As I read this devotional this morning, I wondered, “What can I learn from this devotional about “a strong black woman”? And it occurred to me that while I cannot completely relate to the expectations Dr. Walker-Barnes writes about, I can relate to trying to live out others’ expectations of me. The expectation that I would always have answers for my children, would always be available to “fill in the financial gaps for my family” and others, and be the resident expert on all things “masculine” and or “spiritual” in my nuclear family. It occurred to me that I have carried the pressure of trying to live up to others’ expectations; expectations that I never really agreed to “own”. Perhaps they often owned me. JDV
Theologian Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes describes the pressure placed on Black women to be strong, available to others, and without needs of their own. She refers to this cultural expectation as an archetype of “StrongBlackWoman”:
I learned to be a StrongBlackWoman early in life. I am the eldest child of a single mother, with a brother eight years my junior. With my mother working long, hard hours to support us (often twelve-hour stints on the third shift), I had to step in to help take care of the family…. By fourteen, my afterschool routine consisted of taking the city bus to pick up my brother from daycare, helping him with his homework (and doing my own), supervising while he played outside, cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen, and getting him bathed and in bed….
Over the years my caretaking tendencies expanded to include everyone around me—family, friends, co-workers. It was a natural (and expected) progression. I was constantly concerned with the needs of others, always trying to be helpful…. Over-extending myself became my modus operandi. I was living in a state of serious self-care neglect. Of course, I did not call it neglect. I called it being responsible. In fact, I prided myself on being the most responsible person I knew. And my high sense of responsibility was rewarded often by others who were pleased with me and the things that I did for them….
In my worldview, overactivity was normative. It was what Black women did. Black women, after all, were strong. Proving myself capable of taking care of everything and everyone in my sphere of existence was, I thought, a rite of passage into full Black womanhood.
Walker-Barnes imagines sharing her “addiction” to overextension and strength in a recovery group:
If this were a twelve-step meeting for StrongBlackWomen, I would begin by saying, “Hi, my name is Chanequa and I’m a StrongBlackWoman. I have been in recovery for over a decade now. But at most, I’ve probably only accrued a few weeks of being clean at once. I relapse constantly, maybe even daily. I don’t know if I’ll ever break free of this thing. But I’m here. And just for today, I will make at least one decision in favor of my physical, spiritual, emotional, and relational health. Just for today, I will try to let go of my need for control, to become aware of when I need help, and to ask for help when I need it. Just for today, I give myself permission to cry when I’m sad, to scream when I’m frustrated, to smile and laugh when I’m happy, and to dance like I’ve got wings when the Spirit moves me. Just for today, I will reject the mandate to be a StrongBlackWoman. Just for today, I will simply be.”
It’s all right to be human. When your mind wanders while you are praying, don’t be surprised or upset. Simply return your attention to Me. Share a secret smile with Me, knowing that I understand. Rejoice in My Love for you, which has no limits or conditions. Whisper My Name in loving contentment, assured that I will never leave you or forsake you. Intersperse these peaceful interludes abundantly throughout your day. This practice will enable you to attain a quiet and gentle spirit, which is pleasing to Me.
As you live in close contact with Me, the Light of My Presence filters through you to bless others. Your weakness and woundedness are the openings through which the Light of the knowledge of My Glory shines forth. My strength and power show themselves most effective in your weakness.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Deuteronomy 31:6 NLT
6 So be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid and do not panic before them. For the Lord your God will personally go ahead of you. He will neither fail you nor abandon you.”
1st Peter 3:4 NLT
4 You should clothe yourselves instead with the beauty that comes from within, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is so precious to God.
2nd Corinthians 4:6-7 NLT
6 For God, who said, “Let there be light in the darkness,” has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ.
7 We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves.
2nd Corinthians 12:9 NLT
9 Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.
Additional insight regarding 2nd Corinthians 12:9: Although God did not remove Paul’s affliction, he promised to demonstrate his power in Paul. The fact that God’s power is displayed in our weaknesses should give us courage and hope. As we recognize our limitations, we will depend more on God for our effectiveness rather than on our own energy, effort, or talent. Our limitations not only help develop Christian character but also deepen our worship, because in admitting them, we affirm God’s strength.
Richard Rohr explores our human and religious temptation to hide qualities we think of as negative or “less than” in order to make ourselves seem better than we are.
Entering the spiritual search for truth and for ourselves through the so-called negative, dealing squarely with what is—in ourselves, in others, or in the world around us—takes all elitism (its most common temptation) out of spirituality. It makes arrogant religion largely impossible and reveals any violent or self-aggrandizing religion as an oxymoron (although sadly that has not been widely recognized). In this upside-down frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is unworthiness itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity.Our conscious need for mercy is our only real boarding pass. The ego doesn’t like that very much, but the soul fully understands.
In different ways, we humans falsely divide the world into the pure and impure, the totally good and the totally bad, the perfect and imperfect. It begins with dualistic thinking and then never manages to get beyond it. Such a total split or clean division is never true in actual experience. We all know that reality is a lot more mixed and “disordered” than that; so, in order to continue to see things in such a false and binary way, we really have to close down. That is the hallmark of immature religion. It demands denial, splitting, and mental pretense. It moves from the first false assumption of purity or perfection toward an entire ethical code, a priesthood of some sort, and various rituals and taboos that keep us on the side of the seeming pure, positive, or perfect—as if that were even possible.
I mean this next point kindly: Organized religion is almost structurally certain to create hypocrites(the word literally means “actors”), those who try to appear to be pure and good, or at least better than others. Jesus uses the word at least ten times in Matthew’s Gospel alone! We are unconsciously trained to want to look good, to seek moral high ground, and to point out the “speck” in other people’s eyes while ignoring the “log” in our own (Matthew 7:3–5). None of us lives up to all our spoken ideals, but we have to pretend we do in order to feel good about ourselves and to get others of our chosen group to respect us.
Honest self-knowledge, shadow work, therapy, and tools like the Enneagram are sometimes dismissed with hostility by many fervent believers, perhaps because they are afraid of or hiding something. They disdain this work as “mere psychology.” If so, then the desert fathers and mothers, the writers of the Philokalia, Thomas Aquinas, and Teresa of Ávila were already into “mere psychology,” as was Jesus. Without a very clear struggle with our shadow self and some form of humble and honest confession of our imperfections, none of us can or will face our own hypocrisy.
MLK: The False God of Nationalism (Pt. 1)
Click Here for Audio I used to do a fair amount of premarital counseling. After a few meetings with the engaged couple, I always asked them an important diagnostic question: “Tell me something you don’t like about your fiancé.” Healthy, mature couples could answer the question with some specificity. Couples that couldn’t answer the question meaningfully, or who responded with, “Nothing at all! S/he is absolutely perfect,” set off warning lights on my pastoral dashboard. It indicated they were in love with their idealized perceptions of each other rather than real, fallible human beings.
The way people relate to their country is very similar. A healthy love of country is mature enough to celebrate what is admirable about one’s homeland, its history, culture, and people, but also recognize its imperfections and failures. In other words, it’s a love rooted in reality rather than fantasy. This is also the difference between godly patriotism and idolatrous nationalism. Just as scripture calls us to honor our father and mother but not affirm or emulate their sins, true patriotism honors our country without ignoring or endorsing its transgressions. It’s a love based in truth rather than myth.
Nationalism, by contrast, is a juvenile love of country that ignores or denies any shortcomings. It’s infatuated with an imaginary and infallible country. Where nationalism declares, “America—love it or leave it!” godly patriotism says, “America—love it by improving it.”In his 1953 sermon, which is strikingly prophetic for our times, Martin Luther King Jr. identified the characteristics of this mythological and unholy love of country:“We are all familiar with the creed of this new religion. It affirms that each nation is an absolute sovereign unit acknowledging no control save its own independent will. The watchword of this new religion is: ‘My country right or wrong.’ This new religion has its familiar prophets and preachers. In Germany it was preached by Hitler. In Italy it was preached by Mussolini. And in America it is being preached by the McCarthy’s and the Jenners, the advocators of white supremacy, and the America first movements.”
Healthy patriotism is admirable as it motivates us to serve and sacrifice for our neighbors. But Christian love, like our Lord’s, is never blind. “My country right or wrong” is not a pledge a follower of Jesus can ever make. Our Lord’s love rejoices when we do what is right, and his love brings correction—and even discipline—when we are wrong. If we are to avoid the false god of nationalism, our love for our country ought to reflect our heavenly Father’s love for us by celebrating what is good and seeking to change and improve what is not. Christians, more than any others, should demonstrate a mature, honest love for their country, and never participate in myths that seek to hide its sins.
DAILY SCRIPTURE HEBREWS 12:3–11 1 TIMOTHY 2:1–2 WEEKLY PRAYER. Hilary of Poitiers (310 – 367) Keep us, O Lord, from the vain strive of words, and grant to us a constant profession of the truth. Preserve us in the faith, true and undefiled; so that we may ever hold fast that which we professed when we were baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; that we may have you for our Father, that we may abide in your Son, and in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Spiritual teacher Mirabai Starr considers how our imperfect families and relationships are opportunities to practice divine love, acceptance, and compassion:
It’s hard to give up our fantasies of a life where beauty is built in and we don’t have to work at finding it. It’s easy to recognize the presence of the sacred in the saintly hospice chaplain who turns your mother’s deathbed into a temple…. But what about your boring job, your addicted partner, your hometown that feels more like a strip mall than a community? What about your dining room table at dinner time?
One of the things it means to be an ordinary mystic is to bow at the feet of your everyday existence, with its disappointments and dramas, its peaceful mornings and luminous nights, and to honor yourself just as you are…. A mystic finds the magic in the midst of the nitty-gritty, the crusty spaghetti sauce pot in the sink and the crocus poking out of a spring snowfall, the unsigned divorce papers on the kitchen table and the results of your latest blood work on your computer screen.
I know that’s not always easy. I am continually challenged to stop arguing with reality and instead soften into what is. For instance, my students may think I’m wise, but my kids seem to think I’m a dork. I don’t love this disconnect. Like you, maybe, I set myself up with an array of preconceived notions about the kind of family I would like to make, and then beat … myself [up] when things don’t work out the way I envisioned.
Through accepting reality, we find a greater capacity to love what is.
Over time, I learned to let go of my fantasy of the perfect family and to find beauty, meaning, and wholeness in the heart of reality. Unpredictable, ever-changing, humiliating, and humbling reality. I began to take a look at the white supremacy embedded in my liberal self-image, noticing the odor of a white savior complex rising from my resentment that my brown children did not appreciate all I had done for them. Eventually, I even came to love unlovable me, against all odds.
Chances are, if you are a parent, whether adoptive or biological, you too have experienced the collapse of your parenting fantasies. You also have received an open invitation to accept the kids you have and forgive the parent you are, with a degree of humility bordering on humiliation and a dash of humor that can sometimes carry maniacal overtones….
This is the human condition. And at the very center of your own shattered dream, the face of the sacred flashes and glimmers. The holy disaster is a beckoning. Come. Enter the fire of love and let it remake you again and again. To be an ordinary, everyday mystic is to take your rightful place on the throne of what is.
MLK: The False God of Science
Click Here for Audio In his first sermon about idolatry from July 1953, Martin Luther King Jr. makes clear that few idols are entirely evil. Their lure comes from their goodness and utility. This is certainly true of science. MLK noted how science has improved our world:“It was quite easy for modern man to put his ultimate faith in science because science had brought about such remarkable advances, such tangible and amazing victories. He realized that man through his scientific genius had dwarfed distances and placed time in chains. He noticed the new comforts that had been brought about by science, from the vast improvements in communication to the elimination of many dread plagues and diseases.”
King’s words are even more relevant today as smartphones and the internet have “dwarfed distances and placed time in chains” in ways he could never have imagined. It is this remarkable power that makes science such a tempting idol. The solution, King said, is not the abandonment of science nor the demonization of those utilizing it for good. Because it has been idolized in the modern world, some Christian fundamentalists incorrectly see science as a threat to God and faith, and therefore reject it entirely—even during a global pandemic that killed millions.
This, said King, is the wrong response. Instead, we must utilize the gift of science while also recognizing its limits. He said:“Is not science important for the progress of civilization? To this I would answer yes. No person of sound intelligence could minimize science. It is not science in itself that I am condemning, but it is the tendency of projecting it to the status of God that I am condemning. We must come to see that science only furnishes us with the means by which we live, but never with the spiritual ends for which we live.“In this sermon, the 24-year-old minister was echoing Augustine who said, “Idolatry is worshiping what should be used and using what should be worshiped.” Science is a powerful tool that we ought to use for the alleviation of suffering and the advancement of the common good. Yet in the end it is just a tool to be used, it should never be a replacement for God, as some atheists and materialists are inclined to promote. Science can help us accomplish our God-given work, it can satisfy our God-given curiosity about the natural world, and it is a critical resource for helping us alleviate suffering which makes it an ally, not an enemy, of God’s mission and his kingdom. Despite these blessings, however, science can never reveal the deeper mysteries of purpose, origin, and destiny. It cannot answer our deepest human needs which are satisfied in God alone. Simply put, science can answer the question “How?” but never the question “Why?” Science is a means but it cannot give meaning.
Keep us, O Lord, from the vain strive of words, and grant to us a constant profession of the truth. Preserve us in the faith, true and undefiled; so that we may ever hold fast that which we professed when we were baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; that we may have you for our Father, that we may abide in your Son, and in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
An essential aspect of Franciscan spirituality is what Father Richard Rohr calls “the integration of the negative.” Rather than insisting that God values perfection or an idealized morality, Francis of Assisi intuited, through the example of Jesus’ life and death, that God could be found in all things, even those our religion and culture urge us to reject. Father Richard writes:
I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the “integration of the negative.” Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus’ revolutionary good news, the apostle Paul’s deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare of Assisi lived out with such simple elegance.
The integration of the negative still has the power to create “people who are turning the whole world upside down” as was said of early Christians (see Acts 17:6). Today, some therapists call this pattern of admitting our shortcomings and failures “embracing our shadow.” Such surrendering of superiority, or even a need for superiority, is central to any authentic enlightenment. Without it, we are misguided ourselves and poor guides for others.
Francis and Clare made what most would call the negative or disadvantage shimmer and shine by their delight in what the rest of us ordinarily oppose, deny, and fear: things like being insignificant, poor, outside systems of power and status, or weakness in any form. Francis generally referred to these conditions as minoritas. This is a different world than most of us choose to live in. We all seem invariably to want to join the majority and to be admired. Francis and Clare instead made a preemptive strike at both life and death, offering a voluntary assent to full reality in all its tragic wonder. They made a loving bow to the very things that defeat, scare, and embitter most of us, such as poverty, powerlessness, and being ridiculed.
I personally think that honesty about ourselves and all of reality is the way that God makes grace totally free and universally available. We all find our lives eventually dragged into opposition, problems, “the negatives” of sin, failure, betrayal, gossip, fear, hurt, disease, etc., and especially the ultimate negation: death itself. Good spirituality should utterly prepare us for that instead of teaching us high-level denial or pretense.
Needing a ladder to climb only appeals to our egotistical consciousness and our need to win or be right, which is not really holiness at all—although it has been a common counterfeit for holiness in much of Christian history. The Ten Commandments are about creating social order (a good thing), but the eight Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–12) of Jesus are all about incorporating what seems like disorder (a negative),which promotes a much better and different level of consciousness.
The Difficult Work of Loving Others
Jesus taught them, “But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” —Matthew 5:44
Richard Rohr describes how loving our enemies is a practice of “integrating the negative,” accepting what we find unacceptable within ourselves:
Our enemies always carry our own shadow side, the things we don’t like about ourselves. We will never face our own shadow until we embrace those who threaten us (as Francis of Assisi embraced the leper in his conversion experience). The people who turn us off usually do so because they carry our own faults in some form.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says in essence, “If you love those who love you, what’s so great about that?” (Matthew 5:46). It’s simply magnified self-love. Instead, we are called to love the stranger at the gate, the one outside of our comfort zone. Until we can enter into love with them, Jesus is saying we really have not loved at all.
And what’s Jesus’ motivation for doing this? Some translations say, it’s to “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). In my opinion, a more useful and accurate understanding of the word translated as “perfect” is “whole.” Jesus and Francis met a God who is One, whole, and all inclusive. Be all inclusive as our God is all inclusive and all merciful. This is the heart of the gospel. Jesus’ and Francis’ goal was imitation of a loving, forgiving God. [1]
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) modeled how to “integrate the negative” by facing the realities of racism, poverty, and war, while insisting that we follow Jesus’ command to love our enemies.
Let us be practical and ask the question, How do we love our enemies?
First, we must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive…. Forgiveness does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act. It means, rather, that the evil act no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship….
Second, we must recognize that the evil deed of the enemy-neighbor, the thing that hurts, never quite expresses all that they are. An element of goodness may be found even in our worst enemy….
There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies. When we look beneath the surface, beneath the impulsive evil deed, we see within our enemy-neighbor a measure of goodness and know that the viciousness and evilness of their acts are not quite representative of all that they are. We see them in a new light. We recognize that their hate grows out of fear, pride, ignorance, prejudice, and misunderstanding, but in spite of this, we know God’s image is ineffably etched in their being. Then we love our enemies by realizing that they are not totally bad and that they are not beyond the reach of God’s redemptive love.
JAN 20, 2025 MLK on Idolatry
Click Here for Audio To understand Martin Luther King Jr. as a Civil Rights leader, you first have to understand King as a minister of the Gospel. He made clear that his pursuit of justice was rooted in his faith. The two were inseparable despite the attempts of recent remembrances to erase or ignore the Christian foundations of King’s life.In July 1953, when MLK was just 24 years old, he worked alongside his father, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. That summer the young minister preached three sermons in a series he called “False Gods We Worship.” The messages were titled, “The False God of Science,” “The False God of Money,” and “The False God of Nationalism.”
The short sermons remain remarkably relevant even seven decades later. Behind all three sermons was King’s biblical understanding of worship and idolatry. In the opening of his first message, he said:“Certainly worship is as natural to man as the rising of the sun is to the cosmic order. Men always have worshipped and men always will worship. There is the ever-present danger, however, that man will direct his worship drive into false channels. It is not so [much] disbelief as false belief that is the danger confronting religion. It is not so much downright atheism as [much as] strong, determined polytheism which impedes the progress of religion.”
MLK understood that the real threat isn’t that people will stop believing in God, but that they will devote themselves to the wrong one. Even in those early years—well before the Montgomery Bus Boycott would launch him to the forefront of the Civil Rights movement—King was already beginning to recognize and name the spiritual maladies of American society. What some may find surprising is the breadth of MLK’s diagnosis. His preaching was not limited to racism or segregation. Instead, he saw these evils as intertwined with materialism, greed, laziness, and nationalism.
With so many Christians expressing concern over the secularizing and the de-churching of America, we need to hear King’s warnings again. It’s possible to become so fixated on the growing number of non-believers with no faith in God that we never stop and ask the believers which God they are worshipping. But MLK understood that calling oneself a “Christian” and attending church regularly was no guarantee that one was devoted to Christ, as revealed in scripture.
Instead, we may be employing the trappings of Christian faith to mask our devotion to a very unchristian false god. Over the next few days, we will look at some of Martin Luther King Jr.’s prophetic words about our culture’s idolatry as we ask ourselves how we can redirect our worship to where it rightfully belongs.
DAILY SCRIPTURE DEUTERONOMY 12:30–31 AMOS 5:21–24 WEEKLY PRAYER. Hilary of Poitiers (310–367) Keep us, O Lord, from the vain strive of words, and grant to us a constant profession of the truth. Preserve us in the faith, true and undefiled; so that we may ever hold fast that which we professed when we were baptized into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit; that we may have you for our Father, that we may abide in your Son, and in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.
When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.
It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.
It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.
It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold print, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.
It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.
Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.
None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.
On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the Civil Rights Movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.
After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”
Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.
He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”
People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.
Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.
Women navigate the world through relationships. The relationships that are built by bringing together Muslim and Jewish women, who share so many practices and beliefs, are life-changing and can help put an end to anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish sentiment. We influence family, friends and the general public about our strength in coming together to build bridges and fight hate, negative stereotyping and prejudice. We are changing the world, one Muslim and one Jewish woman at a time! —Sheryl Olitzky, Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom
While individuals often inspire us to action, communities working together also serve as catalysts to transform hearts and cultural narratives. Activist Sandhya Jha describes the powerful example of a group of Muslim and Jewish women in the United States:
Another beautiful way … relationship building has emerged is through the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, originally a group of 12 women in New Jersey that now has local chapters all over the country.…
After a visit to Poland in 2010 when [founding member] Sheryl [Olitzky] was struck by what hate had wrought in relationship to her Jewish community, she came back to the U.S. determined to make a contribution to reducing hate. She contacted an imam she knew who introduced her to Atiya Aftab, and the two women invited an additional five Jewish and five Muslim women to meet monthly. They are now a national organization with local chapters all over the country. While they talk about ending hatred one Muslim and one Jewish woman at a time, they actually recognize the power of community in effecting change.
Organizations focused on peacemaking and healing can create a ripple effect in our communities.
The local Kansas City chapter’s social action was to step in and provide meals at a local cancer treatment center during Christmas so that the Christian volunteers could spend the holiday with their families, creating another relational bridge in the process. [SOSS board member Amber Khan] also said there was something really powerful in the fact that in order to deal with anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the women needed to confront the “isms” they had internalized about each other in order to be in true relationship with each other, and that has been some of the most powerful work she has witnessed.
What Amber values is that the women of the local chapters “are not professional organizers; they’re women who said, ‘my community needs healing and I want to be a part of that.’” When white nationalists desecrated mosques, the Jewish community showed up in force, sometimes even sharing worship spaces.
“I think there’s more of a sense of urgency,” says Aftab at the Sisterhood. “We’ve heard from people all over the country, even all over the world, saying, ‘I need to reach out and do something constructive rather than be affected by this fear in a negative way.’”
The question of identity is a perennial one. It is a question each person of each generation must answer.
“Who am I?”
It might be a part of the first half of life, but early on, we seem to announce our identity to other people. Some of us might even forcefully do so. Meanwhile, others may have no idea about their identity and desperately run after any other person or activity to tell them who they are. During different seasons of my life, I am sure I have pursued both frantic pursuits.
Identity is sometimes defined as something between action and intention, but there might be another option… It is another thing entirely to sit down, rest in the present moment, and allow the arc of our life to preach to us about who we are and who we are becoming.
2.
“The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.“
To participate in a lie, while knowing it is a lie, is a diabolical choice.
If the truth sets us free, then it makes sense that untruths or lies can enslave us.
3.
“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It’s a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.“
Carter was not appreciated during his presidential term, which is likely why he was a single-term president. However, in the years since, he proved himself in the public eye to be one of the more moral and compassionate politicians who put his hands to work building homes for the less privileged. As I have come across things about his life, I can’t help but think that he seemed to embody the best of the Christian ethic. It is not an easy or small task to live out the Sermon on the Mount, which seems to be at the forefront of Carter’s approach to life.
The proof is in the pudding.
Or, as some other ancient Carpenter said, “…A tree will be known by its fruit.” (Matthew 12:33)
4.
“Never confuse the person formed in the image of God with the evil that is in him because evil is but a chance misfortune, an illness, a devilish reverie. But the essence of the person is the image of God, and this remains in him despite every disfigurement.“
In particular interpretations of Christianity, there is the presupposition or belief structure that anything that is not God is inherently evil. This train of thought has long roots that stretch back to Augustine in the 4th century who very well might have had OCD. Reflecting on his own wayward youth, Augustine postulated that to be human was to be deeply flawed.
The problem is that when our internal voice of condemnation is that strong or loud, we are prone to mistake it for the voice of God.
According to Genesis 1-2, nothing other than God was pronounced “evil.” Instead, everything else was pronounced “very good.”
It is not that we are intrinsically evil; it is that we have been misled or wounded by our own disordered loves and flawed decision-making.
Why is this an important distinction?
Because that which is broken can be mended, that which is wounded can be healed, that which has been misled can be redirected, and that which is lost can be found.
5.
“You cannot love and live as you want.“
– Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk and Author
This one hits hard and right in my selfishness.
During my sessions of Spiritual Direction with people, we often talk about how “our life is our curriculum.” Our life’s events are the lessons that were designed for us to learn how to be human, to learn how to love, how to forgive, how to be compassionate, etc.
I am unsure if I am passing or failing my life curriculum, but my life feels like a Divine IEP designed to systematically break down my worst traits.
It is not possible to love and to live on our own terms. To love others inherently means compromise and meeting people in the middle. It is not love if we do not allow other people’s lives to affect us if we do not allow ourselves to experience pain or suffering with or on behalf of others. To love others, we cannot constantly put up fences and keep doors locked. To love at all means to be open to not living life as WE want but recognizing that having the gift of love (given or received) is far grander than having life precisely as we want. To love others means to let down our invincible shields and triple-layered armor and meet people face to face.
If this whole thing called life is just a massive curriculum of love, we probably should put our best efforts into that schooling.
In an interview for the Daily Meditations, Sikh activist Valarie Kaur tells a brief story of Guru Nanak (1469–1539), founder of the Sikh faith:
The story goes that every morning a man named Nanak sat by a river and meditated on the world and took the pain of the world into his heart until it crescendoed inside of him. One morning he did not return from the river. People thought him a dead man, a drowned man. The sun rose and the sun fell. The sun rose and the sun fell. And on the third day, a figure was spotted, seated in a cemetery covered in ash. It was Nanak, but not Nanak. He had been rebirthed in those waters and his first utterance was “Nako Hindu. Nako Musliman.” There is no Hindu. There is no Muslim. This was more than treat your neighbor as you would yourself. This was more than taking in the stranger. This was: There is no stranger. There is no you-against-me at all. We constitute each other. [1]
Kaur describes how his followers transformed their culture:
[Nanak] began to sing powerful mystical poetry, accompanied by a Muslim bard. For twenty-four years, Guru Nanak traveled in each of the cardinal directions on foot…. Everywhere he went, his songs held a vision that landed in people’s hearts: We can all taste the truth of Oneness, and when we do, we are inspired to care for one another, and fight for one another. Perhaps what was most powerful about Guru Nanak is how he distilled the mystical heart of all the world’s wisdom traditions into its essence: love.
Guru Nanak’s followers were called Sikhs, seekers or students…. Sikhs believed that people of all castes, genders, faiths, races, and places were equal…. It was a radical experiment that rebelled against the caste hierarchy and feudal order of the era, a mysticism that inspired revolutionary social change…. The ideal archetype in the Sikh tradition became the sant sipahi: the sage warrior. [2]
Kaur’s grandfather’s example shaped the trajectory of her work:
My grandfather was the first sage warrior I knew…. Papa Ji tied his turban every day, clasped his hands behind his back, and surveyed the world through the eyes of wonder. When he listened to kirtan, sacred music, he closed his eyes and let the music resound wondrously within him; he wrote poetry in his garden….
As I fell asleep each night, Papa Ji would sing the Mool Mantr, the foundational verse that opens the Guru Granth Sahib, our sacred canon of musical wisdom. It begins with the utterance “Ik Onkar,” which means Oneness, ever-unfolding. “All of Sikh wisdom flows from here,” Papa Ji would say. All of us are part of the One. Separateness is an illusion: There is no essential separateness between you and me, you and other people, you and other species, or you and the trees. You can look at anyone or anything and say: You are a part of me I do not yet know. [3]
Come to Me, and rest in My loving Presence. You know that this day will bring difficulties, and you are trying to think your way through these trials. As you anticipate what is ahead of you, you forget that I am with you–now and always. Rehearsing your troubles results in experiencing them many times, whereas you are meant to go through them only when they actually occur. Do not multiply your suffering in this way! Instead, come to Me, and relax in My peace. I will strengthen you and prepare you for this day, transforming your fear into confident trust.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Matthew 11:28-30 NLT
28 Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”
Joshua 1:5-9 NLT
5 No one will be able to stand against you as long as you live. For I will be with you as I was with Moses. I will not fail you or abandon you.
6 “Be strong and courageous, for you are the one who will lead these people to possess all the land I swore to their ancestors I would give them. 7 Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the instructions Moses gave you. Do not deviate from them, turning either to the right or to the left. Then you will be successful in everything you do. 8 Study this Book of Instruction continually. Meditate on it day and night so you will be sure to obey everything written in it. Only then will you prosper and succeed in all you do. 9 This is my command—be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”
Let us not tire of preaching love, for this is the force that will overcome the world. Let us never tire of preaching love. Even if we see waves of violence coming to drown out the fire of Christian love, love must win out. It is the only thing that can. —Óscar Romero, homily, September 25, 1977
Religion scholar Kerry Walters writes of the transformative life of Archbishop Óscar Romero.
Oscar Romero [1917–1980], Archbishop of San Salvador, was gunned down on March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass. Over the next few days, his body lay in state in the cathedral where he had so often preached. Thousands of mourners filed past his coffin, many of them campesinos, landless peasants and field workers, who had traveled miles to be there.
They hadn’t come just to pay their respects to a Church dignitary, although that was certainly part of it. They came because they loved Romero. During the three years he served as their archbishop, they knew him as a father who stood between them and a death-dealing government. Now that he was gone, they not only felt orphaned, they were terrified….
[Romero] was accused of being a Communist, an agitator, a Soviet stooge, a gullible fool, imprudent, unintelligent, and a bad priest. The calumny hurled at him soured his relations with the Vatican, leading to humiliating curial scolding during his lifetime and stonewalling on his canonization after his death. But Romero was clear in his own mind and conscience that he was doing Christ’s work, not playing power politics. [1]
In a homily given in 1978, Archbishop Romero urged communities and individuals to recognize how their actions had the power to convert and transform the world:
A Christian community is evangelized in order to evangelize. A light is turned on in order to give light. “People do not light a candle and put it under a basket,” said Christ. “They light it and put it up high so that it gives light” (Matthew 5:15). That is true community. A community is a group of women and men who have found the truth in Christ and in his Gospel and join together to follow the way of truth more resolutely. It is not just a matter of individual conversion but of community conversion. A community is a family that believes; it is a group where each member accepts God and feels strengthened by the others. In their moments of weakness, they help one another and love one another; they shed the light of their faith as an example for others.When that happens, the preachers no longer need to preach because there are Christians whose very lives have become a form of preaching.
I said once before and I repeat today, sisters and brothers, that if some sad day they silence our radio and stop us from writing in our newspaper, then all of you who believe must become microphones, radio stations, and loudspeakers—not by talking but by living the faith. [2]
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Jesus Calling
MY FACE IS SHINING UPON YOU, beaming out Peace that transcends understanding. You are surrounded by a sea of problems, but you are face to Face with Me, your Peace. As long as you focus on Me, you are safe. If you gaze too long at the myriad problems around you, you will sink under the weight of your burdens. When you start to sink, simply call out, “Help me, Jesus!” and I will lift you up. The closer you live to Me, the safer you are. Circumstances around you are undulating, and there are treacherous-looking waves in the distance. Fix your eyes on Me, the One who never changes. By the time those waves reach you, they will have shrunk to proportions of My design. I am always beside you, helping you face today’s waves. The future is a phantom, seeking to spook you. Laugh at the future! Stay close to Me. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ
Jesus. —PHILIPPIANS 4:7 Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!” —
MATTHEW 14:29–30 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. —HEBREWS 12:2
Until the killing of black men, black mothers’ sons / Is as important as the killing of white men, white mothers’ sons … / We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes! —Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Ella’s Song”
Religious historian Dr. Nichole Flores shares the Christian witness of civil rights organizer and strategist Ella Baker, a powerful mentor and champion for young people’s voices and leadership.
This is “Ella’s Song,” inspired by the words and witness of Miss Ella Josephine Baker (1903–1986), a magisterial authority of the civil rights movement and a witness to true human freedom…. “Ella’s Song” announces the existence of those who are often made invisible in our society: black people, poor people, young people, and women…. [It] shines a light on Baker’s belief in freedom and justice, but it also changes the condition of those who sing this song. It changes their hearts. It changes their actions. It becomes their creed….
Her creed is at once deeply democratic and profoundly Christian, leading her to insist that special concern for “the least of these” (Matthew 25) and “lifting up the lowly” (Luke 1) are spiritual priorities as well as social and political ones.
Baker’s most significant work … was with young people. While Baker was a serious young person with an innate maturity—her grandfather called her “Grand Lady” because she was a great conversationalist even as a child—she had a natural sympathy for young people and their causes. As an undergraduate student at Shaw University, Baker led protests for the right of female and male students to walk across campus together and for women to be able to wear silk stockings. She took on these causes … because she saw them as important expression of young people learning to secure and defend their liberty and autonomy…. [Decades later,] she believed that the students [in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] needed space to develop their own voices, their own relationships, and their own agenda….
While Baker supported the students in their efforts, she insisted that the movement was about larger issues than lunch counters; it was about “something much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized Coke.” [1] True freedom required learning to treat others with dignity and equality … [and] teaching others to love freedom and to do the work required to sustain it. Baker considered human equality to be a divine calling, a state that was good for its own sake. And she offered the students another perspective on their organizing without dousing the flames of the passionate pursuit of their own most important issues and campaigns….
Baker also shows the way forward for those who want to eradicate racism from American society. She shows us that sharing our bounty with our neighbors builds a strong community. She teaches us to love good ideas even when they are new or unfamiliar. She demonstrates that loving our neighbors requires that we listen to their stories. She reveals that humility and self-critique are the friends of courage and power.
The Idol of Celebrity: The Evangelical Industrial Complex
Click Here for Audio Richard Halverson, the former chaplain of the United States Senate, summarized church history this way:“In the beginning the church was a fellowship of men and women centered on the living Christ. Then the church moved to Greece, where it became a philosophy. Then it moved to Rome, where it became an institution. Next, it moved to Europe, where it became a culture. And, finally, it moved to America, where it became an enterprise.”
Halverson recognized that a significant portion of American Christianity is shaped by business forces that reward ministries for operating more like corporations than churches, and too often they elevate leaders for their marketplace acumen rather than their spiritual maturity.In earlier church traditions, and some still today, there were ecclesiastical authorities that served as gatekeepers. They guarded pulpits and platforms to ensure only leaders who have been tested and approved are granted access to positions of wide influence. They took seriously the Apostle Paul’s instruction to appoint only mature leaders, not recent converts, with good character and a gentle spirit (1 Timothy 3:1–7).
Within the American church, however, there are few overseers to guard the flock against the influence and abuse of ungodly leaders filling our media, bookshelves, and conferences. In the place of a church hierarchy, we’ve built the Evangelical Industrial Complex where we expect publishers, conference directors, and radio producers to protect the flock from wolves. Yet when facing an existential threat to their organizations, managers within the Evangelical Industrial Complex will quickly remember that they were not appointed to shepherd us but to sell to us. And a very large ministry can survive if its leader is an ungodly tyrant. It can survive if people don’t meet or serve Jesus through the ministry’s work.
But it cannot survive if customers don’t buy its products or fund its payroll.That’s why the rise and fall of any celebrity pastor is merely a symptom of an underlying malady within much of American Christianity. Why are there now so many celebrity pastors? Because they generate a lot of revenue for the Evangelical Industrial Complex. Why do these pastors fall with such regularity? Because the Evangelical Industrial Complex often uses a business standard rather than a biblical standard when deciding which leaders to promote.
DAILY SCRIPTURE 1 PETER 5:1–5 MATTHEW 20:20–28 WEEKLY PRAYER Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) Most merciful Savior, increase the faith of your servants, that we may never stray from your truth; our obedience, that we may never swerve from your commandments. Increase your grace in us, that, alive in you, we may fear nothing but you, because nothing is more mighty; love nothing but you, because nothing is more lovable; glory in nothing but you, who is the glory of all the saints; and finally desire nothing but you, who, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is the full and perfect felicity forever. Amen.
Father Richard Rohr describes why role models and personal examples often inspire change more effectively than right ideas and beliefs:
Correct ideas and church mandates cannot cause the kind of change that the soul needs. The soul needs living models to grow, exemplars with the expansive energies of love. People who are eager to love change us at the deeper levels. They alone seem able to open the field of both mind and heart at the same time.When we’re in this different state—and that is what it is—we find ourselves open to directions or possibilities we would never allow or imagine before.
When I studied Scholastic philosophy in the seminary, we learned that there were formal causes of things, material causes, efficient causes, exemplary causes, and final causes. After Newtonian physics emerged, most people thought efficient causes were the only way that things could happen, such as strong arms causing a rock to be dislodged from a field, but the kind of cause that especially intrigued me was the exemplary cause. With that kind of causality, someone or some event, just by being what it is, by being an example or model, “causes” other things to happen as a result.
Final causes work in much the same way, by pulling us forward through attraction and allurement. Final causes “cause” things to emerge and evolve in a certain way by offering ideals, models, and seductions that pull us forward. Saint Bonaventure taught that our destiny or goal (telos) finally determines our meaning. If our end goal is clear to us, we have our North Star for a coherent life purpose. It will quite truthfully and inevitably pull us forward and give us a clear trajectory.
When I taught in South Africa, again and again I heard how Nelson Mandela initiated a cultural leap forward for many African men, especially when they saw pictures of him hoeing in the fields, which they still thought of as women’s work. He was a good example of both an exemplary and a final cause. He changed the tangent and the possibility for many people.
I believe the gospel itself, and the Franciscan vision of the gospel, is primarily communicated by richly symbolic human lives that operate as prime attractors and exemplars: through actions visibly done in love; by a nonviolent, humble, simple, liberated lifestyle; by a happy identification with poor and excluded people; by obvious happiness itself; and by concrete and visible people who “give others reasons for spiritual joy”—as Francis said when he rubbed two sticks together to play an imaginary violin and as Pope Francis did when he washed the feet of prisoners, women, and Muslims. When such people then speak or act, their words burn, and their actions convict!
Surely this is what Jesus meant when he told us to be “a light on a lampstand” or to be “leaven” and “salt” (Matthew 5:13–15, 13:33). He knew that holiness is passed on through contagion.
Love Draws Us Forward
Father Richard points to the transformative power of St. Francis and other more recent mystics and prophets.
Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) was a living exemplar of where we are all being attracted and led. Just as the Cosmic Christ serves as the Omega Point (Teilhard de Chardin’s term) for all of history, Francis is also a prime attractor, or what medieval theologians called a “final cause.” Christ and Francis draw humanity forward just by walking the full journey themselves. Transformed people quite simply transform people and set the bar of history higher for all of us. That is one of the ways we fundamentally “help” other people.
If we ourselves are totally focused on our own personal security or on a need for answers and explanations, we have almost no ability to even minimally understand the what, why, and who of persons like Francis, other mystics, or even someone like Jesus himself, who operate out of a completely different level of consciousness. Such people know that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). We tend to drag down such profound humanizers and divinizers to our own comfortable level and actually have little curiosity or ability to care about their major message.
Developmental experts state that the best we humans can do—on a very good day—is perhaps understand someone a bit beyond ourselves. Being invited forward by prophets and mystics—though they invariably face great resistance—is the clear pattern of history. We sadly know this to be true in recent centuries from the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Wangari Maathai, Dorothy Day, many UN secretaries-general, and Martin Luther King Jr. Tragically, we don’t usually love and embrace more advanced people, but quite often hate and fear them. Francis is really an amazing exception. He somehow succeeds in being loved, admired, and imitated even by non-Christian religions and very secular people to this day.
God gives us highly evolved people to pull us all forward. The Christian word for them was simply “saint.” We cannot imagine something until we see it through a living model or archetypal figure. Then it constellates in our consciousness as maybe possible for us too. Through his story, Francis is still greasing the wheels of consciousness and holiness. It then rubs off and spreads out by osmosis.
I felt this strongly when I was invited to accompany the Dalai Lama. He said little beyond, “My religion is kindness,” but the stadium was packed. The lines just to see him, or perhaps touch him, reached across the Ohio River bridge to Louisville. Many pointed out the direct line between that event and Thomas Merton’s presence down the Kentucky road at Gethsemani Abbey. Merton, Mother Teresa, Pope Francis, and the Dalai Lama are all good examples of prime attractors in our own time.
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Learning from the Mystics: Mechthild of Magdeburg. from John Chaffee
Quote of the Week: (This is a dialogue between Mechthild and the Lord.) “Lord, you are constantly lovesick for me.That you have clearly shown personally.You have written me into your book of the Godhead;You have painted me in your humanity;You have buried me in your side, in your hands and feet.Ah, allow me, dear One, to pour balsam upon you.””O One dear to my heart, where shall you find the balm?””O Lord, I was going to tear the heart of my soul in two and intend to put you in it.””You could never give me a more soothing balsam than to let me unceasingly lie weightlessly in your soul.””Lord, if you were to take me home with you, I would be your physician forever.” – From Book III of The Flowing Light of the Godhead
Reflection Mechthild occasionally wrote dreams, lists, poems, and dialogues within her best-known work, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Shown above is just one of those dialogues. When we read it, we are gifted with a peek into an intimate conversation between Mechthild and God. The conversation does two noteworthy things. First, Mechthild deeply understands the “mutual indwelling” that all the Christian mystics point toward in their works. At the outset, she states that her whole existence is within God, but then shows Divine hospitality by “tearing the heart of her soul in two,” so that she could put God in there. Second, Mechthild inverts the famous passage from the Gospels… “Jesus answered them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.'” (Luke 5:31) God is understood as the Great Physician who comes to heal the sick, but here it is God who is lovesick and it is Mechthild that offers to be the Great Physician to Him. Mechthild, as well as all the other Christian mystics, often speak of an intimacy with God that might make others blush. It is almost brazen (and some have even deemed it dangerous) how Mechthild relates to God as an equal, rather than maintaining Kierkegaard’s “infinite qualitative distance” to God. Many times, we have been trained into a strict reverence for God that actually can become a wall, a separation, a buffer from the very intimacy that we want with God. In some sense, Mechthild is an example to throw that caution to the wind and to dive right into the immediate, intimate and infinite reality of Divine Love.
Prayer Good God, Help us to throw caution to the wind. Do not allow religion to be the safest place to hide from you, and grant us the wildness of heart to express ourselves to you and to receive the very romance that you extend to us. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen and amen.
Life Overview of Mechthild of Magdeburg:
Who is She: Mechthild of Magdeburg
Where: Unknown, Most Likely in modern-day Germany.
When: 1207-1282 (possibly 1294)AD
Why She is Important: She was the first Christian mystic to write in German. She was a member of the Beguines, a collection of writers and figures from a particular region of Western Europe.
What Was Their Main Contribution: Mechthild of Magdeburg often wrote poetry and discourse with God. These poems and discourse are considered a part of the corpus of Mystical Marriage, a genre of spiritual writings that evoke the intimacy and vulnerability between married spouses.
Transformed people working together for a more just and connected world. —CAC Vision Statement
At the recent Students of Life conference, Brian McLaren encouraged the CAC community to practice “engaged contemplation” as a way to participate in a movement for healing, justice, and peace in the world:
We know that what we do flows from who we are. Our work in the healing work in the world flows from the ongoing healing we experience within ourselves. Just like hurt people hurt people, healing people heal people. But it’s not like we get healed and then we go “fix” everybody else. We’ve met people who think that’s the case, but their sense of having it all together actually makes it harder for them to help others.
At the CAC, we often refer to Henry Nouwen’s image of being “wounded healers.” Our own process of healing, with all its pain and difficulty, helps us participate humbly, gently, and sensitively in the ongoing healing of others and the world. I think that’s why so many of us are attracted to the work of engaged contemplation. We know that what we do flows from our being and becoming. In contemplation, we’re attending to the curation of our own inner being and becoming. What we do in the world around us flows from this inner lifelong process of healing and growth.…
None of us know what the near or long-term future holds, but we can gain clarity within ourselves about how we want to show up. I want to show up as a person of peace, but not alone. I want to be in partnership with others to create a circle of peace—not a circle that puts up a wall to keep others out, but one that welcomes others in no matter what happens. We’re not the first ones who have tried to do this. We’ve got to look around, recognize, and be grateful for how many people are doing their part—what they are uniquely called and gifted to do….
We are so blessed in the Christian tradition to have so many amazing leaders and teachers who have been creating circles of healing and peace for generations. It is truly inspiring to learn from their examples. But our job is not only to learn from them, but more: to join them in this ongoing work in the world. Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and climate activist Katharine K. Wilkinson write, “Let’s move forward with love, not conquest; humility, not righteousness; generous curiosity, not hardened assumptions. It is a magnificent thing to be alive in a moment that matters so much. Let’s proceed with broken-open hearts, seeking truth, summoning courage, and focused on solutions.” [1]
Can we accept this magnificent opportunity? To be alive in a moment that matters so much? Dare we believe that this contemplative work and exploration and study that we’re engaged with is not to just make us happier people, but rather to help us be partners together in loving action?
Let Me prepare you for the day that stretches out before you. I know exactly what this day will contain, whereas you have only vague ideas about it. You would like to see a map; showing all the twists and turns of your journey. You’d feel more prepared if you could somehow visualize what is on the road ahead. However, there is a better way to be prepared for whatever you will encounter today: Spend quality time with Me.
I will not show you what is on the road ahead, but I will thoroughly equip you for the journey. My living Presence is your Companion each step of the way. Stay in continual communication with Me, whispering My Name whenever you need to redirect your thoughts. Thus, you can walk through this day with your focus on Me. My abiding Presence is the best road map available.
RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Exodus 33:14 NLT
14 The Lord replied, “I will personally go with you, Moses, and I will give you rest—everything will be fine for you.”
John 15:4-7 NLT
4 Remain in me, and I will remain in you. For a branch cannot produce fruit if it is severed from the vine, and you cannot be fruitful unless you remain in me.
5 “Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing. 6 Anyone who does not remain in me is thrown away like a useless branch and withers. Such branches are gathered into a pile to be burned. 7 But if you remain in me and my words remain in you, you may ask for anything you want, and it will be granted!
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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