In Jesus’ painful death, theologian Kwok Pui Lan experiences God’s solidarity with the suffering of Asian women. 

Jesus cried out for Jerusalem. His sorrow was so deep that Matthew had to use a “feminine metaphor” to describe what he actually felt: “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…” (Matthew 23:37). How much more would a mother lament over her dead son who died in the wars in Indochina? How can the mothers, wives, and lovers in Korea who are separated from their loved ones stop crying over the divided country?…  

[Asian] women suffer from the millennia-old prejudices and discriminations of the male-dominated Eastern cultures, from rampant socio-political exploitations, and from their structural vulnerability. These big burdens join hand-in-hand to rob a woman of her personhood, to render her a no-body.  

Because suffering touches the innermost part of her being, she feels the pain of the suffering God: a God who cried out from the cross … a God who was put to death by the military and political forces, who was stripped naked, insulted and spat upon. Didn’t the prophet Isaiah say: “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces…” (Isaiah 53:3)? God has taken the risk to become a human being, and experiences personally what it means to be a no-body.  

It is the very person on the cross that suffers like us, was rendered a no-body, who illuminates our tragic human existence and speaks to countless women in Asia. We are not looking to Jesus as a mere example to follow, neither shall we try to idolize him. We see Jesus as the God who takes human form and suffers and weeps with us. [1] 

For Richard Rohr, the “bias from the bottom” is a way of following God and living life from the side of suffering:   Instead of legitimating what we are already doing, liberation theology simply tries to read the text from the side of the pain. That’s all. For me, that is the icon of Jesus—to read not from the side of power, but from the side of pain. Who has the pain? Where is the pain? As many have said, Jesus is on both sides of every war. The Germans in the First World War had their “Gott mit uns” [God with us] on their belt buckles, but God is in the foxholes of both sides. God is with all people crying out in their pain. Doesn’t that leave us feeling helpless? It’s not an exclusive god of our group anymore; it’s the universal God of all the earth, of all peoples. But it’s only possible to think this way when we move to the level of wisdom, which is the level of liberation. We don’t have time for group-centric religion anymore. There is too much suffering.

______________________________________________________

Sarah Young Jesus Listens

My living Lord, Help me not to be so hard on myself! I know that You can bring good out of everything—even my mistakes. My finite mind tends to look backwards, longing to undo decisions I have come to regret. This is such a waste of time and energy, leading only to frustration! Instead of floundering in the past, I want to release my mistakes to You. As I look to You in trust, I’m confident that Your infinite creativity can weave my good choices and my bad ones into a lovely design. I know I’ll continue to make mistakes in this life—because I’m only human. You’ve shown me that thinking I should live an error-free life is a symptom of pride. My failures can actually be a source of blessing—humbling me and giving me empathy for other people in their weaknesses. Also, failure vividly highlights my dependence on You. I’m grateful that You are able to bring beauty out of the morass of my mistakes. My part is to trust You and watch to see what You will do. In Your marvelous Name, Jesus, Amen

ROMANS 8:28 ESV; And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, 

PROVERBS 11:2; When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom. 

PROVERBS 3:5 ESV; Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. 6 In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.

MICAH 7:7; But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me. 

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 212). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Heaven and Hell Are Here and Now

… Creator be with us as we are born anew 
Amidst the frail anxiety of our lives 
Come among us with your healing spirit 
Carried through Christ, our brother, your child. Amen.  
—Carol J. Gallagher, “Heaven and Hell”  

Episcopal bishop and member of the Cherokee nation Carol J. Gallagher reflects on how her Indigenous ancestry and the profound suffering of her people enrich her understanding of heaven and hell:  

To reflect on heaven and hell is to honestly walk in the ways of my ancestors…. I have heard their ancient stories, the stories of survival and persistence, and I have lived the inheritance of people who have been removed, reviled, and turned away. It has been an inheritance of pain and suffering, and an inheritance of light and beauty….  

Heaven and hell are not so much places we end up in the afterlife or places of reward and punishment, but rather, they are moments in relationship, lived experience here and in the time that follows our sojourn on this earth. On the one hand, the sense of heaven, for me, rests in the connection and interwoven sense of life that is organic to a tribal community. On the other hand, hell might be imagined as those times of severe dislocation, removal, and dis-connection to tribe and family….  

Gallagher understands heaven and hell as the impact of our choices to live in relationship with creation and to follow a God with a “bias from the bottom”: 

Our place of removal, Oklahoma Indian Territory, was a dry place, ever so different from our homelands. Yet, even there our people found promise, small hillocks and shaded streams, places that sang to us of home…. In the midst of the worst kind of hell people can live through—displacement, dislocation, and dishonor—we sought a little heaven in our little gardens and small streams, and in one another. In the night we sang our songs and told our stories. From the outside we might have looked damned, but on the inside we knew there was yet more to come. We knew our God to be understanding of the heavy burdens we were bearing, as one who walked the removal road with us, who suffered such loss and indignations, who would hold us close and carry us to a place of healing and renewal.…  

To me, then, heaven and hell are concepts that are part of all creation. Heaven and hell exist within and beyond the confines of our world of space and time. We can participate in heaven by living in harmony and respect with all of creation or in hell by bringing greed, selfishness, and disease upon the whole earth.…  

We are endowed by the Creator with power to live our lives for the well-being of all. Heaven and hell are about living (or not) in right relationship with all of creation, of honoring or dishonoring all, and knowing the love of God by sharing it with all of our relatives: human, plants, trees, four-legged, winged, water, and earth all woven together.

[59] Law and Spirit

The commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep them: the man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces. It needs a clean heart to have pure hands, all the power of a live soul to keep the law—a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not the effort of duty.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 31-32). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

God’s Universal Love

For decades, Murphy Davis (1948–2020) advocated for people on death row and for people without homes. Here she comments on Matthew 25:31–46, a passage she saw as foundational to her community and work:   

Jesus said to his followers, “The time is coming when I won’t be physically with you anymore. You need to know how to follow me, know my suffering, comfort me, and be with me. I live with you and among you in the presence of the poor and the outsider. Serve them and you are serving me. Befriend them and you will be friends of God. Shut them out, harass them, deny them what they need to sustain their lives, and you deny God.” Simply put, Jesus was teaching the disciples that God is present among us in the poor and suffering ones: the sickest, hungriest, smelliest, most neglected, most condemned. How we treat them is a direct indication of our love of God.…  

As the Latin American liberation theologians teach us, a spirituality that is not concrete is not real.… Our spirituality is how we hammer out the meaning of our encounter with God …: here, now, in this place, with these people, in the midst of this struggle. Whatever our circumstances, God comes to us in the poor and oppressed and invites us to open up our lives. When we do share, welcome, and invite, we find ourselves in the glad company of a loving God. We are no longer alone. We are not abandoned. When we reject the invitation, we choose the path of isolation. We cut ourselves off. We might still have the food or whatever we didn’t share clutched in our hand, but when we look up, there is no one to share the meal with us. We are alone. This is essential to the nature of a liberation spirituality: always we are invited in, invited into community. [1]  

Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez (b. 1928) teaches God’s love for the poor—and all of us:  

For me, the first question of theology is how do we say to the poor: God loves you?… 

One of the central axioms of liberation theology has thus been “the preferential option for the poor.” Sometimes this concept is misinterpreted to mean that there is a competition for God’s love between the rich and the poor. This is not the meaning. In fact, the concept displays the universality of God’s love for all—a love that, in a world structured to the benefit of the powerful, extends even to the least among us. In fact, Jesus shows us that God’s love is clearest there. Like a mother who tends most tenderly to the weakest and threatened of her children, so it is with God’s care for the poor. And the call of the gospel is for us to do the same, to make the same option, to show that God’s love is universal by focusing our attention on the most threatened among us. [2] 

[57] Bondage

A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (p. 31). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

The Exodus Beginning

In the CAC’s early years, Richard Rohr often shared his talk “Gospel Call for Compassionate Action—Bias from the Bottom.” Richard emphasized the Hebrew experience of freedom in the Exodus:  

Something happened that allowed an enslaved group of Semitic peoples to go through a liberation experience and to be led to the lands we now call Israel and Palestine. The Exodus journey became an externalized and internalized journey, as true spirituality always is. It marked the beginnings of the creation of this people, and the creation of a spirituality that includes both action and contemplation.  

We know the man called Moses at the heart of this Exodus journey. The account begins with his early religious experience (Exodus 3:2–6). We know he is a murderer; that he escapes from the law and lives out in the desert, taking care of his father-in-law’s sheep when he has his “burning bush” experience of God. It’s a nature experience, which is very often our own first religious experience. There’s no tabernacle, church, temple, priesthood, or anything to do with formalized religion. 

Immediately upon this experience, the voice Moses hears from the bush says: “I have heard the groaning of my people in Egypt and you are to go, confront the Pharaoh and tell him to let my people go” (see Exodus 3:7–10). The contemplative “burning bush” experience comes and immediately has social, economic, and political implications. There is no authentic God experience which does not situate us in the world in a different way and cause us to see things differently and act accordingly. [1] 

Theologian Dwight Hopkins writes about what it has meant for Black Americans in poverty to read the Exodus story and discover a God who liberates:  

Today’s poor African Americans struggle for freedom and encounter oppressed conditions similar to those in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. The Hebrew Scriptures reveal [YHWH] compassionately hearing and seeing the dire difficulties experienced by the least in society, in this case, the Hebrew slaves. When the poor today read the story of Hebrew slaves and their relationship to a liberator God, they can see that they are not alone in their cruel predicament in contemporary America. 

The biblical stories of exodus feature an oppressed people (that is, the Hebrews) who suffered at the hands of brutal taskmasters; were accused falsely; were pursued by forces of prejudice; dwelled in the midst of a wilderness experience; went through periods of anxiety, fear, and doubt about the future, at times longing for a return to their former status in an inhuman system; and quarreled with their leaders while doggedly continuing along the way to freedom….

Moreover, the African American poor, reading the Hebrew Scriptures from their position on the bottom of American society, discover a whole new world different from the dominating Christianity and theology of mainstream American believers. The exodus theme does not end with harsh difficulties. On the contrary, the hope of deliverance cancels out the pain and gives today’s poor the strength to “keep on keeping on.” [2] 

Stories from the Bottom

Father Richard shows how one of the Bible’s persistent themes is how God chooses the rejected, the outsider, and the unlikely for grace and divine purpose:  

One of the few subversive texts in history is the Bible! The Bible is most extraordinary because it repeatedly and invariably legitimizes the people on the bottom, not the people on the top. Rejected sons, barren women, sinners, lepers, or outsiders are always the ones chosen by God. It’s rather obvious when pointed out to us. In every case, we are presented with some form of powerlessness—and from that situation God creates a new kind of power. This is the constant pattern found hidden in plain sight. [1] 

We repeatedly see God showing barren women favor in the Hebrew Scriptures. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, was barren and past child-bearing years when God blessed her with baby Isaac (Genesis 17:15–19). Rachel, Jacob’s wife, was barren until God “opened her womb” and she bore Joseph (Genesis 30:22–24). Barren Hannah poured out her soul before the Lord, and God gave her Samuel (1 Samuel 1). [2] 

Even before Moses, God chose a “nobody,” Abraham, and made him a somebody. God chose Jacob over Esau, even though Esau was the elder, more earnest son and Jacob was a shifty, deceitful character. Election has nothing to do with worthiness but only divine usability, and in the Bible, usability normally comes from having walked through one’s own wrongness or “littleness.” God chose Israel’s first king Saul out of the tribe of Benjamin, the smallest and weakest tribe. The pattern always seems to be that “the last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16). We see this especially in Mary, a “humble servant” (Luke 1:48). This is so consistently the pattern that we no longer recognize its subversive character. 

One of the more dramatic biblical stories in this regard is the story of David. God chose him, the youngest and least experienced son of Jesse, to be king over the nation. His father, who had many sons, did not even mention David as a possibility, but left him out in the fields (1 Samuel 16). David was thus the forgotten son who then became the beloved son of YHWH, the archetypal whole man of Israel, laying the foundation for the son of David, Jesus. [3] 

In case after case, the victim becomes the real victor, leading philosopher René Girard (1923–2015) to speak of the “privileged position of the most victimized victim” as the absolutely unique and revolutionary perspective of the Gospels. [4] Without it, we are hardly prepared to understand the “folly of the cross” of Jesus. Without this bias from the bottom, religion ends up defending propriety instead of human pain, the status quo instead of the suffering masses, triumphalism instead of truth, clerical privilege instead of charity and compassion. And this from the Christianity that was once “turning the whole world upside down” (Acts 17:6). 

[56] The Moral Law

The immediate end of the commandments never was that men should succeed in obeying them, but that, finding they could not do that which yet must be done, finding the more they tried the more was required of them, they should be driven to the source of life and law—of their life and His law—to seek from Him such reinforcement of life as should make the fulfillment of the law as possible, yea, as natural, as necessary.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 30-31). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Richard writes that “everything belongs” when we loosen our ego’s grip and allow ourselves to receive and dwell in the present moment: 

At the level of contemplative consciousness, we move beyond dualistic, either/or thinking. At this point, life and death, goodness and badness are not opposites. The one does not cancel out the other. There is enough spaciousness for everything to belong, a return to an elemental innocence, some kind of radical “okayness.” Our dualistic, logical minds keep coming to offer us the satanic temptation to eat again of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but this time we refuse.  

It is only the first level of consciousness that needs that kind of security system and explanation for everything. That is what it means to be like God: I will be the decider. So many Christians are absolutely sure they know who is going to heaven and who is going to hell. What a strange and horrible comfort that must be! Why would anything except the tiny mind want that? The great mind hands that back to where it belongs, with the only mind where everything does belong—which is, of course, the mind of God.  

Every bit of resistance to this contemplative consciousness comes from some previous mental explanation of how things should be, or what we want or expect them to be. If we start our day with ten expectations, we have just set ourselves up for an unhappy day. When we live out of our minds, it just creates expectations and reasons to be disappointed. Don’t do that! We’ve got to choose God here, in this moment, and whatever happens, happens. I don’t care how crowded or late the bus is or even if it breaks down three times. It’s okay. We don’t always succeed at this, but when we do, we know that everything belongs. We know that God can use even this and that maybe the experience really was all right.

It seems that simply allowing ourselves to be here, to recognize the sacrament and the grace of the present moment, is enough to allow God’s loving gaze to happen. What we are doing in the allowing is returning the gaze. That’s it. We are completing the circuit and saying it’s okay.  

I am not advocating for some kind of cheap universalism. We don’t want to become people who glibly say “everything belongs” in the face of suffering and injustice. I hope you don’t hear me saying that. It might sound like I am contradicting myself, and our calculating minds may be saying, “Come on. It can’t be that simple.” I think that is why the diabolical, beguiling mind keeps confusing us and trapping us in head trips, instead of surrendering to the naked now that God always inhabits. This is the place where the incarnation is always taking place, and where God is mysteriously present in every moment, perfectly hidden and at the same time perfectly revealed.  

_________________________________________________________

Sarah Young Jesus Listens

Blessed Jesus, I invite You to permeate my moments with Your Presence so I can see things from Your perspective. When I’m around someone who irritates me, I’m prone to focus on that person’s flaws. Instead of this negative focus, I need to gaze at You through the eyes of my heart and let those irritants wash over me without sinking in. I know that judging other people is a sinful snare—and it draws me away from You. How much better it is to simply be joyful in You, my Savior! Strength and Joy are in Your dwelling place. The more I fix my eyes on You, the more You strengthen me and fill me with Joy. Please train my mind to stay aware of You even when other things are demanding my attention. Thank You for creating me with an amazing brain that can be conscious of several things at once. I want to keep my eyes on You, Lord, enjoying the Light of Your Presence continually. In Your strong Name, Amen

MATTHEW 7:1 HCSB; Do not judge, so that you won’t be judged. 

HABAKKUK 3:18; Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.

1 CHRONICLES 16:27; Glory and honour are in his presence; strength and gladness are in his place.

HEBREWS 12:2; fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 205). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

Following the examples of Jesus and Francis of Assisi (1182–1226), Richard encourages us to inclusive compassion: 

Francis, like Jesus, refused to exclude things from the garden of grace; there is no exclusionary instinct in either of them—except toward exclusion itself! Francis had a genius for not eliminating the negative, but instead using it, learning from it, and thus incorporating it. He goes to the edge and the bottom of society, he kisses the leper, he loves the poor. He doesn’t hide from his shadow self but advertises it. So much of our religion has taught us to deny or hide our shadow, which forces us into a fatal split from foundational reality.  

Just as we grow by ultimately accepting and forgiving our own failures, conscious people, like Jesus and Pope Francis, are able to say about others, “Who am I to judge?” (Luke 12:14). That’s quite the opposite of religion as exclusion! In my fourteen years as a jail chaplain, I met people who had done things that are wrong, sinful, immoral, or “bad”; yet when I drew close to a particular life, I found that the human heart is most often either sincere, mistaken, or afraid. From that place, they sought apparent good but not the true good. It made them do some stupid things; they’re suffering for that now because evil is its own punishment. But when we draw close to it, the human heart has a kind of tenderness, sweetness, and littleness, even in its fragility and fear. As Scottish minister John Watson (1850–1907) stated, “Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.” [1] Remember, sisters and brothers, Jesus is really saying that we are punished by our sins rather than for our sins. None of us know the wounds that every human being carries or why they do the things they do. Human sin, failure, and imperfection are to be wept over and pitied, not something to be abhorred. [2] 

Franciscan spirituality puts a big exclamation point behind Jesus’ words, “The last will be first and the first will be last” (Matthew 20:16; Luke 13:30) and Paul’s words, “When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). Upside-downness is at the heart of our message, always prompting us to look more deeply and broadly at things. This opens our eyes to recognize God’s self-giving at the far edges where most of us cannot or will not see God, such as in other religions, in any we define as outsiders or sinners, and even to the farthest edge of our seeing, toward those who fight us and oppose us—our so-called enemies.  

We must grow up to our full stature to find the full stature of God (Ephesians 4:13). Small souls are incapable of knowing a great God, and great souls are never satisfied with a small or stingy God. Once we become fully conscious ourselves, all things will be beautiful. [3] 

___________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Young Jesus Listens

My perfect Guide, You are my Shepherd who guides and shields me. You’re the perfect Shepherd, and Your care for me is wonderfully complete: You love me with endless, unfailing Love. You know everything about me—my weaknesses and limitations, my struggles and sins, my strengths and abilities. So You are able to shepherd me like no other! Help me walk through this perilous world in trusting dependence on You. I know that You go before me and open up the way, carefully preparing the path I will follow. I’m counting on You to remove many dangers and obstacles from the road ahead—and to provide all I need for coping with the difficulties that remain. Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for You are close beside me. Your nearness comforts and delights me. As I stay in communication with You, I trust You to guide me faithfully through this day—and all my days. For You are my God forever and ever; You will be my Guide even to the end. In Your comforting Name, Jesus, Amen

PSALM 23:1 AMPC; The Lord is my Shepherd [to feed, guide, and shield me], I shall not lack.

EXODUS 15:13; In your unfailing love you will lead. the people you have redeemed. In your strength you will guide them. to your holy dwelling. 

PSALM 23:4 NLT; Even when I walk through the darkest valley,* I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.

PSALM 48:14; For this God is our God forever and ever; He will be our guide even till death.

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 204). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.

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Darkness into light
Light leads into life
Life breathed into man
And to man He gave a wife
But not a savior 'til
A cross became The Cross

Evil turned to rain
The rain became a flood
Flood became a promise
In the colors up above
For a savior when
A cross became The Cross

From suffering and death came resurrection
His own sacrifice to my salvation
Life on Earth gives way to life eternal
So we sing hallelujah

Virgin to a mom
A babe became the Christ
Christ became the King
Of my heart and of my life
He's my Savior 'cause
A cross became The Cross

The lame began to walk
The blind began to see
Lazarus is alive and
Jesus lives inside of me
As my Savior since
A cross became The Cross

From suffering and death came resurrection
His own sacrifice to my salvation
Life on Earth gives way to life eternal
So we sing hallelujah

A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross

A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross
A cross became The Cross

Water turned to wine
Wine becomes the blood
Blood poured out for me
And now I am in love

Water turned to wine
Wine becomes the blood
Blood poured out for me
And now I am in love

With my Savior 'cause
A cross became The Cross
I'm in love with my Savior 'cause
A cross became The Cross

God Is Found in All Things

Father Richard finds the foundation for his teaching that everything belongs in the crucifixion itself:  

The cross is a perfect metaphor for what we mean by “everything belongs.” The rational, calculating mind can never fully understand the mystery of the cross. These insights can only be discovered through contemplative seeing: God is to be found in all things, even and most especially in the painful, tragic, and sinful things, exactly where we do not want to look for God. The crucifixion of the God-Human is at the same moment the worst and best thing in human history. 

Human existence is neither perfectly consistent, nor is it incoherent chaos. Instead, life has a cruciform pattern. All of life is a “coincidence of opposites” (St. Bonaventure), a collision of cross-purposes. We are all filled with contradictions needing to be reconciled. This is the precise burden and tug of all human existence. 

The price that we pay for holding together these opposites is invariably some form of “crucifixion.” Jesus himself was archetypally hung between a good thief and a bad thief, between heaven and earth, holding together both his humanity and his divinity, a male body with a feminine soul. He was a Jewish believer who forgave and loved everyone else. He “reconciled all things in himself” (Ephesians 2:14–16). Jesus really is an icon of what Carl Jung called the holy and whole-making spirit. [1] 

The demand for the perfect is the enemy of the possible good. Be peace and do justice, but let’s not expect perfection in ourselves or the world. Perfectionism contributes to intolerance and judgmentalism and makes ordinary love largely impossible. Jesus was an absolute realist, patient with the ordinary, the broken, the weak, and those who failed. Following him is not a “salvation scheme” or a means of creating some ideal social order as much as it is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world, and to love the way that God loves—which we cannot do by ourselves. 

The doctrine, folly, and image of the cross is the great clarifier and truth-speaker for all human history. We can rightly speak of being “saved” by it. Jesus crucified and resurrected is the whole pattern revealed, named, effected, and promised. Jesus did not come to found a separate or new religion as much as he came to present a universal message of vulnerability and foundational unity that is necessary for all religions, the human soul, and history itself to survive. Thus, Christians can rightly call Jesus “the savior of the world” (John 4:42), but no longer in the competitive and imperialistic way that they have usually presented him. By very definition, vulnerability and unity do not compete or dominate. The cosmic Christ is no threat to anything but separateness, illusion, domination, and the imperial ego.  

[54] Christ’s Disregards

The Lord cared neither for isolated truth nor for orphaned deed. It was truth in the inward parts, it was the good heart, the mother of good deeds, He cherished…. It was good men He cared about, not notions of good things, or even good actions, save as the outcome of life, save as the bodies in which the primary live actions of love and will in the soul took shape and came forth.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 29-30). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

We Create Exclusion or Belonging

Richard Rohr describes how exclusion works. Everything does not belong when people and systems project their evil elsewhere:  

If our egos are still in charge, we will find a “disposable” person or group on which to project our problems. People who haven’t come to at least a minimal awareness of their own shadow side will always find someone else to hate, fear, and exclude. Hatred holds a group together much more quickly and easily than love and inclusivity, I am sorry to say. [1] 

Sadly, the history of violence and the history of religion are almost the same history. When religion remains at an immature level, it tends to create very violent people who ensconce themselves on the side of the good, the worthy, the pure, the saved. They project all their evil somewhere else and attack it over there. [2] 

Something has to be sacrificed. Blood has to be shed. Someone has to be blamed, attacked, tortured, imprisoned, or killed. Sacrificial systems create religions and governments of exclusion and violence. Yet Jesus taught and modeled inclusivity and forgiveness! 

As long as we try to deal with evil by some other means than forgiveness, we will never experience the real meaning of evil and sin. We will keep projecting, fearing, and attacking it over there, instead of “gazing” on it within ourselves and weeping over it.  

The longer we gaze, the more we will see our own complicity in and profitability from the sin of others, even if it’s the satisfaction of feeling we are on higher moral ground. Forgiveness demands three new simultaneous “seeings”: I must see God in the other, I must access God in myself, and I must experience God in a new way that is larger than an “Enforcer.” [3] 

Author Cole Arthur Riley, creator of Black Liturgies, considers the toll that exclusion takes:  

Exclusion operates by the same rule of mutuality as welcome, for it harms both the excluded and the excluder. If you are the hands of exclusion for long enough, you learn acceptance only at the hands of someone else’s exile. You learn belonging as competition, not restoration. It is also a kind of restlessness, for the energy you expend forbidding others to walk through the door of community is only matched by the energy you expend competing to stay inside yourself. This is maybe more dangerous; no one ever perceives the doorkeeper as needing an invitation themselves.… 

I wonder if God feels as alienated from us as we do from [God]. Sometimes, it cracks me up to think of the stories that describe Christ just boldly inviting himself over to people’s houses for dinner. Roaming around telling people to stop everything and follow him. Multiplying food, but making everyone sit down in groups to eat it. He knew how to make his own belonging. Do we? [4] 

[53] Goodness

The Father was all in all to the Son, and the Son no more thought of His own goodness than an honest man thinks of his honesty. When the good man sees goodness, he thinks of his own evil: Jesus had no evil to think of, but neither does He think of His goodness: He delights in His Father’s. “Why callest thou Me good?”

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (p. 29). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Holding the Paradox

This week, the Daily Meditations focus on the fourth of CAC’s Seven Themes of an Alternative Orthodoxy:  

Everything belongs. No one needs to be punished, scapegoated, or excluded. We cannot directly fight or separate ourselves from evil or untruth. Evil becomes apparent when exposed to the Truth. [1] 

Richard Rohr affirms that “everything belongs,” both the good and the bad, and it takes discernment to learn how to hold the paradox: 

The spiritual gift of discernment (1 Corinthians 12:10) shows how seemingly good things can be recognized as sometimes bad things, and seemingly bad things can also be seen to bear some good fruit. Darn it! This kind of discernment invites people into yes/and thinking, rather than simplistic either/or thinking. This is the difference between merely having correct information and the true spiritual gift of wisdom (1 Corinthians 12:8).  

Once we have learned to discern the real and disguised nature of both good and evil, we recognize that everything is broken and fallen, weak and poor—while still being the dwelling place of God: you and me, our countries, our children, our marriages, and even our churches, mosques, and synagogues. That is not a put-down of anybody or anything, but actually creates the freedom to love imperfect things. As Jesus told the rich young man, “God alone is good” (Mark 10:18). We cannot wait for things to be totally perfect to fall in love with them, or we will never love anything. Now, instead, we can love everything! [2] 

Jesus uses a number of mixture images to illustrate the tension of our own mixture of good and evil. They seem to say this world is a mixture of different things, and unless we learn how to see, we don’t know how to separate; we get lost in the weeds and can’t see the wheat. In one parable, servants ask, “Should we pull out the weeds?” Jesus responds, “No. Let them both grow together until the harvest.” Then, at the end of time, he will decide what is wheat and what is weed (Matthew 13:24–30). But we are a mixture of weed and wheat, and we always will be. As Martin Luther put it, we are simul justus et peccator[at once justified and a sinner], each of us simultaneously saint and sinner. That’s the mystery of holding weed and wheat together in our one field of life. It takes a lot more patience, compassion, forgiveness, and love than aiming for some illusory perfection that usually cannot see its own faults. The only true perfection available to us is the honest acceptance of our imperfection. 

If we must have perfection to be happy with ourselves, we have only two choices. We can either ignore our own evil (deny the weeds) or we can give up in discouragement (deny the wheat). But if we put aside perfection and face the tension of having both, then we can hear the good news with open hearts. [3] 

Oneness with Everyone

If “everything belongs,” then no one needs to be punished, scapegoated, or excluded. [1] God has loving room for all of us—even those we consider enemies. Author Lerita Coleman Brown considers the mystic Howard Thurman’s (1899–1981) insistence that everyone is a child of God.   

The understanding that I am a holy child of God contains within itself often unrealized consequences. If I embrace this notion about myself, I must accept its corollary: that is, if I am a holy child of God, then so is everyone else. This sentiment is echoed in an interview in which Howard’s daughter, Olive Thurman Wong, bemoaned the fact that people didn’t fully comprehend the importance of oneness in her father’s life and work. “‘Oneness’ is an easy enough thing to bandy about,” writes Thurman scholar Liza Rankow, who interviewed Wong. “It is even an easy thing to profess, until we realize that it must include not only the people we like and agree with, not only those to whom we are sympathetic, but also those whom we view as abhorrent (whatever side of a political position we may hold). We don’t get to choose who we are one with—it’s everybody.” [2] 

Sometimes the faces of the people I detest flash across my mind and heart…. How can they possibly be holy children of God? Howard Thurman answers this question in the final chapter of Jesus and the Disinherited. Pointing to the centrality of the love ethic in Jesus’s teachings, he observes the types of people Jesus befriended who, by all accounts, should have been absolute enemies. Thurman points to the necessity of extinguishing bitterness within the heart in order to recognize adversaries as holy children of God. [3] 

Thurman emphasizes Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies as a radical challenge to love as if everyone belongs: 

Jesus, however, approaches life from the point of view of God. The serious problem for him had to be: Is the Roman a child of God? Is my enemy God’s child? If he is, I must work upon myself until I am willing to bring him back into the family.… If God loves them, that binds me. Can it be that God does not know how terrible my enemy is? No, God knows them as well as he knows himself and much better than I know them. It must be true, then, that there is something in every human that remains intact, inviolate, regardless of what he [or she] does. I wonder! Is this true? Is there an integrity of the person, so intrinsic in its value and significance that no deed, however evil, can ultimately undermine this given thing? If a person is of infinite worth in the sight of God, whether they are saint or sinner, whether they are a good person or a bad person, evil or not, if that is true, then I am never relieved of my responsibility for trying to make contact with this worthy thing in them. [4] 

[52] The Body

It is by the body that we come into contact with Nature, with our fellowmen, with all their revelations to us. It is through the body that we receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of beauty, of science. It is through the body that we are both trained outward from ourselves, and driven inward into our deepest selves to find God. There is glory and might in this vital evanescence, this slow glacier like flow of clothing and revealing matter, this ever uptossed rainbow of tangible humanity. It is no less of God’s making than the spirit that is clothed therein.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (pp. 28-29). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Lewis, C. S.. George MacDonald (p. 28). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Episcopal priest and author Adam Bucko reminds us of the Gospel call to solidarity with the poor, who reveal Christ:  

The Christian spiritual tradition is very clear about how we are to relate to those who are fragile, who have been rejected and forgotten, and who are standing on the bread lines waiting for food. We are to see them as Christ and approach them with the same kind of reverence and willingness to say yes. This identification of Christ with the poor is such that an old Anglo-Catholic saying, often cited in the context of the slum priest movement of the 1920s, tells us that unless we are willing and able to see Christ on the highways and byways of our cities in those who are rejected, homeless, and poor, we have no business talking about meeting him in the Eucharist. Our faith cannot be complete unless we have connected the two. As one theologian said, “The real presence of Christ, which is hidden in the bread and wine, is visibly manifested in his social presence in the poor who are the sign and image of his ongoing passion in the world.” [1] 

Bucko visited a refugee camp in Greece and draws a parallel between the “Good Shepherd” Jesus and those who act in solidarity with refugees: 

In Jesus’s Parable of the Lost Sheep, we meet the Christ who is the good shepherd, who, like the thousands of volunteers who rescued those refugees from the freezing waters of the Mediterranean Sea, is there searching for those who are lost, in need of being wrapped in literal or metaphorical blankets of motherly love. We meet the One who is an open gate, not unlike the gate of that refugee camp, which made the passage to safety and care possible for so many. I love how frankly Matthew’s Gospel puts it:  

What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost (Matthew 18:12–14).

Indeed, Christ comes to us not only in prayer, not only in beautiful celebrations like those that we experience in church on the great festivals and holidays, but also in those who are hungry and thirsty for our presence and our love, in those who ask us for help. And, “our attitude towards them, or rather our commitment to them, will indicate whether or not we are directing our existence in conformity with the will of the Father.” [2] They both open the door to God’s house for us and they give us a chance to become the door for others.  

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Sarah Young Jesus Listens

Everlasting God, You, the Creator of the universe, are with me and for me. You are all I need! When I feel as if something is lacking, it’s because I’m not connecting with You at a deep level. You offer me abundant Life. Help me respond to Your abundance by receiving Your blessings gratefully—trusting in Your provision and refusing to worry about anything. I’m learning that it’s not primarily the adverse events in my world that make me anxious; the main culprit is my thoughts about those events. When something troubles me, my mind starts working strenuously to take control of the situation—striving to bring about the result I desire. My thoughts close in on the problem like ravenous wolves. Determined to make things go my way, I forget that You are in charge of my life. At such times, I desperately need to switch my focus from the problem to Your Presence. Teach me how to stop my anxious striving and wait for You—watching in hope to see what You will do. You are God my Savior! In Your redeeming Name, Jesus, Amen

ISAIAH 41:10 NLT; Don’t be afraid, for I am with you. Don’t be discouraged, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will hold you up with my victorious right hand. 

ROMANS 8:31–32;  What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?

JOHN 10:10 ESV; The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. 

MICAH 7:7; But as for me, I watch in hope for the LORD, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me

Young, Sarah. Jesus Listens (p. 198). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.