Remain in Relationship 

“Jesus said, “Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. . . . As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love.” 
—John 15:4–5, 9 

This year’s Daily Meditations theme is “Nothing Stands Alone,” a truth revealed in God as Trinity and throughout all of creation. This week we explore how listening with depth, respect, and even reverence is key to building and maintaining loving relationships. In this homily, Father Richard speaks of Jesus’ desire for us to remain connected: 

I want you to be honest: Would you rather have a friend who is always right or one who is in right relationship with you? I think I know the answer: We’d rather have someone who’s in right relationship with us. In fact, someone who’s right all the time can be pretty obnoxious. Would we rather have a friend who’s always correct or a friend to whom we’re always connected? Of course, we’d rather have the second.  

So why did we in the West seemingly change the rules for God? Many of us grew up thinking God wanted us to be right, to be correct, even to be perfect. What this passage in John’s Gospel is saying is that God wants people who are in right relationship, which means that we are open, and that we can listen to others with understanding and compassion. It means that we can admit when we’re wrong, which is almost every day for most of us. It certainly is for me.   

And yet we keep condemning ourselves and others for not being perfect, for not being right, for not being correct. This parable, really one of the most beautiful in all the gospels, tells us what God desires—simply that we remain connected, a branch on the vine, which is the love of God.  

“Jesus said, “Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. . . . As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love.” 
—John 15:4–5, 9 

This year’s Daily Meditations theme is “Nothing Stands Alone,” a truth revealed in God as Trinity and throughout all of creation. This week we explore how listening with depth, respect, and even reverence is key to building and maintaining loving relationships. In this homily, Father Richard speaks of Jesus’ desire for us to remain connected: 

I want you to be honest: Would you rather have a friend who is always right or one who is in right relationship with you? I think I know the answer: We’d rather have someone who’s in right relationship with us. In fact, someone who’s right all the time can be pretty obnoxious. Would we rather have a friend who’s always correct or a friend to whom we’re always connected? Of course, we’d rather have the second.  

So why did we in the West seemingly change the rules for God? Many of us grew up thinking God wanted us to be right, to be correct, even to be perfect. What this passage in John’s Gospel is saying is that God wants people who are in right relationship, which means that we are open, and that we can listen to others with understanding and compassion. It means that we can admit when we’re wrong, which is almost every day for most of us. It certainly is for me.   

And yet we keep condemning ourselves and others for not being perfect, for not being right, for not being correct. This parable, really one of the most beautiful in all the gospels, tells us what God desires—simply that we remain connected, a branch on the vine, which is the love of God.  

Everybody seems to be trying to prove that they are right. We have almost a collective incapacity to admit failure, to ever admit that we are wrong, which makes us liars most of the time. Jesus is calling forth a very different kind of human being. 

Jesus says people who live the vulnerable life of connection and relationship will bear much fruit. These are the people we trust, like, and admire. And yet so many of us are afraid to be the very thing that we admire the most. How foolish human beings are! But again, Jesus has told us the way: he is the vine. We are the branches. None of us can be or need to be correct, but we can always be connected.  

Compassionate Listening

Father Richard shares his experience of how challenging it is to hear each other without agenda or defensiveness:   

Can we take responsibility for the fact that we push people to polarized positions when we do not stand in the compassionate middle? I think of how often, during my talks, someone raises a hand and says, “I disagree with what you just said.” Often, they did not hear or understand what I said, and they don’t have the humility to ask, in a non-accusatory way: “Did I hear you correctly in saying . . . ?” or “What do you mean when you say . . . ?” Of course, sometimes I am wrong, but such a mentality does not encourage dialogue or mutuality. Unfortunately, my response also often suffers because of the negative energy generated. I am then defensive or biting my tongue to control my own judgments or desire to attack back. The result is a half response, at best, because the environment is not safe and congenial.  

Responses of this sort are usually full of assumptions: “I did understand you. I know your motivation. I know what you’re trying to say. Therefore, I actually have the need and right to attack you.” Normally, neither person grows or expands in such a context. The truth is not well served, because neither individual feels secure, respected, or connected. Unfortunately, this has become the state of our public discourse.  

Fortunately, there will always be people who have the grace and the ability to engage in reflective listening, to ask, “Richard, did I understand what you were saying?” and repeat back to me their perception of what I said. Normally then I can clarify, or perhaps admit that I have communicated poorly or am, in fact, incorrect. When we can listen and respond in that way, each person is treated with the respect and dignity they deserve as children of God. Each person feels heard, and misunderstandings are clarified compassionately.  

Unfortunately that is not the way the ego likes to work. Opposition gives us a sense of standing for something, a false sense of independence, power, and control. Compassion and humility don’t give us a sense of control or psychic comfort. We have to be willing to let go of our moral high ground and hear the truth that the other person may be speaking, even if it is only ten percent of what they are saying. Compassion and dialogue are essentially vulnerable positions. If we are into control and predictability, we will seldom descend into the vulnerability of undefended listening or the scariness of dialogue. If we are incapable of hearing others, we will also be incapable of hearing God. If we spend all day controlling and blocking others, why would we change when we kneel to pray?  

Father Richard’s Franciscan tradition prioritizes putting love into concrete action while drawing on Divine Love as our Source:

Love won’t be real or tested unless we somehow live close to the disadvantaged, who frankly teach us that we know very little about love. To be honest, my male Franciscan seminary training didn’t teach me how to love. It taught me how to obey and conform, but not how to love. I’m still trying every day to learn how to love. As we endeavor to put love into action, we realize that on our own, we are unable to obey Jesus’ command, “Love one another as I have loved you.” To love as Jesus loves, we must be connected to the Source of Love.

Over decades of serving New York City’s poorest individuals, Dorothy Day (1897–1980) never lost sight of the gospel’s challenging invitation to love:

Whenever I groan within myself and think how hard it is to keep writing about love in these times of tension and strife which may at any moment become for us all a time of terror, I think to myself “What else is the world interested in?” What else do we all want, each one of us, except to love and be loved, in our families, in our work, in all our relationships. God is Love. Love casts out fear. Even the most ardent revolutionist, seeking to change the world, to overturn the tables of the money changers, is trying to make a world where it is easier for people to love, to stand in that relationship to each other. We want with all our hearts to love, to be loved. . . . It is when we love the most intensely and most humanly that we can recognize how tepid is our love for others. The keenness and intensity of love brings with it suffering, of course, but joy too because it is a foretaste of heaven. . . . 

When you love people, you see all the good in them, all the Christ in them. God sees Christ, His Son, in us and loves us. And so we should see Christ in others, and nothing else, and love them. There can never be enough of it. There can never be enough thinking about it. St. John of the Cross said that where there was no love, put love and you would take out love. [1] The principle certainly works. [2] . . .

Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much.

Sarah Young…

No matter what the world throws at you, you have, in Me, everything you need to persevere. Fix your eyes on Me, I am always nearby simply waiting on your surrender.

2 Corinthians 4:8-9 We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair.

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. Read full chapter.

1Peter 2:25
For “you were like sheep going astray,” but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls. 

John 10:28
And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand.

Rosemarie Freeney Harding (1930–2004) was a spiritual leader in the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s. Her Mennonite faith shaped her commitment to radical hospitality, healing, and transformation. She describes the interracial community she and her husband Vincent formed at Mennonite House in Atlanta:  

One of my first tasks as a young organizer in the Southern Freedom Movement was developing an interracial social service project and community center called Mennonite House in Atlanta, Georgia, in the early 1960s. . . . In addition to our work of placing volunteers with various movement organizations, training young activists, and coordinating early efforts at interracial dialogue and reconciliation, Mennonite House became an important place of retreat for many who were struggling and sacrificing so much to transform the South and the nation. Sometimes movement people would call us from the bus station, and [my husband] Vincent would drive over and pick them up, and they’d stay for a few days or a few weeks, because they needed a place to get some rest. Because of my mother’s example, I understood very clearly how important it was to have spaces of refuge in the midst of struggle. Spaces of joy and laughter, good food and kind words. In fact, this kind of compassionate care is a transformative force in itself. As the Cape Breton novelist Alistair MacLeod [1936–2014] writes, “We are all better when we’re loved.” [1] . . .  

Black people in Atlanta were intrigued with Mennonite House. This was something new—an interracial social service project tied to the freedom movement, where most of the volunteers were white and the directors were Black, and everybody lived together in the same house. In 1961, this was definitely new. Seeing my husband and me in the leadership roles made Black folks glad and proud. And it impressed them to know that our church (which most had never heard of) had sent us to represent the denomination. I didn’t realize the significance of all of this until later. I was just happy to be there. . . . 

In the early 1960s, Mennonite House was one of the places, perhaps one of the few, where interracial conversation and community was being consciously created in the South.  

Freeney Harding’s activism was inspired by her abiding and mystical experience of God’s love and justice. Rachel Harding recalls her mother’s vision:  

There is no scarcity. There is no shortage. No lack of love, 
of compassion, of joy in the world. There is enough.  
There is more than enough.  

Only fear and greed make us think otherwise. 

No one need starve. There is enough land and enough food.  
No one need die of thirst. There is enough water. No one  
need live without mercy. There is no end to grace. And we  
are all instruments of grace. The more we give it, the more  
we share it, the more we use it, the more God makes. There  
is no scarcity of love. There is plenty. And always more.  This is the universe my mother lived in.

Sarah Young…

Rest in My presence. When you relax in my presence, you demonstrate your trust in Me. When you lean on and trust Me, I delight in your confidence. Many turn away when they are exhausted, thinking I demand energy. In fact, trusting in Me provides energy. Trust and rest in Me.

Psalm 91:1
Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. 

Proverbs 3:3 AMP
Do not let mercy and kindness and truth leave you [instead let these qualities define you]; Bind them [securely] around your neck, Write them on the tablet of your heart

Isaiah30:15 AMP
For the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel has said this, “In returning [to Me] and rest you shall be saved, In quietness and confident trust is your strength.” But you were not willing

Standing Still

Catherine de Hueck Doherty (1896–1985) was a Russian baroness whose family emigrated to Canada to escape the collapse of Russia’s tsarist monarchy. Eventually, she gave up everything in her commitment to live “the gospel without compromise.” She served the poor and promoted interracial justice through her work at Friendship House in New York City. She then formed a contemplative community called Madonna House in Canada, where she helped bring the spirituality of the Eastern Church to Western Christianity. Like many mystics, Doherty experienced God’s presence and deep love in silence: 

True silence is the speech of lovers. . . . True silence is a key to the immense and flaming heart of God. It is the beginning of a divine courtship that will end only in the immense, creative, fruitful, loving silence of final union with the Beloved.  

Yes, such silence is holy, a prayer beyond all prayers. True silence leads to the final prayer of the constant presence of God, to the heights of contemplation, when the soul, finally at peace, lives by the will of [God] whom she loves totally, utterly, and completely.  

This silence, then, will break forth in a charity that overflows in the service of the neighbor without counting the cost. It will witness to Christ anywhere, always. Availability will become delightsome and easy, for in each person the soul will see the face of her Love. Hospitality will be deep and real, for a silent heart is a loving heart, and a loving heart is a hospice to the world.  

She truly was a contemplative in the world, understanding that silent prayer is an experiential gift for everyone who desires greater intimacy with God:  

This silence is not the exclusive prerogative of monasteries or convents. This simple, prayerful silence can and should be everybody’s silence. It belongs to every Christian who loves God, to every Jew who has heard in his [or her] heart the echoes of God’s voice in [the] prophets, to everyone whose soul has risen in search of truth, in search of God. . . .  

Deserts, silence, solitudes are not necessarily places but states of mind and heart. These deserts can be found in the midst of the city, and in the every day of our lives. We need only to look for them and realize our tremendous needs for them. . . .  

But how, really, can one achieve such solitude? By standing still! Stand still, and allow the deadly restlessness of our tragic age to fall away. . . .  That restlessness was once considered the magic carpet to tomorrow, but now we see it for what it really is: a running away from oneself, a turning from the journey inward that all [people] must undertake to meet God dwelling within the depths of their souls.   

I Bring Myself

Sister Thea Bowman (1937–1990), a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration, addressed the United States Catholic bishops in 1989. She sang several lines of the African-American spiritual “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child / A long way from home.” Embracing her Black, Catholic, female identity, she said:  

What does it mean to be Black and Catholic? It means that I come to my church fully functioning. . . . I bring myself, my Black self, all that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become; I bring my whole history, my traditions, my experience, my culture, my African-American song and dance and gesture and movement and teaching and preaching and healing and responsibility as a gift to the church.                                                              

I bring a spirituality that . . . is contemplative and biblical and holistic, bringing to religion a totality of minds and imagination, of memory, of feeling and passion and emotion and intensity, of faith that is embodied, incarnate praise, a spirituality . . . that  steps out in faith, that leans on the Lord, a spirituality that is communal, that tries to walk and talk and work and pray and play together. . . .  

A spirituality that in the middle of your Mass or in the middle of your sermon just might have to shout out and say, “Amen, hallelujah, thank you Jesus.” A faith that attempts to be Spirit-filled. The old ladies say if you love the Lord your God with your whole heart, [with] your whole soul and your whole mind and all your strength, then you praise the Lord with your whole heart and soul and mind and strength and you don’t bring [God] any feeble service. . . .   

Today we’re called to walk together in a new way toward that land of promise and to celebrate who we are and whose we are. If we as church walk together, don’t let nobody separate you. That’s one thing Black folk can teach you. Don’t let folk divide you or put the lay folk over here and the clergy over here, put the bishops in one room and the clergy in the other room, put the women over here and the men over here.  

The church teaches us that the church is a family. It’s a family of families and the family got to stay together. We know that if we do stay together, if we walk and talk and work and play and stand together in Jesus’ name, we’ll be who we say we are, truly Catholic; and we shall overcome—overcome the poverty, overcome the loneliness, overcome the alienation, and build together a holy city, a new Jerusalem, a city set apart where they’ll know we are his because we love one another.  

Christ Is Everywhere

Father Richard begins his book The Universal Christ by quoting English mystic Caryll Houselander (1901–1954), who experienced Christ in the faces of people around her while riding the subway and walking through London. From that mystical experience, she knew: 

Christ is everywhere; in [Christ] every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life. It is not the foolish sinner like myself, running about the world with reprobates and feeling magnanimous, who comes closest to them and brings them healing; it is the contemplative in her cell who has never set eyes on them, but in whom Christ fasts and prays for them—or it may be a charwoman in whom Christ makes Himself a servant again, or a [ruler] whose crown of gold hides a crown of thorns. Realization of our oneness in Christ is the only cure for human loneliness. For me, too, it is the only ultimate meaning of life, the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to every life. [1] 

Father Richard continues:  

The question for me—and for us—is: Who is this “Christ” that Caryll Houselander saw permeating and radiating from all her fellow passengers? Christ for her was clearly not only Jesus of Nazareth but something much more immense, even cosmic, in significance. I believe this vision, once encountered, has power to radically alter what we believe, how we see others and relate to them, our sense of how big God might be, and our understanding of what the Creator is doing in our world.  

A cosmic notion of the Christ competes with and excludes no one, but includes everyone and everything (Acts 10:15, 34). In this understanding of Christianity’s message, the Creator’s love and presence are grounded in the created world, and any mental distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” falls apart.  

When I know that the world around me is both the hiding place and the revelation place of God, I can no longer maintain a significant distance between the natural and the supernatural, between the holy and the profane. (A divine “voice” makes this exactly clear to a very resistant Peter in Acts 10.) Everything I see and know is indeed one “universe” that revolves around one coherent center. This Divine Presence seeks connection and communion, not separation or division—except for the sake of an even deeper future union.  

What a difference this makes in the way we walk through the world, in how we encounter every person in the course of a day! It is as though everything that seemed disappointing and “fallen,” all the major pushbacks against the flow of history, can now be seen as one whole movement, still enchanted and made use of by God’s love. All of it must somehow be usable and filled with potency, even the things that appear as betrayals or crucifixions.

God Is the Beloved

This week’s Daily Meditations feature writings of twentieth-century women mystics. Each one shares her experience of God as unconditional and unsurpassed love from her unique background. Father Richard Rohr believes this is true for all mystics:   

People who know God well—mystics, hermits, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator. God is never found as an abusive father or a tyrannical mother; God is always a lover greater than we dared hope for. How different from the “account manager” most people seem to worship. God is the lover who receives and forgives everything.  

When we go into the Presence, we find someone not against us, but someone who is definitely for us! Mystics recognize someone else is holding them. People who pray always say, “Someone is for me more than I am for myself.” Prayer is being loved at a deep, sweet level. I hope everyone has felt such intimacy alone with God. I promise it is available to all. Maybe a lot of us just need to be told that this is what we should expect and seek. We’re afraid to ask for it; we’re afraid to seek. It feels presumptuous. We can’t trust that such a love exists. But it does.  

Father Richard has found great inspiration over the past several years in the writings of Jewish mystic Etty Hillesum (1914–1943). In her letters from the Westerbork transit camp, Hillesum describes the solace she finds in God’s continual presence:  

You have made me so rich, oh God, please let me share out Your beauty with open hands. My life has become an uninterrupted dialogue with You, oh God, one great dialogue. Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on Your earth, my eyes raised toward Your heaven, tears sometimes run down my face, tears of deep emotion and gratitude. At night, too, when I lie in my bed and rest in You, oh God, tears of gratitude run down my face, and that is my prayer. I have been terribly tired for several days, but that too will pass. Things come and go in a deeper rhythm, and people must be taught to listen; it is the most important thing we have to learn in this life. I am not challenging You, oh God, my life is one great dialogue with You. I may never become the great artist I would really like to be, but I am already secure in You, God. Sometimes I try my hand at turning out small profundities and uncertain short stories, but I always end up with just one single word: God. And that says everything, and there is no need for anything more. And all my creative powers are translated into inner dialogues with You. The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches. [1]  

Episcopal priest Becca Stevens is founder of Thistle Farms, a social enterprise run by survivors of sexual abuse, trafficking, and addiction. We share part of her story:  

My mother’s example of showing love through practical means gave me the wherewithal to open a home for women survivors of trafficking, prostitution, and addiction more than twenty-five years ago in Nashville, Tennessee. It was a small house for five women. I said: “Come live free for two years with no authority living with you. Live free.” . . . I figured that’s what I would want if I were coming in off the streets or out of prison. . . . I did it because sanctuary is the most practical ideal of all. 

I wasn’t interested in repackaging charity in shiny, new boxes with the latest words. I was bored by trendy cause-hawking that left me feeling disconnected. I was disillusioned by a bifurcated political system that numbs compassion. I wanted to do the work of healing from the inside out. And that begins with a safe home. . . .  

From its humble beginning, Thistle Farms now has thirty global partners that employ more than 1,600 women. . . . The mission to be a global movement for women’s freedom is broad and is growing exponentially.  

Rev. Stevens’s mission reminds us of Jesus’ parable (Luke 13:18–19) about the kingdom of God and a mustard seed’s growth from tiny plant to large tree:  

Initially, it seemed a bit ridiculous to me to think that by starting a small community, we could somehow change the world, but now, it seems more ridiculous to me to think that somehow the world will change if we don’t do something.  

Now, I can see that one loving gesture is practically divine. We have to do small things and believe a big difference is coming. It’s like the miraculous drops of water that seep through mountain limestone. They gather themselves into springs that flow into creeks that merge into rivers that find their way to oceans. Our work is to envision the drops as oceans. We do our small parts and know a powerful ocean of love and compassion is downstream. Each small gesture can lead to liberation. The bravest thing we can do in this world is not cling to old ideas or fear of judgment, but step out and just do something for love’s sake. . . . 

There is no secret formula to experiencing the sacred in our lives. It just takes practice and practicality. The deep truth of our lives and the fullness we are striving for don’t happen with someone giving us the code to deep knowledge. Meaning and faith are not secret things. Sometimes what we need most is to remind one another of how the divine is all around us, calling us to see and taste it for ourselves. 

Sarah Young…

Keep waking with Me on the path(s) I have chosen for you. The path may be difficult at times but there will be sparkling surprises around the bend. Stay on the path I have selected for you and receive many blessings as well.

Isaiah 40:31 NKJV But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.

Psalm 37:23-24
The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he delighteth in his way. 24 Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord upholdeth him with his hand. 

Psalm 16:11 NKJV
You will show me the path of life; In Your presence is fullness of joy; At Your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Osheta Moore is a pastor and peacemaker committed to following the nonviolent path of Jesus in her work for racial justice. 

I’ve spent the last decade calling in the peacemakers to view their peacemaking in light of the Hebraic concept of shalom. I define it as God’s dream for the world as it should be, nothing missing, nothing broken, everything made whole. Because shalom is God’s dream and God is love, our shalom practices must be rooted in love. Therefore, I’ve invited peacemakers to resist peacemaking that is rooted in anxiety and to choose peacemaking out of a posture of love. When love enters the equation, everything changes. We begin to ask ourselves what we’re for instead of what we’re against.   

Moore makes a distinction between “keeping the peace,” which often allows injustice to flourish, and actively “making peace”:  

The call to be an anti-racism peacemaker is not easy, because the shalom of God does not come easy. This kind of peace that lasts was shown to us in Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection, and then we as peacemakers are called to live it out. Anything that does not require us to sacrifice for each other is another form of peacekeeping, not peacemaking. I’m interested in dismantling white supremacy in order to build up something better for you and for me. I’m interested in the peacemaking North Star of the Beloved Community . . . that holds us accountable to be in right relatedness to each other and create an environment where we can all thrive.  

The whole of Jesus’ ministry was to establish a community so convinced of their Belovedness to God that they proclaim the Belovedness of others. [Richard: Chosenness is for the sake of letting all others know they are chosen too!] Belovedness is a massive act of owning and accepting your humanness as a gift from a God who deeply loves you. As we adjust our thinking of this work as rehumanizing those who have been dehumanized, Belovedness is essential in our anti-racism peacemaking. Which is why nonviolence in thought, word, and deed is a pillar in my anti-racism work. . . .  

       This is the way of the Beloved Community: 
       Claim your Belovedness: love God, love self.  
       Then proclaim it: love others, love the world. . . .  

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was the primary way students joined the civil rights movement and learned how to practice its nonviolent technique. In 1962, at a staff meeting they reaffirmed their commitment to nonviolence by describing it this way, “Love [is] the central motif of nonviolence,” the “force by which God binds man to himself and man to man.” [1] . . .  

Daily I tell myself this when I choose to engage with anti-racism peacemaking work from a nonviolent, peacemaking posture:  

I, a Black Peacemaker, am Beloved, and you, a White Peacemaker, are Beloved, and we belong to each other. . . .  

Everything else will disappoint and overwhelm, but the love of God owned and reflected is the living water we need along the journey.  

The Joy of Not Counting  

For Father Richard, Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) is a shining example of someone who “practiced the better.” Instead of relying on judgment and criticism, Francis understood the power of simply living a better way:  

God gave St. Francis to history in the pivotal period when Western civilization began to move into rationality, functionality, consumerism, and perpetual war. Francis was himself a soldier, and the son of a cloth merchant; he came from the culture he critiqued, and he challenged these emerging systems at the beginning of their now eight centuries of world dominance. Rather than fighting the systems directly and risk becoming their mirror image, Francis just did things differently. He is the inspiration for this core principle of the Center for Action and Contemplation: The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. [1] 

As theologian Adolf Holl (1930–2020) observed, Francis was born as people started measuring time by clocks instead of church bells. [2] When Christian leaders started counting, Francis stopped counting. He moved from the common economy of merit to the wondrous economy of grace, where God does not do any counting, but only gives unreservedly. 

As Europe began to centralize and organize everything at high levels of control, Francis said, like a divine trickster, “Who cares?!” When Roman Catholicism under Pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216) reached heights of papal and worldly power, Francis answered, “There is another way that is much better!” When we began a style of production and consumption that would eventually ravage planet Earth, he decided to love Mother Earth and live simply and barefoot upon her. And Francis did it all with a “perfect joy” that comes from letting go of the ego. 

Francis didn’t bother questioning Church doctrines and dogmas. He just took the imitation of Christ seriously and tried to live the way that Jesus lived. In The Legend of Perugia, one of the earliest accounts about Francis, he reminds the first friars that they only know as much as they do. [3] His emphasis on action, practice, and lifestyle was foundational and revolutionary for its time and is at the root of Franciscan alternative orthodoxy. Francis and Clare fell in love with the humanity and humility of Jesus. For them, Jesus was someone actually to imitate and not just to worship as divine. 

The early Franciscan friars and Poor Clares wanted to be gospel practitioners instead of merely “word police,” “inspectors,” or “museum curators” as Pope Francis calls some clergy. Both Francis and Clare offered their rules as a forma vitae, or form of life. They saw orthopraxy (correct practice) as a necessary parallel, and maybe even precedent, to verbal orthodoxy (correct teaching). History has shown that many Christians never get to the practical implications of their beliefs. “Why aren’t you doing what you say you believe?” the prophet invariably asks.  

Living What We Are “For” 

Father Richard teaches that we can only practice new ways of being in the world if we maintain some degree of nonattachment from the systems around us: 

I would insist the foundation of Jesus’ social program is what I will call non-idolatry, or the withdrawing of our enthrallment from all kingdoms except the Kingdom of God. This supports a much better agenda than feeling the need to attack things directly. Nonattachment (freedom from loyalties to human-made, domination systems) is the best way I know of protecting people from religious zealotry or any kind of antagonistic thinking or behavior. There is nothing to be against. Just keep concentrating on the Big Thing you are for!  

Paul tries to create some “audiovisual aids” for this big message, which he calls “churches” (a term Jesus used only twice and in only one Gospel (Matthew 16:18 and 18:17). He needs living, visible models of this new kind of life to make evident that Christ’s people really follow a way different from mass consciousness. They are people who “can be innocent and genuine . . . and can shine like stars among a deceitful and underhanded brood” (Philippians 2:15). To people who asked, “Why should we believe there’s a new or better life possible?” Paul could say, “Look at these people. They’re different. This is a new social order.” In Christ, “there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).  

In Paul’s thinking, we were supposed to live inside of an alternative society, almost a utopia, and from such fullness “go to the world.” Instead, we created a model whereby people live almost entirely in the world, fully invested in its attitudes toward money, war, power, and gender—and sometimes “go to church.” This doesn’t seem to be working! Groups like the Amish, the Bruderhof, Black churches, and members of some Catholic religious orders probably have a better chance of actually maintaining an alternative consciousness. Most of the rest of us end up thinking and operating pretty much like our surrounding culture.  

Many people, however, now find this solidarity in think tanks, support groups, prayer groups, study groups, house-building projects, healing circles, or community-focused organizations. Perhaps without fully recognizing it, we are often heading in the right direction. Some new studies indicate that Christians are not as much leaving Christianity as they are realigning with groups that live Christian values in the world—instead of just gathering again to hear the readings, recite the creed, and sing songs on Sunday. Jesus does not need our singing; we need instead to act like a community. Actual Christian behavior might just be growing more than we realize. Behavior has a very different emphasis than belonging. 

Remember, it is not the brand name that matters. 
It is that God’s heart be made available and active on this earth.  

The Zealots and the Pharisees 

Father Richard expands upon the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Third Core Principle: “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Oppositional energy only creates more of the same.” 

There seem to be two typical ways to avoid conversion or transformation, two diversionary tactics that we use to avoid holding pain: fight and flight.  

“Fight” is what I’ll call the way of Simon the Zealot. It describes people who want to change, fix, control, and reform other people and events. The zealot always looks for the political sinner, the unjust one, the oppressor, the bad person over there. Zealots consider themselves righteous when attacking them (whoever they are at a given time), hating them, even killing them. When they do, they believe they are “doing a holy duty for God” (John 16:2).  

Zealots often have good conclusions, but their tactics and motives can be filled with ego, power, control, and the same righteousness they hate in others. They want to do something to avoid holding pain until it transforms them. Such people present Christianity as “a cult of innocence” as opposed to a movement for solidarity.  

As long as they are the problem (whoever they are), and we keep our focus on changing them and correcting them, then we can sit in a reasonably comfortable position. But it’s a position that the saints call pax perniciosa, a dangerous and false peace. It feels like peace, but instead is the false peace of avoidance, denial, and projection. The Peace of the Crucified comes from holding the tension.  

This brings us to flight, the second diversionary tactic. This is the common path of the “Pharisee,” the uninformed, and the falsely innocent. Such people deny pain altogether and refuse to carry the shadow side of anything in themselves or in their chosen groups. They allow no uncertainty nor ambiguity as they scapegoat and project their own wounded side somewhere else!  There will be no problems. It is a form of narcotic, and at times probably necessary to get some people through the day.  

Both fight and flight people are subject to hypocrisy, projection, or just plain illusion: “We are right; you are wrong. The world is divided into black and white, and we alone know who is good and who is bad.”  

“Resurrected” people are the ones who have found a better way by prayerfully bearing witness against injustice and evil—while also agreeing compassionately to hold their own complicity in that same evil. It is not over there—it is here. It is our problem, not theirs. The Risen Christ, not accidentally, still carries the wounds in his hands and side. The question becomes: How can I know the greater truth, work through the anger, and still be a life-giving presence?  

That is the Third Way beyond fight or flight, which in a certain sense includes both. It’s fighting in a new way from a God-centered place within, and fleeing from the quick, egocentric response. Only God can hold such an act together within us.

Father Richard values how Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures introduced the gift of self-critical thinking into their relationship with God:  

The Hebrew Scriptures, against all religious expectations, include what most of us would call the problem—the negative, the accidental, the sinful—as the precise arena for divine revelation. There are no perfectly moral people in ancient Scriptures; even Abraham rather cruelly drove his second wife into the desert with their child. The Jewish people, contrary to what might be expected, chose to present their arrogant and evil kings and their very critical prophets as part of their Holy Scriptures. They include stories and prophecies that do not tell the Jewish people how wonderful they are but, rather, how terrible they are! It is the birth of self-critical thinking and thus moves consciousness forward. No other religion has been known for such capacity for self-criticism, down to our own time. [1] 

The Jewish rabbi and noted theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel understood such self-critical thinking and dissent as central to Judaism and to all vibrant and healthy religion:  

Inherent to all traditional religion is the peril of stagnation. What becomes settled and established may easily turn foul. Insight is replaced by clichés, elasticity by obstinacy, spontaneity by habit. Acts of dissent prove to be acts of renewal.  

It is therefore of vital importance for religious people to voice and to appreciate dissent. And dissent implies self-examination, critique, discontent.  

Dissent is indigenous to Judaism. The prophets of ancient Israel who rebelled against a religion that would merely serve the self-interest or survival of the people continue to stand out as inspiration and example of dissent to this very day.  

An outstanding feature dominating all Jewish books composed during the first five hundred years of our era is the fact that together with the normative view a dissenting view is nearly always offered, whether in theology or in law. Dissent continued during the finest periods of Jewish history: great scholars sharply disagreed with Maimonides; Hasidism, which brought so much illumination and inspiration into Jewish life, was a movement of dissent. . . . Creative dissent comes out of love and faith, offering positive alternatives, a vision. [2] 

Father Richard seeks a both-and approach that embraces self-criticism without falling into excessive intellectualism or despair:   Self-criticism is quite rare in the history of religion, yet it is necessary to keep religion from its natural tendency toward arrogant self-assurance—and eventually idolatry, which is always the major sin for biblical Israel. We must also point out, however, that mere critique usually deteriorates into cynicism, skepticism, academic arrogance, and even post-modernistic nihilism. So be very careful and very prayerful before you own any self-image of professional critic or anointed prophet! Negativity will do you in.

Sarah Young Jesus Calling…

Soak in My Presence and be energized and lightened. By gazing at Me you transfer your heavy burdens to me. Focus on Me and receive MY perspective on your life.

Psalm 48:9
“We have thought.” Holy men are thoughtful men; they do not suffer God’s wonders to pass before their eyes and melt into forgetfulness, but they meditate deeply 

Deuteronomy 33:12
“Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long, and the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders.

Psalm 37:4
Delight thyself also in the Lord: and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.