A Deep Well Within
Friday, April 4, 2025
There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too.
Dear God, these are anxious times… We must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.
—Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life
Father Richard turns to Scripture and contemplation in the face of collective suffering.
In the wisdom of the Psalms, we read:
In God alone is my soul at rest.
God is the source of my hope.
In God I find shelter, my rock, and my safety.
—Psalm 62:5–6
What could it mean to find rest like this in a world such as ours? Every day more and more people face the catastrophe of extreme weather. The neurotic news cycle is increasingly driven by words and deeds that incite hatred, sow discord, and amplify chaos. There is no guarantee of the future in an economy designed to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of far too many people subsisting at society’s margins.
It’s no wonder the mental and emotional health of so many people in the USA is in tangible decline! We have wholesale abandoned any sense of truth, objectivity, science, or religion in civil conversation; we now recognize we’re living with the catastrophic results of several centuries of what philosophers call nihilism (nothing means anything; no universal patterns exist).
Somehow our occupation and vocation as believers must be to first restore the Divine Center by holding it and fully occupying it ourselves. If contemplation means anything, it means that we can “safeguard that little piece of You, God,” as Etty Hillesum describes. What other power do we have now? All else is tearing us apart, inside and out. We cannot abide in such a place for any length of time or it will become our prison.
God cannot abide with us in a place of fear.
God cannot abide with us in a place of ill will or hatred.
God cannot abide with us inside a nonstop volley of claim and counterclaim.
God cannot abide with us in an endless flow of online punditry and analysis.
God cannot speak inside of so much angry noise and conscious deceit.
God cannot be born except in a womb of Love.
So offer God that womb.
Contemplation can help stand watch at the door of your senses, so chaos cannot make its way into your soul. If we allow it for too long, it will become who we are, and we’ll no longer have natural access to the life-giving “really deep well” that Etty Hillesum returned to so often to find freedom.
In this time, I suggest some form of public service, volunteerism, mystical reading from the masters, prayer—or, preferably, all of the above.
You have much to gain now and nothing to lose. Nothing at all.
And the world—with you as a stable center—has nothing to lose.
And everything to gain.
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John Chaffee 5 On Friday
1.
“[The Prophets] introduced a completely novel role into ancient religion: an officially licensed critic, a devil’s advocate who names and exposes their own group’s shadow side.”
– Fr. Richard Rohr, Fransiscan Founder of the CAC
The Hebrew Prophets have been wildly misunderstood in conventional Western Christianity.
Prophets are commonly understood to be fortune-tellers for the faithful and doom-casters for the heathens. However, some diminish them even further and say that the only thing they did that mattered was to utter a few odd prophecies that the Messiah was coming.
Instead, the Prophets were religious and political critics of their people. They did not tell those outside the faith they were doomed as much as they called out their own kings and priests when they lost sight of true justice, mercy for the vulnerable, and conviction for those who commit evil “on our behalf” or “in our stead.” It was mainly AFTER the coming of the Messiah that the first generation of the Church looked back and saw that some of their words could be seen as referring to the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
The Prophets were and continue to be like anti-viruses within the religious culture, who are fighting against corruption, immorality, greed, malice, scapegoating, and so many other things that the rest of us are content to let be unless they negatively affect us.
2.
“εἰς τοῦτο γὰρ κοπιῶμεν καὶ ὀνειδιζόμεθα, ὅτι ἠλπίκαμεν ἐπὶ θεῷ ζῶντι, ὅς ἐστιν σωτὴρ πάντων ἀνθρώπων, μάλιστα πιστῶν.
(That is why we labor and strive, because we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially those who believe.)”
Μάλιστα, transliterated is malista.
It is sometimes translated into English as “chiefly.” However, most translations will say “especially.”
Toward the end of his life, this single verse called out to Billy Graham more and more. In fact, it rather haunted him. As a famous American Baptist Evangelist, he later in life wished he had gone to seminary. There were particular mysteries of the faith that he could never fully resolve, and as I mentioned, this passage was one of them.
In a famous interview, Billy Graham said that he believed there were Christ-followers in other religious traditions, even if they didn’t know it. The interview was a bit scandalous because it sounded as though Graham was enlarging the circle of who God might save beyond those who fit a particular category of “Christian.”
After all, Christ is the savior of all people, especially those who believe. It’s almost as if they are in on a secret…
3.
“The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”
– Flannery O’Connor, American Novelist
In my most recent book, The Way of Holy Foolishness, I wrote about the need to be a part of a community. It was a turning point for me because I was finally able to articulate some of my own healing and growth. A subsection in that chapter says, “If a community hurt you, it will take a community to heal you.”
Seeing the line above from Flannery O’Connor made me think I should write a book about my ecclesiology (my theological understanding of the church community) at some point.
I have long understood the Church as a collective that witnesses each other’s successes and failures together in full view of the teachings of Jesus, the Word, the Sacraments, and this ineffable mystery we call God. The collective is not held together by a building or a charismatic leader but more around a conscious decision to love all neighbors and enemies because they have chosen to give up on the old way of exclusive, merit-based affection.
4.
“When we speak of divine things, we have to stammer, because we have to express them in words.”
– Meister Eckhart, 13th Century German Preacher
This is known as “apophatic theology,” which seeks to “move away from what can be positively stated.”
We all better slow down, show more reverence for this mystery we call God and recognize that our limited languages can never fully describe God’s infinity.
5.
“However beautiful and adorned Christianity can be and however useful it is by its works, all this still remains imperfect.”
– Meister Eckhart, 13th Century German Preacher
Yeah, I know.
Two Meister Eckhart quotes in a row.
Well, I am still reading a book of his sermons, and there are so many good liners!
This last quote, especially, simultaneously affirms and negates Christianity.
Faith and how it is expressed will always be limited, with faults or cracks, and constantly dealing with unhealthy things within itself. However, it is still beautiful and adorned even if people practice it in fractured ways.
