Father Richard Rohr recognizes how a focus on religion as a matter of personal belief has discouraged some Christians from engaging in political action.  

For many people, politics and religion are so personal that neither topic is deemed appropriate to discuss publicly. While separation of church and state is an important protection for all religions, it doesn’t mean we as people of faith shouldn’t engage in our civic duties and the political process. The idea of “staying out of politics” doesn’t come from God. My sense is that it arises from our egoic, dualistic thinking that has a hard time hearing a different perspective or learning something new. [1] 

Christianity in its first two thousand years has kept its morality mostly private, personal, interior, fervent, and heaven bound, with very few direct implications for our collective economic, social, or political life. Politics and religion remained largely in two distinct realms, unless religion was uniting with empires. Yes, we looked to Rome and Constantinople for imperial protection, little realizing the price we would eventually pay for such a compromise with foundational gospel values.  

This convenient split took the form of either the inner or the outer world. We religious folks were supposed to be the inner people while the outer world was left to politicians, scientists, and workers of every stripe. Now this is all catching up with us, as even the inner world has largely been overtaken by psychology, literature, and the huge world of self-help. Fewer and fewer people now expect religion to have anything to say about either the inner or outer worlds! But if we do not go deep and in, we cannot go far and wide.  

In my opinion, the reason we lost our Christian authority is because we did not talk about the inner world very well. We were much more focused on believing doctrines, practicing rituals, and following requirements, which are not, in and of themselves, inner or deep. Frankly, Buddhism spoke to inner transformation far better than the three monotheistic religions. We Christians did not connect the inner with the outer—which is a consequence of not going in deeply enough. Christianity now has become increasingly irrelevant, often to the very people who want to go both deep and far. We so disconnected from the political—the welfare of God’s aggregated people and the public forum—that soon we had nothing much to say.  

I am not talking about partisan politics here, but simply the connecting of the inner world with the outer world. We have allowed the word partisan to be the first and sometimes only meaning of the word political and so people don’t even allow us to preach a purely gospel message from the pulpit—as it might sound “political”!  

Here is my major point: There is no such thing as being nonpolitical. Everything we say or do either affirms or critiques the status quo. Even to say nothing is to say something: The status quo—even if it is massively unjust and deceitful—is apparently okay. This “nonpolitical” stance is an illusion we must overcome.

A Politics Rooted in God’s Love

When deciding how we want to act in the public sphere, Rev. Wes Granberg-Michaelson reminds Christians to begin with the personal experience of God’s overflowing love for the world: 

Our temptation is to begin with politics and then try to figure out how religion can fit in. We start with the accepted parameters of political debate and, whether we find ourselves on the left or the right, we use religion to justify and bolster our existing commitments…. 

But what if we make the inward journey our starting point? What if we recognize that our engagement in politics should be rooted in our participation in the Trinitarian flow of God’s love? Then everything changes. We are no longer guided or constrained by what we think is politically possible, but are compelled by what we know is most real. At the heart of all creation, the mutual love within the Trinity overflows to embrace all of life. We are invited to participate in the transforming power of this love. There we discover the ground of our being, centering all our life and action. 

This was revealed most fully in Jesus, as God’s Son. His love for enemies, his non-violent response to evil, his embrace of the marginalized, his condemnation of self-serving religious hypocrites, his compassion for the poor, his disregard for boundaries of social exclusion, his advocacy for the economically oppressed, and his certainty that God’s reign was breaking into the world all flowed from his complete, mutual participation in his Father’s love. Jesus didn’t merely show the way; he lived completely in the presence and power of God’s redeeming, transforming life. 

Granberg-Michaelson envisions a future based on God’s desire for the world: 

Transformative change in politics depends so much on having a clear view of the desired end. Where does that vision come from? Possibilities may be offered by various ideologies, or party platforms, or political candidates. But, for the person of faith, that vision finds its roots in God’s intended and preferred future for the world. It comes not as a dogmatic blueprint but as an experiential encounter with God’s love, flowing like a river from God’s throne, nourishing trees with leaves for the healing of the nations (see Revelation 22:1–2).… 

Such a vision strikes the political pragmatist as idyllic, unrealistic, and irrelevant. But the person of faith, whose inward journey opens [their] life to the explosive love of God, knows that this vision is the most real of all. It is a glimpse of creation’s purpose and a glimmering of the Spirit’s movement amid the world’s present pain, brokenness, and despair. This vision also recognizes the inevitable journey of inward and outward transformation—the simultaneous, continuing transformation of the inward hearts of people liberated by God’s astonishing grace and the outward transformation of social and economic structures liberated by God’s standards of justice. 

Note to CO Few: This is from Mark Longhurst. He assists Richard Rohr with writing, compiling and editing. This is his comment about a book he has written. DJR

A Holy, Ordinary Invitation

What if mysticism is for everybody?

I’m not being falsely humble when I say I wrote The Holy Ordinary as an aspiration rather than a lived reality. I feel drawn to a life of spiritual depth, but I’m not a monk, nun, or even a professional pastor serving a church anymore. I’m just an ordinary dude, working a job I am privileged to love, raising boys who play soccer, going to the movies, reading, and spending time with my wife. I also, frankly, am not very good at slowing down and appreciating the holiness of the ordinary. I have an anxious and task-oriented psyche that leads me into obsessive thought patterns more than it does a trusting posture of enjoying the moment.

But as I write in the book, I’m convinced that “underneath the rhythmic contours of each day are deepening roots that sip from mystical streams.” I sit in silent meditation or chant morning psalms—which is something monks and nuns have been doing for centuries—and I’m reminded at some level that my true life is not found in the things that I’m doing and that my belonging lies in a deeper, divine love in which I am invited to participate.

Here’s the thing: once you know that there’s a deeper love pulsing behind and through all things, you can’t unknow it. It doesn’t mean I’m special; I’ve just glimpsed something beautiful that I believe is true, and I know I’m not the only one. I meet so many people (many on Substack!) who are living regular lives on the surface, who are perfectly ordinary in our wounds and failures, many of whom do not go to church or find belonging in traditional religious structures but who have glimpsed something deeply loving about reality—and can’t unsee it.

This is the call that the “mystic” has traditionally responded to. For about 1,500 years, the “mystical” meant monastic—but we’re living in a time where this is no longer true. In our ecumenical era, the divisions that once caused wars between Protestants and Catholics are no longer ultimate. Lots of people are leaving Christianity altogether, and often with good reason—but lots of people also realize that there are treasures hidden in Christianity and that they don’t need to belong to one denominational group or the other to enjoy them. So, in today’s religious landscape, you could run into evangelical Christians praying Psalms like monks, liberal Protestants singing songs from the French monastery Taizé, or thousands of people who don’t belong to any tradition hiking a former medieval pilgrimage path—the Camino de Santiago. Christians practice silent meditation and yoga now, practices traditionally reserved for Christian monks, Buddhists, and Hindu renunciates, and the Trappist monastery a few hours away from me in Spencer, MA, makes jam and beer.

I’m asking through this book: What if mysticism is for everybody? What if it’s not for those special people but for me—for us? And what if following a path of deep spirituality in this way helps us discover the radical “holiness” of ordinary life?  

So, what is the holy ordinary—and what is mysticism? Well, how do you begin talking about the ineffable? I don’t have a specific answer, but I can tell you what I’ve learned from others. One medieval scholar, Jean Gerson, described it as “the experiential knowledge that comes from God through the embrace of unitive love.” So, it’s experiential and not something we learn from reading books. That’s extremely difficult for someone like me who loves reading theology and spirituality books. I often can trick myself into believing that because I’ve read or thought something, I’ve experienced it fully—but that’s decidedly not the case. Mysticism comes from God, or ultimate reality, whatever word you want to use, through an embrace of love. Mysticism has everything to do with knowing, feeling, and trusting that an embrace of love is at the heart of it all. But it’s also “unitive,” meaning it unites us and connects us to God, each other, and the earth. It’s a love that heals and brings together and does not separate. I’m convinced that that’s what we most need today.

This loving, uniting embrace is available to me in all our ordinary moments, from standing waiting at the bus stop to doing the dishes to working on a deadline for our jobs. It’s available when cooking, walking in nature, or playing with our kids. This loving, uniting embrace is also available as a resource to me and each of us in the hard moments. It holds us in the grief of our heartbreaks, diagnoses, and deaths, ever prompting us to solidarity with those who are most suffering and are marginalized. Discovering the “holy” ordinary means living a life that trusts this loving embrace.

Wisdom Will Come 

Friday, October 25, 2024

Earlier this week, we shared with the CAC community that our beloved teacher Dr. Barbara Holmes passed away. As CAC Executive Director Michael Poffenberger expressed with deep sadness, “we lost a giant in our community.” “Dr. B.,” as many referred to her, has now become a spiritual ancestor. In the video series Wisdom in Times of Crisis, Dr. B. reminds us that we can draw on the wisdom of our spiritual ancestors to guide our actions: 

Jesus, Muhammed, Buddha, and others—their stories of resistance, survival, and faith inspire and guide us. We have to know that we’re not alone. Despite a concerted social effort to convince us that we are radical individuals, that our motto should be “I’ll get mine, you get yours,” a deeply communal spirit arises when we least expect it and when we need it most. According to author James Baldwin, we are a community of witnesses with responsibilities to the next generation. He says, “Nothing is fixed forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.” [1]  

So, visionaries, prophets, and Jesus have all warned us that this journey that we are on will be beset by troubles. In this life, you will have trouble. How we handle that trouble is our witness to future generations. An old order is passing away. A new order is on its way, and we do not have the power to stop or slow the transitions that we encounter, but we can live through it and help one another.…   

What I want to say about the wisdom that matters now is that this wisdom often comes from discernment of Divine Spirit in our midst. Hearing and heeding the voice of the Divine is critical during difficult times. But sometimes, with all of our media distractions and our own boredom, it’s difficult to hear the voice of the Creator. So, I’m going to suggest that if you’re hoping to hear beyond this realm into the next, remember that the key is newness. The Creator does not come as we expect. The Spirit does not move under our command. When we expect divine intervention in one way, it usually comes in another. We expect the warrior king to set things right, God sends a baby in a manger. We expect wrongs to be punished, God extends grace and mercy to all.   

Read 1 Kings 19:11: “And the Lord said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.” So, where is the Divine One in the midst of crisis? I suggest that God is in the whispers of the heart, and the love of neighbor. Rejoice, beloved, you are not alone.  

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Oct 25, 2024, Skye Jethany Psalm 149: Expecting Softballs but Getting Curveballs

A few weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attack, I was invited to be a guest speaker at a college and young adult ministry at a very large church. The pastor asked me to teach a series over multiple weeks on the book of 1 Corinthians. I was still a seminary student, and these opportunities were rare, so I was eager to accept.The pastor knew I had studied Islam as an undergraduate, so before speaking to the group on my first night, he pulled me aside and said, “We’re going to do some Q&A after your message. Because of the terrorist attack, I may throw you some softball questions about Islam.” That made sense to me, but his questions turned out to be curveballs, not softballs.After a few questions about 1 Corinthians from the group, the pastor shouted his question from the back of the room. “Skye, you’ve studied Islam. Can you explain why it’s a religion of violence, but Christianity is a religion of peace? ” That’s a common stereotype,” I said, “and the attack on 9/11 has reinforced it. But it’s important to remember that there are over one billion Muslims in the world, and the overwhelming majority believe that God has called them to live in peace. And while Christ clearly preached a message of peace, we shouldn’t ignore the terrible violence that has been done in his name throughout history.”The pastor was not happy with my answer, so he tried again. “But doesn’t the Quran command Muslims to kill their enemies?” he said.“There are verses in the Quran that have been interpreted that way,” I said. The pastor smiled and nodded. But then I continued. “Of course, there are also verses in the Bible that have been twisted and used to justify violence against non-Christians as well—particularly in the Old Testament.” I then read to them from Psalm 149. “May the praise of God be in their mouths and a double-edged sword in their hands, to inflict vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples” (Psalm 149:6-7).The Q&A time came to an abrupt end after that.After the service, the pastor was furious with me. “Look!” he said pointing his finger at my chest, “there are people here struggling with God. They’re questioning everything, and you had a chance to explain why Christianity is better.” I told him that I would gladly speak all night about Christ, the gospel, and why I’m committed to the Christian faith after studying many others. But I’m not going to do it by misrepresenting other religions or disparaging my Muslim neighbors. And I’m not going to hide or whitewash the mistakes Christians have made in the past. To no one’s surprise, the rest of my series on 1 Corinthians was canceled and I was never invited back. I share this story because it illustrates the common tendency to emphasize the parts of the Bible we like and diminish or ignore the parts we do not. Likewise, we quickly point out the specks of violent history, weird doctrine, or troubling verses in another religion’s eye, and ignore the same specks—or truckloads of lumber—in the Church’s eye. For me, Psalm 149 is one of those troubling parts of the Bible—particularly the part about praising God with our mouths while inflicting violence with a sword in our hands. Historically, Christians have tried to erase the violent imagery of this psalm by reinterpreting the “double-edged sword” through a New Testament lens. In both Hebrews and Revelation, a double-edged sword is used as a metaphor for the Word of God (see Hebrews 4:12 and Revelation 1:16). Therefore, some try to argue that Psalm 149 is figurative; it’s about wielding Scripture not slaying enemies. Honestly, I remain unconvinced and I continue to grapple with how to understand and apply this psalm. Pop Christianity wants us to believe the Bible is a book of softball answers, but passages like Psalm 149 remind us that the Bible is full of curveballs. DAILY SCRIPTURE Psalm 149:1-9 Hebrews 4:12-13 WEEKLY PRAYER From Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1975)Lift up our hearts, O Christ, above the false show of things, above laziness and fear, above selfishness and covetousness, above whim and fashion, up to the everlasting Truth that you are; that we may live joyfully and freely, in the faith that you are our King and our Savior, our Example and our Judge, and that, so long as we are loyal to you, all will ultimately be well. Amen.

Thursday, October 24, 2024

Rabbi Nahum Ward-Lev describes how the ancient prophets listened for God’s liberating word:  

At its heart, the prophetic witness was a way of listening, listening beyond the social norms of the day, listening to the word of the liberating God. The prophets urged the people to listen to God’s word because the discourse of the king, princes, and wealthy landowners was too narrow and was limited to the interests of these elites. This conversation did not include the voices of suffering people. The prophets, in God’s name, offered a much broader discourse, a conversation that listened to and addressed the needs of the poor and the disadvantaged…. 

The prophetic listening tradition is alive today to inspire people to listen beyond the established conversation. The prophetic tradition challenges us to listen especially to the cries of those who suffer and to listen to the voice of alternative possibility, to the voice of God.  

Ward-Lev shares that the living presence of God is still calling to us today: 

The Living Presence also speaks within our lives, wordlessly calling us out into life, encouraging us to grow beyond our current limitations. This Presence breathes into us desires and visions of whom we might become. Listening to the word of God is opening to the often-wordless speech of this Presence, allowing the transcendent to touch us, to inspire us, to beckon us across boundaries, to take the next step in our lives. Listening well to our inner lives—to the thoughts, inclinations, images, and emotions that arise within us—is an important practice along the liberation journey. Listening is essential in relationship to the Living Presence and in mutual relationship with people….  

In my life, listening is a prime spiritual practice. Throughout the day, I seek to listen. I find that I sometimes hear the words but do not bring my full attention to listening. A friend is speaking to me; am I listening with a quiet mind? I see the beauty of the roses in my garden. Am I listening internally, taking a moment to notice the effect that the beauty of the roses has on me? I hear an undocumented immigrant in my community describe how her family lives in fear. Am I listening with a responsive heart? I read a story in the newspaper about heroin addiction in our state. Am I listening? I study a passage in Scripture. Am I paying attention to the details in the passage? Am I providing the time and attention to notice what the text might be stirring up in me?…  

Listening is an essential practice along the liberation journey. Deep listening challenges our internal status quo and exposes us to new possibilities. The world is full of possibilities for healing and wholeness, for well-being and joy. Like the biblical prophets and contemporary people who live in their lineage, all those of us on a liberation journey are called to listen, to learn, and then to act to bring a more fruitful future into the world. 

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Sarah Young Jesus Calling

Jesus Calling: October 24th

Come to Me when you are hurting, and I will soothe your pain. Come to Me when you are joyful, and I will share your Joy, multiplying it many times over. I am All you need, just when you need it. Your deepest desires find fulfillment in Me alone.
     This is the age of self-help, Bookstores abound with books about “taking care of number one,” making oneself the center of all things. The main goal of these methodologies is to become self-sufficient and confident. You, however, have been called to take a “road less traveled”: continual dependence on Me. True confidence comes from knowing you are complete in My Presence. Everything you need has its counterpart in Me.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

John 15:5 (NLT)
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.

Additional insight regarding John 15:5: “Fruit” is not limited to soul winning. In this chapter, answer prayer, joy, and love are mentioned as fruit (John 15:7, 11, 12). Galatians 5:22-24 and 2nd Peter 1:5-8 describe additional fruit: qualities of Christian character. Remaining in Christ means (1) believing that he is God’s Son, (2) receiving him as Savior and Lord, (3) doing what God says, (4) continuing to believe in the Good News, and (5) relating in love to the community of believers, Christ’s body.

James 1:4 (NIV)
4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

 

We ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord.
—Colossians 1:9–10 

For Father Richard, contemplation cultivates an ability to discern right action:  

Our goal consists in doing the will of God, but first we have to remove our attachment to our own will so that we can recognize the difference between the two. Throughout history, many people who did horrible things were convinced that they were doing God’s will. That’s why we have to find an instrument to distinguish between God and us. Paul calls this gift the discernment of spirits. We have to learn when our own spirit is at work and when the Spirit of God is at work.  

The most convincing social activists in our country were and are people of prayer, like Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., Sister Simone Campbell, John Dear, and Jim Wallis. It’s important that we bring the contemplatives and the activists together in the Church and in the world, because neither group is credible without the other. Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days; only after that did he begin to preach the reign of God and to heal the sick. And along the way he kept reminding his disciples to withdraw and rest in quiet, peaceful places (see Mark 6:31).  

With this withdrawal and this emptiness, we are, so to speak, cultivating fertile soil where we can be receptive to the seed of God’s word. I don’t believe that Jesus dumps the harvest into our laps. Rather, he shows us a process of growth. He shows us a way we can learn to hear God, a path of self-surrender and forgiveness. He trusts that his followers, as they practice this way of prayer, will learn to hear the truth ever more clearly. The great truth will always lie beyond us. The great truth of God will never underpin a small world. This means that the Christian life must be a constant journey back and forth between the radical way inward and the radical way outward. [1]  

Dutch priest and author Henri Nouwen (1932–1996) views discernment as a gift that comes from our intimacy with God: 

I can see no other way for discernment than a life in the Spirit, a life of unceasing prayer and contemplation, a life of deep communion with the Spirit of God. Such a life will slowly develop in us an inner sensitivity, enabling us to distinguish between the law of the flesh [ego] and the law of the Spirit [soul]. We certainly will make constant errors and seldom have the purity of heart required to make the right decisions all the time. But when we continually try to live in the Spirit, we at least will be willing to confess our weakness and limitations in all humility, trusting in the one who is greater than our hearts. 

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OCT 23, 2024. Psalm 147: God Cares About the Immense and the Mundane Click Here for Audio In 1985, Ronald Reagan went to Geneva, Switzerland, for his first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, to discuss nuclear disarmament. While in Geneva, the Reagan’s borrowed the chateau of a Muslim friend. The homeowner’s son, Hussain, left a note for the President asking him to please feed his goldfish, which Mr. Reagan was happy to do.On the first morning of the summit with Gorbachev, tragedy struck. A goldfish was dead at the bottom of the tank. The First Lady later said the President was so upset that he called his entire staff into the boy’s bedroom to figure out a solution. In the end, the summit with the Soviet leader was a huge success marking the beginning of the end of the Cold War. And before leaving Geneva, President Reagan personally wrote the following note to the homeowner’s son: Dear Friend,  On Tuesday I found one of your fish dead in the bottom of the tank. I don’t know what could have happened but I added two new ones, same kind, I hope this was alright. Thanks for letting us live in your lovely home. Ronald Reagan The President of the United States It’s a charming story, but what I find most remarkable is the contrast between the two challenges the President was facing. On the one hand, he was responsible for managing the fate of humanity by de-escalating the threat of a nuclear holocaust. On the other hand, he was concerned about one boy’s dead goldfish.A similar but far larger contrast is seen in Psalm 147. YHWH is described as having limitless cosmic power. He commands the earth and the heavens, supplies rain and manages the seasons, and governs the stars above and the nations below. Verse 5 captures this vision of God when it declares, “Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limits.”But this expansive vision of YHWH’s awesome power is contrasted by his intimate concern for those who suffer. “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (verse 3). And while “he determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name” (verse 4), his thoughts are not so lofty that he cannot give his attention to those who are overlooked here on earth. “YHWH sustains the humble” (verse 6). The message of Psalm 147 is echoed by Jesus in the gospels. When speaking to his followers about persecution, Jesus offers comfort by reminding them of God’s intimate care. He counts every hair on our heads, and he knows every sparrow—and goldfish—that falls (See Matthew 10:26-31). For the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, who is robed with immense power, there is nothing that’s too mundane to be beyond his care. DAILY SCRIPTURE PSALM 147:1-20 MATTHEW 10:26-31 WEEKLY PRAYER From Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1975) Lift up our hearts, O Christ, above the false show of things, above laziness and fear, above selfishness and covetousness, above whim and fashion, up to the everlasting Truth that you are; that we may live joyfully and freely, in the faith that you are our King and our Savior, our Example and our Judge, and that, so long as we are loyal to you, all will ultimately be well. Amen.

Spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton shares how the Ignatian practice of discernment helps us to recognize God’s guidance in our lives: 

The habit of discernment is a quality of attentiveness to God that is so intimate that over time we develop an intuitive sense of God’s heart and purpose in any given moment. We become familiar with God’s voice—the tone, quality and content—just as we become familiar with the voice of a human being we know well. We are able to grasp the answers to several key questions: Who is God for me in the moment? Where is God at work, continuing to unfold [God’s] love and redemption? Who am I most authentically in response? It is a way of looking at all of life with a view to sensing the movement of God’s Spirit and abandoning ourselves to it…. 

For many of us, though, knowledge of God’s will is a subject fraught with doubt and difficulty. Is it really possible to know the will of God? we wonder. Do I really trust [God] to do what’s best for me? How do I know whether I have “discerned” God’s will or if it is just a good way to justify what I want? How do I make sense of those times when I thought I understood the will of God but it ended up being a mess? It was hard enough to trust God the first time. How can I trust God again? 

Barton writes that an authentic discernment process identifies love as our primary calling:   

For the Christian person, the choices we make are always about love and which choice enables us to keep following God into love. There may be other factors to consider, but the deepest question for us as Christian people is, What does love call for in this situation? What would love do? 

Why is it that we so rarely ask this question relative to the choices we face? What distracts us from love in various situations in which we are trying to discern God’s will? I don’t know your answers to this question, but I can tell you a few of mine. For one thing, love is a major inconvenience at times. It is rarely efficient…. Furthermore, love challenges my self-centeredness, and sometimes it requires me to give more of myself than I want to give. Sometimes love hurts, or at least it makes me vulnerable. All the time, love is risky, and there are no guarantees.  

And yet love is the deepest calling of the Christian life, the standard by which everything about our lives is measured…. Any decision-making process that fails to ask the love question misses the point of the Christian practice of discernment. Discernment is intended to take us deeper and deeper into the heart of God’s will: that we would follow God passionately into love—even if it takes us all the way to the cross.  

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A Few Quotes from George MacDonald

Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever-unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” not the Bible, save as leading to Him.

I am so tried by the things said about God. I understand God’s patience with the wicked, but I do wonder how he can be so patient with the pious!

All about us, in earth and air, wherever the eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in daisy, now in a wind-waft, a cloud, a sunset; a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us. The same God who is in us, and upon whose tree we are the buds, if not yet the flowers, also is all about us- inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us.

Learning to Listen

Father Richard Rohr considers the many challenges we face when seeking to “hear” God’s voice:  

Humanity is in a time of great flux, of great cultural and spiritual change. The psyche doesn’t know what to do with so much information. For most of human history, knowledge was written down, gathered in libraries, and shared physically; now, we’re linked 24/7 to unlimited data via televisions, our phones, or computer screens. That may explain the confusion and anxiety that we’re dealing with today.  

In light of today’s information overload, people are looking for a few clear certitudes by which to define themselves. We see fundamentalism in many religious leaders when it serves their cultural or political worldview. We surely see it at the lowest levels of religion, where God is used to justify violence, hatred, prejudice, and “our” way of doing things. The fundamentalist mind likes answers and explanations so much that it remains willfully ignorant about how history arrived at those explanations or how self-serving they usually are. Satisfying untruth is more pleasing to us than unsatisfying truth, and full truth is invariably unsatisfying—at least to the small self.  

Great spirituality, on the other hand, is always seeking a very subtle but creative balance between opposites. When we go to one side or the other too much, we find ourselves either overly righteous or overly skeptical and cynical. There must be a healthy middle, as we try to hold both the needed light and the necessary darkness.  

We must not give up seeking truth, observing reality from all its angles. We settle human confusion not by falsely pretending to settle all the dust, but by teaching people an honest and humble process for learning and listening for themselves, which we call contemplation. Then people come to wisdom in a calm and compassionate way without the knee jerk overreactions that we witness in so many today.  

Faith isn’t supposed to be a top-down affair, but an organic meeting between an Inner Knower (the Indwelling Holy Spirit) accessed by prayer and experience, and the Outer Knower, which we would call Scripture (holy writings) and Tradition (all the ancestors). This is a calm and wonderfully healing way to know full Reality. [1] 

Adam Bucko shares how contemplation refines our inner knowing:  

Contemplation is about receptivity, about deep listening, about wrestling with questions like what breaks your heart, what makes you truly alive, and allowing those questions, as well as the pain of the world, to shatter us. When we do that, in the midst of all of that, we discover that there’s something arising deep within. For me, that’s the Holy Spirit looking to essentially flow into our lives, take whatever is left of us, and reassemble it into something that can become our unique gift to the world. The contemplation part is the receptivity and consent, and the action part is simply letting God live through us as much as possible, letting Christ live and love and protest through us.

A Loving Voice

If we can trust and listen to our inner divine image, our whole-making instinct, or our True Self, we will act from our best, largest, kindest, most inclusive self. 
—Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ 

Richard Rohr describes how we can humbly receive and share God’s “good word” for ourselves and the world:  

We must receive all words of God tenderly and subtly, so that we can speak them to others with tenderness and subtlety. I would even say that anything said with too much bravado, over-assurance, or with any need to control or impress another, is never the voice of God within us. If any thought feels too harsh, shaming, or diminishing of ourselves or others, it is not likely the voice of God. Trust me on that. That is simply our egoic voice. Why do humans so often presume the exact opposite—that shaming voices are always from God, and grace voices are always the imagination? If something comes toward us with grace and can pass through us and toward others with grace, we can trust it as the voice of God.  

One holy man who came to visit me recently put it this way, “We must listen to what is supporting us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging us. We must listen to what is alive in us.” I personally was so trained not to trust those voices that I think I often did not hear the voice of God speaking to me or what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.” Yes, a narcissistic person can and will misuse such advice, but a genuine God lover will flourish inside such a dialogue.  

We must learn how to recognize the positive flow and to distinguish it from the negative resistance within ourselves. It can take years, if not a lifetime. If a voice comes from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the “Accuser,” which is the literal meaning of the biblical word “Satan.” Shaming, accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks, but sadly, it is too often how we talk—to ourselves and to one another. God is supremely nonviolent; I’ve learned that from the saints and mystics that I have read and met and heard about. That many holy people cannot be wrong.  [1]  

There is a deeper voice of God which we must learn to hear and obey. It will sound like the voice of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of common sense, of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of our deepest self. It will always feel gratuitous, and it is this very freedom that scares us. God never leads by guilt or shame! God leads by loving the soul at ever-deeper levels, not by shaming at superficial levels. 

(from John Chaffee’s Monday email on the mystics) Learning from the Mystics: Julian of Norwich

Quote of the Week: “Our soul is one-ed with him, and he is unchangeable goodness.  There can be neither anger nor forgiveness between God and our soul.  For the goodness of God has made our soul so completely one with him that there can be nothing separating us.” – Chapter 46, p 114. Reflection:  For Julian, the line that separates the creation from the Creator has largely dissolved.  In today’s world, someone is considered spiritual or learned because of their ability to separate, to distinguish, to be apart rather than unified, reconciling, and integrated with the world around them. Julian was under some level of scrutiny for these comments, but she was likely under the watchful eye of people who were “higher” in authority but “earlier” in their faith journey and maturity.  Julian was unable to find a word to talk about the intimacy of God and our being she invented a new term: being one-ed with God.   Elsewhere in the Showings, she likens the soul and God is tied in a knot, two ropes in one existence. If we take a moment to realize what she is saying, it is nothing more than what happens in the climax of Romans 8, that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”  Sometimes we read that passage and affirm it conceptually but not in reality.  For Julian, she took the intimate closeness of God and the human soul to be the reality upon which all other theology and spirituality should be built. Prayer  Dear Lord, help us not only to affirm but to also live from the deep reality that you have chosen to tie yourself to us, that we are united in one existence by sheer grace and love.  Help us also to recognize the deep unity and interrelationship of all things, and overcome every separation, segregation, and division that we foolishly employ.  In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Life Overview:  Who Were They: Julian, also known as Juliana Where: Norwich, England When: 1343-1416AD (During the Bubonic Plague) Why She is Important: She is the first published female in the English language, and is known for her incredibly hopeful, intimate and tender theology of God. What Was Their Main Contribution: The Showings (or Revelations) of Divine Love

Endless Strength! / Your love authored life / when You spoke that one Word. / You’re the One who ordered / order, created / Creation, Your own / way.  
—Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Carmen Acevedo Butcher 

Father Richard understands the cosmos as the first Incarnation of God:  

The first Incarnation of God did not happen in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. That is just when it became human and personal for us, and many people started taking divine embodiment seriously. The initial Incarnation actually happened around 13.8 billion years ago with the “Big Bang.” That is what we call the moment when God decided to materialize and self-expose.   

Two thousand years ago marks the human incarnation of God in Jesus, but before that there was the first and original incarnation through light, water, land, sun, moon, stars, plants, trees, fruit, birds, serpents, cattle, fish, and “every kind of wild beast” according to the creation story in Genesis 1:3–25. This was the “Cosmic Christ” through whom “God has let us know the mystery of his purpose, the hidden plan he so kindly made from the beginning in Christ” (see Ephesians 1:9–10). Christ is not Jesus’ last name; it’s the title for his life’s purpose.  

Jesus is the very concrete truth revealing and standing in for the universal truth. As Colossians puts it, “he is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation” (1:15); he is the one glorious part that names and reveals the even more glorious whole. “The fullness is founded in him … everything in heaven and everything on earth” (Colossians 1:19–20). Christ, for Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus, was the very first idea in the mind of God [1] and God has never stopped thinking, dreaming, and creating the Christ. “The immense diversity and pluriformity of this creation more perfectly represent God than any one creature alone or by itself,” adds Thomas Aquinas. [2] 

For most of us, this is a significant shaking of our foundational image of the universe and of our religion. Yet if any group should have come to this quite simply and naturally, it should have been the three groups of believers that call themselves monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims all believe that the world was created by one God. It would seem to follow therefore that everything, everything without exception, would bear the clear imprint and likeness of the one Creator.  

Our very suffering now, our condensed presence on this common nest that we have fouled, will soon be the ONE thing that we finally share in common. It might well be the one thing that will bring us together. The earth and its life systems on which we all entirely depend (just as we depend on God!) might soon become the very thing that will convert us to a simple gospel lifestyle, to necessary community, and to an inherent and universal sense of the holy.   

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Skye Jethani

In much of our culture, leadership has become a dirty word. Trust in institutions has plummeted over the last 30 years because of toxic, abusive, or corrupt leadership. The greed of financial leaders created the mortgage crisis that nearly destroyed the economy in 2008. The self-interest of religious leaders led them to cover up abuse scandals in some of the country’s largest churches and denominations. And let’s not even get into the shortcomings of our political leaders.

I don’t know if today’s leaders are more corrupt and less virtuous than leaders from the past, or if we simply see more of their shortcomings now because of technology and social media. Either way, the temptation to abuse power is not a modern problem, and neither is the desire to seek a leadership position for selfish gain and ego inflation. The Bible is full of terrible leaders, some good leaders, and many flawed leaders. David belonged to the last category.

In Psalm 144, David speaks of his leadership by echoing the words of Psalm 8. John Goldingay says, “Psalm 8 marvels that God puts mere humans in control of the world; Psalm 144 marvels that God puts a particular human being, the king or governor, in charge of Israel.” (See Psalm 8:4-6 and Psalm 144:3). Although David is just a mortal man, YHWH has given him the power of life and death, the power to make war, and to subjugate people (verses 1-2). It is a terrible and awesome responsibility that is easy to abuse—and often is.

The final verses of Psalm 144, however, reveal David’s wisdom. He understands that God has not given him this leadership role to glorify himself, but to serve the interest of others. David recognizes that being a faithful and successful king will result in future generations being blessed. He speaks of Israel’s sons and daughters living in peace and prosperity, and free from the fear of poverty or slavery (verses 12-14). Simply put, YHWH made him king to serve and bless God’s people. God’s people do not exist to serve and bless the king.

Although the church has no king but Jesus, the same principle implied by Psalm 144 is found in the New Testament. When speaking about gifts within the church, Paul is careful to say that the Spirit gives gifts “for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). And gifts often associated with leadership—apostleship, prophecy, teaching, etc.—are not given to believers for their own benefit, but to build up and strengthen others within the church. Therefore, any Christian given a role of influence is to have the same mindset as Christ. We are to value others above ourselves and use our power to serve and bless others. Maybe if this Christian vision of power were seen more within the church, leadership would no longer be a dirty word.

DAILY SCRIPTURE

Psalm 144:1-15
1 Corinthians 12:4-11

WEEKLY PRAYER

Basil of Caesarea (330 – 379)

O Lord, the help of the helpless,
the hope of the hopeless,
the savior of the storm-tossed,
the harbor of voyagers,
the physician of the sick;
we pray to you.
O Lord, you know each of us and our petitions;
you know each house and its needs;
receive us all into your kingdom;
make us children of light,
and bestow your peace and love upon us.
Amen.

Thursday, October 17, 2024

Theologian Elizabeth Johnson shows how our understanding of creation has evolved since Genesis:  

Ancient biblical writers, imbued with faith in God’s creative power, described poetically how God stretched out the heavens, laid firm the foundations of the land, gave the sea instructions to stay within its bounds. Their model of the cosmos put an unchanging Earth at the center with the sun, moon, and other heavenly bodies circling around it under the dome of the sky, which is actually the way things appear to the unaided human eye.  

Many centuries later we have a different understanding. Scientific discoveries have led us to see the heavens and the earth as the still-unfinished result of natural processes…. Since life began on this planet more than 3.5 billion years ago, different species of plants and animals have evolved in sync with this changing environment, emerging and disappearing….  

The Bible with its belief in a Creator who makes heaven and earth and all that is in them was written centuries before this modern knowledge developed and should not be expected to possess it. What remains constant for faith, whatever model one uses to envision Earth, is the religious intuition that the living God has an ongoing creative relationship with land, sea, air, and their inhabitants that enables their existence and actions. 

Johnson invites us to think of God as Creator through a broad lens:   

The ambling character of life’s evolutionary emergence over billions of years … is hard to reconcile with a simplistic idea of God the Creator at work…. Best to let go of the idea of God as a monarch acting upon other beings. Move your mind in the direction of the living God who is infinite holy mystery. Sit with the truth that our finite minds cannot comprehend the One who is infinite; our finite hearts cannot grasp love without limit. Look toward God not as an individual actor within the range of creatures but as the unimaginable personal Source of all beings, the very Ground of being, the Beyond in our midst, a generative ocean of love, Creator Spirit. Then begin to realize that the power of the Creator Spirit is not exercised as raw power-over but as love that empowers-with. God’s creative activity brings into being a universe endowed with the innate capacity to evolve by the operation of its own natural powers, making it a free partner in its own creation.  

Expanding our view of the living God along the lines of the paradigm of the lover opens a way to respect the genuine autonomy of nature’s operation and the freedom of creatures’ behavior that the Creator God makes possible….  

As God’s good creation, the world becomes a free partner in its own becoming while the Creator enables its existence at every moment. To put this succinctly, God creates the world by empowering the world to make itself. Far from compelling the world to develop according to a pre-designed plan, the Spirit continually calls it forth to a fresh and unexpected future. 

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Sarah Young Jesus Calling

Jesus Calling: October 17th, 2024

Anxiety is a result of envisioning the future without Me. So the best defense against worry is staying in communication with Me. When you turn your thoughts toward Me, you can think much more positively. Remember to listen, as well as to speak, making your thoughts a dialogue with Me.
     If you must consider upcoming events, follow these rules: 1) Do not linger in the future, because anxieties sprout up like mushrooms when you wander there. 2) Remember the promise of My continual Presence; include Me in any imagery that comes to mind. This mental discipline does not come easily, because you are accustomed to being god of your fantasies. However, the reality of My Presence with you, now and forevermore, outshines any fantasy you could ever imagine.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:
Luke 12:22-26 (NLT)
Teaching about Money and Possessions
22 Then, turning to his disciples, Jesus said, “That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food to eat or enough clothes to wear. 23 For life is more than food, and your body more than clothing. 24 Look at the ravens. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for God feeds them. And you are far more valuable to him than any birds! 25 Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? 26 And if worry can’t accomplish a little thing like that, what’s the use of worrying over bigger things?

Additional insight regarding Luke 12:22-34: Jesus commands us to not worry. But how can we avoid it? Only faith can free us from the anxiety caused by greed and covetousness. Working and planning responsibly is good; dwelling on all the ways our planning could go wrong is bad. Worry is pointless because it can’t fill any of our needs; worry is foolish because the Creator of the universe loves us and knows what we need. He promises to meet all our real needs but not necessarily all of our desires. Overcoming worry requires the following: (1) Simple trust in God, our heavenly Father. This trust is expressed by praying to him rather than worrying. (2) Perspective on your problems. This can be gained by developing a strategy for addressing and correcting your problems. (3) A support team to help. Find some believers who will pray for you to find wisdom and strength to deal with your worries.

Ephesians 3:20-21 (NLT)
20 Now all glory to God, who is able, through his mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think. 21 Glory to him in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations forever and ever! Amen.

Additional insight regarding Ephesians 3:20-21: This doxology – prayer of praise to God – ends Part 1 of Ephesians. In the first section, Paul describes the timeless role of the church. In Part 2 (chapters 4-6), he will explain how church members should live in order to bring about the unity God wants. As in most of his books, Paul first lays a doctrinal foundation and then makes practical applications of the truths he has presented.

Ever since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities—God’s eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, because they are understood through the things God has made. —Romans 1:20  

Sarah Augustine, a Pueblo (Tewa) author and activist, identifies what we can learn from creation about the Creator:  

This Scripture [from Paul] is consistent with an Indigenous worldview—that the nature of the Creator is evident in the creation. What does creation tell us about God’s divine nature?… 

Faithfulness. In the environment where I live, in the foothills of Pahto, the sacred mountain of the region, I see the faithfulness of the Creator with each season. In spite of the consistent [polluting] inputs…, each spring, life returns to the soil, trees and plants flower, and pollinators do their important work to spread the miracle of life. We humans do nothing to earn this. We do not collectively give thanks. Yet each spring returns faithfully, and with it, life.  

The interconnectedness and interdependence of the entire cosmos.The Yakama practice reverence in their spring feast, giving thanks before they go to gather. The elders instruct us: take just what you need. Leave plenty for future generations. This implies that life is interdependent; what I do has a direct impact on the lives of other creatures. Living in ways that are consistent with this basic understanding results in abundance…. 

Creation is ongoing. Creation did not occur in six days and then stop; it is an ongoing process. Reverence means demonstrating deep respect for the plants and animals required to sustain my life and the lives of my family members….  

Mutual accountability. Reverence does not happen once per week; it is practiced each day faithfully, moment by moment. It is acknowledging that we are dependent on the systems of life, that they are not subordinate to us or to our will. [1] 

The Indigenous caucus at the 10th Assembly of the World Council of Churches shared the ecological wisdom of their traditions: 

We as Indigenous Peoples believe that the Creator is in Creation. God revealed himself/herself as Creator and Sustainer in the act of creation. The triune God along with land co-parents all life. The mystery in John chapter 1 unfolds how the Creator abides in creation. The incarnation of God in Christ becomes totality in God’s creation…. Through God all things were made, without God nothing was or is made. In God there is life, and in God is the light of all Creation. The presence of God made the world and therefore [it] is sacred. The work of creation in God is the unity of diversity, where all lives coexist in a harmonious balance because they are all from God. Each seed that sprouts begins creation anew, and not one seed can grow unless the Creator enables it. We believe that doing justice to God’s creation is the basis of liberation and the human search for selfhood. [

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Dear Nadia, Why do you believe?

Dear Nadia, Why, after your own journey, do you still find yourself believing in a personal God and in the resurrection of Jesus? I’d like to believe these things, but I struggle to find them intellectually tenable. Thanks!

Joseph

Short answer:

Dear Joseph,

None of this is intellectually tenable. So that struggle you find yourself in? You can take a break from that. Also I find the word “personal” to be kind of bullshit too. Like I can find my “Personal Lord and Savior” in my contacts somewhere between my “Personal Assistant” and my “Personal Trainer”. This, my friend, is not something you need to buy in to in order to have faith.

You need not muster up any feelings of “closeness to God”, and you need not intellectually assent to theological propositions. Maybe faith isn’t about the intellect or even “feelings”. Maybe it’s about a deep knowing. And I suspect that if you can quiet down all those church-y messages you received, you might, in the moments between your breaths, in the moments between your doubts, be just barely still enough to know that God is.

Love,

Nadia

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Long answer:

Dear Joseph

As a schoolgirl I was taught to believe that certain formulas were reliable; 1 + 1 will always equal 2. This was provable and beyond questioning. 

And then I’d go to church where we were taught to believe all this Christian stuff in the same way we believed in math.  When argued correctly, we could use human reason to prove the absolute truth of the Christian faith. All the stories in the Bible and, more importantly, all the doctrine the church made up were also reliable, provable and beyond questioning.  So having faith meant approaching the Bible and the doctrine and teachings of Christianity with as much certitude and unwavering confidence as I would simple math.   And one would never dream of doubting arithmetic.  I mean, if mathematics was the sort of thing where sometimes 1 + 1 = 2, if mathematics was the sort of thing where you know,  2,000 years ago 1+1 = 2 but with the changes in culture it just simply no longer does…well, then all of Mathematics would be up for grabs. 

By the time I left the conservative church I was raised in, I no longer believed that only Church of Christ members were “going to heaven”, or that women were spiritually inferior to men, or that God created this wild diversity of humanity but was only “pleased” with the small subset that happened to be devout Christian heterosexuals who went to church and never used swear words. This also meant that I did not believe in that whole “God loves us very much but will send us into a lake of burning fire to be tortured for eternity if we are gay or allow women to pray out loud when men are present or if we have sex before we are married.”

But when I walked away from THAT I was also walking away from the only world I had ever known: worship, hymns, retreats, camps, potlucks, devotionals, prayer, plus also: grape juice & crackers each Sunday.

It took me years to realize that the symbol system and stories and music and language and practices of Christianity formed me in ways that I could not escape by simply no longer going to church, Joseph.  But they formed me in ways that transcended the strident certainty of the Church of Christ. So I would pray without realizing I was doing it, and would be moved to tears by hearing a hymn in a movie score without wanting to be, and when my roommate would find the wallet she thought she’d lost I’d say “call the neighbors” without realizing she didn’t know the Bible like I did and wouldn’t get the joke. My life had been inflected by faith from the time I was growing in my mother’s belly and to have only negative feelings about Christianity was to also have some negative feelings about my own being.

So, Joseph, I left the church of my childhood for reasons of self-preservation, but I returned to the faith of my childhood for reasons of self-love because there were little pieces of me back in there that I eventually could see and love and well . . . I wanted them back.  Leaving Christianity felt like a way to save myself but eventually, reclaiming some aspects of Christianity felt like a way to love myself. 

Not sure if that all makes sense, Joseph and I do not know your story. But I can hear your desire to try and figure this all out, so if I had any advice for you it would be to know that you do not have to strive for something that is already woven inside of you. Whatever is there, whatever knowing, whatever love for lost things and loaves and fishes, whatever prayer your grandmother taught you that you kind of want to also teach your own children, whatever comfort in the mystery, that is faith, my friend. And it is enough.

So yeah, I believe in God and even the resurrection. But not in the way I believe in math.

I believe because, as The Hold Steady song goes,

She crashed into the Easter mass with her hair done up in broken glass
She was limping left on broken heels
And she said, “Father, can I tell your congregation how a resurrection really feels?

And I believe because it is in me to do so.

And I believe because I have borrowed the faith of others.

And I believe because of how bonkers all the Bible stories are not despitehow bonkers all the Bible stories are.

And “I believe, help my unbelief”.

And I believe because: 

Jesus sought me when a stranger

wandering from the fold of God.

And I believe because yesterday I saw this flower:

And I believe because I have experienced it all to be true and am unconcerned whether or not it is fact.

So, thanks for asking. And I hope your faith finds you and that you welcome whatever shape it takes and that you refrain from thinking it isn’t enough.

Be gentle with yourself, Joseph. 

Love, Nadia

Father Richard considers what we can learn from the first Bible of nature: 

The first act of divine revelation is creation itself. The first Bible is the Bible of nature. It was written at least 13.8 billion years ago, at the moment that we call the Big Bang, long before the Bible of words. “Ever since God created the world, God’s everlasting power and divinity—however invisible—are there for the mind to see in the things that God has made” (Romans 1:20). One really wonders how we missed that. Words gave us something to argue about, I guess, while nature can only be experienced, and hopefully enjoyed and respected with admiration and awe. Don’t dare put the second Bible in the hands of people who have not sat lovingly at the feet of the first Bible. They will invariably manipulate, mangle, and murder the written text.  

The biblical account tells us God creates the world developmentally over six days, almost as if there was an ancient intuition of what we would eventually call evolution. Clearly creation happened over time. The only strict theological assertion of the Genesis story is that God started it all. The exact how, when, and where is not the author’s concern. This creation story, perhaps written five hundred years before Jesus Christ, has no intention or ability to be a scientific account. It is a truly inspired account of the source, meaning, and original goodness of creation. Thus, it is indeed “true.” Both Western rationalists and religious fundamentalists must stop confusing true with that which is literal, chronological, or visible to the narrow spectrum of the human eye. Many assume the Bible is an exact snapshot—as if caught on camera—of God’s involvement on Earth. But if God needed such literalism, God would have waited for the 19th century of the Common Era to start talking and revealing through “infallible” technology. [1]  

Science often affirms what were for centuries the highly suspect intuitions of the mystics. We now take it for granted that everything in the universe is deeply connected and linked, even light itself, which interestingly is the first act of creation (Genesis 1:3). Objects—even galaxies!—throughout the entire known universe are in orbits and cycle around something else. There’s no such thing in the whole universe as autonomy. It doesn’t exist. That’s the illusion of the modern, individualistic West, which imagines the autonomous self to be the basic building block and the true Seer. [2] 

Yet all holy ones seem to say that the independent self sees everything incorrectly. Parts can only recognize parts and so split things even further. Whole people see things in their wholeness and thus create wholeness (“holiness”) wherever they go and wherever they gaze. Holy people will find God in nature and everywhere else too. Heady people will only find God in books and words, and finally not even there. 

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Contemplation in the Desert

MARK LONGHURST OCT 6

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I’m no desert dweller. I love New Mexico’s dry dirt, short trees, and adobe houses, but I wouldn’t dare journey for days in the actual desert. When my wife and I first discussed moving to western Massachusetts, I asked, “Is there an independent movie theater? Where’s the nearest craft brewery?”

The desert, however, is a rich and longstanding image in the Jewish and Christian traditions. Ancient Christian monks wandered to the most remote and craggy outposts they could find and set up camp. The barren landscape became a spiritual metaphor for the interior purification or “letting go” process needed to meet God.

The ancient Israelites were a wilderness, nomadic people. They contemplated God in deserts, on mountaintops, on the margins, and on the move. Of course, the image of the promised land looms large in the Jewish imagination, but the desert persistently haunts the people as a symbol and harsh reality.

It’s the wilderness—in Hebrew, the same word for desert, midbar—that wields transformative, liberating power. The dramatic, mountain-quaking revelation at Sinai that Moses experiences is preceded by the people’s escape from Egyptian slavery and time spent wandering in the desert. But before Moses leads the people in the archetypal freedom flight from Empire, he goes out to the desert.

He has fled Egypt, having murdered an Egyptian and taken refuge in a land called Midian. One day, Moses is keeping the flocks of his father-in-law, Jethro (Exodus 3:1). He leads his flock into the wilderness-desert and arrives at a mountain, where he stumbles across a burning bush and receives Yahweh’s liberating call.

His own divine desert encounter galvanizes his leadership.

Before the people arrive at Sinai, they, too, trek through the desert. But the desert is tough and impersonal. It does not care about people. It has its own identity and will. It does not bend easily to our desires, if at all. The desert is not only a stop on the way to the mountain or an unfortunate detour on the way to the promised land but also a destination itself.

The ancient Israelites learn this lesson with great complaint. They cross the Red Sea, fleeing Pharaoh’s chariots while divine power holds waves at bay. Once in the wilderness-desert, the people face hunger, thirst, and armed enemies. Newly liberated, they nevertheless romanticize their oppression. They start to pine for Egypt’s full meals. They become thirsty. They protest Moses’s leadership. “Why did you bring us out into the desert, to kill us?” they ask (Exodus 16:3). God sends food from heaven for sustenance. God gives water that flows out of a rock struck by Moses. They run into other desert nomads, called Amalek, and are forced to fight to protect themselves.

The desert is the in-between space of testing, divine revelation, and transformation. It’s the job loss and search, the dissolution of a marriage, the grief after a beloved’s death. It’s also the place to discover God’s freedom and presence, from which a voice cries out, “Prepare the way of the Lord” (Mark 1:3). The story of Israel in the desert is also the story of the gospels, the way retread by Jesus. Once baptized and immersed in water, Jesus, too, is thrust into the wilderness-desert. Moses lingers at Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights while, generations later, Jesus endures the desert and Satan’s cross-examination for forty days and forty nights.

Once tested and proven true in the desert, Jesus returns to the desert. It’s as if Jesus chooses the uncertain liminality of the desert to frame his life. Mark’s gospel includes rich, brief lines that suggest Jesus’s dedication to contemplation. They often simply read, “Jesus withdrew to a quiet place.” Writers on silent prayer have often turned to these verses hoping that Jesus, too, values silence. But Jesus’s embrace of silence is tied to landscape: the Greek word eremos means both a solitary and desert place (see Mark 6:31). When Jesus goes off to pray, he is not only stealing solitude, he is going to the desert.

The desert is the archetypal and literal place where we meet God, the place of fierce love. Deserts of loss, grief, pain, and literal sand strip down our pretensions, as if to say that preparing for God’s way requires abandonment of all our prior ways. The ways that we are in the world are all too often directed by addiction and a desire for more. The desert demands us to be emptied rather than filled, to show up and be tested, for divine fire to refine our desire, to face inner barrenness head-on, just as Jesus faces down the devil in the wilderness.

We are confronted with our naked self in the desert. There’s no place for our pride, lust, anger, resentment, or need for approval to hide. No amount of posturing will shield us from the desert sun’s unremitting glare. Its clarity may even stir us to long once again for the seemingly safe oppression of Egypt.

Or the truth that the desert peels away may cause us to plunge headlong in love with God, to say with the poet of the Song of Songs, “Who is that coming up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved?” (8:5)

The desert is a pliable metaphor for spaces of contemplation. While barren landscapes still hold transformative power, deserts are more populated these days. In a technological age, deserts are contested sites for cities, nuclear tests, oil drilling, and pipeline development. As Thomas Merton once wrote, “When man and his money and machines move out in the desert and dwell there, not fighting the devil as Christ did, but believing in his promises of power and wealth . . . then the desert moves everywhere.” Deserts symbolize the inner work of purgation and reality confrontation that would-be contemplatives must undergo wherever we find ourselves.