Friday, January 24, 2025
Drawing on personal experience, Father Richard offers an encouraging reminder that we don’t need to be perfect in order to be loved and accepted by God.
We don’t come to God by doing it right. Please believe me on this. We come to God by doing it wrong. Any guide of souls knows this to be true. If we come to God by being perfect, no one is going to come to God. This absolutely levels the playing field. Our failures open our hearts of stone and move our rigid mind space toward understanding and patience. It’s in doing it wrong, making mistakes, being rejected, and experiencing pain that we are led to total reliance upon God. I wish it weren’t true, but all I know at this point in my journey is that God has let me do just about everything wrong, so I could fully experience how God can do everything so utterly right.
I believe this is why Christianity has as its central symbol of transformation a naked, bleeding man who is the picture of failing, losing, and dying, yet who is really winning—and revealing the secret pattern to those who will join him there. Everyone wins because, if we’re honest, the one thing we all have in common is weakness and powerlessness in at least one—though usually many—areas of our lives. There’s a broken, wounded part inside each of us. [1]
In the Everything Belongs podcast, Father Richard explains how he has been freed from his tendency to focus on “what’s wrong” with himself, others, and the world:
As a perfectionist by nature, accepting that things aren’t perfect has been at the center of my life’s inner struggle. I’m always seeing the wrong of everything. At the same time, I haven’t wanted to let “what’s wrong” drive the show—in myself and others. I want to be perfect, and I want other people to be perfect—but of course, the only perfection available to us is the ability to embrace the imperfect.
What I like to call “holy dissatisfaction” gave me my instinct for reform, but it also chewed me up. In the first half of my life, I was constantly thinking, “It’s not supposed to be that way!” I was constantly noticing, “That isn’t it! That isn’t it!” It’s only in the second half of my life that I am finally able to live in the holy tension of accepting that a “remnant” or “critical mass” is enough. Scattered in each group are always a few who get it, a few who live and love the gospel. When that became enough, and even more than enough (even in myself), I was free. So, this scriptural image of “remnant” or “yeast”—to use Jesus’ words—is very important for me and my own liberation. If I’m going to wait for the reign of God to be fully realized before I can be happy, I’m never going to be happy. [2]
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5 On Friday John Chaffee
1.
“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.“
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Healthy Religion is simply the container that brings us to Spirituality (or perhaps brings Spirituality to us?). In the modern devaluing of Religion, we have lost access to Spirituality. I believe much of the fracturing we see in the world is a consequence of this.
Spirituality can uniquely cultivate wisdom, reflection, self-awareness, and many other things necessary for human thriving. STEM fields do not touch on those topics in the same way.
Follow me for a moment: what do we think the world might look like if we have atomic warfare, flame-throwers, health insurance policies, and political hierarchies but still have a shallow humanity? Any immature human will use these things for their benefit to trample out opposition, right?
Anyone guided by a healthy Spirituality will say it is time to dismantle the missiles into farming equipment and point toward a better way forward (just like the prophets of old).
After all…
“He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” – Isaiah 2:4
2.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.“
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
One of the most overlooked or dismissed aspects of Christianity is its emphasis on one-ness, on the interconnected reality of everything. This idea is often scoffed off as either too “Eastern” or “New Age.”
If anything, it is an “Old Age” thought we have lost reverence for—the myth of separation causes and excuses many evils. Our actions and thoughts have consequences that reverberate out to other people, whether we know it or not.
Perhaps this is why in Romans 12, Paul teaches us to weep with those who are weeping and rejoice with those who are rejoicing.
What happens to one of us happens to all of us.
3.
“True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.“
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I think of this often.
The absence of conflict is not true peace.
MLK elsewhere calls the absence of conflict as “negative peace.”
“Positive peace” is only achieved after a healthy conversation or disagreement is done well. I fully believe we often settle for being in the same room and avoiding topics, shallowly believing that “peace” is what is happening.
Think about it…
During the Pandemic, there was an enormous amount of “negative peace.” It felt as though whole communities tried to gather and yet not talk about anything of consequence or meaning to avoid conflict. Of course, that was unsustainable, and the rising social pressure rose until it burst out in disagreements or even riots. I am sure that history books will be written about that season of human history.
True peace is only possible with justice, truth, and love.
4.
“Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. He who loves is a participant in the being of God.“
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
This quote is fantastic because of two powerful themes: Love and Participation.
It is not new to say that Christianity values Love as the fount and foundation of all the virtues. It might be new to some to discover that Participating in the Life of God was a theme of the Early Church. All of us exist within God already, and God is already present within all things. As a result, we can either “Participate in the Life of God” and work together with it or, in our fury and selfishness, work against the Life of God within us and around us.
It is entirely possible to exist within the mystery of God and yet not Lovingly Participate in it.
5.
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.“
– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Spiritual death. That is a heavy diagnosis.
In light of this quote, I Google searched a few things. Here is what I found out:
- America has 750 military bases around the world.
- Currently, the US has 5,000+ nuclear warheads.
- The US budget for the Department of Defense for 2024 was roughly $850 Billion.
Is a country having such things a sign of spiritual health or unhealth? Can we say that a country knows how to “love its enemies” when it occupies that much ground in other countries, has that many nuclear warheads, and spends that much money when the problem of homelessness could be solved for $20 Billion? Jesus never told his disciples to invest in instruments of war, so why do we, as a self-proclaimed “Christian country,” do that? If we are not even allowed to ask the question, does that tell us something? Why is this topic not more talked about in churches?
As I have written in other places, when Christianity became the formal and favored religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, it gained a favored seat at the cost of its preachers becoming chaplains of the empires of man rather than prophets of the Kingdom of God.
Remember, Martin Luther King, Jr. had a 32% approval rating just two years before his assassination. Never forget that this man went to seminary and was deeply influenced by the Hebrew Scriptures and Greek New Testament in his critiques of American culture. Jesus would likely have the same critiques if we were ruthlessly honest with ourselves.
