Richard Rohr has learned from alcoholics and the Twelve Steps that it’s when we hit rock bottom that we realize how our suffering and God’s suffering are connected: 

Only those who have tried to breathe under water know how important breathing really is—and will never take it for granted again. They are the ones who do not take shipwreck or drowning lightly, the ones who can name “healing” correctly, the ones who know what they have been saved from, and the only ones who develop the patience and humility to ask the right questions of God and of themselves.  

It seems only the survivors know the full terror of the passage, the arms that held them through it all, and the power of the obstacles that were overcome. All they can do is thank God they made it through! For the rest of us, it is mere speculation, salvation theories, and “theology.”  

Those who have passed over to healing and sobriety eventually find a much bigger world of endurance, meaning, hope, self-esteem, deeper and true desire, and, most especially, a bottomless pool of love, both within and without. The Eastern fathers of the church called this transformation theosis, or the process of the divinization of the human person. This deep transformation is not achieved by magic, miracles, or priestcraft, but by a “vital spiritual experience” that is available to all human beings. It leads to an emotional sobriety, an immense freedom, a natural compassion, and a sense of divine union that is the deepest and most universal meaning of that much-used word salvation. Only those who have passed over know the real meaning of that word—and that it is not just a word at all. 

It is at precisely this point that the suffering God and a suffering soul can meet. It is at this point that human suffering makes spiritual sense, not to the rational mind, the logical mind, or even the “just and fair” mind, but to the logic of the soul, which I would state in this way:  

Suffering people can love and trust a suffering God.  
Only a suffering God can “save” suffering people.    

Jesus is, more than anything else, the God of all who suffer—more than any god that can be encompassed in a single religion. Jesus is in competition with no world religion, but only in nonstop competition with death, suffering, and the tragic sense of life itself. That is the only battle that he wants to win. He wins by including it all inside of his body, “groaning in one great act of giving birth … waiting until our bodies are fully set free” (Romans 8:22–23).  

The suffering creatures of this world have a divine Being who does not judge or condemn them, or in any way stand aloof from their plight, but instead, a Being who hangs with them and flows through them, and even toward them in their despair. 

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5 for Friday John Chaffee

1.
“Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”

• TS Eliot, English Poet
   
  If we take a moment and remember that TS Eliot was considered the first post-modern poet, who wrote during and after the fallout of World War II, this quote takes on a deeper meaning…

The Second World War was atrocious and dehumanizing in the West.  It included concentration camps, exterminations, human experimenting, and the creation of atomic warfare, all while being the most documented war in human history.  Was it caused by the hubris of one man who sought to be important?  Was it the result of many people who sought to be important?

What about our small offenses?  Do we cause harm on a small scale by our insecurities?  Probably.  We may not start world wars but we can certainly cause collateral damage to those around us.

Perhaps this is why the early Church emphasized humility as a vitally important virtue.  Did they see what happens within a person when humility is not present?  I am sure that they did.

2.
“Between God and the soul, there is no between.”

• Julian of Norwich, 14th Century English Mystic
   
  This whole religious myth that we are separate from God until we do something, pray something or believe something is not true.

After all, nothing can separate us from the Love of God (Romans 8:38-39), in whom we all live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28).

3.
“To know all is to forgive all.”

• Early Church Saying
   
  Within classical Christian theology, there are the three attributes of the omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience of God.  Respectively, they describe the universal presence of God, the boundless capabilities of God, and the unlimited knowledge of God.  Although these three terms come to us originally from Aristotelian philosophy, the early Church believed them to be true and formalized them officially after Thomas Aquinas published the Summa Theologiae.

Let’s focus on the all-knowing capabilities of God.

The omniscience of God means God knows your genetic makeup, and how it was the result of countless generations of parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.  That means God knows what household raised you, all the good and all the bad.  That means God knows what mentors and dementors were over you.  That means God knows every single hurt, disappointment, regret, shame, glory, failure, success, tear of joy, tear of pain, grief, loss, gain, embarrassment, victory, addiction, destructive habit, self-loathing, delusion of grandeur, belonging, attachment, community, exclusion, birthday, laugh, gift you have ever experienced.  God also knows all the same details for everyone else in the cosmos.

The early Church believed that to know all is to forgive all.

Once you understand where someone came from, with all the scars and traumas, it is easier to forgive them.  To discover that a school bully goes home to a violent household and feels threatened every evening and morning by simply existing, helps us to forgive them.  Extrapolate that same idea out to every person who has ever existed and you can see what the early Church meant.  For God to know all, actually makes God most able to forgive!

To be God is inherently to know all, to forgive all, to love all, and to reconcile all.  We are sitting here, on the other side of omniscience, and have to work through faith and love to stay open to forgiving the other (which is no simple feat!).  However, if we seek to be like Christ, there is no higher goal to strive for.

4.
“If you are a friend of Christ you should have as friends persons who are benefit to you and contribute to your way of life.  Let your friends be men of peace, spiritual brethren, holy fathers.”

• St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic, 9th Century Syrian Monk
   
  Be mindful of who you spend the most time around.  Just as bad company corrupts good morals, so does good company restore them.

5.
“You’ve survived too many storms to be bothered by raindrops.”

• Unknown
   
  It was 2 am in the forests of southern Maine near Rangeley, I looked up and saw a moose staring back down at me.  Its nostrils snorted out a puff of air that I could see in my headlamp.  I remember yelling, “NIGHT MOOSE!”  Our whole crew of night-hikers bolted out of there, running into the black night because what was out there seemed safer than playing a game of chicken with an awkward 1.5-ton horse-like beast with antlers.

There are times when I forget what I have already lived through.  On these days, I sometimes allow my fear and anxiety to get a hold of me.  As a head-oriented person, it is easy for me to overthink to the point of ruminating and thereby doomcast what might happen.  It’s a problem that I have, and fortunately, it does not happen often.  Plus, now that I can admit it about myself I am less likely to get trapped in that way of thinking.

All that goes to say, there are also times when I remember what I have been through.  I forget how tough I can be.  I forget how I have been within 10 feet of multiple moose, scared off bears, quit unhealthy jobs, been in 2 car accidents, broken a tooth on the dance floor, stared down a mentally unstable drug addict in college, stepped into the ER multiple times, taken buses across the US alone, danced in the rain in Ghana during the dry season, been to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Germany, done the longest zipline in the northeast, and so much more.  Hopefully, I can keep adding to that list.

Sometimes we forget how much we have been through.  Sometimes it’s good to remember that what we are going through is just some raindrops, compared to the earlier storms of life.

Psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (1905–1997) describes the denigrating horror of the Nazi concentration camps:  

In the camps, even the life that was considered worthy only of death was fully exploited to its absolute limit. What a devaluation of life, what a debasement and degradation of humankind!… Were we not told often enough in the concentration camps that we were “not worth the soup,” this soup that was doled out to us as the sole meal of the day, and the price of which we had to pay with the toil of digging through the earth? We unworthy wretches even had to accept this undeserved gift of grace in the required manner: as the soup was handed to him, each prisoner had to doff his cap. So, just as our lives were not worth a bowl of soup, our deaths were also of minimal value, not even worth a lead bullet, just some Zyklon B. [1] 

After his release, Frankl became known for his radical insistence on saying “yes to life in spite of everything”:  
 
It is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us—we are the ones who are questioned! We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to—of being responsible toward—life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us. Now everything depends on what is expected of us. As to what awaits us in the future, we don’t need to know that any more than we are able to know it. [2]  

Facing imprisonment under German occupation, Dutch Jewish writer Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) expressed her love for life: 

“Reposing in oneself” … probably best expresses my own love of life: I repose in myself. And that part of myself, that deepest and richest part in which I repose, is what I call “God.” In Tide’s [Hillesum’s Christian friend] diary I often read, “Take him gently into Your arms, Father.” And that is how I feel, always and without cease: “as if I were lying in Your arms, oh God, so protected and sheltered and so steeped in eternity.” As if every breath I take were filled with it and as if my smallest acts and words had a deeper source and a deeper meaning.… 

The reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death … by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich [life]. [3]  

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Sarah Young; Jesus Calling

I speak to you from deepest heaven. You hear Me in the depths of your being. Deep calls unto deep. You are blessed to hear Me so directly. Never take this privilege for granted. The best response is a heart overflowing with gratitude. I am training you to cultivate a thankful mind-set. This is like building your house on a firm rock, where life’s storms cannot shake you. As you learn these lessons, you are to teach them to others. I will open up the way before you, one step at a time.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Psalm 42:7 (NLT)
7 I hear the tumult of the raging seas
    as your waves and surging tides sweep over me.

Psalm 95:1-2 (NLT)
Psalm 95
1 Come, let us sing to the Lord!
    Let us shout joyfully to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come to him with thanksgiving.
    Let us sing psalms of praise to him.

Additional insight regarding Psalm 95:1-4: Songs, shouts, gratitude, and praise erupted from those gathered to worship the Lord. While there are certainly many examples of stillness and silence in God’s presence taught and illustrated in Scripture, there are equally as many examples of raucous worship. Both peaceful silence and enthusiastic praise are appropriate expressions of worship to our great God.

Matthew 7:24-25 (NLT)
Building on a Solid Foundation
24 “Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. 25 Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock.

Additional insight regarding Matthew 7:24: To “build” on solid rock means to be a hearing, responding disciple, not a phony, superficial one. Practicing obedience becomes the solid foundation to weather the storms of life. See James 1:22-27 (below) for more on putting what we hear into practice.

James 1:22-27 (NLT)
22 But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves. 23 For if you listen to the word and don’t obey, it is like glancing at your face in a mirror. 24 You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like. 25 But if you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free, and if you do what it says and don’t forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it.
26 If you claim to be religious but don’t control your tongue, you are fooling yourself, and your religion is worthless. 27 Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.

CAC teacher Barbara Holmes finds strength in collective storytelling:  

We are revived by the stories that we tell about our reality, our bodies, our spirits, and our God. These stories challenge and unsettle us. They touch us in places that facts seldom reach and often move us to action. Most religions have more stories than anything else. Whenever Jesus is asked a question, he answers with a story, a parable. “He did not say anything to them without using a parable” (Matthew 13:34).  

We tell our stories because all of us have survived something, because stories are signposts from the past that give us clues about the future. Finally, our stories are a witness to the next generation and an opportunity to understand the universal as well as the particular in tales of trauma, healing, and survival. [1] 

Writing to his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates names the importance of each person’s story:  

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. [2] 

Holmes continues:  

When I allow myself to succumb to storytelling, I sense connections to others that I seldom notice. I hear the black community’s story in the stories of Jewish persecution and the attempts to destroy the cultures of Native people in the Americas. My memories are specific to the sacred stories of my village, but these stories also resonate with others who have endured similar circumstances.…  

There is a future because the stories are not locked up within our individual lives. Instead, they are held as precious elements of communal wisdom. Our stories do not need opportunities for neat resolution; they just need to be told over and over again … heard and pondered before the dancing begins—and the dancing will begin again because when we lose hope and joy as individuals, the community digs deep into its shared resources and starts the beat yet again. They tap their feet and drum the promises of God. [3] ==================================================

Remember the Future

Click Here for Audio Yesterday, we saw how the table does more than commemorate the past. Based on the Hebrew understanding of remembrance, when we come to the table we are inviting the power of God’s salvation in the past to find completion in the present. But the table is more than a time machine to the past; it is also a glimpse into the future.At the Passover meal, Jesus used the bread and wine to represent his redemptive death. The sorrow of betrayal, abandonment, and death was certainly on Jesus’ mind. His hour of suffering had finally come. But there was more on his mind than the cross. He said to his friends: “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.” And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, he said, “Take this and divide it among you. For I tell you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.”These words reveal that Jesus was not just focused on God’s past faithfulness or even his present work of redemption through the cross. He was also looking to the future—the fulfillment of the kingdom of God. At that table, Jesus anticipated a future table, a future feast, and a future cup. On the other side of his suffering, he saw a celebration. Revelation 19 offers us a glimpse of the banquet Jesus imagined. Known as the wedding feast of the Lamb, the meal represents the fulfillment of God’s redemptive work in history when all evil is vanquished, the innocent are vindicated, and the world is put right.Like Jesus, the earliest Christians saw the communion table as a prophetic symbol, a window into a future age. For those experiencing great persecution, pain, and trials, the table offered hope. It was a foretaste of the feast that was to come in a world without pain, where we will sit at a table with no traitors, with bodies that shed neither blood nor tears and where God himself will serve us.Therefore, we come to the communion table not just to remember the past, but to remember the future. We gather to feast on the imagination of Christ—to see what he saw, to fill our minds with the sights, and sounds, and smells, of heaven even if the darkness around us feels like hell. When we come to the table as Jesus did, we will discover it is where the past, present, and future converge into a single point of grace. DAILY SCRIPTURE LUKE 22:14-20 REVELATION 19:1-9 WEEKLY PRAYER. From Thomas Ken (1637 – 1711) Glory be to you, O Jesus, my Lord and my God, for feeding my soul with your most blessed body and blood. Oh, let your heavenly food transfuse new life and new vigor into my soul, and into the souls of all that communicate with me, that our faith may daily increase; that we may all grow more humble and contrite for our sins; that we may all love you and serve you, and delight in you, and praise you more fervently, more incessantly, then ever we have done before. Amen.

For who that has read the Gospel does not know that Christ counts all human suffering his own? —Origen, On Prayer 11.2  

Richard Rohr considers the presence of so many evils in the world and God’s solidarity with suffering: 

Theodicy is a branch of theology that has developed many arguments on how there can be a good God, or a just God in the presence of so much evil in the world—about which “God” appears to do nothing.  

The evidence is overwhelming that God fully allows and does not stop genocides, child abuse, brutal wars, unspeakable human and animal suffering, the imprisonment of the innocent, sexual assaults and enslavement, the death of whole species and civilizations, and the tragic lives of addicts and their codependents. Further, God seems to at least “allow” the “natural” disasters of drought, flood, hurricane, tornado, tsunami, plague, famine, and painful diseases of every kind, many of which we call “acts of God,” and all of which have made much of human life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” [1] What are we to do with this?   

For me, there is a workable and loving way through this. If God is somehow in the suffering, also participating as a suffering object, in full solidarity with the world that God created, then I can make some possible and initial sense of God and this creation. Only if we’re joining God, and God is joining us, in something greater than the sum of all its parts, can we find a way through all of this. Trust in the crucified—and resurrected—Jesus has indeed “saved” many. [2] 

Theologians Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan Shaw show how Jesus is a survivor of violent abuse who leads the way for other survivors to find transformation:  

For Jesus, the way of God is the way of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, helping the stranger in a ditch, and demanding equity and justice, whether from judges, religious leaders, or politicians. Surviving with Jesus can redirect our anger, our han, our despair. [3] We can learn to accept ourselves, and we can work to create a better world. Things won’t just be hunky-dory. Transformation is a process. The accurate language for faith is not that “we are saved” but that we are “being saved.” Susan once heard poet Maya Angelou tell the story of a young man who asked her if she were “saved.” “Are you?” Angelou responded. “Yes,” he replied. “Really?” she countered, “Already?” Transformation is a process—and for survivors, it’s a process with its ups and downs, flashbacks, and panic attacks. But, as the resurrection confirms, it is the better way; it is God’s way.  

Surviving with Jesus gives us hope that a different kind of world is possible—a world without sexual abuse, without misogyny and racism, and without violence. That’s a world worth surviving for and working toward with faith that in each of us God truly is making all things new. [4] 

God’s Sustaining Presence

In today’s meditation, CAC teacher James Finley shares his personal experience with domestic abuse. We invite readers to ground themselves as Finley describes growing up with a violent, alcoholic father. Beginning at age twelve, he stayed awake at night, terrified for his mother’s safety. 

If my father was in a good mood when I went upstairs to bed, I felt it was safe for me to go to sleep. But quite often he would already be in an angry mood when I and my younger siblings went to bed. And so I would keep my vigil, sitting at the top of the stairs, listening, trying to figure out if he was just hitting [our mother] again, grabbing hold of her, pulling her hair, or if he was starting to kill her.… 

It was in these ongoing traumatizing conditions that I learned to survive by being hypervigilant, looking for the first signs that my father was beginning to become angry at my mother, my younger brothers, or me. I learned to survive by being as passive as I could, doing my best to do whatever my father wanted me to do, so as not to trigger his rage…. Most of all, I learned to survive by being as interiorly grounded as I could be in God’s sustaining presence, which protected me from nothing, even as it inexplicably sustained me in the ongoing, atmospheric traumas that pervaded my life in those days.  

Seeking solace, Finley created an altar with the Bible, and images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, at which he prayed every night.  

As I look back at these experiences now, what most stands out to me is a truth of the awakening heart known to those who have been fortunate enough to have experienced it. This truth being the surprising realization that from the hidden depths of a darkness too terrible to name or explain, God can emerge as a sovereign, silent presence that carries us forward, amazed and grateful, into realms of clarity and fulfillment that we could scarcely have imagined.…  

I recall how I would go to my room in the evening to pray. As I knelt on the floor with my rosary wrapped around my hands, the darkness in which I was kneeling was, at the surface level, merely the darkness of the room illumined by the blue light of the vigil candle shining through its glass container…. At an infinitely deeper, more interior level, the darkness in which I knelt in prayer was the primordial darkness in which God’s hidden presence was sustaining me in ways I could not and did not need to comprehend.… 

In looking back at these moments, I can see how I was being led by God into enigmatic and paradoxical waters in which I was invited to realize that ultimately speaking there is no wall, no barrier between the polar opposite realms of trauma and transcendence that meet and merge and interpenetrate each other in endlessly varied ways throughout our lives. 

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The Table is a Time Machine

Click Here for Audio Jesus commanded his followers to break bread and share the cup “in remembrance” of him. Using commonly available items like bread and wine to remember Jesus made sense in the ancient world, but today we have far better tools available. We have video screens, streaming sermons, and mass publishing. We have Christian t-shirts, bracelets, and avatars. We have little Jesus fish on our cars eating little Darwin fish. We have so many things to remind us of Jesus; do we really need the communion table anymore?Well, that depends on what Jesus meant by “remembrance.” If remembering is merely a mental act of recollection, which is how modern people understand it, then the Lord’s Table seems unnecessary and redundant. The ancient Jewish understanding of remembrance, however, was very different than ours. Theologian Paul Bradshaw puts it this way: “In the Jewish world, remembrance was not a purely mental activity…it was not simply about nostalgia for the past…but about asking God to remember his people and complete his saving purpose today” (emphasis added).In the ancient world, remembrance was not merely the mental recollection of past events. Rather, it meant recalling a past event so that the power of that event may enter the present. For Jesus and his disciples, the redemptive work of God was not something to reminisce about. It was not just a story to be mentally recalled. The redemption of God, and his power to deliver his people, was continuing right into the present.This is why Jesus celebrated the Passover meal with his friends. The Passover was a symbol of how God saved his people from slavery in the past, but Jesus appealed to that power and applied it to their present circumstances. He used the unleavened bread from the Passover meal and gave it a contemporary meaning. “This is my body, broken for you.” And the same with the wine. “This is the new covenant in my blood.” The meal was not just about remembering what God had done in the past—Jesus was inviting that saving power into the present.So when Jesus told his Jewish followers to take the bread and the cup in “remembrance of me” he was instructing them to do something more than a mental exercise. The table was to be more than an edible history lesson. When we come to the table we are not just recalling a story from 2,000 years ago. The table is a time machine through which God’s saving power from the past is transported into the present. If we believe the table is just a mental exercise, then it’s no surprise why we’ve ignored it in our worship in favor of hypnotic videos and loud music. But, what if we’re wrong? What if the table isn’t just about remembering God’s past redemption? What if it’s about experiencinghis redemption today? What if, in remembering, we bring the salvation of the past into the present? If that’s what Christ intended the table to be, then by marginalizing it in our gatherings we have unknowingly marginalized the power of God and replaced it with a performance by mere men. DAILY SCRIPTURE EXODUS 13:3-10 LUKE 22:14-20 WEEKLY PRAYER From Thomas Ken (1637 – 1711) Glory be to you, O Jesus, my Lord and my God, for feeding my soul with your most blessed body and blood. Oh, let your heavenly food transfuse new life and new vigor into my soul, and into the souls of all that communicate with me, that our faith may daily increase; that we may all grow more humble and contrite for our sins; that we may all love you and serve you, and delight in you, and praise you more fervently, more incessantly, then ever we have done before. Amen.

Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2021) recounts the many ways Jesus talked about the reign of God: 

Jesus didn’t talk much about the church, but he talked a lot about the kingdom….

In contrast to every other kingdom that has been and ever will be, this kingdom belongs to the poor, Jesus said, and to the peacemakers, the merciful, and those who hunger and thirst for God. In this kingdom, the people from the margins and the bottom rungs will be lifted up to places of honor, seated at the best spots at the table. This kingdom knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture. It advances not through power and might, but through acts of love and joy and peace, missions of mercy and kindness and humility. This kingdom has arrived, not with a trumpet’s sound but with a baby’s cries, not with the vanquishing of enemies but with the forgiving of them, not on the back of a warhorse but on the back of a donkey, not with triumph and a conquest but with a death and a resurrection….

When we consider all the messes the church has made throughout history, all the havoc she has wreaked and the things she has destroyed, when we face up to just how different the church looks from the kingdom most of the time, it’s easy to think maybe Jesus left us with a raw deal. Maybe he pulled a bait and switch, selling us on the kingdom and then slipping us the church. 

Evans names how the church is called to manifest the kingdom of God:  

This word for church, ekklesia, was used at the time of Jesus to refer… to the people of God, assembled together. So church is, essentially, a gathering of kingdom citizens, called out—from their individuality, from their sins, from their old ways of doing things, from the world’s way of doing things—into participation in this new kingdom and community with one another….

The purpose of the church, and of the sacraments, is to give the world a glimpse of the kingdom, to point in its direction…. 

In this sense, church gives us the chance to riff on Jesus’ description of the kingdom, to add a few new metaphors of our own. We might say the kingdom is like St. Lydia’s in Brooklyn where strangers come together and remember Jesus when they eat. The kingdom is like the Refuge in Denver, where addicts and academics, single moms and suburban housewives come together to tell each other the truth. The kingdom is like Thistle Farms where women heal from abuse by helping to heal others….

And even still, the kingdom remains a mystery just beyond our grasp…. All we have are almosts and not quites and wayside shrines. All we have are imperfect people in an imperfect world doing their best to produce outward signs of inward grace and stumbling all along the way.  

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5 For Friday John Chaffee

1.
“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.”

• Carl Jung, Swiss Psychologist
   
  Holding two, opposing truths at the same time is not easy.  Paradox is not something that ordinary logic and rationality can comprehend or control.  This is especially true when we consider one another.  It is possible for me to both be kind and a jerk within the same day.  Which one is true?  Both.  The internal tension we feel around paradoxes can be so great that we dismiss reality and make broad-stroke assumptions about the world to do away with the complexity.

Lord, have mercy.  Help us to live in the tension rather than judge one another.

2.
“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”

• Dorothy Day, Founder of the Catholic Worker
   
  This quote frequently pops up in my mind.  Teresa of Avila also says that it is impossible to know if we love God, but that our love for God is best examined/qualified by how we love people around us.  It is entirely possible that Dorothy Day knew the works of Teresa of Avila but for now, let us ask who we love the least, and what we can do to rectify that.

3.
“Don’t just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything. The value of an education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.”

• George Carlin, American Comedian
   
  This may be controversial, but I never found George Carlin as particularly funny.  Every one of his standup specials, while crude, I felt as though was the work of a philosopher who was looking to deeply examine everything.

Education for the purpose of “copying and pasting” information from one source into the mind of a student is not education.  I agree with Carlin that proper education invites people to be formed into fully autonomous and independent thinkers.

4.
“Those persons prove themselves senseless who exaggerate the mercy of Christ, but are silent as to the judgment.”

• Irenaeus, Against Heresies Book IV
   
  Whenever I have conversations with people about the “restoration, reconciliation, renewal of all things in Christ”, they tend to bring up the same objections.  Often, they push back because they believe that the reconciliation of all things means no accountability for anyone.

In response, I bring up how the early Patristics taught that within God’s final plan, there is both full accountability and full amnesty.  The paradox of both of those things being true is distressing to our dualistic and either/or understanding of the world.  On the other hand, I believe that Divine Love is capable of making the paradox true.

Irenaeus, with the quote above, is trying to correct a misconception that some people believe in the absolute mercy of God but have little ability to understand, let alone continue to preach, the judgment of God.  For myself, once I allowed myself to submit to the possibility that within God there is unavoidable grace and unavoidable judgment, then the Bible began to make more sense.

After all, it is not that God’s mercy conflicts with God’s judgment, it is that it is God’s judgment to be merciful to all (Romans 11:32).

5.
“The entire cosmos is one vast burning bush, permeated by the fire of the divine glory and power.”

• Kallistos Ware, Eastern Orthodox Theologian
   
  A few years ago, I was fixated on the story of Exodus 3.  It is the famous chapter in which the shepherd Moses inadvertently runs into a burning bush.  From within the bush, God called out to him and gave him the divine task of setting the Israelites free.

What I enjoy most about Exodus 3 is that it is the reversal of everything that happened in Genesis 3.

In Genesis 3, God is out walking in the wilderness (Eden) while humanity is hidden in a bush.  God asks a question and humanity replies.  Meanwhile, in Exodus 3, humanity is out walking in the wilderness, while the Divine is hidden in a bush.  Humanity asks a question and the Divine answers.

There is even more Hebrew brilliance to these two corresponding passages, but for now, let us take the story to infer that God is hiding everywhere within nature and waiting for us to give a second and deep enough look to find him.  Perhaps this is the truth of what happens whenever we spend time near rivers, mountains, shores, plains, or beneath starry skies.  God is ever-present within our physical realm.

Richard Rohr emphasizes how community is at the heart of the reign of God:  

The world has suffered much from the various forms of Christian colonialism. Yet the reign of God is an alternative to domination systems and all “isms.” Jesus teaches that right relationship (that is, love) is the ultimate and daily criterion. If a social order allows and encourages strong connectedness between people and creation, people and each other, people and God, then we have a truly sacred culture: the reign of God. It wouldn’t be a world without pain or mystery, but simply a world where we are connected and in communion with all things.  

God’s reign is about union and communion, which means that it’s also about mercy, forgiveness, nonviolence, letting go, solidarity, service, and lives of love, patience, and simplicity. Who can doubt that this is the sum and substance of Jesus’ teaching? In the reign of God, the very motives for rivalry, greed, and violence have been destroyed. We know we’re all part of God’s beloved community. [1] 

Palestinian Anglican priest Naim Ateek emphasizes Jesus’ call to community and peacemaking: 

Jesus called into community a small group of people. They were his disciples and friends. He taught them the essence of faith—the love of God and the love of neighbor—and he became a role model to them. When they asked him to teach them to pray, he taught them to pray for the coming of God’s kingdom: “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” If you want to be children of God, he said, you need to be engaged in peacemaking; if you want to imitate God and be God’s children, you have to love your enemies and to pray for those that persecute you. If you want to resist evil, do not use evil methods. You have to practice forgiveness and reconciliation. You must be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. [2] 

Father Richard continues: 

Every description Jesus offers of God’s reign—of love, relationship, non-judgment, and forgiveness, where the last shall be first and the first shall be last—shows that any imposition on God’s side is an impossibility! Wherever we’ve tried to force Christianity on people, the long-term results have been disastrous. The gospel flourishes in the realm of true freedom.  

But it’s a freedom we must choose for ourselves. It is almost impossible to turn away from what seems like the only game in town (political, economic, or religious), unless we have glimpsed a more attractive alternative. It’s hard to imagine it, much less imitate it, unless we see someone else do it first. Jesus is that icon of the more attractive alternative, a living parable. Jesus has forever changed our human imagination, and we are now both burdened and gladdened by new possibility. There is good news to counter the deadening bad news, but we first have to be turned away from a conventional way of understanding. [3] 

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Sarah Young Jesus Calling

Expect to encounter adversity in your life, remembering that you live in a deeply fallen world. Stop trying to find a way that circumvents difficulties. The main problem with an easy life is that it masks your need for Me. When you became a Christian, I infused My very Life into you, empowering you to live on a supernatural plane by depending on Me.
     Anticipate coming face to face with impossibilities: situations totally beyond your ability to handle. This awareness of your inadequacy is not something you should try to evade. It is precisely where I want you – the best place to encounter Me in My Glory and Power. When you see armies of problems marching toward you, cry out to Me! Allow Me to fight for you. Watch Me working on your behalf, as you rest in the shadow of My Almighty Presence.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Revelation 19:1 (NLT)
Songs of Victory in Heaven
1 After this, I heard what sounded like a vast crowd in heaven shouting,
“Praise the Lord!
    Salvation and glory and power belong to our God.”

Additional insight regarding Revelation 19:1: Praise is the heartfelt response to God by those who love him. The more you get to know God and realize what he has done, the more you will respond with praise. Praise is at the heart of true worship. Let your praise of God flow out of your realization of who he is and how much he loves you.

Psalm 91:1 (NLT)
1 Those who live in the shelter of the Most High
    will find rest in the shadow of the Almighty.

Additional insight regarding Psalm 91:1: God is a shelter, a refuge when we are afraid. The writer’s faith in God as protector would carry him through all the dangers and fears of life. This should be a picture of our trust – trading all our fears for faith in him, no matter how intense our fears. To do this we must “live” and “rest” with him. By entrusting ourselves to his protection and pledging our daily devotion to him, we will be kept safe.

Theologian Dorothee Sölle (1929–2003) understood God’s kingdom as good news for women and all oppressed people.  

The Jesus movement was a group of female and male friends who followed the little man from Nazareth. Many had no fixed dwelling and had abandoned their traditional family bonds…. We can best imagine these conditions if we think of the vast [barrios] of Latin America, for example, where the poorest of the poor are women. When the New Testament speaks on almost every page about the sick, we must think here of sick women, blind, paralyzed, and seared by misery. Many were psychically sick, or possessed by demons, as the New Testament says. The Jesus movement offered hope for these sufferers. They were healed and began to heal others. They heard the good news of liberation and passed it on. They were filled, and they shared the little they had.  

The Jesus movement lived in conflict with its society. Jesus expected the reversal of all social oppositions through God’s intervention, and this expectation—“the kingdom of God is at hand”—characterized the movement. All those who were outsiders according to the norms of society and held to be “impure” according to the law—the poor, the landless, public sinners, tax collectors, and women—were accepted here. “The last will be first” [Matthew 20:16] is a keynote permeating the whole message of Jesus. [1] 

James Cone (1938–2018) relates Jesus’ vision of God’s liberating kingdom to the experience of Black enslavement: 

In their encounter with Jesus Christ, black slaves received a “vision from on high” wherein they were given a new knowledge of their personhood, which enabled them to fight for the creation of a world defined by black affirmations. Their hope sprang from the actual presence of Jesus, breaking into their broken existence, and bestowing upon them a foretaste of God’s promised freedom. They could fight against slavery and not give up in despair, because they believed that their earthly struggle was a preparation for the time when they would “cross over Jordan” and “walk in Jerusalem just like John.” They were willing to “bear heavy burdens,” “climb high mountains,” and “stand hard trials,” because they were “trying to get home.” Home was the “not yet,” the other world that was not like this one. Jesus was the divine coming One who would take them to the “bright mansions above.”…  

For many black slaves, Jesus became the decisive Other in their lives who provided for them a knowledge of themselves, not derived from the value system of slave masters. How could black slaves know that they were human beings when they were treated like cattle?… [Or] that they had a value that could not be defined by dollars and cents, when the symbol of the auction block was an ever present reality? Only because they knew that Christ was present with them and that his presence included the divine promise to come again and to take them to the “New Jerusalem.” [2]  

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Jesus Calling Sarah Young

Trust Me in the depths of your being. It is there that I live in constant communication with you. When you feel flustered and frazzled on the outside, do not get upset with yourself. You are only human, and the swirl of events going on all around you will sometimes feel overwhelming. Rather than scolding yourself for your humanness, remind yourself that I am both with you and within you.
     I am with you at all times, encouraging and supportive rather than condemning. I know that deep within you, where I live, My Peace is your continual experience. Slow down your pace of living for a time. Quiet your mind in My Presence. Then you will be able to hear Me bestowing the resurrection blessing: Peace be with you.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Colossians 1:27 (NLT)
27 For God wanted them to know that the riches and glory of Christ are for you Gentiles, too. And this is the secret: Christ lives in you. This gives you assurance of sharing his glory.

Additional insight regarding Colossians 1:26-27: Through Christ, God’s “message” was made open to all. God’s secret plan is “Christ lives in you” – God planned to have his Son, Jesus Christ, live in the hearts of all who believe in him – even Gentiles like the Colossians. Do you know Christ? He is not hidden if you will come to him.

Matthew 28:20 (NLT)
20 Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Additional insight regarding Matthew 28:20: How is Jesus “with” us? Jesus was with the disciples physically until he ascended into Heaven and then spiritually through the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4). The Holy Spirit would be Jesus’ presence that would never leave them (John 14:26 – “But when the Father sends the Advocate as my representative—that is, the Holy Spirit—he will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I have told you.”). Jesus continues to be with us today through his Spirit.

John 20:19 (NLT)
Jesus Appears to His Disciples
19 That Sunday evening the disciples were meeting behind locked doors because they were afraid of the Jewish leaders. Suddenly, Jesus was standing there among them! “Peace be with you,” he said.

A Gracious Weed

Richard Rohr describes the reign of God as an alternative way of relating:  

When Jesus talked about the reign of God, he was talking about an utterly different way of relating with one another than human society as we know it. The new world order—the reign of God—is the heart of the Christian Scriptures.  

The kingdom is Jesus’ message. He never describes it conceptually; he walks around it and keeps giving images of the Real. This is the classic pattern of the spiritual teacher. Only those ready and seeking will normally understand. 

For example, “The reign of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the biggest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air can come and shelter in its branches” (Matthew 13:31–32). The mustard seed is very small and insignificant. Pliny the Elder, a contemporary of Jesus, writes only two things about the mustard plant: It’s medicinal, so it did have some value. But he said not to plant it because it tends to take over the entire garden. It is a weed that cannot be stopped.  

Those would have been the two images on which Jesus was clearly building. He teaches: What I’m describing for you is therapeutic—it’s life, it’s healing, it’s medicinal—but it’s like a weed. I’m planting a weed in the world. What a shocking image! Jesus talks about strange things like nonviolence and living a simple life by saying they’re planted and they’re going to take over the whole garden; the old world is over. 

That’s Jesus’ hope, but we have to witness what patient hope that is. He didn’t see it happen in his lifetime, when religion was highly corrupt and most people were poor, oppressed, or enslaved. Yet still, in the midst of that, he dared to announce the present reign of God! He dared to promise, “You can live the new reality right now.”  

The word for that way of living in the in-between times is faith. Let’s get rid of every thought of faith as belief, as prosperity, or as a set of rules or moral guidelines. Those are fine, but they’re not what Jesus is talking about. He’s talking about the grace and the freedom to live God’s dream for the world now—while not rejecting the world as it is. That’s a mighty tension, one that is not easily resolved.  

Remember this: There are always two worlds. The world as it operates is power; the world as it should be is love. The secret of kingdom life is how we can live in both—simultaneously. The world as it is will always be built on power, ego, and success. Yet we also must keep our eyes intently on the world as it should be—what Jesus calls the reign of God. 

A Symbol is Never Just a Symbol

Click Here for Audio I do not understand Christians who dismiss the Lord’s table as “just a symbol.” A symbol by definition points to or represents something more than what it is. For example, if an American flag were not a symbol it would merely be a red, white, and blue cloth, but because it is a symbol it carries powerful and emotional meaning for millions of people. Being a symbol makes something more important not less. The same is true for Christ’s table.During the Passover meal with his disciples, Jesus said the cup of wine represented “the new covenant in my blood.” He was elevating the meal as a new covenant symbol—a concept that would have been familiar to his Jewish followers. Throughout the Old Testament, God’s relationship with his people developed through a series of covenants—agreements and promises—and each one was marked with a symbol related to the nature of the covenant itself. After the flood, for example, the Lord promised never to destroy the world again with water, and he used a rainbow as a sign of this covenant. Later, he promised Abraham, who was old and had no children, that he would have descendants beyond count. This covenant was symbolized by circumcision—a mark on the part of the body necessary for reproduction. And when God rescued his people from slavery and gave them his law, he instructed them to rest one day every week. The Sabbath, according to Deuteronomy 5:15, was a symbol so the people would remember how the Lord rescued them from the brutality of slavery. Egyptian slaves, after all, never got a day off from work.In each case, the covenant symbol was directly related to the nature of the covenant itself, and each symbol pointed to something powerful about God’s relationship with his people. Rainbows/flood, circumcision/children, rest/slavery. Therefore, the fact that Jesus identified a communal meal as the sign of God’s new covenant with his people shouldn’t be ignored or dismissed as “just a symbol.” A shared meal is a powerful reminder that what Jesus accomplished on the cross wasn’t a sacrifice merely to redeem me, but the way God has reconciled a people to himself. As we look at our sisters and brothers around the Lord’s Table, we are reminded that the new covenant is how Christ has brought reconciliation between hostile people, not just between individuals and God. In fact, a case could be made that a table, rather than a cross, should be the universal symbol of our faith. DAILY SCRIPTURE GENESIS 17:1-11 DEUTERONOMY 5:12-15 EPHESIANS 2:11-16 WEEKLY PRAYER From Ambrose (c.339 – 397) Praise to you, saving sacrifice, offered on the wood of the cross for me and for all people. Praise to the noble and precious blood, flowing from the wounds of my crucified Lord Jesus Christ and washing away the sins of the whole world. Remember, Lord, your creature, whom you have redeemed with your blood. I repent of my sins, and I long to put right what I have done. Merciful Father, take away all my offenses and sins; purify me in body and soul, and make me worthy to taste the holy of holies. Amen.

In this homily, Father Richard reflects on Jesus’ teaching on the reign of God presented in Matthew’s Gospel: 

I think what Jesus calls the kingdom of heaven or the reign of God is when we live inside of the Big Picture and not inside of the small pictures that we create and seem to prefer. Most of us live inside of our own small, self-created kingdoms: the kingdom of being American or the kingdom of being Catholic or the kingdom of being white. That’s all going to pass away. Those are not the kingdom of God. 

The reign of God will not pass away. It’s the eternal state of things, how things finally and fully and freely are. To live in the reign of God is to live with that kind of big perspective, where we move beyond the tiny human-made boundaries that we all create. Most of us are afraid to venture out of our little comfort zone of “people just like me.” 

In the second century, the Christian people started calling themselves the “catholic” people. Too few of us were taught that catholic simply means universal in Greek. From the beginning, Christians recognized that their message was not for any one ethnic group or nation, but in fact was about how things eternally are everywhere, all the time. If we can live at that level, then we’re in the kingdom of God. When we’ve had a glimpse of this kingdom, we keep pushing out the boundaries, so we can see God everywhere. 

Matthew 4:15 says that Jesus moved away from Nazareth into “Galilee of the Gentiles.” Jesus deliberately moves on to the frontier, the edge, where not everybody is Jewish, where many cultures and ethnicities come together. It’s there, in the land of the Gentiles, that Jesus proclaims the reign of God. 

We know we’re living in God’s Big Picture when we can see God in all cultures, in all social classes, and even in all religions. We have to stop thinking that any one religion has God in its pocket, or controls God, or that God only likes certain people who happen to be Christians. Would God be that stingy? Would God be that small and petty to only love people like me? I hope not. Because it’s precisely this great heart of God that is able to love all of God’s children. Jesus comes to the land of the Gentiles to proclaim a God for the universal kingdom. 

Every time we pray “thy kingdom come” we’re praying that God can grant, and we can participate in, a universal, truly “catholic” world where all of us can love one another without distinction, and without discrimination. I’m afraid we have to admit that we haven’t gotten very far yet. We still have not caught up with Jesus. We prefer to live in our smaller kingdoms instead of the universal kingdom of God.  

A Reign of Peace and Harmony

CAC affiliate faculty Randy Woodley connects the Hebrew concept of shalomwith Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God:  

Jesus, in his ancient context of imperial occupation, was also concerned with creation’s harmony, and used the phrase kingdom of God to communicate this idea. The metaphor was rightly understood by Jesus’ audience in contradistinction to the kingdom of Caesar. God’s kingdom stood over against the death-dealing ways of the Roman Empire; God’s kingdom was a Spirit-filled community living out the Creator’s shalom purposes on earth.…  

Jesus used kingdom language in his context because it made sense to the people and powers to whom he spoke. His kingdom goal was stated simply: “On earth as it is in heaven.” In other words, heaven’s economy is to be made manifest in creation. And what is heaven’s economy? It is shalom, a Hebrew term often translated as “peace.” But peace doesn’t capture the depth of this word. Shalom is who the Creator is—the one God, a trinity of persons (from a Christian perspective) dwelling in harmony, mutuality, and deference toward one another and the creation. Shalom embodies wholeness, completeness, and love. It is strikingly similar to many Indigenous constructs of “harmony,” which emphasize the interconnectedness and interdependency of all things, the need for balance, and the primacy of community. And if that is what Jesus’ kingdom was about—radical shalom and harmony—it is helpful to translate this metaphor into something like community of creation, a phrase infused with Indigenous meaning, which more readily emphasizes that all living things are participating in this new peace that the Creator is bringing about through Christ. [1]  

Brian McLaren considers the metaphor of a “network” to describe the kingdom of God:  

For many people today, kingdom language evokes patriarchy, chauvinism, imperialism, domination, and a regime without freedom. Not a pretty picture—and the very opposite of the liberating, barrier-breaking, domination-shattering, reconciling movement the kingdom of God was intended to be!… 

God is inviting people into a life-giving network. First, God wants people to be connected, plugged in, in communication with God, so God can transfer to them what they need—not just information but also virus-debugging software, along with love, hope, empowerment, purpose, and wisdom. Also, each person who is connected to God must become integrally connected to all others in the network. In this way, the network of God breaks down the walls of smaller, exclusive networks (like networks of racism, nationalism, and the like), and invites them into the only truly world wide web of love. The network exchanges information and increases understanding for all participants. The network becomes a resource for people outside the network as well, and of course, people are always invited to enter the connectivity themselves.  

The metaphor of an ecosystem could work in a similar way: we are currently living in an imbalanced, self-destructive ecosystem, but God is inviting us to live in a new network of relationships that will produce balance, harmony, and health. [2]  

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The Table Unites & Divides

Click Here for Audio The church has existed for over 2000 years, and throughout the millennia Christians have gathered on Sundays to worship God. Across all those generations, however, very few things have remained consistent—a lot has changed. For example, the church has not always had a dedicated building in which to gather. The earliest Christians met in homes. We have not always had projectors and instruments to accompany our singing. We haven’t always had a complete record of the Scriptures. In the first centuries after Christ, his followers received occasional letters from the Apostles for instruction; there was no New Testament. In fact, there is only one aspect of Christian worship and community that we can trace to the very beginning. Across every generation, every ethnicity, every economic and denominational barrier the simple elements of the bread and the cup have endured as marks of Christ’s people. The table has united the Church throughout the ages. For that reason, we’ll begin our exploration of the Church by looking at the table, its meaning, its place in our worship, and in our life with God. Of course, a shared meal is not uniquely Christian. It’s a powerful tool in every human culture because every society uses meals to both unite and divide. Sharing a table is how we form bonds and establish a common identity. It’s why cultures use meals to celebrate marriages. Two families share a table to acknowledge their new bond as kin. Likewise, every culture uses the table to divide and exclude. Segregation in the American South prohibited blacks from sharing a table with whites to solidify their status as unequal and outsiders. The unifying and dividing power of eating is also a dominant theme in the Bible. In the beginning, the Lord invited the man and woman to eat from any tree in the garden, but eating from one particular tree would separate them from God and life itself. And the Old Testament dietary laws, which seem odd and arbitrary to modern readers, had a very practical function. They prevented God’s people from sharing a menu, and therefore a table, with the nations surrounding them. If people are unable to eat together, they are less likely to form bonds, blend cultures, or intermarry. Israel’s diet kept them separate thereby preserving their special calling and covenant with God. Sharing a meal is a bodily, social, creative, and spiritual act perhaps second only to sexual intimacy in its power to form bonds. A church that ignores this power, or uses it in a manner contrary to the gospel, ought to be concerned. But for Christians who recognize the power of the table, the gospel can shape their lives and community in unimaginable and beautiful ways. DAILY SCRIPTURE GENESIS 2:15-17 LEVITICUS 11:1-8 ACTS 2:42-47 WEEKLY PRAYER From Ambrose (c.339 – 397) Praise to you, saving sacrifice, offered on the wood of the cross for me and for all people. Praise to the noble and precious blood, flowing from the wounds of my crucified Lord Jesus Christ and washing away the sins of the whole world. Remember, Lord, your creature, whom you have redeemed with your blood. I repent of my sins, and I long to put right what I have done. Merciful Father, take away all my offenses and sins; purify me in body and soul, and make me worthy to taste the holy of holies. Amen.

What was given to you freely, you must give away freely. —Matthew 10:8 

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.   
—Step 12 of the Twelve Steps 

Richard emphasizes how inner transformation needs to extend outward to the world: 

After teaching the gospel for over fifty years, trying to build communities, and attempting to raise up elders and leaders, I’m convinced that one of my major failures was that I didn’t ask more of people from the very beginning. If they didn’t turn outward early, they tended to never do so. Their dominant concerns became personal self-development, spiritual consumerism, church as “more attendance” at things, or, to use a common phrase among Christians, “deepening my relationship with Jesus.” Bill W. semed to recognize this danger early on. Until people’s basic egocentricity is radically exposed and foundationally redirected, much religion becomes occupied with rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, moving alongside other isolated passengers while the whole ship sinks.  

Step 12 found a way to expose and transform that perpetual adolescence by telling us early on that we must serve others. Supporting others in their healing is not an option, not something we might eventually be “called” to after thirty-five religious retreats and fifty years of church services. It isn’t something we do when we finally get our act together. No; we don’t truly comprehend any spiritual thing until we give it away. Spiritual gifts increase only by “using” them.  

The author of the Letter of James always insists on orthopraxy instead of mere verbal orthodoxy: “To listen to the word and not obey it is like looking at your own features in a mirror, and then, after a quick look, going off and immediately forgetting what you look like” (1:23–24). For James, to “actively put it into practice is to be happy in all that one does” (1:25) and “if good works do not accompany faith, it is quite dead” (2:17). James is a unique apostle of the Twelve Step behavioral approach. [1]  

James Finley warns against the temptation to prioritize our own healing at the expense of others: 

There’s a certain temptation [as you go down the spiritual path] to say, “I’m out of here. I know it’s a troubled world, but I’m a mystic in the making. Don’t disturb me. See, I’m out of here.” There’s a temptation to think you’re finding your way into a realm of divinity or inner peace [or healing], removed from the brokenness and sadness of this world, which is really then to betray the path. Thomas Merton once said to me in the cloistered monastery, “We did not come here to breathe the rarified air beyond the suffering of this world. We came here to carry the suffering of the whole world in our heart. Otherwise, there’s no validity in living in a place like this.” What goes around comes around and it circles back around in the practice with ourselves first. [2] 

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5 For Friday John Chaffee

1.
“We mature with the damage, not with the years.”

• Mateus William
   
  Earlier this week I had a lunch meetup with an older friend who is a pastor.  He remarked to me how easy it is for people to stop growing at 28 as if most people hit adulthood and proceed to never grow beyond that.  Sometimes we grow because we want to, and sometimes we grow because we have to.  In either case, the experience of growing is often the result of struggle, discomfort, or as this quote says, “damage.”

This means our addiction to ease, comfort, and avoiding struggle is our greatest obstacle to growing.

2.
“The failure to invest in civil justice is directly related to the increase in criminal disorder.”

• Friedrich W. J. Schelling, German Philosopher
   
  Investing in prison systems and warfare is not the same thing as investing in civil justice.  Civil justice, when sought out, recreates structures, environments, and circumstances in which criminal disorder is likely to happen.

This reminds me of what Shane Claiborne often points out: retributive justice is not the same as restorative justice.

Retributive justice seeks to repay wrongdoing with equal pain/discomfort inflicted upon the perpetrator on behalf of the victim.

Restorative justice seeks to correct how the perpetrator has become twisted/malformed and repair or make amends for the victim and what they have lost.  

Restorative justice is far more in line with the God of both the Old and New Testament than retributive justice is thought to be.  The problem is that since we wrongly understand the Gospel as a matter of retributive justice from God, it wrongfully “excuses and validates” us (but not really) building a whole society around it.

3.
“Narcissism describes when a person cannot tolerate or absorb any form of shame – even ‘healthy shame’ that would enable them to self-reflect and take ownership or accountability.”

• Kathryn Wilkins, Counselor and Therapist
   
  Over the years, I have been growing in my understanding of how shame deeply impacts people and social settings.

Shame is such an uncomfortable emotion for many of us that we dive into the reflexive use of defense mechanisms of denial, rationalization, secrecy, minimizing, comparing, justifying, excusing, scapegoating, and so much more.  When people fall into those habits, it is usually because they are seeking to avoid the experience of shame.

Narcissism is the personality disorder of someone who is pathologically oriented against feeling any amount of shame or embarrassment.  And guess what?  Among the top 5 professions that are reported to display narcissism are doctors, lawyers, surgeons, business leaders, and clergy.

Lord have mercy.

4.
“The spiritual journey is a struggle to be ever more available to God and to let go of the obstacles to the transforming process.”

• Thomas Keating, Trappist Monk
   
  Freedom is the name of the game.  Freedom from every obstacle, addiction, avoidance, aversion, habit, concern, or fear that might block our being changed more and more into a person who is capable of sacrificial love.

5.
“Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writers, mystics, painters, troubadours for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.”

• Jacob Nordby, Writer
   
  Every time I see the word “troubadour” the person of St. Francis of Assisi comes to mind!

May we all be misfit saints!