An Alternative Orthodoxy

Richard Rohr explains that Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) paid attention to different things than the Catholic Church of his time. Eventually, his prophetic witness and emphasis became an “alternative orthodoxy” through the Franciscan tradition. Richard begins: 

In the Legend of Perugia, one of the earliest accounts of his life, Francis offers this instruction to the first friars: “You only know as much as you do.” [1] His emphasis on action, practice, and lifestyle was foundational and revolutionary for its time and remains at the heart of Franciscan alternative orthodoxy. For Francis and Clare, Jesus became someone to actually follow and imitate.   

Up to this point, most of Christian spirituality was based in desert asceticism, monastic discipline, theories of prayer, or academic theology, which itself was often based in “correct belief” or liturgical texts, but not in a kind of practicalChristianity that could be lived in the streets of the world. Francis emphasized an imitation and love of the humanity of Jesus, and not just the worshiping of his divinity. That is a major shift.  

Throughout history, the Franciscan School has typically been a minority position inside of the Roman Catholic and larger Christian tradition, yet it has never been condemned or considered heretical—in fact, quite the opposite. It simply emphasized different teachings of Jesus, new perspectives and behaviors, and focused on the full and final implications of the incarnation of God in Christ. For Franciscans, the incarnation was not just about Jesus but was manifested everywhere. As Francis said, “The whole world is our cloister!” [2]  

Francis’ starting place was human suffering instead of human sinfulness, and God’s identification with that suffering in Jesus. That did not put him in conflict with any Catholic dogmas or structures. His Christ was cosmic while also deeply personal, his cathedral was creation itself, and he preferred the bottom of society to the top. He invariably emphasized inclusion of the seeming outsider over any club of insiders, and he was much more a mystic than a moralist. In general, Francis preferred ego poverty to private perfection, because Jesus “became poor for our sake, so that we might become rich out of his poverty” (2 Corinthians 8:9).  

I sincerely think Francis found a Third Way, which is the creative and courageous role of a prophet and a mystic. He basically repeated what all prophets say: that the message and the medium for the message have to be the same thing. And Francis emphasized the medium itself, instead of continuing to clarify or contain the mere verbal message; this tends to be the “priestly” job, one which Francis never wanted for himself.  

Both Francis and Clare saw orthopraxy (“correct practice”) as a necessary parallel, and maybe even precedent, to verbal orthodoxy (“correct teaching”) and not an optional add-on or a possible implication. “Why aren’t you doing what you say you believe?” the prophet invariably asks.  

Letting Go of Churchiness

In the CAC online course The Franciscan Way, Richard Rohr explains several different emphases in Franciscan alternative orthodoxy: incarnation instead of redemption, cosmos instead of churchiness, poverty instead of perfection, the bottom instead of the top, the humility of God, and an emphasis on the union of humanity and divinity in Jesus instead of just his divinity. In response to the question “Which one of these do you think the world is most ripe for at this time?” Richard replies: 

I wonder if it isn’t “cosmos instead of churchiness.” There is such a universal disillusionment with churchiness, which is the building and maintenance of churches and services. We’ve overplayed the church card for much of the last thousand years. It’s like the messenger overtook the message. Once we divided Christianity into Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, all of the individual churches had to prove they were the one true church. All that did was preoccupy us with the churchy conversation, while taking our eyes off the cosmos, off of what was right beneath our feet, in front of our eyes, and the very whole of which we are already a part.  

We naturally participate in the universe. We have the reptilian brain, we have the mammalian brain, we have the neocortex. We have the sensate connection with the plant world and the animal world. We’re just involved at every level with this entire universe around us. I’m told that the atoms and molecules that existed at the Big Bang are the same atoms and molecules here right now, and all they’ve done for 13.8 billion years is change form, that nothing dies.   

Nothing dies; it just keeps changing form. So, we have a natural foundation for what we call resurrection that isn’t a unique belief of Christianity—it is in the very shape of the cosmos. What this leads us to is a whole new partnership with what we used to negatively dismiss as “mere science.” Sadly, we split the universe when we did that. We said that our form of knowledge was the only true form and all those other knowers were ignorant unbelievers. We can’t do that anymore. We now know that truth is one, and we’re all seeing it from different angles and at different levels. Just because one group uses the vocabulary at one level, and those in our group use the vocabulary at a different level, what right do we have to say our vocabulary is the only true description of the universe?   

Religion is no longer a spectator sport, an observing of some distant, far-off truth, but it’s an observing of what is true in me, and what is true in me is true of the cosmos. It’s all one reality. Frankly this makes the job of evangelization—if we want to use that Christian word—much easier because we’re not bringing in an extraneous message. We’re simply naming what is.   

James Finley encourages each of us to continue on the contemplative path: 

Through our renewed fidelity to our contemplative practices we learn to discern and take steps to correct any tendencies to drag around dust-gathering trophies of things past…. Sitting silent and still in meditation, walking with attentive gratitude at sunset, reaching out to cup the beloved’s face in our hands, we find ourselves once again at the never ending origins of the one unending present moment in which our lives unfold.  

We know by experience that in a relative, but very real sense, we are the arbiters of our journey, that we must take responsibility to cooperate with the grace of being faithful to our contemplative practices. If we do not meditate there will be no meditation in our lives. If we do not patiently work through the obstacles encountered along the way, we can lose our way and lose ourselves in the process. But at a deeper level, the entire journey is one in which we are called over and over again to surrender to a self-transforming process not of our own making. Each time we give ourselves over to our contemplative practices, whatever they might be, we find ourselves, once again, one with the communal mystery in which there is no separate self. [1]  

Finley reminds us that solitary contemplative paths simultaneously invite us to respond with compassion to real world needs:  

Let me emphasize … the need to discern and take steps to correct the ways in which our contemplative self-transformation is hindered by our failures to compassionately love others. Ideally speaking, a commitment to contemplative living is synonymous with a heightened awareness of and response to the real suffering of real people. The difficulty however, is that our own wounded ego can circle about contemplative experiences in ways that make us less, not more sensitive to our own real needs and the needs of those around us. Religious faith, artistic inspiration, romantic-sexual love, the process of psychological healing, and all other arenas of contemplative experience and self-transformation, can and should be arenas of heightened compassionate sensitivity to the real needs of those around us….  

Contemplative wisdom discerns that we hinder ourselves in our ongoing self-transformation when we catch ourselves expounding, through clenched teeth, the principles of a dance that our own self-absorbed rigidity will not let us dance. But no matter how foolish and broken we may be, compassionate love is always ready to drain the fear-based rigidity out of the situation to the point that we might begin to recognize our ever-present invitation to join in the general dance of God, one with us in our brokenness. The dance never ceases to stir within us, beating “in our very blood whether we want it to or not.” [2] The dance is deathless, childlike, and free; an infinite Presence wholly poured out in and as the concrete immediacy of who we simply are, beyond grasping in any way whatsoever. [3]

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Jesus Calling; Sarah Young

Seek Me with your whole being. I desire to be found by you, and I orchestrate the events of your life with that purpose in mind. When things go well and you are blessed, you can feel Me smiling on you. When you encounter rough patches along your life journey, trust that My Light is still shining upon you. My reasons for allowing these adversities may be shrouded in mystery, but My continual Presence with you is an absolute promise. Seek Me in good times; seek Me in hard times. You will find Me watching over you all the time.

Deuteronomy 4:29
But from there you will seek the Lord your God and you will find him, if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul.
 
Hebrews 10:23
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.
 
Psalm 145:20
The Lord preserves all who love him,
    but all the wicked he will destroy.

For people looking to nurture a contemplative way of life, James Finley counsels “Find your contemplative practice and practice it.” 

A contemplative practice is any act, habitually entered into with your whole heart, as a way of awakening, deepening, and sustaining a contemplative experience of the inherent holiness of the present moment. Your practice might be some form of meditation, such as sitting motionless in silence, attentive and awake to the abyss-like nature of each breath. Your practice might be simple, heartfelt prayer, slowly reading the scriptures, gardening, baking bread, writing or reading poetry, drawing or painting, or perhaps running or taking long, slow walks to no place in particular. Your practice may be to be alone, really alone, without any addictive props and diversions. Or your practice may be that of being with that person in whose presence you are called to a deeper place. The critical factor is not so much what the practice is in its externals as the extent to which the practice incarnates an utterly sincere stance of awakening and surrendering to the Godly nature of the present moment.  

At any given time we are likely to have not a single practice but rather a constellation of practices, often with one of them as our primary practice. Others may surround it, each carrying its own special place in our life…. As the months and years go by the constellation changes. New practices emerge. Practices that have been present for years fall out of the picture….  

We discover by experience that if we are faithful to our contemplative practices our practices faithfully lead us in the direction of a more daily, abiding awareness of the divinity of the life we are living.  

Finley stresses the importance of prioritizing intentional presence on a daily basis, while encouraging us to do what we can within the limitations of our lives.  

Remaining faithful to our contemplative practices calls for the integrity of remaining faithful to a commitment that nobody sees; it consists of giving ourselves over with all our heart to simple acts which, on the surface, seem to be but the incidental passage of time. But if we are faithful to this unassuming path of fidelity to our daily contemplative practices, the subtle awareness of the depths to which they grant access begins to permeate the very texture of our daily experience of living. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, fidelity to our contemplative practices evolves into an habitual awareness that does not miss the surprise appearance of God showing up in something as immediate and simple as the sunlight that suddenly fills a room on a cloudy day.  

Finding your contemplative practice is then an event that occurs in each and every granting of contemplative experience in which the divinity of the present moment is realized.… By such fidelities [to practice] you, without your knowing how, are led along the path of your transformation into the depths of divinity that your daily living manifests. 

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Sarah Young; Jesus Listens

Jesus, my splendid Companion, I desire to walk with You in close, trusting Love-bonds of joyful dependence. The companionship You offer me sparkles with precious promises from the Bible: You love me with perfect, everlasting Love. You are always with me, each moment of my life. You know everything about me, and You have already paid the penalty for all my sins. My inheritance—kept in heaven for me—can never perish, spoil, or fade. You guide me through my life, and afterward You will take me into Glory! You’ve shown me that dependence is an inescapable part of being human—You designed me to rely on You continually. Help me to view my constant need of You as a blessing. When I accept my dependent condition and stop striving to be self-sufficient, my awareness of Your loving Presence increases. Draw me closer to You, Lord, so I can enjoy Your marvelous Companionship. I delight in Your invitation to walk with You in joyful dependence along the pathway of my life. And I love hearing You whisper: “Beloved, I am with you.” In Your marvelous Name, Amen

JEREMIAH 31:3NJKV; The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying: “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.

EPHESIANS 1:7–8; In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace 8 that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding, 

1 PETER 1:3–4; Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade.

PSALM 73:24; You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will take me into glory. 

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 254). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Extraordinary Ordinary Moments

Spiritual teacher and CAC friend Mirabai Starr poetically describes the contemplative experience that is stirred through regular lives, whether in nature, through relationships, or our suffering:  

Contemplative life flows in a circular pattern: awe provokes introspection, which invokes awe. 

Maybe you’re making dinner and you step outside to snip chives from the kitchen garden just as the harvest moon is rising over the eastern slopes. She is full and golden, like one of those pregnant women who radiates from within. Suddenly you cannot bear the beauty. Scissors suspended in your hand, tears pooling at the corners of your eyes, you nearly quit breathing. Your gaze softens, and the edges of your individual identity fade. You are absorbed into the heart of the moon. It feels natural, and there is no other place you’d rather be. But the onions are burning, and so you turn away and cut your herbs and go back inside. You resume stirring the sauce and setting the table.  

This is not the first time you have disappeared into something beautiful. You have experienced the unfettering of the subject-object distinction while holding your daughter’s hand as she labored to give birth to your grandson; when curled up in bed with your dying friend …; while yielding to your lover’s lips. You have lost yourself in heartbreak, then lost the desire to ever regain yourself, then lost your fear of death. You long ago relinquished your need for cosmic order and personal control. You welcome unknowingness.  

Which is why seemingly ordinary moments like moonrises and lovemaking undo you. The veil has been pulled back. Everything feels inexhaustibly holy. This is not what they taught you in the church of your childhood. Your soul has been formed in the forge of life’s losses, galvanized in the crucible of community, fertilized by the rain of relationship, blessed by your intimacy with Mother Earth. You have glimpsed the face of the Divine where you least expected it.  

Starr connects these moments of awe to a renewed commitment to contemplative practice:  

And this is why you cultivate contemplative practice. The more you intentionally turn inward, the more available the sacred becomes. When you sit in silence and turn your gaze toward the Holy Mystery you once called God, the Mystery follows you back out into the world. When you walk with a purposeful focus on breath and birdsong, your breathing and the twitter of the chickadee reveal themselves as a miracle…. 

So you sit down to meditate not only because it helps you to find rest in the arms of the formless Beloved but also because it increases your chances of being stunned by beauty when you get back up. Encounters with the sacred that radiate from the core of the ordinary embolden you to cultivate stillness and simple awareness. In the midst of a world that is begging you to distract yourself, this is no easy practice. Yet you keep showing up. You are indomitable. You are thirsty for wonder.

From Surprised By God. …..the woman at the well…..

“Just then his disciples came” (John 4:27). Precisely in that moment—before we’re told a word of her response to Jesus’s self-revelation—the disciples return. We should live as if this is always true: we arrive in every moment just after the One Who Is has made himself known. Whomever we encounter, and whenever we encounter them, we already find ourselves having returned to holy ground. Because the I Am is always there before us.

……….

We have much to learn from her witness. Not least that our task is not to convince our neighbors to believe in Jesus, much less to accept our beliefs and way of life as their own. We need to remember that our calling is nothing more or less than to bear witness to what God has done in our lives in ways true to his character—his humility, his gentleness, his mercy, his patience, his compassion. In evangelization, the how and the what are inseparable and mutually determined. The kindness of God leads to repentance, Scripture says. So it is only as we kindly bear witness to God’s kindness that we can help others find the way to repentance. We are at most only midwives: we do not create life in others; we merely come alongside them to help them give birth to the Christ the Spirit has formed in them.

Green, Chris E. W.. Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters . Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Be Awake

Richard Rohr reflects upon Jesus’ teaching his disciples to “be awake,” which Richard understands as the key to authentic religion:  

In Mark 13:33–35, Jesus tells his disciples, “Be awake. Be alert.… You do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cock crow, or in the morning.”  

Most of us probably hear such a passage as if it were threatening or punitive, as if Jesus is saying, “You’d better do it right, or I’m going to get you.” But Jesus is not talking about a judgment. He’s not threatening us or talking about death. He’s talking about the forever coming of Christ, the eternal coming of Christ … now … and now … and now.… 

Christ is always coming; God is always present. It’s we who are not! Jesus tells us to always be ready, to be awake, to be fully conscious and expectant. It’s the key to all spirituality, because we usually are not.  

Most of us just repeat the same routines every day, and we’re upset if there are any interruptions to our patterns. Yet God is invariably and ironically found in the interruptions, the discontinuities, the exceptions, the surprises—and seldom in the patterns. God has to catch us literally “off guard”! 

I often say to myself “Just this!” even amidst the things I don’t want, I don’t expect, and sometimes don’t like—“in the evening, or at midnight, or at cock crow, or in the morning.” [1]  

The great task of religion is to keep us fully awake, alert, and conscious. Then we will know whatever it is that we need to know. When we are present, we will know the Presence. It is that simple and that hard. Too much religion has encouraged us to be unconscious, but God respects us too much for that.  

In the Garden of Gethsemane, the last words Jesus spoke to his apostles were, “Stay awake.” In fact, he says it twice (see Matthew 26:38–41). The Buddha offered the same wisdom; “Buddha,” in fact, means “I am awake.”  

Staying awake comes not from willpower but from a wholehearted surrender to the moment as it is. If we can be present, we will experience what most of us mean by God, and we do not even need to call it God. It’s largely a matter of letting go of resistance to what the moment offers or to quit clinging to a past moment. It is an acceptance of the full reality of what is right here and now. It will be the task of our whole lives.  

We cannot get there by any method whatsoever; we can only be there. The purest form of spirituality is to find God in what is right in front of us—the ability to accept what the French Jesuit and mystic Jean Pierre de Caussade (1675–1751) called the “sacrament of the present moment.” [2]  

From Surprised by God

John Chrysostom, commenting on the story of Lazarus, observed that “many are offended when they see any of those who are pleasing to God suffering anything terrible.” Yet the hard truth is that those who are “dear to God” are no more exempted from the sorrows of this life than are non-believers. Nor would they want to be, Still, now, no less than then, it is a hard truth to hear that someone we love—and someone we know loves God and is loved by God—is ill. We inevitably find ourselves asking some form of this question: why does an all-powerful, all-good God allow any evil or suffering at all? If God in fact does love us, and if, as my eight-year-old son puts it, God “has it in him” to keep us from sorrow, then why is anyone ever ill or in trouble? There is, in short, no good answer for us to give to that question. We can offer no adequate theodicy, no righteous justification for God. Instead, we have to live with what we have received: the hope that when all is said and done, God will show himself to be worthy of our confidence. Until then, we pray and we wait. We pray the prayer of the prophets—“How long, Lord?”—and the prayer of the apostles—“Come quickly, Jesus.” Above all, we pray the prayer of Jesus— “Father, let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Green, Chris E. W.. Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters . Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

A Cosmic Dance

When he teaches about living a contemplative life, CAC faculty memberJames Finley often uses an image he learned from Thomas Merton (1915–1968)—the cosmic dance. In Merton’s words:  

If we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear [God’s] call and follow Him in His mysterious cosmic dance…. 

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not. 

Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance. [1]  

Finley expands on Merton’s metaphor in his book The Contemplative Heart:  

Learning to dance the cosmic dance—this is why we are here on this earth, living the life we are living. At least this is one way of expressing the heart’s conviction concerning the need to recognize and move with the divinity manifested in the primordial rhythms of the day-by-day life we are living. [2]  

There’s a dance of being awake and being asleep, of being alone and being with others. It’s a dance of being seen and understood and not seen and understood at all. There’s a dance of being happy and being sad. There’s a dance of feeling so happy you think you’re finally beginning to understand the spiritual dimension, and then this part where you don’t think you ever will. The dance of being confused and having clarity, going back and forth. And if we were to set it to music, we would say that God is the infinity of the primordial rhythms of your life, and God waits for you to find Her there. God is the infinity of the very rhythms of your day, breathing in, breathing out, being awake, being asleep, standing up and sitting down.  

It’s like God forever comes to visit, but we’re rarely at home. We’re probably out buying a spiritual book or something, or getting in an argument with somebody about God. So we’re always trying to step into this rhythm…. How can you learn to move with the God-given Godly nature of the primordial unfolding rhythms of your life and your passage through time from birth to death? [3] (Good question DJR)

Waking up to Life

In a virtual retreat for Turning to the Mystics podcast listeners, James Finley shares his wisdom on living a contemplative way of life in the world: 

The contemplative way of life is so called because it’s the way of life devoted to the cultivation of contemplative experience. That’s our starting place. To contemplate means to observe carefully, to pay close attention. Most of the things that we notice, we notice in passing, on our way to something else; then, every so often, something gives us reason to pause. Something catches our eye or draws our attention, and we’re drawn for a moment to ponder or to reflect on that which awakened us in this way. [1]  

Finley offers examples of moments in which we awaken to God’s presence in “the cosmic dance”: 

Without warning, we find ourselves falling into the abyss of a star-strewn sky or find our heart impaled by a child’s laughter or the unexpected appearance of the beloved’s face. Without warning we lose our footing in the silence broken and, in the breaking, deepened by the splash of a frog we did not know was there.  

What is so extraordinary about such moments is that nothing beyond the ordinary is present. It is just a starlit sky, a child at play. It is just the primal stuff of life that has unexpectedly broken through the mesh of opinions and concerns that all too often hold us in their spell. It is just life in the immediacy of the present moment before thought begins. Here, in this unforeseen defenselessness, is granted the contemplative experience, however obscure it might be, that we are the cosmic dance of God, that the present moment, just the way it is, is already, in its deepest actuality, the fullness of union with God we seek. [2]  

We choose a contemplative way of life when we recognize and return to these moments of awakening: 

These moments pass and the real question then for us is, “What happens next?” All too often, unfortunately, nothing happens next. The gate to Heaven opened and your cell phone went off. You were already late to a meeting. Nothing happened next.  

But sometimes what happens is that although the moment has passed, you reflect back upon it, and you realize that the subtle moment was a kind of homecoming. You settled, with a sense like “I belong here.” When you start understanding your life in the light of these moments, you realize this feeling that you’re skimming over the surface of the depths of your own life. It’s all the more unfortunate because God’s unexplainable oneness with us is hidden in the depths over which we’re skimming. Then there’s the gift of a holy discontent. We say to ourselves “I don’t like living this way.” I don’t like living exiled from this inner richness that from time-to-time visits me and quickens me from within…. I want to abide in the depths so fleetingly glimpsed. [3] 

Following is an excerpt from Surprised By God, by Chris Green

As readers of this Gospel from Origen to the present day have noted, John’s stories are made to work as master-parables for the life of faith. Even the minutest details in these stories (think, for example, of the woman leaving her bucket at the well or the man by the pool taking up his mat after he is healed) are mysteriously freighted with significance. Lazarus, called back to life but still bound in his grave clothes, figures for us what Romans 8 describes as the conflict of “flesh” and “Spirit.” Even after we have been baptized into Christ’s death and filled with the Spirit of his new-creation life, we remain bound by the “grave clothes” of the old humanity (“Adam”). Long after we are delivered from slavery in Egypt, we find that we still engage the world as slaves. We are delivered from death not only to life-with-God but also life-with-neighbor. We are saved not from one another, but for and to one another. And so continually we have to have our minds renewed, our hearts purged, our imaginations sanctified, our loves reordered. We have continually to be converted not only to Christ, but also to Lazarus.

Green, Chris E. W.. Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters . Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

In this homily, Father Richard describes how different God’s methods of transformation and correction are from ours:  

Isaiah 35:4–7 is quite an important reading for what we call “restorative justice.” It begins by saying: “Say to those who are frightened: Be strong, fear not. Here is your God. He comes with vindication. He comes with divine recompense” (35:4). Most people stop reading here, after the supposed threats—but threats don’t save anybody. We have to continue to the next lines for the “good news” where Isaiah defines how YHWH is going to save the people Israel: “God comes to save you, God will open the eyes of the blind, the ears of the deaf will be cleared, the lame will leap like a stag, and the tongue of the mute will sing” (35:5–6). God doesn’t come with punishment—in fact, God comes to love us, heal us, and transform us.  

Almost all of us in Western civilization were educated with the notion of retributive justice. Our entire penal system and judicial systems are based on it. Even the old-fashioned ideas of heaven and hell are based on it: if we sin this much, we get this much punishment; if we do this much good, we get this much heaven. It’s a pretty sick system, based on quid pro quo thinking. There’s nothing grand, transformative, or godly about it.  

Here’s the great surprise of the Hebrew Scriptures, revealed in this central passage from Isaiah: People are not going to get what they deserve, they’re going to get much better than they deserve. God says, “The way I punish you—this vindication, this retribution—is actually going to be by loving you more and loving you more deeply.” Show me anyone whose heart was changed by punishing them! Love is the only thing that transforms the human heart. Nothing else. I was a jail chaplain for fourteen years and I have seen the evidence. We can punish people all we want, and the more we punish people and imprison people, the worse they become.  

Many Catholics grew up with the threat of purgatory and arbitrary sentences doled out for various sins—from three days in purgatory to three months to three years. Please tell me how that makes us love God more? In fact, what it’s done is make a high percentage of Catholics fear God, not love God. It certainly did not make us love our neighbor.  

I think the question we really have to ask is, “Do we like restorative justice?” If we’re honest, we’ll admit that we like to see people punished. We like to see people in jail and for them to “get what they deserve.” How different God is from humanity! We don’t know God, agree with God, or understand God. We think in such a small, small way. We think fear and anger and judgment and punishment are going to achieve love—but show me where?  

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Sarah Young Jesus Listens

Triumphant God, If You are for me, who can be against me? Please help me to grasp—in the depths of my being—that You really are for me. When things don’t go my way or someone I trusted turns against me, it’s easy for me to feel abandoned. So it’s essential at such times to remind myself of the truth: You are not only with me always, You are for me all the time. This is true on days when I perform well and on days when I don’t, when people treat me well and when they don’t. I can face adversity more calmly and courageously by trusting wholeheartedly that You are for me. Knowing that You will never turn against me gives me confidence to persevere during tough times. Because I belong to You forever, I am continually in Your approving Presence. I’m thankful that it’s ultimately Your opinion of me that matters—and will continue to matter throughout all eternity. And I rejoice that nothing in all creation will be able to separate me from Your Love! In Your invincible Name, Jesus, Amen

ROMANS 8:31; What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 

MATTHEW 28:20 NLT; 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.”

NUMBERS 6:26 AMPC; he Lord lift up His [approving] countenance upon you and give you peace (tranquility of heart and life continually).

ROMANS 8:39; neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 247). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Communal Restoration

Author and minister Dominique DuBois Gilliard identifies the relational emphasis of God’s justice: 

Restorative justice aligns with the heart of God. It supports that justice is primarily relational rather than individual. In the Old Testament, justice and sin were both relational realities, and justice was not about upholding individual rights but protecting the well-being of communities.…  

This rightness of relationships on every level is known as shalom, which is juxtaposed to the state’s understanding of justice. Shalom calls Christians to view and pursue justice in light of God’s original intent. It summons us to live within the confines of covenantal community, where we actively pursue communal flourishing, consider the interests of others (particularly “the least of these”), and prioritize the restoration of righteous relationships in the face of harm. Crime is never merely an individual breaking the law; it is always a communal transgression that fractures shalom.  

God’s justice is restorative and reconciling as opposed to retributive and isolating. Our criminal justice system quarantines people who cause harm, which subsequently harms them through punitive measures and dehumanizing conditions. Theologically, restorative justice acknowledges that divine justice entails people being reconciled to God, each other, the community, and themselves.… 

God’s justice moves toward restoration, reintegration, and redemption. God’s justice is inherently connected to healing the harmed, restoring what has been lost, and reconciling those who are estranged from God and community. God’s heart and justice are inherently restorative.  

Restorative justice gives shape to a communal ethic that is conciliatory in spirit and just in nature. It provides a structure for conflict resolution that facilitates truth telling, accountability, forgiveness, and restitution. The restorative nature of God’s justice is woven throughout Scripture. Divine justice induces relational rightness between hostile parties, the holistic reintegration of exiled individuals, and economic and systemic restitution in the face of harm. Throughout Scripture, God works amid brokenness, restoring victims, communities, and offenders. [1]  

Biblical scholar Christopher Marshall, a practitioner of restorative justice, writes:  

Biblical justice is a complex, multi-faceted reality. It relates to every dimension of human experience, and it has many different applications. But arguably the term that best captures the spirit and direction of biblical justice, both social justice and criminal justice, is the word restoration. Justice flows from God’s own being and designates the way God intends the world to be. But things have fallen into disorder; the shalom of creation has been ruptured. God responds by seeking to restore the world to the way it ought to be.  

Biblical justice seeks to restore dignity and autonomy to those who have been unjustly deprived of access to sufficient resources in order to meet their own basic needs for physical survival and human fulfillment. God acts to reconstruct shalom by overthrowing oppressive powers and setting victims free, and by healing the destructive legacy of sin and death. To know this God is to learn about the meaning of justice. To love this God is to join in God’s great campaign to restore justice to the world. [2] 

Truth and Reconciliation

Richard Rohr teaches that restorative justice is not about denying harm, but about speaking truth in the service of forgiveness:  

Almost all religions and cultures that I know of have believed in one way or another that sin and evil are to be punished and retribution is to be demanded of the sinner in this world—and usually the next world, too. Such retributive justice is a dualistic system of reward and punishment, good folks and bad folks, and makes perfect sense to the ego. I call it the economy of merit or “meritocracy.” This system seems to be the best that prisons, courtrooms, wars, and even most of the church (which should know better) appear equipped to do.  

Jesus, many mystics, and other wisdom traditions—such as the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous—show that sin and failure are, in fact, an opportunity for the transformation and enlightenment of the offender.  

Mere counting and ledger-keeping are not the way of the Gospel. Our best self wants to restore relationships, and not blame or punish. This is the “economy of grace.” (The trouble is that we defined God as “punisher-in-chief” instead of Healer, Forgiver, and Reconciler and so the retribution model was legitimized all the way down!)  

What humanity really needs is an honest exposure of the truth and accountability for what has happened. Only then can human beings move ahead with dignity. Hurt needs to be spoken and heard. It does not just go away on its own. This can then lead to “restorative justice,” which is what the prophets invariably promise to the people of Israel (see Ezekiel 16:53; Isaiah 57:17–19) and is exemplified in Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32) and throughout his healing ministry. We lose that and we lose the Gospel itself. 

As any good therapist knows, we cannot heal what we do not acknowledge. What we do not consciously acknowledge will remain in control from within, festering and destroying us and those around us. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus teaches, “If you bring forth that which is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring it forth, it will destroy you.” [1]  

Only mutual apology, healing, and forgiveness offer a sustainable future for humanity. Otherwise, we are controlled by the past, individually and corporately. We all need to apologize and we all need to forgive or this human project will surely self-destruct. No wonder almost two-thirds of Jesus’ teaching is directly or indirectly about forgiveness. Otherwise, history devolves into taking sides, bitterness, holding grudges, and the violence that inevitably follows. As others have said, “Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different past.” Reality is what it is, and such acceptance leads to great freedom, as long as there is also both accountability and healing forgiveness. 

Divine Love Restores

Father Richard Rohr is convinced that God’s justice in the Bible is fundamentally loving and restorative rather than punitive. 

As we read the Bible, God does not change as much as our knowledge of God evolves. I certainly recognize there are many biblical passages that present God as punitive and retributive, but we must stay with the text—and observe how we gradually let God grow up. Focusing on divine retribution leads to an ego-satisfying and eventually unworkable image of God which situates us inside of a very unsafe and dangerous universe. Both Jesus and Paul observed the human tendency toward retribution and spoke strongly about the limitations of the law. 

The biblical notion of justice, beginning in the Hebrew Scriptures with the Jewish prophets—especially Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Hosea—is quite different. If we read carefully and honestly, we will see that God’s justice is restorative. In each case, after the prophet chastises the Israelites for their transgressions against YHWH, the prophet continues by saying, in effect, “And here’s what YHWH will do for you: God will now love you more than ever! God will love you into wholeness. God will pour upon you a gratuitous, unbelievable, unaccountable, irrefutable love that you will finally be unable to resist.” 

God “punishes” us by loving us more! How else could divine love be supreme and victorious? Check out this theme for yourself: Read passages such as Isaiah 29:13–24, Hosea 6:1–6, Ezekiel 16 (especially verses 59–63), and so many of the Psalms. God’s justice is fully successful when God can legitimate and validate human beings in their original and total identity! God wins by making sure we win—just as any loving human parent does.  

Love is the only thing that transforms the human heart. In the Gospels, we see Jesus fully revealing this divine wisdom. Love takes the shape and symbolism of healing and radical forgiveness—which is just about all that Jesus does. Jesus, who represents God, usually transforms people at the moments when they most hate themselves, when they most feel shame or guilt, or want to punish themselves. Look at Jesus’ interaction with the tax collector Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1–10). He doesn’t belittle or punish Zacchaeus; instead, Jesus goes to his home, shares a meal with him, and treats him like a friend. Zacchaeus’ heart is opened and transformed. Only then does Zacchaeus commit to making reparations for the harm he has done.  

As Isaiah says of God, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8). Yet I am afraid we largely pulled God down into “our thoughts.” We think fear, anger, divine intimidation, threat, and punishment are going to lead people to love. We cannot lead people to the highest level of motivation by teaching them the lowest. God always and forever models the highest, and our task is merely to “imitate God” (Ephesians 5:1). 

Jesus’ Work of Shalom

Author and activist Shane Claiborne connects biblical justice with righteousness:   

The word “justice” gets abused and misused. People demand “justice” all the time but have very different things in mind as they call for it. It has been so misrepresented that justice itself might do well to find some new lawyers; it needs better representation.  

For starters, the word for “justice” in the Bible is the same word as “righteousness.” This overlap shows that the central concern of biblical justice was not “getting what you deserve”; rather, it was making right what was done wrong, restoring what had been destroyed, healing the wounds of an offensive act. It was about bringing balance and wholeness back to the community, which is why you often see scales as an icon for justice.  

But the scales can be misleading, since it is not just about balance or even “eye for an eye” justice. Real justice goes much deeper. One of my friends who is a biblical scholar says the best contemporary translation for the ancient notion of “justice/righteousness” is “restorative justice.” [1] 

Sister Mary Katherine Birge offers examples of ways Jesus enacted restorative justice: 

The kingdom of God that Jesus taught, preached, and enacted during his ministry … begins from a conviction that God’s deepest hope for humanity—that we live with God and with one another in relationships that are just—is possible.… 

Jesus lives, teaches, preaches, and demonstrates to all who are willing to listen to him this same kingdom of God, the image of shalom [wholeness, harmony, and peace]. He makes the kingdom of God present every time he performs a miracle of healing (see Mark 1:29–31), drives out evil spirits from someone they possess (see Matthew 9:32–34), and brings back to this life a person who has died (Mark 5:21–24, 35–43; Luke 7:11–17; John 11:1–44). Through his own hospitality and openness to the alien and the enemy … [and] to those who would put him to death …, [Jesus] makes it possible for others to join him in building the kingdom of God, building shalom, in the present age.… 

This is the task of those who would follow Jesus: to live in just relationships with one another, to work at restoring to wholeness those people and relationships that they and others have broken, and to repair as best they can what cannot be restored. This practice of restoring and repairing relationships between people and God and among people themselves is not unlike that in which the contemporary practice of restorative justice engages. Like Jesus’ own work … to bring about the fullness of shalom, through the practice of right relationships and the healing of those people who are “broken,” restorative justice focuses on the present and future needs of the victim, the perpetrator, and society in order to repair what has been broken or stolen from the victim, to bring the perpetrator to acceptance of responsibility, and to mend the threads that hold society together. [2]