An Inward Migration
Friday, April 17, 2026
Brian McLaren reflects on how contemplation and community enable him to live according to the values of the kingdom of God:
During my years as a news junkie, I found myself getting a strange high from the latest ugliness report. Each time I indulged, I fanned the flames of something unhealthy … my moral superiority, or resentment, or fear, or despair, or desolation, or us-versus-them hostilities….
The internal realities we construct in our minds actually exist in our minds, ugly or beautiful, false or true. They shape our internal values which influence our external behavior. We tend to make the world around us resemble the world within us. Based on our focus, ugliness is everywhere or beauty abounds.
Alexis Wright is an Aboriginal writer from Australia. As an indigenous person, she understands that the end of the world has been happening for centuries for indigenous people. She understands that both colonizers and colonized need to be liberated from the mindset of colonization. The first step toward freedom, she says, is to decolonize or de-capitalize the mind, so you can “develop strengths that will not be defined by how others believe you should think.” She calls this liberation “sovereignty of mind” [1] ….
The journey to sovereignty of mind requires an inward migration, where we in a sense become refugees from our external nation, culture, economy, and civilization, even though we still live within its borders. We withdraw inwardly….
When I heard Alexis Wright speak of this inward migration, I felt I gained a new insight into Jesus and his oft-quoted but rarely understood term “kingdom of God.” “The kingdom of God is within you,” he said (Luke 17:21). He described the innermost room of your consciousness (Matthew 6:6), where you go to think differently, to sort out your desires and hopes authentically. When you learn how to do that inward migration, that spiritual migration, you find yourself looking for others who have also gone there, who have discovered a freedom and sovereignty of mind….
[Jesus said,] “Wherever two or three of you gather in my name, there I am,” and [we] might understand him to say, “Listen, I understand that you are outnumbered. I understand that so many people around you have been sucked into the story of ugliness. I understand that you are learning to live by a different story where beauty abounds. You don’t need me physically present to tell the beautiful story. You can tell it yourselves. Even just two or three of you can gather together, embodying my way of being in the world. You can be cells of resistance, outposts of transformation, seedbeds of beauty.”
That is the best future I can imagine for organized religion in these dangerous times. Instead of helping nostalgic people inhabit bubbles of the past, religious communities can help people go forward on this inward migration toward sovereignty of mind, where in defiance of a rising level of ugliness, people cultivate beauty… seeing it, creating it, savoring it. Savoring beauty within will lead to beautiful outward action.
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5 On Friday John Chaffee
1.
“It’s impossible to learn that which you think you already know.”
– Stoic Principle
It is a strange thing that in order to learn, one must admit that they do not know everything.
In my younger years, I was insecure but did not know it. The way that I protected myself from my own insecurities was to put on a persona that “already knew” about things. I am sure I rubbed people the wrong way, including myself, over time.
One of the most liberating things to do is to give up assuming you are an expert about anything and admit that there is always more you can learn about any topic.
2.
“As long as we are sheep, we overcome and, though surrounded by countless wolves, we emerge victorious; but if we turn into wolves, we are overcome…”
– St. John Chrysostom, 5th Century Doctor of the Church
This is an interesting one.
The implications of it are profound when you think about it.
It reminds me of aspects of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Then, non-violent resistance was mandatory for most protests. To fight back was to lose the movement’s witness.
This past week, I heard a firsthand account of how Martin Luther King Jr. would dismiss young people from his rallies if they were not committed to nonviolence. It was of utmost importance to him that everyone attending his events was fully committed to the movement’s ethos. To put it bluntly, they all had to be willing to be beaten with fists or clubs.
I cannot imagine the courage that would take.
In a world that often operates on violence, oppression, and chaos, it is spiritually important for the sheep to remain sheep and not give in to the temptation to “fight fire with fire” and act like wolves.
3.
“Only without the sword can the Christian wage war: the Lord has abolished the sword.”
– Tertullian, 2nd Century North African Theologian
Fascinatingly enough, the whole idea of a “Just War Theory” did not even come up until after Christianity was legalized and then made the formal religion of the Roman Empire in the 4th century.
Prior to the 4th century, it was a given that Christians were nonviolent and would not participate in violence (whether state-sanctioned or not). Tertullian, the early church theologian, obviously saw much violence in his lifetime, but still maintained that the Christian ethic does not allow one to do harm to someone else.
It was after the legalization of Christianity and through the works of Ambrose, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas that Just War Theory began to formalize.
And, just for the record, Just War Theory mandates that war is “allowable” if it is in self-defense and if it has exhausted all other potential options of peacemaking. It also states that if a war is motivated at all by anger, retribution, or greed, it is immediately invalidated as a “Just War.”
4.
“Faith is a decision. We cannot avoid that. ‘You cannot serve two masters’ [Matt. 6:24], from now on either you serve God alone or you do not serve God at all. Now you only have one Lord, who is the Lord of the world, who is the Savior of the world, who is the one who creates the world anew. To serve God is your highest honor.
But to this Yes to God belongs an equally clear No. Your Yes to God demands your No to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and the poor, to all godlessness and mocking of the Holy. Your Yes to God demands a brave No to everything that will ever hinder you from serving God alone, whether it be your profession, your property, your house, your honor before the world.“
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 20th Century German Pastor
I know I have shared this quote before.
I think what I like about it is the usage of Yes and No.
In order to say Yes to some things, we are bound to say No to other things.
Christianity does not allow for mixed allegiances. “You cannot serve two gods,” remember?
Perhaps things were “easier” when humanity was more overtly polytheist. One could pray to the god of peace in the morning, then pray to the god of war in the afternoon. There was no incongruency or inconsistency because you were praying to different deities.
However, in the realm of radical monotheism, to pray for both peace and war from the same God doesn’t quite seem to work.
As the book of Exodus teaches us, the God of the Israelites does not suffer oppressive empires for long and takes up the plight of those at the bottom of society as his own personal mission. God is more on the side of those “with the boot of the empire on their neck” than with the emperor or elite who are stepping on those beneath them.
5.
“Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain.”
– Pope Leo XIV, Current Head of the Catholic Church
This is probably the most important quote of the week.
When Jesus flipped over the tables in the Temple, I believe it was because he was sickened by people who were profiteering off the piety of good people. The Temple was being made into a marketplace for commerce rather than a place for prayer and compassion.
To anyone who uses religion as a means to a selfish end, I think God will have quite stern words to say.
Why?
Because Jesus himself did not see faith as something to manipulate. Rather, Jesus had his harshest words for the religious elite who were making gain after gain after gain while doing very little to help those they were taking from.
As soon as Christianity is co-opted for the purposes of “Us vs Them” ideologies, it has ceased to be Christianity.
The faith does not play those types of games.
