimental — it is deeply practical, rooted, and embodied.
Throughout history, basic everyday care has been shown to be radical.Whether creating a community garden, making music, ensuring continuing friendship – all of these acts serve as a counterweight to despair and overwhelm, giving up and giving in.
When the Nazis spread across Europe and took over in places like Denmark, Norway, and France, people organized underground poetry readings, musical performances, and religious gatherings. Or in Japanese-American Internment Camps during WWII, families planted gardens and published community newspapers. The Black Panther Party was founded with a mission of care: to support Black folks with self-defense training and eventually breakfast programs, health clinics, and more.
All of these examples sustained hope – all of them centered the community and insisted in the primacy of dignity, beauty, and human value.
Today, we can see this work in mutual aid networks and in communities that focus on building a culture of resilience and care amongst themselves. Through their actions, these spaces build the community strength needed to resist authoritarianism and weave connection amongst people so that nobody has to feel isolated and alone.
Question: What can you do this week to show care (a meal, a phone call, a garden, a story) in a way that builds resilience against despair?
Father Richard offers a summary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s principles of nonviolence:
Nonviolence is a way of strength and not a way for cowards. It is not a lack of power which allows us to be nonviolent, but in fact the discovery of a different kind of power. It is a choice, not a resignation; a spirituality, not just a tactic.
The goal of nonviolence is always winning the friendship and the understanding of the supposed opponent, not their humiliation or personal defeat. It must be done to eventually facilitate the process of reconciliation, and we ourselves must be willing to pay the price for that reconciliation. King based this on Jesus’ lifestyle and death and on Ephesians 2:13–22 and Romans 12:1–2.
The opponent must be seen not so much as an evil person, but as a symbol of a much greater systemic evil—of which they also are a victim!We must aim our efforts at that greater evil, which is harming all of us, rather than at the opponent.
There is a moral power in voluntarily suffering for the sake of others. Christians call it the “myth of redemptive suffering,” whereas almost all of history is based on the opposite, the “myth of redemptive violence.” The lie that almost everybody believes is that suffering can be stopped by increasing the opponent’s suffering. It works only in the short run. In the long run, that suffering is still out there and will somehow have to work its way out in the next generation or through the lives of the victims. A willingness to bear the pain has the power to transform and absorb the evil in the opponent, the nonviolent resister, and even the spectator. This is precisely what Jesus was doing on the cross. It changes all involved and at least forces the powers that be to “show their true colors” publicly. And yes, the nonviolent resister is also changed through the action. It is called resurrection or enlightenment.
This love ethic must be at the center of our whole life,or it cannot be effective or real in the crucial moments of conflict. We have to practice drawing our lives from this new source, in thought, word, emotion, and deed, every day, or we will never be prepared for the major confrontations or the surprise humiliations that will come our way.
Nonviolence relies on a kind ofcosmic optimism which trusts that the universe/reality/God is finally and fully on the side of justice and truth. History does have a direction, meaning, and purpose. God/good is more fundamental than evil. Resurrection will have the final word, which is the very promise of the Jesus event. The eternal wind of the Spirit is with us. However, we should not be naïve; and we must understand that most people’s loyalties are with security, public image, and the comforts of the status quo.
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John Chaffee Learning from the Mystics: St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio
Quote of the Week: “But if you want to know how these things come about, ask grace not instruction, desire not understanding, the groaning of prayer not diligent reading, the Spouse not the teacher, God not man, darkness not clarity, not light but the fire that totally inflames and carries us into God by ecstatic unctions and burning affections.” – The Soul’s Journey into God, Ch. 7.6
Reflection
For people such as Bonaventure, the work of theology and the work of pious devotion were the same task. However, it appears as though the temptation was already happening in his day to emphasize the love of the mind rather than the love of God. Although the mind has its place in the pursuit of God, it also has its limitations. The perennial temptation is to think that to be “correct” theologically is what allows us to be “close” to God, rather than to remember that being “close” to God is more a matter of romance…
In this quote above, Bonaventure is wrapping up the entirety of his work, The Soul’s Journey into God, with this emphasis on pious devotion. As a son of Francis of Assisi, his words are directly in line with the teachings and values of the Franciscan order: Divine Love and Mystery will always hold sway at the end of the day. Bonaventure was at one point a professor of theology at the University of Paris, and so for him to not esteem his work and profession as a high mark is noteworthy.
In his own words, the journey into God is a matter of grace, desire, prayer, betrothal, divinity, darkness, and fire.The journey into God is NOT a matter of instruction, understanding, diligent reading, a teacher, humanity, clarity, or enlightenment. One of the main tenets of Franciscanism is the equality of all believers, elitism is utterly denounced within the order. No Franciscan is to be called a “Father,” only a “Friar.” No one is a “Major,” and everyone is a “Minor.” To be close to God is not a reward for a special few, but a gracious gift to those with hearts ready.
For Bonaventure, the only thing that mattered was the “burning love of the Crucified One.” This burning heart of Jesus is the furnace through which all other loves, all other devotions, all activities, and passivities must pass. Love is not only the goal, love is also the path, love is the motivation, love is the engine, love is the fuel. For Bonaventure, the whole of the Christian life, theology, and devotion can be summed up in the word “love.”
Prayer Heavenly Father, we admit that we sometimes prefer the ideas of You to the reality of You. We chase after theology rather than devotion. Perhaps it is because it is less threatening to talk about You than to You, to talk about loving You rather than to love You. Return us to our original very goodness and dive full-bodied into devotion once again. Set our hearts on fire for You once more. May it be so. Amen.
Life Overview of St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio:
When and Where: Born in 1221 AD. Died on July 15th, 1274. He spent most of his life in what is now modern-day Italy and France.
Why He is Important: Bonaventure was a major teacher of the faith who taught at the University of Paris. He is known as the Seraphic Doctor, gave us one of the most influential biographies of St. Francis of Assisi, and sought to write about the Christian faith in an integrative manner that brought together all the various disciplines of his own day.
Father Richard Rohr reflects on the spiritual and moral futility of violence, drawing on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and his radical call to love:
Part of the genius of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968), inspired by the teachings of Jesus and Gandhi, was that he was able to show thoughtful people that violence was not only immoral but actually impractical and, finally, futile. In the long run, it doesn’t achieve its stated purposes, because it only deepens bitterness on both sides and leaves them in an endless and impossible cycle of violence that cannot be stopped by itself. Instead, some neutralizing force must be inserted from outside to stop the cycle and point us in a new direction.
King insisted that true nonviolent practice is founded on a spiritual seeing and has little to do with mere education or what I would call the “calculative mind.” He thought it self-evident that the attitudes of nonviolence were finally impossible without an infusion of agapelove from God and our reliance upon that infusion. He defined agape love as willingness to serve without the desire for reciprocation, willingness to suffer without the desire for retaliation, and willingness to reconcile without the desire for domination. This is clearly a Divine love that the small self cannot achieve by itself. We must live in and through Another to be truly nonviolent. [1]
Palestinian Christian theologian Munther Isaac challenges us to confront the deep disconnect between the nonviolent teaching of Jesus and the ways Christianity has often aligned with systems of power and violence, even today:
Christianity and violence should not go hand in hand, at least theoretically. The teachings of Jesus are very clear. The teachings of Paul and the apostles are very clear. There is no place for violence for the followers of Jesus. Yet an honest assessment of even the last 150 years will clearly reveal that many who claimed to be Christians committed some of the worst atrocities in our world: the Belgians in Congo, the Germans in Namibia, the French in Algeria, the Bosnian Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Guatemalan genocide against the Laya indigenous people, and of course the Holocaust against the Jewish people in Europe.
The Bible and theology have played a significant role in this war of genocide in Gaza.… To be clear, I fully believe that when Scripture is used to justify genocide or promote ideologies of supremacy, this use has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus nor the essence of the Christian faith. Yet, shamefully, the church has aligned itself with empire throughout the centuries. It has chosen the path of power and influence. One would expect Christians to have learned the lesson. We have not.
Can We Love All?
Congressman John Lewis (1940–2020) describes his Christian faith as the foundation of his commitment to nonviolence:
I believe in the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. I accepted it not simply as a technique or as a tactic, but as a way of life, a way of living. We have to arrive at the point, as believers in the Christian faith, that in every human being there is a spark of divinity. Every human personality is something sacred, something special. We don’t have a right, as another person or as a nation, to destroy that spark of divinity, that spark of humanity, that is made and created in the image of God.
I saw Sheriff Clark in Selma, or Bull Connor in Birmingham, or George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, as victims of the system. We were not out to destroy these men. We were out to destroy a vicious and evil system. [1]
Theologian Walter Wink (1935–2012) recalls a tense moment in Selma in which a reminder to love their enemies shocked the conscience of the crowd and forged a nonviolent path forward:
King so imbued this understanding of nonviolence into his followers that it became the ethos of the entire civil rights movement. One evening … the large crowd of black and white activists standing outside the Ebenezer Baptist Church was electrified by the sudden arrival of a black funeral home operator from Montgomery. He reported that a group of black students demonstrating near the capitol just that afternoon had been surrounded by police on horseback, all escape barred, and cynically commanded to disperse or take the consequences. Then the mounted police waded into the students and beat them at will. Police prevented ambulances from reaching the injured for two hours….
The crowd outside the church seethed with rage. Cries went up, “Let’s march!” Behind us, across the street, stood, rank on rank, the Alabama State Troopers and the local police forces of Sheriff Jim Clark. The situation was explosive. A young black minister stepped to the microphone and said, “It’s time we sang a song.” He opened with the line, “Do you love Martin King?” to which those who knew the song responded, “Certainly, Lord!”… Right through the chain of command of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference he went, the crowd each time echoing, warming to the song, “Certainly, certainly, certainly Lord!” Without warning he sang out, “Do you love Jim Clark?”—the Sheriff?! “Cer … certainly, Lord” came the stunned, halting reply. “Do you love Jim Clark?” “Certainly, Lord”—it was stronger this time. “Do you love Jim Clark?” Now the point had sunk in, as surely as Amos’ in chapters 1 and 2: “Certainly, certainly, certainly Lord!”
Rev. James Bevel then took the mike. We are not just fighting for our rights, he said, but for the good of the whole society. “It’s not enough to defeat Jim Clark—do you hear me Jim?—we want you converted. We cannot win by hating our oppressors. We have to love them into changing.”
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TODAY IS THE FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
We’re still in the “season within a Season” the four Sundays in September now celebrated by many churches as the “Season of Creation.”
On this Sunday, we read one of Jesus’ strangest and most misunderstood parables — about a corrupt manager who gets praised for stealing from his own boss.
Luke 16:1-13
Jesus said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. So he summoned him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because you cannot be my manager any longer.’
“Then the manager said to himself, ‘What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager, people may welcome me into their homes.’‘
“So, summoning his master’s debtors one by one, he asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He answered, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.’ Then he asked another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘A hundred containers of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill and make it eighty.’ And his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.
“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.”
from Diana Butler Bass
The passage today is appropriate for both this season of creation and the threatening political season of global authoritarianism in which we live. It is a parable — a story that isn’t factual but is true — told to make a point or two. There is a point about shrewdness: People of faith are often kind of clueless but shouldn’t be. There’s a point about money: “You can’t serve God and wealth.”
And there is also a point about justice: You can do the right thing even while having less than honorable intentions toward others. In this parable, the manager tries to save his own neck but winds up acting justly toward the poor. Sure, he keeps his job. But those who receive the greatest benefit from his actions are the debtors. Ultimately, those struggling to repay the manager’s master have their debts reduced some 20 to 50 percent!
The rich man, the householder, is out a lot of cash. Yet he still praised the corrupt manager who stole from him.
All sorts of things may be happening behind the scenes. It may be that the manager had cooked the books all along. Maybe he’d padded the debts by 20 to 50 percent and skimmed that extra off the top for his own benefit. In order to rescue his job, he abruptly ended his scheme to profit off the master’s account. Perhaps he added to the debts to make more money for the master — who might be impressed by the profitability of the estate and reward him for his good work.
Corruption wears many masks.
But people started to talk — and the manager got called out. So, whatever smarts he’d employed toward cheating in the first place, he now redirected to impress and befriend those in debt. Because those were the folks about to become his new neighbors.
If you emphasize the debtors in the parable (instead of the householder or the manager), the story shifts. At first, the manager sees the debtors as a kind of personal piggybank — cheating them, whether directly or indirectly, enriches him. He sees them as a way up the financial or social ladder, people to be used on his way up.
When it becomes clear that he might spend the rest of his life among those whom he’d defrauded, he didn’t panic. Instead, he saw the situation differently. He will be in their debt. He’ll be beholden to them for friendship and food. He will live among them, not over them.
Well, he might have panicked a little. Would they cast him out? Would they turn their backs on him? Would they cheat him as he had cheated them?
He may have thought they were objects to be used for his benefit. But they were people, human beings as vulnerable as he was.
What will make them like me? Accept me? Welcome me to their tables?
The manager had a change of mind. He converted, at least in a vaguely selfish way, to side with those whom he’d previously seen as less than human. He decided to buy their affection. And he slashed their debts.
The manager’s boss finds this shrewd. It certainly was a creative redeployment of resources.
In the process of saving himself, the manager made the debtors’ world a little more just. He’s an accidental sort of social justice warrior. And guess what? They probably did like him much better than before. Who wants to hang out with a crooked debt collector?
At this point, the debtors disappear from the story and we are left with questions about them.
My sense is, given Jewish law and customs about hospitality at the time, the debtors would not have rejected the fired manager. If he came to them in distress, and if they took the teachings of their own faith seriously, they would have accepted him and cared for him. The debtors might have been generous people glad to have the manager finally take a seat at their tables. Even without the debt reduction.
But he saw the world through his own eyes — seeing people as pawns in his own game. He discovered he needed others, even as “pawns” to save himself, and did a strangely good deed for them.
The householder steps back in at the end. He praised the manager because the manager did something right even with these less-than-pure motives. The manager oddly became an agent of God’s justice for the poor. And then, the householder added one more thing — bring your heart in line with your mental shrewdness.
We might paraphrase the householder’s final speech: You did the right thing for the wrong reasons. How much greater would it be if you understood that you still had used my wealth to get ahead, to placate your own fears and greed, and that money was still your ultimate master. Don’t do the right thing accidentally. Change your heart, too. Because, ultimately, you can only follow one path — you must embrace the love of God and neighbor or continue to serve and save yourself through mammon.
Shrewd, yes. But loving? My cunning manager, you’ve got some work to do.
And what of that manager? As the story closes, his boss is pleased with him and expects him to do better in the future and his neighbors are grateful to him for making their lives easier. The manager now has the opportunity to go from being a crooked middleman in a corrupt arrangement to being well-regarded by the entire community. From having no friends to being surrounded by friends.
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I find great comfort in these truths within Jesus’s story. (Always remember: a parable is fiction, not something that actually happened.) I certainly have done good things for the wrong reasons — often those reasons were greedy and self-serving. And I’ve seen other people as little more than rungs on a ladder of my own getting ahead, only to learn later that, ultimately, all we humans are in the same boat.
The shrewd manager reminds me that I’m not alone. And the householder’s generous response to his manager’s actions — to praise him and keep him on — makes me feel safer, accepted, and forgiven. For all my flaws, I don’t feel condemned. Instead the householder’s response makes me want to do better. I want my actions and my heart to match, to grow in tandem toward the love of God and neighbor.
And, as we do better, everybody else does better. Because it isn’t about ascending to the top of some power pyramid by abusing and cheating others. We really live, even though we don’t always see it, in an interconnected community of mutual benefit.
This twist on the parable is greatly needed today. We are literally drowning in a sea of the most massive political corruption in the history of the United States. It is outrageous and brutal, and it is destroying the fabric of community at every level.
So many of us stand at the ready — indeed are eager — to condemn both the actions and intentions of the corrupt. To gossip and accuse and charge others with fraud and abuse. All those whom we deem less than human, those whom we think it is fine to abuse on our way to getting some result in our own interest. Corruption in the middle of a system invites more corruption throughout.
Perhaps we all need to take a breath — and try to see if and where good is really being done, ham-handedly perhaps, by those with impure hearts (and please do tell me if you find many actors with pure hearts) and mixed motives. Where the most unexpected of characters winds up being a hero in the story. I bet there’s more of those sorts of folks than we imagine — shrewd managers who accidentally learned that they don’t have to buy their friends. And that they don’t have to cheat to get ahead.
In the midst of it all, imitate the householder.
Praise the good; resist condemnation; invite even the awkwardly contrite to do the right things for the right reasons. Extend mercy. Seek the unity of mind and heart, of action and compassion. Rightly direct your love and urge others to do the same. Welcome all who come to the table.
And make sure that we, each one ourself, continues on that neighborly way — where we find we have far more friends than we knew all along.
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In conversation with Richard Rohr on the Everything Belongspodcast, founder of Homeboy Industries Father Greg Boyle describes how love heals us:
On a podcast the other day I said, “Lovenever fails,” and the interviewer said, “Our listeners are going to think you’re naive.” And I thought, well, I don’t know how you prove that [love never fails] except to say, I think that if anybody stops to think about how that’s been operative in their life, they realize, in fact, in the end, it’s never failed. If it feels like it has, it’s just not the end.
Somehow we don’t have confidence in it. We think that it’s more savvy to not embrace love somehow—that your head is in the clouds at a time when we need to be doing some things that are concrete.Idon’t think love cancels out concrete action. This is sort of the marriage of contemplation and action…. When the ego interrupts you, you try to catch yourself, so that you can return to sweetness…. Hold out for sweetness and life because that’s what a confidence in love as “never failing” will usher in—that kind of moment of connection and kinship.
I always talk about “cherishing,” because the word “love” sort of gets lost. Cherishing is love with its sleeves rolled up. It’s about really seeing people. At Homeboy, we want to create a place that’s safe, where people are seen, so that they can be cherished because that’s what is healing.
Boyle recounts how his organization came to believe thatlove and cherishing are the path to healing:
In the early days, we were saying, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” We thought an employed gang member would never return to prison. Then, as we started a school, we thought, “Well, an educated gang member won’t ever go back to prison,” but that was proving not true. Then we kind of landed, maybe 20 or 25 years ago (out of our 37 years), where we said, “No, a healed gang member will not ever re-offend.” Period. And it’s been born out as truthful, so that’s the emphasis.
We do all the other things: employment, here’s money in your pocket, a gainful job, education and all these other things like tattoo removal and therapy. All those things are secondary to the primary community of healing where people are receiving doses [of love] constantly, in a very repetitive way.It’s the repetitive nature of reassurance, affirmation, affection, hugging—all these things. We used to fret if somebody relapsed with drugs or returned to gang life for a moment or went to jail. We used to say, “Well, maybe they’ll come back.” Nobody says that now. Everybody says, “He’ll be back”—and they all come back. I’m not really aware of an exception. They’ll come back because once you’ve had a taste of having been cherished in a way that’s authentic, it’s so compelling that [you surrender to it].
We each likely fall for it when people first tell us that they love us. Perhaps it is part of our better angels that we want to believe others, and then there might also be a side of us that desperately wants to believe their words are true.
Although it is a start to tell others we love them, we must prove those words by the actions that follow.
And perhaps that is why the word “love” carries so much potency. The word itself is almost like a promissory note saying that we want, will, and are committed to the Good happening for the Beloved.
To say, “I love you,” is not merely a statement about the now; it is a foreshadowing of what to expect from us in the future.
2.
“Religion at its worst reinforces the status quo, often at the expense of our faith.”
To the best of my knowledge, Seth is not a religious person. And yet, I think he gets this absolutely right about religion at its worst.
I am of a generation that was taught that faith informs every part of our lives. We were taught that God cares about Justice and Mercy, speaking prophetically on behalf of the downtrodden and abused. We were taught that God is more on the side of the slaves of the world than the Pharaohs who dominate. Knowing all of this, it is little wonder to me that so many of my generation walked away from the church.
Especially if the faith has been hijacked to protect the status quo rather than challenge it.
At its best, religion can remind us of the duty and responsibility we have to one another. It can teach us how to love our neighbors as ourselves, and therefore highlight aspects of culture that are not very loving towards our neighbors.
3.
“Wash the plate not because it is dirty nor because you are told to wash it, but because you love the person who will use it next.”
The best of the Christian activists remind us of the importance of the little actions we do out of love for one another.
When born of hubris and a need to be important, we likely give too much focus on addressing the social issues that seem large enough to warrant our attention and effort.
However, that might come at the expense of doing the small actions of love, the little things that help ease the day of someone close to us, which can help shoulder some of their suffering and generally improve the quality of their lives.
I think what I enjoyed about this quote is that it gave a tangible expression to the commandment of “loving your neighbor as yourself.” Our acts of love do not need to be noticed or even celebrated for our Beloved to feel loved by us.
4.
“Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.”
A few nights ago, I finished reading Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. It is a fantastic and small book that packs quite a punch if you are in the right season of life for it. It is devoted to the topic of vocation and calling, and how, over time, we can follow a golden thread that has been with us from the start of our lives and connects us to what we are here to do.
Every success and every failure, every door opening and every door closing, was a fork in the road that we either courageously took or foolishly avoided.
Parker Palmer reminds us that discerning our vocation and calling can be challenging if we are not attuned to our true selves. If we are still in the mode of living out the life that others demand of us, and if we do not dare to listen to our own soul subtly pulling us in a particular direction, then we will fail at finding our vocation.
However,
If we are true to ourselves, listen to the sound of the genuine within ourselves, and pay attention to the themes of every job we ever had, every interaction we enjoyed or hated, then we have plenty of signposts to help us discover what we are here to do.
And, it seems as though wisdom is a matter of figuring out what the “next right step” is and courageously taking it.
5.
“We are more fond of spiritual sweetness than crosses.”
As I mentioned last week, I am undertaking another re-read of Interior Castle, the great spiritual classic of Spanish Catholic mysticism.
This time, I am using a blue highlighter, which is fun because it occasionally overlaps previous yellow highlighting and leaves most pages covered in green.
It is true, though, no matter how long we are on the path of Christ, we forget that it will invariably involve a cross. To follow Christ is a matter of ego-annihilation, a matter of submitting ourselves to the painful task of loving the world in the midst of all of its brokenness and then picking ourselves up and doing it all over again tomorrow.
When you look at the world as lover, every being becomes precious to you. And the impulse to act on behalf of life becomes irresistible. —Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self
The Tears of Things Reader’s Guide introduces Buddhist teacher and environmental activist Joanna Macy (1929–2025):
When Joanna Macy traveled the world with her husband, a Peace Corps director, she supported Tibetan refugees in India and discovered Buddhism. After earning a PhD in Buddhism and systems theory, Macy helped create the field of “deep ecology” by articulating “the Work That Reconnects,” a process of group transformation that acknowledges ecological grief and encourages people into collective action. Macy has empowered countless people in her workshops to face their grief at the world’s injustices and act with hope, reminding us that by grieving with others and engaging in collective grief, we can “find strength intheir strengths, bolstering our own individual supplies of courage, commitment, and endurance.” [1]
Joanna Macy identifies four stages of work that support our ongoing participation in the healing of the world:
The spiral of the Work That Reconnects maps out an empowerment process that journeys through four successive movements, or stations: coming from gratitude, honoring our pain for the world, seeing with new eyes, and going forth. This spiral … reminds us that we are larger, stronger, deeper, and more creative than we’ve grown accustomed to believing. When we come from gratitude, we become more present to the wonder of being alive in this amazing world, to the many gifts we receive, to the beauty and mystery it offers. Yet the very act of looking at what we love and value in our world brings with it an awareness of the vast violation underway, the despoliation and unraveling….
From gratitude we naturally flow to honoring our pain for the world. Dedicating time and attention to honoring this pain opens up space to hear our sorrow, fear, outrage, and other felt responses to what is happening to our world….Our pain for the world not only alerts us to danger but also reveals our profound caring. And this caring derives from our interconnectedness with all of life. We need not fear it.
In the third stage, we step further into the perceptual shift that recognizes our pain for the world arises from our love for life. Seeing with new eyes reveals the wider web of resources available to us through our rootedness within a deeper, wider, ecological self…. It opens us to a new view of what is possible and a new grasp of our power to act.
The final station, going forth, involves clarifying our vision of how we can act for the healing of our world and identifying practical steps that move our vision forward…. With the shift of perception that seeing with new eyes brings, you can let go of the need to plan every step; instead trust your intention…. Focus on finding and playing your part, offering your own contribution, your unique gift of Active Hope. [2]
I designed you to live in union with Me. This union does not negate who you are; it actually makes you more fully yourself. When you try to live independently of Me, you experience emptiness and dissatisfaction. You may gain the whole world and yet lose everything that really counts. Find fulfillment through living close to Me, yielding to My purposes for you. Though I may lead you along paths that feel alien to you, trust that I know what I am doing. If you follow Me wholeheartedly, you will discover facets of yourself that were previously hidden. I know you intimately – far better than you know yourself. In union with Me, you are complete. In closeness to Me, you are transformed more and more into the one I designed you to be.
RELATED BIBLE VERSES:
Mark 8:36 (NLT) 36 And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul?
Additional insight regarding Mark 8:36: Many people spend all their energy seeking pleasure. Jesus said, however, that worldliness, which is centered on possessions, position, or power, is ultimately worthless. Whatever you have on earth is only temporary; it cannot be exchanged for your soul. If you work hard at getting what you want, you might eventually have a “pleasurable” life, but in the end, you will find it hollow and empty. Are you willing to make the pursuit of God more important than selfish pursuits? Follow Jesus, and you will know what it means to live abundantly now and to have eternal life as well.
Psalm 139:13-16 (NLT) 13 You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex! Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it. 15 You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion, as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. 16 You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.
Additional insight regarding Psalm 139:13-15: God’s character goes into the creation of every person. When you feel worthless or even begin to hate yourself, remember that God’s Spirit is ready and willing to work within you. We should have as much respect for ourselves as our Maker has for us.
2nd Corinthians 3:17-18 (NLT) 17 For the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord. And the Lord—who is the Spirit—makes us more and more like him as we are changed into his glorious image.
Additional insight regarding 2nd Corinthians 3:17: Those who were trying to be saved by keeping the Old Testament law were soon tied up in rules and ceremonies. But now, through the Holy Spirit, God provides freedom from sin and condemnation (Romans 8:1). When we trust Christ to save us, he removes our burden of trying to please him and our guilt for failing to do so. By trusting Christ we are loved, accepted, forgive, and freed to live for him. “Wherever the Spirit of the Lord, there is freedom.”
Additional insight regarding 2nd Corinthians 3:18: The glory that the Spirit imparts to the believer is more excellent and lasts longer than the glory that Moses experienced. By gazing at the nature of God with unveiled minds, we can be more like him. In the Good news, we see the truth about Christ, and it transforms us morally as we understand and apply it. Through learning about Christ’s life, we can understand how wonderful God is and what he is really like. As our knowledge deepens, the Holy Spirit helps us to change. Becoming Christlike is a progressive experience (see Romans 8:29; Galatians 4:19; Philippians 3:21; 1st John 3:2). The more closely we follow Christ, the more we will be like him.
Gandhi and Dr. King used the word nonviolence every hour; they didn’t use the word love. King uses the word love, but he’s really saying, “I don’t mean this or that by it. I mean agape, but we don’t have agape.” —John Dear, Learning How to See
In his sermon “Loving Your Enemies,” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) insists that agape love is the path to justice and peace:
When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality….
Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world. Jesus is not an impractical idealist: he is the practical realist.
I am certain that Jesus understood the difficulty inherent in the act of loving one’s enemy. He never joined the ranks of those who talk glibly about the easiness of the moral life. He realized that every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God. So when Jesus said “Love your enemy,” he was not unmindful of its stringent qualities. Yet he meant every word of it. Our responsibility as Christians is to discover the meaning of this command and seek passionately to live it out in our daily lives….
When Jesus bids us to love our enemies, he is speaking neither of eros[romantic love] nor philia [reciprocal love of friends]; he is speaking of agape, understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all people. Only by following this way and responding with this type of love are we able to be children of our Father who is in heaven. [1]
In the Learning How to Seepodcast, CAC dean of faculty Brian McLaren invites longtime peace activist, priest, and author John Dear to explore the deep connection between love and nonviolence. Dear has worked on many movements for peace in the tradition of Gandhi and Dr. King to abolish war, racism, poverty, nuclear weapons, and environmental destruction. Dear identifies agape love as the source of his commitment to nonviolence:
Nonviolence to me means active love, pursuing its common truth, this basic truth of reality, which is that we’re all one. That we’re already united, that we’re already reconciled, that we’re all children … of a God of universal love. Therefore, we can’t kill anybody, much less sit by if someone’s hurting. We killed 100 million people in the last century. There are forty wars happening today. We are on track to blow up the planet and destroy the planet through catastrophic climate change. So, there’s nothing passive about love. Love is active, creative, daring, public nonviolence that resists all the forces of death.
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Hey CO few. ,I had a different newsletter planned for this week — but then ICE showed up in the parking lot of my workplace. It was early in the morning on Thursday and they showed up in four unmarked cars, planning to use the space to stage an operation in the neighborhood. For context, my office is centered in the middle of a neighborhood with a high immigrant population, and is within walking distance of at least three schools.Their presence was a sign that our neighborhood community members were in danger. And so, seeing them pull up, our head of HR (one of the only people in the building that morning) quickly convened with two colleagues and called in a local immigration lawyer. Along with reporting ICE’s presence to the immigration hotline, they were dedicated to getting them off the property.
She was scared, but focused. Together, they marched out and confronted the ICE agents and, after clearly articulating they were not welcome to use the space, ICE hopped back in their cars and drove off. We don’t know where their operation was planned; we don’t know where they went next. Our full assumption is that harm was still committed. But in that moment, she did what she knew she was able to do.As we face the everyday effects of rising fascism in the United States, we all have a question to grapple with: what is safe enough for me to do right now? Not what is safe…but what is safe enough. On Thursday, the head of HR at our nonprofit assessed the situation, checked with herself internally, gathered power in numbers, and did what was safe enough for her to do.When actions are “safe”…We are maintaining our sense of comfort; these actions don’t challenge our status quo; they are almost entirely risk-free for us, at least in this moment. Often, but not always, these are performative actions without much influence or impact. (In many cases, not taking action fits into this category as a “safe” action.)It’s important to note: our bodies tend to know when we’re staying too safe for too long. We can feel a sense of guilt or restlessness that we’re not doing enough, as if we’re complacent, or even complicit. While I invite us to hold ourselves gently in this, I also believe these feelings are clear flags for us, waving us (inviting us) toward a different way of acting and living.When actions are “not safe, currently”…These actions threaten us in ways we are not willing to subscribe to in this current moment. As things change, these actions might filter into another sphere, but for now, these are the actions on our “I’m not going to do that” or “I just can’t get myself to do that” lists.It takes a lot of support to do these – and if we do, we will very possibly find ourselves outside our window of tolerance, experiencing intense body responses, such as muscular tension, freeze, or extreme sweating, or interacting with trauma responses based on our life’s experiences.
When actions are “safe enough”…These are the actions to hone in on: the actions available to us that are just a bit uncomfortable, that invite a bit of risk for us, that are difficult and require learning or experiencing something new, but are doable. These are the ones that stretch us, challenge us to grow, and push us into becoming someone new, even if it’s ever-so-slightly at first.Communal and societal change happens when a critical mass of folks lean into taking “safe enough” action in the face of injustice and harm.
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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