The roots of ultimate insights are found … on the level of wonder and radical amazement, in the depth of awe, in our sensitivity to the mystery. 
—Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man 

Richard Rohr teaches that awe is a foundational spiritual experience that keeps us open to the mystery of God: 

I believe the basic, primal, foundational spiritual intuition is a moment of awe and wonder. We say, “God, that’s beautiful!” Why do we so often say “God!” when we have such moments? I think it’s a recognition that this is a godly moment. We are somehow aware that something is just too good, too right, too much, too timely. When awe and wonder are absent from our life, we build our religion on laws and rituals, trying to manufacture some moment of awe. It works occasionally, I guess. 

I think people who live their lives open to awe and wonder have a much greater chance of meeting the Holy than someone who goes to church but doesn’t live in an open way. We almost domesticate the Holy by making it so commonplace. That’s what I fear happens with the way we ritualize worship. I see people come to church day after day unprepared for anything new or different. Even if something new or different happens, they fit it into their old boxes. Their stance seems to be, “I will not be awestruck.” I don’t think we get very far with such resistance to the new, the Real, and the amazing. That’s probably why God allows most of our great relationships to begin with a kind of infatuation with another person—and I don’t just mean sexual infatuation, but any deep admiration or appreciation. It allows us to take our place as a student and learner. If we never do that, nothing new will happen.

I think Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understood this when he wrote, “The Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.” [2] It’s a telling judgment. The Western mind almost refuses to be in awe anymore. It’s only aware of what is wrong, and seemingly incapable of rejoicing in what is still good and true and beautiful. The surest way out of that trap is through a new imagination and new cosmology, often created by positive God-experience. Education, problem-solving, and rigid ideology are ultimately inadequate by themselves to create cosmic hope and meaning. Only great religion can do that, which is probably why Jesus spent so much of his ministry trying to reform religion. 

Healthy religion, which always makes space for Mystery, gives us a foundational sense of awe. It re-enchants an otherwise empty universe. It gives people a universal reverence toward all things. Only with such reverence do we find confidence and coherence. Only then does the world become a safe home. Then we can see the reflection of the divine image in the human, in the animal, in the entire natural world—which has now become inherently “supernatural.”

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Joyful Worship

Grant me the curiosity and awe so that I may honor the bottomless, limitless wonder, beauty, and mystery of this world.
—Brian McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?

Poet and essayist Kathleen Norris considers how our language can dampen our expectation of experiencing awe in God’s presence:

Modern believers tend to trust in therapy more than in mystery, a fact that tends to manifest itself in worship that employs the bland speech of pop psychology and self-help rather than language resonant with poetic meaning—for example, a call to worship that begins: “Use this hour, Lord, to get our perspectives straight again.” Rather than express awe, let alone those negative feelings, fear and trembling, as we come into the presence of God, crying “Holy, Holy, Holy,” we focus totally on ourselves, and arrogantly issue an imperative to God. Use this hour, because we’re busy later, just send us a bill … and we’ll zip off a check in the mail. But the mystery of worship, which is God’s presence and our response to it, does not work that way.

The profound skepticism of our age, the mistrust of all that has been handed to us by our grandfathers and grandmothers as tradition, has led to a curious failure of the imagination, manifested in language that is thoroughly comfortable, and satisfyingly unchallenging.

Brian McLaren reflects on the spontaneous joy and awe of true worship:

Why are the most blessed often the most restrained in their worship, and why are those who have the least in terms of health, wealth, and safety the most ready to “make a joyful noise” and “sing for joy to the Lord”? Is it because they relate to God primarily from their heart rather than their head?… Could it be that our accumulation of possessions and protections coat our souls like rubber gloves, so that we touch, but do not feel?… Could it be that the conceptualized and formalized worship of the “developed world” is actually designed to inhibit and control rather than foment joy?…

The scandalous truth, known by mystics throughout history and affirmed in the pages of our sacred texts, is that when we connect with God, it is as if we are plugging our souls into a pure current of high-voltage joy. The joy that surprised me under the stars [in my mystical experience] in my teens was exactly what the ancient psalmist knew (Psalm 16:11), that God is a joyful being and to enter or awaken to God’s presence is to enjoy a bracing jolt of invigorating delight…. Yes, there is indeed a place for quiet reverence, the dignity of robes, and the noble tranquility of marble columns and pipe organs. But … God is joyful, and God’s joy is contagious. When we tap into the joy of the Lord, when we step into the pure joy that burns like a billion galaxies in the heart of God, we’ll soon find ourselves shouting, dancing, singing, leaping, clapping, swaying, laughing, and otherwise jubilating and celebrating.

Advent Heals the Hurt

Friday, December 12, 2025

Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe  

Author Stephanie Duncan Smith writes about her experience of suffering a miscarriage during the Advent season. She recounts how averse she felt to the holiday celebrations in her time of grief:

For the first time in my life, I did not go to the Christmas Eve service. I couldn’t stomach that kind of joy…. I couldn’t participate straight-faced in this remembrance of the ultimate pregnancy narrative, this birth story to end all birth stories, in which God made it from embryo to first howling breath—but my daughter did not.

Cole Arthur Riley writes, “There is no greater exhaustion than a charade of spirituality.” [1] I simply had no energy to keep up the charade.

Duncan Smith describes how Advent honors the darkness present in our lives and world:

When you’re hurting, the only thing worse than the hurt itself is the intimate injury of being told your hurt isn’t that bad, that your pain is somehow unjustified. There is no greater trauma than this invalidation when what you most need is empathetic witness. That’s what Advent felt like to me.

But it wasn’t Advent itself I was bucking against. It was the saccharine, the spin, the half story with the full gloss that rendered this complex coming of God into one-dimensional joy that excludes all other experiences.

The Incarnation always brings good news, but it never minimizes the realness of our pain. Advent declares the hope that a light is coming, but first it declares the truth that the world right now is so very dark. In all the festivities of this season, the threads of Advent and Christmas are commonly confused. The celebration of Christmas only means so much if it bypasses the great waiting, the great groaning, of Advent itself. But this is where the story—and the sacred year itself—begins.

The first language of this expectant season is not bell carols but groaning—the audial ache of a hurting world.

The God of Advent is not a God of indifference, but the God who imagined mirror neurons into existence—the cell network responsible for so much of what makes us human, which is the basic ability to read and respond to the emotional needs of others. Every human encounter of empathy begins with mirror neurons firing in witness to pain.

It is fitting, then, that the sacred year begins with Advent. Human pain is the call—every nerve ending crying out. The Incarnation is the response—every mirror neuron of God firing, volcanic in awakening. God hears the crash and cries of our great fall and, like a mother, comes running. Emmanuel rushes through time and space to be not just near our hurt, but human with us in it.

What I had missed was the very essence of Advent: This is an entire season dedicated to hearing the hurt and naming the night. We are not just allowed to do so, we are openly called to do so.

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John Chaffee 5 on Friday

1.

“Glory to God in the Highest, peace on earth, and goodwill toward mankind.”

– Luke 2:14

Sometimes, I think that we forget how radical the Bible actually is.

God is not some cosmic pharaoh, some divine Genghis Khan, or some holy tyrant.  The beginning of the Nativity story in Luke tells of a completely different story, one that completely discredits every previous conception of God.

Yahweh is wholly invested in “peace on earth” and has nothing but “goodwill toward mankind.”

2.

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

– Earnest Hemingway, American Author

On the heels of the quote above, and in keeping with the insistence that the God revealed in the infant Jesus is peaceful, I would like to offer this one from Hemingway.

Over the past 5 weeks, I have been working with a Mennonite congregation, and have been presented with the topic of nonviolence and being a “conscientious objector” to war.  It has honestly been refreshing and quite stirring to have so many conversations about this topic.

Church history contains many attempts by people far more intelligent than I am to offer nuanced takes on whether there is such a thing as a “just war.”  In fact, in seminary I had to write a paper on the topic (and I wish I could find it again)!

War often takes vices that would be damnable for a person to commit and then scales them across whole nations, making those vices “acceptable.”

For instance…

Stealing bread is seen as wrong, but starving your enemy’s army to death is not.

Stabbing an innocent person you never met before in the street is absolutely evil, but dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is “necessary.”

Do you see what I mean?

And believe me, I completely understand that this is a complex topic.  I have no easy solution or response to the possibility of a just war.  All I am saying is that in the past month, I have met some fascinating people who were conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War and instead worked in hospitals…

And that is an excellent witness to their faith to do such a thing.

3.

“You will see the success of my theories when you recognize yourself as the persecutor.”

– Rene Girard, Social Philosopher and Theologian

Learning about Rene Girard’s conceptualization of the Scapegoat Mechanism was an utter paradigm shift for me.

Girard helped to show me that the Christian story revolves around the Crucifixion, and how it exposes the destructive ways that we allow “sacrificing/scapegoating” other people on the altar of our own desires.

For me, Girard’s work forced me to confront my own worldview and confess that I may have had the Christian story in front of me for literal decades, but still did not understand this one Gospel truth: Christ became the sacrificed scapegoat to reveal humanity’s shameful addiction to victimizing others.

Essentially, by becoming the victim, God revealed that we are far too comfortable being the victimizers of one another.

I fear I am not making any sense.  Or, I am not articulating myself well.

Just go read Rene Girard’s work.  It will change your life.

4.

“The false self is deeply entrenched. You can change your name and address, religion, country, and clothes. But as long as you don’t ask it to change, the false self simply adjusts to the new environment. For example, instead of drinking your friends under the table as a significant sign of self worth and esteem, if you enter a monastery, as I did fasting the other monks under the table could become your new path to glory. In that case, what would have changed? Nothing.”

– Father Thomas Keating, Trappist Monk

Last week, we had another Zoom meetup of the Philly chapter of the International Thomas Merton Society.  We chatted through ch. 5 of New Seeds of Contemplation, which delves into the topic of sainthood and Merton’s teaching on the true self/false self.

In some ways, Keating’s understanding of the true self/false self teaching overlaps with Merton’s, but at a certain point, they diverge and take on different nuances.

During our Zoom call, we agreed on one point: The best spiritual teachers do not teach you a truth or fact, but rather place before you a question that will haunt you the rest of your life.

For Thomas Keating and Thomas Merton, the question they present us is, “Are you living from your false self today?  How can you be more honest and truthful today?”

5.

“Who among us will celebrate Christmas correctly? Whoever finally lays down all power, all honor, all reputation, all vanity, all arrogance, all individualism beside the manger; whoever remains lowly and lets God alone be high; whoever looks at the child in the manger and sees the glory of God precisely in his lowliness.”

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran Pastor

The Christmas story tells us something quite profound…

If God were to become a king, he would not come to be born in a palace to royalty, but to two poor and homeless young adults.

Not only that, but this God has no interest in grasping after power, honor, reputation, vanity, arrogance, and individualism.

It is a strange, sad thing, then, that some followers of Jesus do chase after those things.  It instead tells us that the values of the Christian God have not exactly trickled down to his followers.

Fortunately, every Christmas is a fresh opportunity to say that Jesus reveals to us a God that we could not imagine… and therefore it must be true.

Becoming Light for Others

Thursday, December 11, 2025

The dark night of the soul is a deeply personal experience that also has far-reaching implications for how we interact with others. James Finley considers how a dark night can transform our humanity:

[The dark night] has a quality of heightened empathy, heightened compassion, heightened presence…. John of the Cross was really known for a sensitivity to the poor and the sick. He was also known for his compassion. One of the friars writes in their journal, “When we go off in our little Sunday groups and small groups for our walk, we always hope John of the Cross will join us because he always makes us laugh…”. It’s beyond the darkness of this world in a way that paradoxically radicalizes our presence in it to the holiness of life on life’s terms….

Sometimes I say to myself a little prayer in my advancing years, “God, help me to be the kind of old person young people want old people to be. Help me not just to talk like this but help me to walk around like this and answer the phone like this and talk to my grandchildren like this.” We’re all trying to do our best here to walk the walk. [1]

Spiritual director Therese DesCamp has witnessed within herself an ongoing desire to serve others, even in the midst of a dark night:

I think it’s safe to say that dark nights do involve a loss of meaning, loss of joy, and loss of certainty. Doubt and self-doubt are regular visitors, as is deep sorrow.

But if I’m experiencing a dark night, I will still be able to see the humorous side of life. I will be capable of laughter. I may feel deeply the sadness, confusion, and horror of these times—and I may not expect things to get much better. But I can laugh, and most often at myself. I take myself lightly.

Even more clearly, I will be capable of compassion. The dark night does not reduce our capacity to care for others. Rather, it increases that capacity. In fact, some days, caring for others may be the only thing that relieves the suffering of having lost my bearings.

Dark nights don’t involve a diminution of self, but rather a shift in focus away from the ego and onto others. I may no longer have the consolation of feeling like I’m a good person or experiencing the closeness to the “God” that I used to know so intimately. But daily life will be filled with the awareness of the preciousness of all life…. The dark night heightens our connections to all living beings. In a dark night, I feel deeply the sorrow—as well as the joy—of the other. It may be dark in here, but it’s full of love. [2]

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Sarah Young: Jesus Calling

Jesus Calling: December 11th

I am working on your behalf. Bring Me all your concerns, including your dreams. Talk with Me about everything, letting the Light of My Presence shine on your hopes and plans. Spend time allowing My Light to infuse your dreams with life, gradually transforming them into reality. This is a very practical way of collaborating with Me. I, the Creator of the universe, have designed to co-create with you. Do not try to hurry this process. If you want to work with Me, you have to accept My time frame. Hurry is not in My nature. Abraham and Sarah had to wait many years for the fulfillment of My promise, a son. How their long wait intensified their enjoyment of this child! Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, perceiving as real fact what is not revealed to the senses.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Psalm 36:9 (NLT)
9 For you are the fountain of life,
    the light by which we see.

Additional insight regarding Psalm 36:9: “Fountain of Life” is a vivid image of fresh, cleansing water that gives life to the spiritually thirsty. This same picture is used in Jeremiah 2:13, where God is called the “fountain of living water.” Jesus spoke of himself as living water that could quench thirst forever and give eternal life (John 4:14: “But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.”).

Genesis 21:1-7 (NLT)
The Birth of Isaac
21 The Lord kept his word and did for Sarah exactly what he had promised. 2 She became pregnant, and she gave birth to a son for Abraham in his old age. This happened at just the time God had said it would. 3 And Abraham named their son Isaac. 4 Eight days after Isaac was born, Abraham circumcised him as God had commanded. 5 Abraham was 100 years old when Isaac was born.
6 And Sarah declared, “God has brought me laughter. All who hear about this will laugh with me. 7 Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse a baby? Yet I have given Abraham a son in his old age!”

Hebrews 11:1 (NLT)

Great Examples of Faith

11 Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.

Additional insight regarding Hebrews 11:1: Do you remember how you felt when you were very young and your birthday approached? You were excited and anxious. You knew you would certainly receive gifts and other special treats. But some things would be a surprise. Birthdays combine assurance and anticipation, and so does faith! Faith is the confidence based on past experience that God’s new and fresh surprises will surely be ours. 

Surviving Doubt

John of the Cross describes the doubt that disrupts a soul in the dark night, when all sense of knowing God is absent. Mirabai Starr translates from John’s classic work Dark Night of the Soul:

The deep suffering of the soul … comes not so much from the aridity she must endure but from this growing suspicion that she has lost her way. She thinks that all spiritual blessing is over and that God has abandoned her. She finds neither support nor delight in holy things. Growing weary, she struggles in vain to practice the [prayer methods] that used to yield results.

John of the Cross encourages those experiencing this dark night to trust the silence that comes when we surrender our need to speak to God using words:

This is no time for discursive meditation. Instead, the soul must surrender into peace and quietude, even if she is convinced she is doing nothing and wasting time. She might assume that this lack of desire to think about anything is a sure sign of her laziness. But simple patience and perseverance in a state of formless prayerfulness, while doing nothing, accomplishes great things.

All that is required here is to set her soul free, unencumbered, to let her take a break from ideas and knowledge, to quit troubling herself about thinking and meditating. The soul must content herself with a loving attentiveness toward God, without agitation, without effort, without the desire to taste or feel [God]. These urges only disquiet and distract the soul from the peaceful quietude and sweet ease inherent in the gift of contemplation being offered.

The soul might continue to have qualms about wasting time. She may wonder if it would not be better to be doing something else, since she cannot think or activate anything in prayer. Let her bear these doubts calmly. There is no other way to go to prayer now than to surrender to this sweet ease and breadth of spirit. If the soul tries to engage her interior faculties to accomplish something, she will squander the goodness God is instilling in her through the peace in which she is simply resting….

The best thing for the soul to do is to pay no attention to the fact that the actions of her faculties are slipping away…. She needs to get out of the way. In peaceful plentitude, let her now say “yes” to the infused contemplation God is bestowing upon her…. Contemplation is nothing other than a secret, peaceful, loving inflow of God. If given room, it will fire the soul in the spirit of love.

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What Happens in Prayer is None of My Business

On releasing control, trusting divine mystery, and letting go of results

Mark Longhurst

“What happens in prayer is none of my business. It’s God’s business.” 
—Thomas Keating

Often in my contemplative prayer practice, I expect something to happen. On the lofty spectrum of possibilities, I hope to experience oneness with God, if only for a fleeting moment. Or maybe I will feel myself radically embraced by divine love—again, if only for a moment. On the more practical side of things, at the very least, I hope to emerge from 20-30 minutes of silence refreshed, less reactive, and more centered.

Inevitably, though, something smaller and simpler happens. It could be that I sit there in prayer, snagged by an obsessive thought for nearly the whole time. Each time I attempt to let it go, or say a verse of a Psalm to refocus my attention on God, it pops up again, like a game of whack-a-mole. It could be something I’m supposed to do that day at work or a household task like confirming kids’ doctor appointments. I attempt to let it go and recommit to the silent stillness at hand—or, on less-centered days, I even send myself a quick email reminder.

There are days when I feel incredibly buoyed by prayer, when a snippet of Scripture from lectio divina resonates through my heart for the day, and when I know experientially that I am loved and supported by God. But mostly, my contemplative prayer consists of showing up to God as I am, hurried, relaxed, anxious, happy, frustrated, or whatever, intending but not fully succeeding in practicing receptivity to God’s still presence—and then moving on to the next part of my day. What’s more is that at the end of my meditation sit, I am rarely changed in an overt way. Even if I do feel an encouraging peace or an awareness of deep love, it isn’t some magical alchemy that protects me from, say, reacting defensively to my wife or kids ten minutes later.

This lack of observable outcome—at least in the short term—is why I trust the mystery of Thomas Keating’s quote. Maybe it is not mine to know what is going on in the first place?

Prayer is rarely dramatic. It is showing up to God as I am.

I experience two temptations in prayer. The first is to treat prayer like a technique. If I perform such and such steps, I will succeed in making God’s love more available to me—as if it could be more available than it already is in every moment. If I chant the right number of Psalms, sit in silence in the right way, witness and detach from my thoughts with the right consciousness, inner peace and divine love will be mine. But that treats prayer as a commodity, as a formula that can be applied and with results that are measurable. And prayer doesn’t work that way, because God doesn’t work that way. I can do all the “right” things in prayer and still not experience equanimity after a prayer session. I can do prayer in all the “wrong” ways and still taste peace. Sometimes when I don’t pray in a formal way at all, such as when I’m at the movies, doing dishes, making food, jogging with my wife, or walking my dog, the expansiveness of divine love and peace opens up before me, and often when I least expect it.

The second temptation in prayer is to expect results, like those I shared above. But to reduce prayer to a technique or to expect certain results is to make prayer about me, and not about God—about self-realization instead of self-transcendence (a distinction made by Benedictine Michael Casey in his book Strangers to the City). It’s to think I can track the movements of the soul, as if I can log it in an app, when the wild mercy of God often leaves no trace. Prayer is not about achieving anything, but about allowing God’s action within us, even when it seems like nothing is happening—and even when I’m not allowing God’s action, but instead want to allow it, but unsuccessfully. As Merton said, “Even the desire to please you does in fact please you.” Even the desire to allow God’s action invites God’s mysterious work in my inner life.

There’s another danger inherent here, too, which is to make contemplative prayer, at least as I practice it in the Christian tradition, into therapeutic self-care. I’m all about therapy, self-care, and self-help. I’ll take all the care and help I can get! But to turn contemplative prayer into a technique or result is also to privatize it, whereas Jesus’ message is all about solidarity, especially with those who are suffering the most. This is why I believe that Christian contemplative prayer also has to end with mystical, political solidarity and not simply my individual happiness. Because otherwise it doesn’t really have much to do with Jesus. (See this post and this post for more on that topic).

Met by the Beloved

Inspired by the teachings of John of the Cross, Mirabai Starr encourages us to trust the difficult path of unknowing:

It is time to enter the desert. You may not take anything with you: not your insulated bottle of cool water, not a knife, not a single raisin. You may not take a sleeping bag. No cell phone or map. Leave the sunscreen behind. Burn.

It is time to enter into utter unknowing—and, by unknowing, come to know truly.

The mind is an impediment on this journey. The senses are misleading. Leave them on the porch when you slip away in the middle of the night. Be very quiet as you close the door behind you. The members of your household will not understand your quest. They will try to keep you home. Leave. Go now.

No one claims this will be an easy journey. Your senses will thirst for the familiar juices that remind them of a time when the Holy One fed them from her own breasts. The intellect will grope around in the dark, panicking. Pay no attention. Walk through the night. Sit very still in the daytime and watch the miracle of your breath as it quietly fills your lungs and empties them again.

Spend forty days in the wilderness, and forty nights. Don’t give up. The worst that will happen is that you will die. Die to your fragmented self and be reborn into your divine self. Enter knowing through the needle of unknowing. In silence, finally hear the voice of the Holy One. In surrendering to sheer emptiness, be filled with the Beloved at last.

Starr translates John of the Cross’s poem “Glosa á lo Divino”:  

I would not sacrifice my soul
for all the beauty of this world.

There is only one thing
for which I would risk everything:
an I-don’t-know-what
that lies hidden
in the heart of the Mystery.

The taste of finite pleasure
leads nowhere.
All it does is exhaust the appetite
and ravage the palate.
And so, I would not sacrifice my soul
for all the sweetness of this world.

But I would risk everything
for an I-don’t-know-what
that lies hidden
in the heart of the Mystery.

The generous heart
does not collapse into the easy things,
but rises up in adversity.
It settles for nothing.
Faith lifts it higher and higher.

Such a heart savors
an I-don’t-know-what
found only in the heart of the Mystery.

The soul that God has touched
burns with love-longing.
Her tastes have been transfigured.
Ordinary pleasures sicken her.
She is like a person with a fever;
nothing tastes good anymore.

All she wants
is an I-don’t-know-what
locked in the heart of
the Mystery….

I will never lose myself
for anything the senses can taste,
nor for anything the mind can grasp,
no matter how sublime,
            how delicious.
I will not pause for beauty,
I will not linger over grace.
I am bound for
an I-don’t-know-what
deep within the heart of the Mystery.

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Is Good News Coming? 

Advent and the Art of Preparation

Mark Longhurst

Advent’s stubborn hope is that good news is coming. We need it, desperately. Each day stirs up a maelstrom of dread. But how can we dare to believe in good news? Especially in our fractured moment in which the very category of news, not to mention truth, has become swallowed whole by an abyss of hate-filled chaos? Might this good news of Jesus be fake, or a teflon-like political flip-flop? Might it be ideologically driven? Might it be imperial power masquerading as religion? All of this is possible. 

Yet Gospel writer Mark’s first verse still gleams, like an arrow piercing through all that is false: “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The season of Advent reminds us that good news is coming.

For such good news to arrive, however, requires preparation. We’re so used to bad news that receiving good news takes cultivation, practice, and defiance. This gospel good news starts with the call to prepare, which is a message straight from the prophet of preparation himself, Isaiah: “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way. The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord.”

It must be said, though, that Christmas preparations are not the same as Christ preparations. We ready ourselves for the coming of an adult Christ at Christmas rather than a sweet baby Jesus. Babies, like Christ, bring a whole new world to our lives, but it’s too easy for the birthday of baby Jesus to be sentimentalized. Every Advent, I am reminded of Will Ferrell’s satirical prayer as Ricky Bobby in the movie Talladega Nights, who addresses the Baby Jesus while saying grace at table. “Sweet Baby Jesus,” he says. “We thank you for this bountiful harvest of Dominos, KFC, and the always delicious Taco Bell.” But the coming of Christ is far more than fast-food product placement tacked onto a Pampers commercial. We are readying ourselves for the realm, or dream, of God to arrive right here, smack dab in reality.

Yet in the conflicted meaning-making of our moment, the good news of one is the terrible news of another. Who’s to judge what is good, and how can we know it, much less prepare for it? And yet this conflict over truth is not new. It’s ancient. Good news—or gospel—in Mark’s day (in Greek, euangelion) is a loaded term. 

Good news is the propaganda slogan of peace and security that the Roman emperor supposedly brings. It is not only Jesus’s birthday toward which we lean, but also Caesar’s birthday. A building inscription circa 6 BCE demonstrates as much: “The birthday of the god (Caesar Augustus) has been for the whole world the beginning of good news concerning him.” (quoted in Jesus for President, page 70). The Gospel writer Mark enters the fray and directly opposes the fake good news of the Empire, not by arguing but by telling a counter-story of the Son of God’s birthday—the one who brings true and lasting peace and joy.

Mark, for one, refuses to accept Caesar’s new normal. And what’s more is that Mark does not counter Caesar and Rome’s grandiosity with rants or arguments. As though sending a tweet changes hearts and minds. Instead, Mark tells a story—a story of life, of healing, of justice for the poor and excluded; it’s a story of a person, Jesus, who represents and reminds us of a new realm from heaven that has always been aligning with earth. Some even think Mark’s use of “good news” creates a new genre: the genre of Gospel.

How does one prepare for a new world, for a new consciousness? I always appreciate the lectionary’s wisdom each First Sunday of Advent, because it begins the season with an apocalyptic passage, as if to declare that if we are not prepared, the in-breaking of Christ will end our worlds. The newness of love and justice cuts that deep—at least if we’re not ready. And this is the reason John the Baptizer is on the Advent scene as a messenger of preparedness. His whole presence—from locusts buzzing to fingers sticky with honey to camel hair curling in all directions—shakes us out of the new normal. He’s not bringing change simply for change’s sake, jumping on the new Messiah bandwagon as if it were the latest iPhone model. Rather, John seeks to prepare the way for Christ, and his method of preparation is through something called, a bit clunkily, I’ll admit, a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

But can we even use these words anymore, laden as they are with religious baggage? Isn’t repentance the favorite theme of the street-corner preacher’s shout? Isn’t repentance code for the salvation-from-hellfire decision to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior? If I thought I was going to burn eternally, I’d choose Jesus, too. And I did, for many years. Isn’t the phrase “forgiveness of sins” a holdover from blood atonement, imagining a God who forgives sins through shed animal or beloved-son blood? Many think salvation is at its heart vengeful, or at least about saying the right words to initiate a soul-destination escape from punishment. But no simple prayer—other than the complex and utterly holy living of a life—can prepare us for whatever mystery is beyond this bodily reality.

Repentance. Forgiveness of sins. These words have been coopted and smeared by people for whom extremist, authoritarian politics masquerade as gospel. Maybe it makes sense to have a moratorium on their English translations, just so we can forge new neural associations? Repentance, in Greek metanoia, is nothing more and nothing less than radical transformation. Repentance is the decisive day you decide to stop drinking. Repentance is when you realize that your life is not about you; when you start volunteering at the food pantry; when you first stand up for the rights of immigrants; when, as a privileged person, you first witness real poverty and realize your life will never be the same. Repentance is turning around the direction of your life and choices and values to be about a larger story—God’s larger story.

Here’s the thorny part of preparation, though: good news comes to those who are ready for it. Preparing for Christ first means identifying those ways in which we have not prepared for Christ—or for love, or for justice, or for peace. It means aligning our inner and outer desires with God’s desires. And we surely have not made a straight path for the new world, the new selves, that God seeks to birth in, around, and through us.

This Christmas, our world needs us to take preparation seriously. And there’s a way in which even the arrival of Christ itself is contingent on our preparation. We don’t cause Christ to come, because God is free, and we’re not that important. But if we do not prepare for this arrival, then we will surely fail to recognize good news when it comes. So whenever we pray the Advent prayer “Come, Lord Jesus,” we are also pledging to prepare, to repent, to turn our lives—and our country, and our world—around for love.

Trusting the Unknown Path

Father Richard Rohr describes how he came to trust God in times of uncertainty and even apparent darkness:

I came out of the seminary in 1970 thinking that my job was to have an answer for every question. What I’ve learned is that not-knowing and often not even needing to know are—surprise of surprises—deeper ways of knowing and a deeper falling into compassion. This is surely what the mystics mean by “death” and why they talk of it with so many metaphors. It is the essential transition. Maybe that is why Jesus praised faith even more than love; maybe that is why St. John of the Cross called faith “luminous darkness.” Yes, love is the final goal but ever deeper trust inside of darkness is the path for getting there. [1]

My good friend Gerald May shed fresh light on the meaning of John of the Cross’ phrase “the dark night of the soul.” He said that God has to work in the soul in secret and  in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery/God/grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or to stop the whole process. May writes:

The dark night is a profoundly good thing. It is an ongoing spiritual process in which we are liberated from attachments and compulsions and empowered to live and love more freely. Sometimes this letting go of old ways is painful, occasionally even devastating. But this is not why the night is called “dark.” The darkness of the night implies nothing sinister, only that the liberation takes place in hidden ways, beneath our knowledge and understanding. It happens mysteriously, in secret, and beyond our conscious control. [2]

No one oversees their own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying. God has to undo our illusions secretly, as it were, when we are not watching and not in perfect control, say the mystics. We move forward in ways that we do not even understand and through the quiet workings of time and grace, as “deep calls unto deep” (Psalm 42:8). In other words, the Spirit initiates deep resonance and intimacy with our spirit, as the endless divine yes evokes an ever-deeper yes in us. [3]

As James Finley, one of CAC’s core faculty members, says, “The mystic is not someone who says, ‘Look what I have done!’ The mystic is one who says, ‘Look what love has done to me. There’s nothing left but God’s intimate love giving itself to me as me.’ That’s the blessedness in poverty: when all in us that is not God dissolves, and we finally realize that we are already as beautiful as God is beautiful, because God gave the infinite beauty of God as who we are.

A Dance of Intimacy

Richard Rohr reflects on the dance of divine intimacy:

The divine-human love affair really is a reciprocal dance. Sometimes, in order for us to step forward, our partner must step away a bit. The withdrawal lasts only a moment, and its purpose is to pull us closer—but it doesn’t feel like that in the moment. It feels like our partner is retreating.

God creates the pullback, “hiding his face,” as it was called by many mystics and scriptures. God creates a vacuum that God alone can fill. Then God waits to see if we will trust our God partner to eventually fill that space within us, which now has grown even more spacious and receptive. This is the central theme of darkness, necessary doubt, or what the mystics call “God’s withdrawing of love.” What feels like suffering, depression, uselessness—moments when God has withdrawn—are often deep acts of trust and invitations to intimacy on God’s part. On the soul’s inner journey, we meet a God who interacts with our deepest selves, allowing and forgiving mistakes. It is precisely this give-and-take, and knowing there will be give-and-take, that makes God so real as a Lover. [1]

A translator of Spanish mystic John of the Cross (1542­–1591), Mirabai Starr offers this stirring description of the dark night, in which God moves from dynamic presence to loving absence:

Say when you were very young the veil lifted just enough for you to glimpse the underlying Real behind it and then dropped again. Maybe it never recurred, but you could not forget. And this discovery became the prime mover of the rest of your life in ways you may not have even noticed….

Say these [spiritual] practices fill your heart. They make you feel holiness like wind through every fiber of your being and think rivers of holy thoughts…. The passion of your love for God intensifies….

Say prayer starts to dry up on your tongue. Sacred literature becomes fallen leaves, blows away. Meditation brings no serenity anymore. Devotion grows brittle, cracks. The God you bow down to no longer draws you….

Say each of the familiar spiritual rooms you go to seeking refuge are dark now, and empty. You sit down anyway. You take off your clothes at the door and enter naked. All agendas have fallen away…. This quietude deepens in proportion to your surrender.

Say what’s secretly going on is that the Beloved is loving you back. That your first glimpse of the Absolute was God’s first great gift to you. That your years of revelation inside his many vessels was his second gift, wherein, like a mother, he was holding you, like a child, close to his breast, tenderly feeding you. And that this darkness of the soul you have come upon and cannot seem to come out of is his final and greatest gift to you.

Because it is only in this vast emptiness that he can enter, as your Beloved, and fill you. Where the darkness is nothing but unutterable radiance

Saying Yes to Love

Friday, December 5, 2025

Father Richard describes intimacy with God as a loving yes to Divine Presence: 

For Christians who have gone to their own depths, there is the uncovering of an indwelling Presence—a deep, loving “yes” inherent within us. In Christian theology, this inner Presence is described as the Holy Spirit, which is precisely God as immanent, within, and even our deepest, truest self. God is the very ground of our Being. 

Some mystics have described this Presence as “closer to me than I am to myself” or “more me than I am myself.” Many of us would also describe this as the True Self, as Thomas Merton did. Yet it still must be awakened and chosen. The Holy Spirit is totally given and given equally to all, but must be consciously received, too. The Presence needs to be recognized, honored, and drawn upon to become a living Presence within us. 

From this more spacious and grounded place, one naturally connects, empathizes, forgives, and loves just about everything. We were made in love, for love, and unto love, and it is out of this love that we act. This deep inner “yes” that is God in me, is already loving God through me. [1] 

Seeking to experience God’s love more fully, spiritual director Colette Lafia asks a monk with whom she is friends, “How do I let God love me more?”:  

Without missing a beat, Brother Paul answered in his joyful tone, “God cannot love you more. God already loves you infinitely. You just need to become more aware of [God’s] love … by becoming more present to it. It’s like hearing birdcalls. By paying attention and delighting in it.”  

With Brother Paul’s wisdom etched in my mind, I prayed to be more receptive to the landscape of love within my heart and all around me, recognizing that I was already in a love relationship with the Divine, as are you…. 

In our journey towards a deeper and more abiding love relationship with the Divine, we grow by encountering and understanding our barriers. At the same time, stay open to the glimmerings of God’s grace that you can feel, see, or intuit. As you surrender all aspects of your inner knowing, grace, and resistance, you’ll enter into a fuller relationship with God’s boundless love.  

How do we make receptivity a foundation of our relationship with the Divine and of our life of prayer? To give love, we also need to be able to receive it. This invitation to receptivity encourages us to listen to the stirrings of love, release into communion with God, and become more present to Divine love. “God cannot love you more. God already loves you infinitely.” Embracing this love, we can respond to God, others, and all of life from our heart, which is the source of compassion toward all. [2]  

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John Chaffee 5 On Friday

1.

“We are creatures of sense and of spirit, and we must live an amphibious life.”

– Evelyn Underhill, British Poet and Mystic

The Christian mystics and theologians have always maintained that we are a mixture, synthesis, or hybrid of matter and spirit.

In some sense, the Chalcedonian Creed of 451 resolved this issue for us.  In that creed, the idea is that the two natures of Jesus (human and divine) exist “without confusion, division, separation, or change.”  Meaning, matter and spirit are not antagonistic or in enmity with one another.

We, though, who are with both a material and spiritual nature in our own way, must learn to navigate both worlds.  Some of us fail to live life well because we neglect the spiritual, and some of us fail to live the spiritual life well because we neglect the physical…

Which is why this insight from Evelyn Underhill intrigues me: we must learn to be “amphibious.”

2.

“I believe God is too delighted in you to have a plan for you.”

– Father Greg Boyle, Founder of Homeboy Industries

This past week, I have had two or three conversations about “God’s will.”

It can be discussed in a manner that is quite oppressive.

You and I must carefully navigate figuring out God’s will for our lives, and if we do not find it or follow it, we can somehow thwart God Almighty’s plan for our lives, as well as negatively impact the lives of those around us in concentric circles.

At one point, I even said to someone, “You know, none of us would force our agenda for our kids’ lives on them in such a way that would produce their suffering, and yet, we think that God would do that… But God doesn’t.  That kind of god, who imposes a foreign will on us, would be abusive.”

If anything, God is so enamored with us that God plans that we learn to follow our own desires and to discover who we are, our whole lives long, constantly, and to invite God along in that journey… simply because we know it would be a joyous adventure for God to join us in us following our healthiest and holiest of desires.

You know, I may write more on this topic in a blog or a book.  That sounds like a good idea.

3.

“Fanaticism is always a function of repressed doubt.”

– Frank Herbert in Dune

In my current context of North America, I am acutely aware of the fanaticism that I see in our religious and political spheres.

What worries me is how little we can admit and announce our doubts about anything.  Admitting or announcing doubts is seen as a weakness rather than a humble pursuit of firmer ground.

If we do not learn to appreciate and carry our doubts in a healthy and holy way, I unfortunately believe fanaticism will only continue to rise.

4.

“True godliness does not turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.”

– William Penn, Quaker Founder of the State of Pennsylvania

Either I did not know, or I forgot, that William Penn was a Quaker.

Regardless, I agree with his sentiment here.

Healthy religion leads us to be better in the world and to look for ways to improve it.  The problem is that for those who have succumbed to unhealthy religion, they may THINK they are better in the world and looking for ways to better the world, but…

The proof is in the pudding.

Or, as Jesus would say it,

“You will know a tree by its fruit.” (Matthew 7:15-20, Paraphrased.)

Suppose an interpretation of a faith system produces the “fruit” of angry, resentful individuals who are violent, scapegoating, and constantly threatening to the world around them.  In that case, that is a tree with “bad fruit,” and it absolutely deserves to be cut down and thrown into the fire. 

5.

“Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return.”

– Thomas Kelly, Quaker Mystic

Wow.

This is poetic.

It is VERY Quaker.

And yet, it also resonates with my understanding of the wisdom of Theresa of Avila’s Interior Castle.  That same insight also sounds similar to Thomas Merton’s insight about the Pointe Vierge in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. 

May it be a part of a universal and perennial wisdom?

Every generation must come to its own formulation or description of the mystery that God is deeply within each of us.  Every generation likely doubts this reality, but that is why every generation needs its prophet or mystic who can reach them and tell them that the Spirit of God is already present within and speaking from within.

Courageous Vulnerability

Thursday, December 4, 2025

I am a Christian because of women who said yes.   
—Rachel Held Evans, Wholehearted Faith  

Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) reflects on how Mary’s yes was pivotal to the Incarnation.    

I am more aware than ever of the startling and profound reality that I am a Christian not because of anything I’ve done but because a teenage girl living in occupied Palestine at one of the most dangerous moments in history said yes—yes to God, yes to a wholehearted call she could not possibly understand, yes to vulnerability in the face of societal judgment, yes to the considerable risk of pregnancy and childbirth… yes to a vision for herself and her little boy of a mission that would bring down rulers and lift up the humble, that would turn away the rich and fill the hungry with good things, that would scatter the proud and gather the lowly [see Luke 1:51–53], yes to a life that came with no guarantee of her safety or her son’s.  

By becoming human, God encourages us to honor the vulnerability of our own lives: 

It is nearly impossible to believe: God shrinking down to the size of a zygote, implanted in the soft lining of a woman’s womb…. God inching down the birth canal and entering this world covered in blood, perhaps into the steady, waiting arms of a midwife. God crying out in hunger. God reaching for his mother’s breasts. God totally relaxed, eyes closed, his chubby little arms raised over his head in a posture of complete trust. God resting in his mother’s lap…. 

I cannot entirely make sense of the storyline: God trusted God’s very self, totally and completely and in full bodily form, to the care of a woman. God needed women for survival. Before Jesus fed us with the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say: “This is my body, given for you.”…  

To understand Mary’s humanity and her central role in Jesus’s story is to remind ourselves of the true miracle of the Incarnation—and that is the core Christian conviction that God is with us, plain old ordinary us. God is with us in our fears and in our pain, in our morning sickness and in our ear infections, in our refugee crises and in our endurance of Empire, in smelly barns and unimpressive backwater towns, in the labor pains of a new mother and in the cries of a tiny infant. In all these things, God is with us—and God is for us. And through Mary’s example, God invites us to take the risk of love—even though it undoubtedly opens us up to the possibility of getting hurt, being scared, and feeling disappointed.   

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Emmanuel in the Ordinary: Our Yes to God’s Nearness

A Companion Devotional to “Mary and the Power of Yes”

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Reflection

If Mary’s yes opened the door to the Incarnation, our own small yeses keep that door from closing. The miracle of Emmanuel—God with us—didn’t end in Bethlehem. It continues in every moment we choose vulnerability over safety, presence over distance, trust over control.

Consider this: God chose not merely to visit humanity but to need us. Before Christ offered himself as bread and wine, he needed Mary’s milk. Before he could save the world, he required a woman’s courage to say yes to a call she couldn’t fully understand. This is the scandalous beauty of the Incarnation—God made himself dependent on human cooperation.

The God who meets us is not distant or abstract but draws intimately near, honoring us by seeking to understand our stories. Just as God asked Hagar “What’s your story?” in the desert, God comes to satisfy our deepest need, embracing us with a love that will never let go.

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God in the Unlikely Places

God reveals himself in unexpected locations—not just in sacred spaces but in wilderness places, in desperation and wandering. Mary encountered the angel in her ordinary bedroom. The shepherds received the announcement in their fields. God pitches his tent next to ours, moves into our neighborhood, enters our waiting rooms and traffic jams and dirty dishes.

Whether we face sin and failure, grief and despair, or simply seek meaning and purpose, God embraces us with forgiving, comforting, and encouraging love. No place is godforsaken when God chooses to show up there.

This Advent, ask yourself: Where do I least expect to find God? Your commute? Your difficult conversation? Your fear? Perhaps that’s exactly where Emmanuel waits.

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Our Turn to Say Yes

Mary’s yes wasn’t a single moment but a lifestyle—a continuing wholehearted consent to God’s will unfolding in unexpected ways. She said yes at the Annunciation. She said yes at the manger. She said yes at the cross, becoming mother to all of Jesus’s disciples.

Your yes matters too. Not because you can save everyone or change everything, but because God invites you into co-creation. You cannot say yes for all humanity as Mary did, but you can say yes in your small corner of the world. You can:

• Say yes to noticing the overlooked person
• Say yes to honest vulnerability in a relationship
• Say yes to the risky work of love
• Say yes to showing up even when it’s inconvenient
• Say yes to God’s call even when you can’t see the outcome

Each time we die to self and consent to the challenges of love, we rise to new life in the same surrender, completing our own baptismal journey.

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Prayer for Today

God of the ordinary and extraordinary,

Thank you for drawing near—for choosing not to stay distant but to dwell with us in our most vulnerable moments. Thank you that you trusted yourself completely to human care, that you needed us then and invite our participation still.

Give me Mary’s courage to say yes to your mysterious callings. Help me believe that my small yeses matter, that my willingness to risk love opens space for your kingdom to break through.

Teach me to find you in unexpected places—in my wilderness, in my waiting, in my weakness. Let me pitch my tent next to yours, knowing you have already moved into my neighborhood.

May I trust that vulnerability is not weakness but the posture of incarnation. May I remember that you, the Almighty, chose the low way—power in humility, strength perfected in weakness.

This Advent, make me attentive to where you show up and brave enough to say yes.

Amen.

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Questions for Reflection

1. Where in your life right now is God inviting you to say yes to something that feels risky or vulnerable?
2. What “unlikely places” in your daily routine might God be trying to meet you that you’ve been overlooking?
3. How does knowing that God chose to be vulnerable and dependent change the way you view your own weakness or need?
4. If Mary’s yes opened the door to salvation, what doors might your small yeses open for others?

Echoing Mary’s Yes

Wednesday, December 3, 2025

Spiritual seeker and writer Katie Gordon reflects on the Magnificat, Mary’s prophetic song.  

In the Gospel of Luke, the Magnificat are the words that Mary sings when she is with her cousin Elizabeth, and they are celebrating the surprise of new life in their wombs. Apart from the expected course either of their lives would take, still they said “yes” to that movement of the Holy Spirit within each of them. 

This song that then flowed out of Mary’s faithful heart flipped the script of power in society. She, a lowly young girl, pregnant and unmarried, easily dismissed or decried by most of society, becomes the most blessed. Like the work of the Holy Spirit, her very being disrupted the status quo, and to this day, her words call us into the renewing spirit of mercy and justice…. 

Mary is telling us that when Christ comes into this world, when compassion becomes enfleshed, we gain a new paradigm. We are offered a new way of life, a new set of values to live by. And who brings this good news? It isn’t the kings or priests; it is two ordinary women, who through their encounter in friendship sing the vision into our tradition. These two pregnant women show us how to bring and embrace new life, and it is not revealed to us from a church or temple, but rather from the sanctuary of a home, in the intimacy of their relationship, and in their very bodies. 

Gordon visits a chapel located deep in the woods that features a statue of the pregnant Madonna accompanied by the words of the Magnificat:  

Here, outside of and far away from the seat of power in any traditional church, is where I find hope. In the voice of an outsider who gave birth to this radical vision of a changing and evolving world. In the counter-cultural, revolutionary message at the heart of the faith. In a song of praise that invites us to flip the paradigms of power, not just in church, but in society, too…. 

When we sing that the hungry will be fed, I think of all the mutual aid efforts, soup kitchens, and neighbors who feed one another, not out of obligation but out of love and care. 

When we sing that the humble will be upheld, I think of the dignity of immigrants and refugees, who amid the unjust and illegal deportations, are finding strength in their communities as people are protecting and fighting for one another day after day after day. 

And finally, when we sing of the promise made to our ancestors, to Sarah and to Abraham, I try to remember far enough back to feel the covenantal belonging, this lineage of love that stretches before I was here and far beyond my own time. I’m reminded of my small part in this larger and longer story, of saying “yes” like Mary whenever I can, to bringing new and renewing life into our world, here and now. 

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Sarah Young

Jesus Calling: December 3

Do not be surprised by the fiery attacks on your mind. When you struggle to find Me and to live in My Peace, don’t let discouragement set in. You are engaged in massive warfare, spiritually speaking. The evil one abhors your closeness to Me, and his demonic underlings are determined to destroy our intimacy. When you find yourself in the thick of battle, call upon My Name: “Jesus, help me!” At that instant, the battle becomes Mine; your role is simply to trust Me as I fight for you.
     My Name, properly used, has unlimited Power to bless and protect. At the end of time, every knee will bow (in heaven, on earth, and under the earth), when My Name is proclaimed. People who have used “Jesus” as a shoddy swear word will fall down in terror on that awesome day. But all those who have drawn near Me through trustingly uttering My Name will be filled with inexpressible and glorious Joy. This is your great hope, as you await My return.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Ephesians 6:12 (NLT)
12 For we are not fighting against flesh-and-blood enemies, but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in this dark world, and against evil spirits in the heavenly places.

Additional insight regarding Ephesians 6:12: These who are not “flesh-and-blood enemies” are demons over whom the devil has control. They are not mere fantasies – they are very real. We face a powerful army whose goal is to defeat Christ’s church. When we believe in Christ, these beings become our enemies, and they try every device to turn us away from him and back to sin. Although we are assured of victory, we must engage in the struggle until Christ returns, because Satan is constantly battling against all who are on the Lord’s side. We need supernatural power to defeat Satan, and God has provided this by giving us his Holy Spirit within us and his armor surrounding us. If you feel discouraged, remember Jesus’ words to Peter: “Upon this rock I will build my church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it” (Matthew 16:18).

1st Samuel 17:47 (NLT)
47 And everyone assembled here will know that the Lord rescues his people, but not with sword and spear. This is the Lord’s battle, and he will give you to us!”

Philippians 2:9-10 (NLT)
9 Therefore, God elevated him to the place of highest honor
    and gave him the name above all other names,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

Additional insight regarding Philippians 2:9-11: At the Last Judgement, even those who are condemned will recognize Jesus’ authority and right to rule. People can choose now to commit their lives to Jesus as Lord or be forced to acknowledge him as Lord when he returns. Christ may return at any moment. Are you prepared to meet him?

1st Peter 1:8-9 (NLT)
8 You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. 9 The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls.

Additional insight regarding 1st Peter 1:8: Jesus had said to his disciple Thomas, who came to believe after touching the resurrected Christ: “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me” (John 20:29). Peter, having heard those words, repeats them here: “You love him even though you have never seen him.” That faith brings both salvation and the promise of a day when pain will end and perfect justice will begin. This is mentioned in 1st Peter 1:9: “The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls.” Faith will be rewarded and evil will be punished. But what should we do until then? The Bible’s answer is simple but not easy: Because we know the future, we must faithfully serve God here and now. If today that means resolving a conflict, mending a hurt, working a dull job, confronting a belligerent child, rebuilding a marriage, or just waiting for guidance – do it all with the joy of God, who will return with his reward!

Responding to God’s Yes

Tuesday, December 2, 2025

Richard Rohr envisions our yeses as a response to God’s first yes to us.

We have in Mary’s story what some call the second creation story in the Bible. It’s a creation seemingly “out of nothing.” Mary is the one quite willing to be “nothing.” God doesn’t need worthiness ahead of time; God creates worthiness by the choice itself. As I’ve often said, God doesn’t love us because we are good; we are good because God loves us. It seems God will not come into the world unreceived or uninvited. God does not come into the world unless we want God. God offers the Divine Presence, “the banquet,” but presence itself is a reciprocal concept. God is the eternal “I” waiting for those willing to be a “Thou.”

It’s no surprise that Mary became the icon of prayer for so many in Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, and in many religious orders, even though the Bible never once mentions her “praying.” The closest is that lovely line in Luke: “She treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19, 51). Why? Because every time we pray, it’s God in us telling us to pray. We wouldn’t even desire to pray except for God in us. It’s God in us that loves God, that desires God, that seeks God (see Romans 8:14–27). Every time we choose God on some level, God has in the previous nanosecond just chosen us, and we have somehow allowed ourselves to be chosen—and responded back (John 15:16). 194-195

We don’t know how to say yes by ourselves. We just “second the motion”! There is a part of us, the Holy Spirit within, that has always said yes to God. God first says “yes” inside of us, and we say, “Oh yeah,” thinking it comes from us. In other words, God rewards us for letting God reward us. That is worth noticing, maybe even for the rest of our lives.

Are we ever completely ready to echo God’s “yes”? Probably not, but I am convinced that the struggle is good and even necessary. Struggle carves out the space within us for deep desire. God both creates the desire and fulfills it. Our job is to be the desiring. For God to work in our lives, our fiat, like Mary’s “Let it be done unto me, according to your word” (Luke 1:38), is still essential.

We all find ourselves with this surprising ability to love God and to desire love from God, often for no reason in particular. That doesn’t happen every day, truly, but hopefully arises more often as we learn to trust and rest in life. Moments of unconditional love sort of slip out of us and no one is more surprised when they happen. But when they do, we always know we are living inside of a Larger Life than our own. We know, henceforth, that our life is not about us, but we are about God.

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Jesus Calling: December 2

I AM the Prince of Peace. As I said to My disciples, I say also to you: Peace be with you. Since I am your constant Companion. My Peace is steadfastly with you. When you keep your focus on Me, you experience both My Presence and My Peace. Worship Me as King of kings, Lord of lords, and Prince of Peace.
     You need My Peace each moment to accomplish My purposes in your life. Sometimes you are tempted to take shortcuts, in order to reach your goal as quickly as possible. But if the shortcut requires turning your back on My peaceful Presence, you must choose the longer route. Walk with Me along paths of Peace, enjoy the journey in My Presence.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Isaiah 9:6 (NLT)
6 For a child is born to us,
    a son is given to us.
The government will rest on his shoulders.
    And he will be called:
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
    Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Additional insight regarding Isaiah 9:2-6: In a time of great darkness, God promised to send a light who would shine on everyone living in the shadow of death. He is both “Wonderful Counselor” and “Mighty God.” This message of hope was fulfilled in the birth of Christ and the establishment of his eternal kingdom. He came to deliver all people from their slavery to sin.

John 20:19-21 (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. 20 As he spoke, he showed them the wounds in his hands and his side. They were filled with joy when they saw the Lord! 21 Again he said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.”

Psalm 25:4 (NLT)
4 Show me the right path, O Lord;
    point out the road for me to follow.