Full of Suffering, Full of Love

Thursday, September 3, 2026

Father Richard considers the cross as the center of Jesus’s life—fully human, fully divine—and expressing total solidarity with the pain of the world:

The Divine Mind transforms all human suffering by identifying completely with the human predicament and standing in full solidarity with it from beginning to end. This is the real meaning of the crucifixion. The cross is not just a singular event. It’s a statement from God that reality has a cruciform pattern. Jesus was killed in a collision of conflicting interests and half-truths, caught between the demands of an empire and the religious establishment of his day. The cross was the price Jesus paid for living in a “mixed” world, which is both human and divine, simultaneously broken and utterly whole.

In so doing, Jesus demonstrated that Reality is not meaningless and absurd, even if it isn’t always perfectly logical or consistent. Reality is filled with contradictions, what St. Bonaventure and others (such as Alan of Lille and Nicholas of Cusa) called the “coincidence of opposites.”

Jesus the Christ, in his crucifixion and resurrection, “recapitulated all things in himself, everything in heaven and everything on earth” (Ephesians 1:10). This one verse is the summary of Franciscan Christology. Jesus agreed to carry the mystery of universal suffering. He allowed it to change him (resurrection) and—it is to be hoped—us, too. Christ frees us from the endless cycle of projecting our pain elsewhere or remaining trapped inside of it.

This is the fully resurrected life, the only way to be happy, free, loving, and therefore “saved.” In effect, Jesus was saying, “If I can trust it, you can too.” We are indeed saved by the cross—more than we realize. The people who hold the contradictions and resolve them in themselves are the saviors of the world. They are the only real agents of transformation, reconciliation, and newness. Christians are called to be the visible compassion of God on earth.

These “saviors,” who are inevitably also disciples, exist in every period of time and in every faith tradition. At times they exist even with no “faith” at all, beyond a consciously held belief that solidarity with all of life is, in fact, the meaning of life. For whatever reason, such people agree to share the fate of God for the life of the world now. These people feel called and agree to not hide from the shadow side of things or the rejected group, but in fact draw close to the pain of the world and allow it to radically change their perspective. They agree to embrace the imperfection and even the injustices of our world, allowing these situations to change them from the inside out, which is the only way things are changed anyway.

The gospel is simply the wisdom of those who agree to carry their part of the infinite suffering of God. It must be recognized that many non-Christians fully accept this vocation with greater freedom than many Christians. 

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (Convergent Books, 2021), 147–148.

Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, CAC Environment, 2019-10-09, Photograph, CAC campus, Albuquerque NM. What does it look like to lay down burdens and die to ourselves while still on the path to becoming?

=============================================================================

“Living Presence” 

Ancient Wisdom for Modern Anxiety

BRADLEY JERSAK

AUG 01, 2026

In his profoundly helpful forthcoming book, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Anxiety: Finding Relief through Curiosity and Wonder (Whitaker House, 2027 – preorders available now), Paul E. Ralph (hereafter PER or Paul) uses the personified language of “Living Presence” as a divine name or title. I like that for reasons I’ll mention below. 

Paul isn’t the first to use the phrase—a few earlier examples are notable:

J.A. Motyer (OT scholar and former Principal of Trinity College, Bristol) once wrote,

Over and over again in the Old Testament you come across the familiar phrase, “The word of the LORD came to …” Now in Hebrew that is: ‘The word of the LORD was to …’ The verb used is the verb ‘to be’, not a verb of motion but a verb of realistic experience. ‘The word of God became a living reality to …’ The verb ‘to be’ in Hebrew means living reality, living presence, not just some bare abstract idea of existence as compared with non-existence. When God focusses attention upon this divine name, ‘I am Yahweh’, he is saying, ‘I am the God of living presence with my people…’ 

J.A. Motyer, “The Normative Covenant,” Evangel (April, 1983), 4.

A decade later, Kabir Edmund Helminski wrote a book that draws on the wisdom of Sufism to address contemporary life. He titled it Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self (Tarcher, 1992). 

Rounding out the Abrahamic religions, PER cites Nahum Ward-Lev’s book on the Hebrew prophets as one of his sources to using the phrase as a proper name: 

Seeking an alternative to “the Lord,” I have chosen to translate God’s Name as “the Living Presence.” … The four letters of God’s Name seem to refer to “being” itself, to “Being” or “Being-ness” that transcends time. My use of “the Living Presence” is also guided by God’s interaction with Moses at the burning bush. When Moses asks for God’s Name, God replies, “I will be what I will be” (Exodus 3:14). With this response, God both informs Moses that God’s nature cannot be defined by any limiting quality, such as a name, and God assures Moses that God will be with him throughout time. Looking for a term that reflects this sense of “Being” or “Being-ness” accompanying human beings and creation throughout time, I chose the term “the Living Presence.”

Nahum Ward-Lev. The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets Then and Now (Orbis Books, 2019).

All of these uses of “living presence” are descriptions or translations, but in Paul’s book and in our prayers together, he often uses that term as a proper name: 

“Living Presence, help me stay curious.”

I find this especially helpful on several fronts. To begin with, it is inclusive. Paul’s intentional use of the phrase welcomes all. It allows space for those who are suspicious of terms like “God”—a placeholder both too vague and too narrow to those who don’t identify with a faith tradition. 

Unlike “Ground of Being,” “Ultimate Reality,” or “Sacred Presence,” Living Presence is deeply biblical in resonance (“the living God,” but so far, unburdened by centuries of doctrinal or philosophical baggage.

For me personally, as I work in interfaith spaces, terms like “universe” or “the divine” seem too impersonal. I have no objection to those who use them (as I do if it helps them), but “Living Presence” includes the immanence (radical nearness) and intimacy that pairs well with our experiences of infinite Love. 

In that sense, Living Presence is a descriptor vast enough for anyone whose concept of a “higher power” is also open to the Mystery of Something or Someone that is at least as relational, responsive, and caring as the mother archetype. 

Further, even religious notions of “God” can become a non-experience of “dead absence.” “Living Presence” acknowledges an immersion (“in whom we live and move and have our being”) and an indwelling (infinite Love encountered within us). Yet even the agnostic is welcome to experience and experiment with the transforming aspects of a more impersonal living presence apart from the imaginary “old man in the sky” imagery of God. Paul’s meditations on the Living Presence require no prior faith commitment—all he asks for is openness to be met and held in our anxiety. 

I love Paul and I love this book. Well worth the pre-order while you remember.

Wednesday, September 2, 2026

If I am a child of God, a sister-in-Christ, and belong with all of you to the priesthood of all believers, then my job is to love, not hate, to be creative, not destructive, to follow Christ’s cross.
—Pauli Murray, To Speak a Defiant Word

Speaking to the network Women’s Ordination Worldwide, Sister Joan Chittister evokes a vision of Christian discipleship that requires great courage: 

Christian discipleship is by nature a very dangerous thing. It has put every person who ever accepted it at risk. It made every follower who ever took it seriously on alert for rejection, from Martin of Tours to John Henry Newman, from Mary Ward to Dorothy Day. Discipleship casts every fragile new Christian community in tension with the times in which it grows. In the early church to be a Christian community meant to defy Roman imperialism, to stretch Judaism itself, to counter pagan values with Christian ones. It demanded very concrete presence; it took great courage, unending fortitude and clear public posture. Real discipleship meant the rejection of real things…. It was not easy then and it will not be easy now.

The problem with Christian discipleship is that instead of simply requiring a kind of academic or ascetic exercise … Christian discipleship requires a kind of living that is sure, eventually, to tumble a person from the banquet tables … to the most suspect margins of both church and society. To follow Jesus, in other words, is to follow the one who turns the world upside down, even the religious world. Real discipleship is a tipsy arrangement at the very least. People with high need for approval, social status, and public respectability need not apply.

Following Jesus is a circuitous route that leads always and everywhere to places where a ‘nice’ person would not go, to moments of integrity we would so much rather do without.

Chittister counts the cost of discipleship for those who choose to follow Jesus:

Christian discipleship is about living in this world the way that Jesus the Christ lived in his—touching lepers, raising donkeys from ditches on Sabbath days, questioning the unquestionable and—consorting with women! Discipleship implies a commitment to leave nets and homes, positions and securities, lordship and legalities to be now—in our own world—what the Christ was for his….

Discipleship is prepared to fly in the face of a world bent only on maintaining its own ends whatever the cost. If discipleship is what you’re here for, be not fooled! The price is a high one and history has recorded it faithfully….

True discipleship is … a way of living that is not political but which has serious political implications…. The disciple takes public issue with the values of a world that advantages only those who are already advantaged…. It takes umbrage at systems that are more bent on keeping improper people out of them than they are in welcoming all people into them. True discipleship takes the side always, always, always of the poor, the minority, the outcast, the reviled, the rejected, the other, despite the power of the rich and powerful.

====================

Hello! According to Gallup research, there has been a steady decline in our society’s trust in many institutions over the last 25 years. You may have had your own experience of doubt about the trustworthiness of one or more of these systems. Of significance, one sector of society in which public trust has not declined is in that of small businesses. I am not personally familiar with the details of this research, but I do wonder about the relative degree of embodied, personal connection that exists in such entities—and therefore the greater potential for being more deeply known in those settings compared to those in which people are generally more disconnected personally.   What does any of this have to do with interpersonal neurobiology and being formed in the image of Jesus? As it turns out, a great deal.   Part of everyone’s growth in all aspects of their life includes the fact that we are each shaped in systems.We are born into and reared in particular families. We are shaped by worshipping communities and schools and eventually are formed by communities in which we live out our work, be that as stay at home parents, in an office, on a farm or drive a delivery truck. These systems are crucial for our development. We are made to flourish as part of systems, and will find ourselves organizing ourselves into them—no matter what we report to Mr. Gallup’s poll. But the small business context stands out, and it draws my attention to what the biblical narrative and interpersonal neurobiology point to: that we are more likely to be formed in systems in which there is a greater chance—think, relatively small in number—for us to be more deeply known, such that the system itself can create a structure that more likely leads to integration and wholeness. Yes, we can think we are part of social media systems, and to a degree we are; but by definition, not ones that are primarily embodied, and usually only those with whom we have a great deal in common and very few people are ruffling our feathers. In other words, not the kind of system that God was envisioning in Genesis 2, nor the system that St. Paul is describing in 1 Corinthians 12.   This does not mean that large institutions cannot form us well, nor that they cannot be trusted. Quite the opposite can be true. But to create and maintain that trustworthiness requires a great deal of work that our current world of cell phone addiction makes more challenging.     The crucial question is not, therefore, “Do I trust institutions?” Rather, the crucial question is “What institutions am I becoming part of and creating who will form me into the person God is calling all of us to be?” Which brings me to Tabor College’s Master of Education in Neuroscience and Trauma.   I have been privileged to work with this program and its director, Dr. David Stevens, over the past several years, and it is providing outstanding training for people who work with and are interested in developing awareness and skills to respond to those with a history of trauma. I am particularly struck by breadth of people who find a place to study here, including pastors, teachers, first-responders, those who work in the foster and adoption settings and more.   But beyond what any one individual might gain from studying at Tabor, what is also significant is the role it plays as an institution. Individuals do not merely study there to obtain information. They are also being formed by the institution itself. Moreover, I am persuaded that no small part of why Tabor’s academic community trusts the College is because of the intentionality and attunement with which Dr. Stevens and his colleagues approach each student and the community as a whole, even and especially in the online context of the program. Students report a felt sense of connection, even in a virtual setting. All of this points to how the benefits of this program are not just about the information that people are acquiring; it is about the durable connections that are being made. And given the trend in our cultural distrust in systems, it is a hopeful sign that there are those like Tabor College that are moving the needle in the other direction.   What institutions do you occupy that you trust? What systems are you creating that are providing trusted places for others? Given that these systems are no small part of God’s plan for human flourishing, let us, just like Tabor College’s program, be about the business of being known deeply in order to become stewards of systems of deep hospitality to others on the way to creating outposts of beauty and goodness in our world.  Warmly, Curt

To Think About:

What kind of community or system am I helping to create—and who is becoming more whole, more known, and more welcomed because I am part of it?

Tuesday, September 1, 2026

READ ON CAC.ORG

In a homily on Matthew 16, public theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber highlights how Jesus’s teaching on “carrying your cross” was not intended to increase the suffering of those on the margins: 

In our Gospel text for today, Jesus says that those who wish to follow him must deny themselves, and take up their cross, and those who wish to save their life must lose it.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but these are just the kinds of messages that would never make Jesus an influencer today. He’d never get more than twelve followers these days with that kind of branding….

Maybe like you, I struggle with how this denying ourselves thing is good news.  And not just because of how that verse about picking up your cross has been perverted into messages like deny your Queerness, pick up your cross of heterosexuality and follow him. Or deny your dignity and pick up your cross of continued domestic abuse and follow him. 

Bolz-Weber understands the cross as that which keeps us from relying on God and one another: 

Recently I’ve been wondering: if, when Jesus says deny yourself and follow me, that maybe it’s not about ensuring his followers are doormats. Maybe he’s inviting us to deny the part of us that wants to see itself as separate from God and others. 

Deny the self that believes that spirituality should be a suffering avoidance program.

Deny the self that always creates a list of demands.

Deny the self that is so turned in on itself that it cannot see much of anything beyond itself.

Deny the self that says really horrible things to you about you.

Deny the self that pretends you never need help….

Because in the end, one aspect of the whole death and resurrection thing that Jesus promised us, is the death of the false self.

But the death of the false self doesn’t feel good. In fact, Richard Rohr once wrote that “holiness never feels like holiness, it just feels like you’re dying.”…

But no matter how painful, when the unhealthy ideas and habits and identities we rely on are taken away from us, it just makes space for that which is actually real and actually holy….

We offer no me-based solutions here. Then you know what we have to offer instead? Divine foolishness. The kind that says that if you want to save your life you must lose it and if you lose your life you will find it….

The cross is foolishness to those whose own solutions are still working for them, but to the weak and the cynical and the socially awkward and the exhausted … to the divorced and the unemployed and the alcoholics … in other words, to all who are in need of help and rest, Christ crucified (the foolishness of God) is life in a way that our own solutions can never be—in a way that more status, and more degrees and more financial security can never be. 

After Losing Every Battle

Christian Thoughts on Winning, Greatness, and Glory

BRIAN ZAHND SEP 1

Emperor Augustus Caesar

There’s a lone soldier on the cross
Smoke pouring out of a boxcar door
You didn’t know it, you didn’t think it could be done
In the final end he won the war
After losing every battle
–Bob Dylan, “Idiot Wind”

As the early Christianity of the Jesus Way morphed into the Christendom of the Imperial Way in the long centuries after Constantine, theological vernacular became increasingly characterized by the language of empire with its emphasis on triumph, greatness, and glory. The writers of the New Testament had themselves used this kind of language in speaking of the triumph and glory of Christ, but they had done so in a way that was deliberately provocative and intentionally subversive. They daringly spoke of the glory of the cross as a mockery of the glory of Rome. They proclaimed a kingdom whose King won by losing, triumphed by dying—a King who conquered death only by first surrendering to it. The greatness of the Galilean King was the antithesis of Alexander the Great. The one the New Testament writers called the Son of God was nothing like the so-called Son of God who was the first and august emperor of Rome. Winning now had to be reevaluated, greatness reinterpreted, glory re-imagined.

In the gospel story, Christ’s coronation is by crucifixion, his crown is made of thorns, and his throne is the cross itself. John the Revelator pushes this comic subversion to its ludicrous limits by depicting the powerful and dreadful beasts of empire as conquered, not by a Homeric hero, but by a little lamb who is slain in the battle yet somehow emerges victorious. In the final end he won the war, after losing every battle.

When Jesus’ lifeless body was taken down from the cross and laid to rest in a cold, dark tomb, he had lost. The corrupt priests had won. King Herod had won. Pontius Pilate had won. The Roman Empire had won…as it always did. The twelve apostles Jesus had chosen, trained, and taught all failed him. His chief apostle denied him, another betrayed him, and the rest abandoned him. Mark is unsparing in his report: “All of them deserted him and fled.” (Mark 14:50) What had begun with such promise in Galilee had gone down in bitter defeat at Golgotha. It is finished.

Of course Easter changed everything. Ingolf Dalferth says Christianity “is the awareness and acknowledgment that Christ’s cross and resurrection mark the end of the old world, and the beginning of the new.” And it also changed how those who confess Christ are to think about things like winning, greatness, and glory. In the light of Easter these concepts are radically redefined. We don’t win like Romans. We don’t aspire to be great like Caesar. Our glory is not that of Palatine Hill. We win by losing—losing our lives for the sake of the gospel. We triumph by humility—an imitation of the King who rode a donkey instead of a warhorse. Our glory is in the cross—not in the glittering gold and stately marble of imperial palaces or presidential ballrooms.

A fresco by Fra Angelico in the Convent of San Marco, Florence Italy, c. 1440.

In his wonderful foreword to Postcards From Babylon, Walter Brueggemann writes,

As long ago as the sixteenth century, Martin Luther boldly voiced a vigorous either/or for Christian faith in terms of a “Theology of Glory” and a “Theology of the Cross.” By the former Luther referred to an articulation of Gospel faith that smacked of a triumphalism that was allied with worldly power that specialized in winning, control, being first, and being best. For Luther, that theology was all tied up with the European imperial of his time. By the contrast of a “Theology of the Cross,” Luther referred to the risky way of Jesus that is marked by humility, obedience, and vulnerability that stands in sharp contrast to and in opposition to the hunger for “Glory.” The “way of the cross,” for Luther, is demanding and costly because it contradicts the dominant way of the world.

Much of the Christian engagement in the culture wars and partisan politics of our present moment is an attempt to win a game we were never meant to play. When I hear Christians banging on about how “we must win Congress, we must win the White House,” I want to ask, “who is we and what are we winning?” That’s the kind of winning upon which the cross casts a long shadow of suspicion. A truly Christian way of winning will more often than not look like losing in the context of a superpower. If we are not regularly dismissed as naïve and foolish by the powers that be, it’s probably because we too are playing their game. And that game is a devil’s bargain where winning the world comes at the price of losing your soul.

We who confess the sacred mystery—Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again—can afford to be patient. Caesars and their modern successors cannot afford to be patient; Christians can. We don’t have to win. We don’t have to be greater than others. We don’t have to make a deal with the devil for the kingdoms of the world and their glory. We are a patient people. As James the brother of Jesus said, “Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord.” (James 5:7) And in this time of patient waiting we are not condemned to a disengaged quietism, instead we can achieve justice in our own immediacy—especially in the kingdom immediacy of our local congregations. This is mostly what James’ pithy epistle is about.

The wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of justice is sown in peace by those who make peace. (James 3:17–18)

Our witness to the world is not in winning a contest in scorched-earth political combat, but in being a quiet yet real anticipation of kingdom come. We don’t have to win. It’s enough to be faithful. We don’t have to be great. The pursuit of greatness leads us away from the true, the good, and the beautiful. The grace of humility is the way of Christ. We don’t have to boast of our accomplishments. That’s vanity. The apostle with the brand-marks of Jesus on his body said it best: “May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world was crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Galatians 6:14)

Amen.

BZ

P.S. Shortly after finishing this article I learned of the death of Wendell Berry at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky at the age of 92. Berry was a farmer, scholar, poet, essayist, novelist, and one of America’s greatest prophets. I once wrote-in his name on a Presidential ballot. His work has had an enormous influence on my thinking. Earlier this year I re-read Life Is A Miracleand What Are People For? If I had to choose one of his books as my favorite, I suppose it would be his 2001 novel Jayber Crow. Now it’s time to read it again.

“To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it. We are alive within a mystery, by miracle.” -Wendell Berry, Life Is A Miracle

Sunday, August 30, 2026

Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” — Matthew 16:24–25 

Father Richard Rohr reflects on how discipleship ultimately leads to the cross and identifying with the pain of the world:

My assumption is that Jesus’s totally counterintuitive message of the “cross” had to be sent to earth as a dramatic and divine zinger, because God knew we would do everything we could to deny it, avoid it, soften it, or make it into a theory (which is exactly what we did anyway). Yet this is the message of Jesus that cannot, and must not, be allowed to be pushed into the background. We believe in a Jesus-kind-of-Christ—a God who is going to the mat with humanity and not just presenting us with a heavenly, cosmic vision. If Christ represents the resurrected state, then Jesus represents the crucified/ resurrecting path of getting there.  

It is not insignificant that Christians chose the cross or crucifix as their central symbol. At least unconsciously, we recognized that Jesus talked often about “losing your life.” Perhaps the philosopher Ken Wilber’s distinction between “ascending religions” and “descending religions” is helpful here. He and I both trust descending religion much more, and I think Jesus did too. The primary language is unlearning, letting go, surrendering, serving others, and not the language of self-development—which often lurks behind our popular notions of “salvation.” Unless we’re careful, we will again make Jesus’s descending religion into a new form of climbing religion, as we have done so often before.

Although Jesus made this quite clear throughout his life, we still largely turned Christianity into a religion where the operative agenda was some personal moral perfection, our attaining some kind of salvation, “going to heaven,” converting others rather than ourselves, and acquiring more health, wealth, and success in this world. In that pursuit, we ended up largely aligning with empires, wars, and colonization of our planet, instead of with Jesus or the powerless. It has all caught up with us in the twenty-first century. [1] 

A spirituality of descent frees us to surrender our often messy lives to God. It is about honoring the human journey, loving it, and living it in all its wonder and tragedy. There is nothing really supernatural about love and suffering. It is completely natural, taking us through the deep interplay of death and life, surrender and forgiveness, in all their basic and foundational manifestations. 

Authentic Christianity is not so much a belief system as a life-and-death system that shows us how to give away our life, how to give away our love, and eventually how to give away our death. Basically, how to give away—and in doing so, to connect with the world, with all other creatures, and with God. [2] 

===================

Standing in Solidarity

Monday, August 31, 2026

Father Richard considers how Jesus’s choice to go to the cross reveals God’s solidarity with suffering:  

When we try to live in solidarity with the pain of the world—and don’t spend our lives running from necessary suffering—we will encounter various “crucifixions.” Many say pain is physical discomfort, but suffering comes from our resistance, denial, and sense of injustice or wrongness about that pain. I know that is very true for me. This is the core meaning of suffering on one level or another, and we all learn it the hard way. Pain is the rent we pay for being human, it seems, but suffering is usually optional. The cross was Jesus’s voluntary acceptance of undeserved suffering as an act of total solidarity with the pain of the world. Reflecting on this mystery of love can change our lives.  

I think the acceptance of that invitation to solidarity with the larger pain of the world is what it means to be “a Christian.” It takes great inner freedom to be a follower of Jesus. His life is an option, a choice, a call, a vocation for us, and we are totally free to say yes or no or maybe. We do not have to do this to make God love us. That is already taken care of. We do it to love God back and to love what God loves and how God loves! We either are baptized “into his death” and “resurrection” (Romans 6:3; Philippians 3:10–12), or Christianity is largely a mere belonging system, not a transformational system that will change the world. 

The “crucified God” as personified in Jesus revealed that God is always on the side of suffering wherever it is found, including the wounded and dying troops on both sides in every kind of war, and both the victims and the oppressors of this world; frankly, this pleases very few people. Our resistance to suffering is an entire industry now, perhaps symbolized by the total power of the gun lobby and the permanent war economy in the United States, the fear of any profit sharing with the poor, or the need to be constantly entertained. Maybe that is why some have said that the foundational virtue underlying all others is courage (cor-agere, an action of the heart). It takes immense courage to walk in solidarity with the suffering of others, and even our own. [1]

If God is somehow participating in human suffering, instead of just passively tolerating it and observing it, that changes everything—at least for those who are willing to “gaze” contemplatively. All humble, suffering souls learn this from God, but the Christian Scriptures named it and revealed it publicly and dramatically in Jesus.

We can’t do it alone at all, but only by a deep identification with the Crucified One and crucified humanity. Jesus then does it in us, through us, with us, and for us. Then we have become a “new creation” (Galatians 6:15), a true disciple of Jesus, and a very different kind of human being

Friday Five from John Chaffee

1.

“You’re only given a little spark of madness. You mustn’t lose it.”

– Robin Williams, American Comedian and Actor

I think we can all agree that Robin Williams was a genius.  Not only was he a comedic genius, but he also seemed to be closely attuned to what it means to be human.  His constant battles with depression and addiction likely kept him humble, vulnerable, and approachable.  My guess is that his entire life was a pursuit of protecting the little divine spark of madness that he was gifted.

This means the quote above was a lived wisdom, and not some trite statement he made.  I don’t know what madness I have, or what you have, but I agree that we must protect it.

2.

“As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.”

– Parker Palmer, Educator and Activist

This coming week begins a new teaching semester at Eastern University, where I am an adjunct professor.

Over the summer, I had the chance to teach a few times, and it reminded me how much I enjoy being in the classroom, sharing ideas, and having thoughtful conversations with students.  I am not much the lecturing type, as much as I enjoy the task of moderating a conversation that I only loosely know where it might go.

Teaching is not simply the transmission of information to a student; it is about the transformation of the student.  This transformation can only happen when the teacher shows up as their full self, having already been transformed by the topic they are sharing.

There is something mystical about education, something wild and deeply connected to presence.  It is interesting how I keep finding my way back into the classroom year after year.

3.

“Shalom is communal, holistic, and tangible. There is no private or partial shalom. The whole community must have shalom or no one has shalom. As long as there are hungry people in a community that is well fed, there can be no shalom. . . . Shalom is not for the many, while a few suffer; nor is it for the few while many suffer. It must be available for everyone.”

– Randy Woodley, First Nations Author and Theologian

I’m currently reading How Western Christianity Got It Wrong.  So far, it is a great book.

Randy Woodley is an ordained Baptist pastor, doctor of theology, and the cofounder of Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm & Seeds.

As a First Nations person, his work gives me a fresh angle on Biblical stories, overlooked themes in Western Christianity, and a heightened appreciation for the sacredness of the earth.  One fascinating thing is that he posits that the Bible was written by Indigenous people, who were largely hunter/gatherer types and agrarian folk.  The Bible was written less by city folk than by a tribal culture attuned to the earth and natural rhythms.  Randy’s work reminds me of the importance of a holistic, grounded understanding of Shalom.

4.

“Nothing awakens religious consciousness like suffering.”

– DT Suzuki, Japanese Zen Master

Pain and suffering have the greatest potential energy for transformation.  I fully believe that the Crucifixion story of Jesus is an example of this, and that it teaches us to carry our own pain and suffering with as much dignity and purpose as possible.

5.

“Stupidity is sufficient unto itself.  Wisdom can never learn enough.”

– Mechthild of Magdeburg, German Beguine Nun

In our modern world, we consider stupidity to be the antithesis or foil to being smart or intelligent.

However, for Mechthild, a lay nun in Germany, stupidity is the other end of the pole from wisdom.

As an Enneagram 5, I love learning.  I truly enjoy finding out new perspectives and am always looking for the next paradigm shift.  The Enneagram, though, reminds me that I want wisdom but too often settle for information…

How interesting that, over the years, I am reading more about wisdom and virtue than random factoids that don’t actually help me live a good life!  Perhaps that is a signal that I am heading in the right direction?  At least wisdom has “no ceiling,” and you and I can both always benefit from gaining a little more of it!

This interview was included at the end of today’s daily devotion. … And the book Chaffee mentioned in #3. Check it out if you have time.

Realigned with the True Self

Friday, August 28, 2026

Father Richard teaches that true religion leads us to an experience of our true self and undermines our false self:

The true self is who you are because of the divine indwelling, the Holy Spirit within you (Romans 8:9). We are all temples of God, says Paul (1 Corinthians 3:16). What happened in Christ, the Anointed One, is an announcement of what is happening in all of us, too. We are children of heaven and earth, both at the same time. Much of the work of enlightenment is bringing those two identities together, just as Jesus did.

Putting the human and the divine together is what it means to be “the Christ” (Colossians 1:17–20), and what it means for us to be “the new Adam [and Eve]” (1 Corinthians 15:45–49). Ephesians could not make it much clearer: “You too have been stamped with the seal of the Holy Spirit that was promised—this is the pledge of your inheritance” (1:13–14). Few Christians have ever been seriously taught about their inherent union with God and will find all kinds of self-hating reasons to deny it. Only the true self can dare to believe the gospel’s good news.

The false self is characterized by separateness. Jewish and Christian traditions call this state of disconnectedness “sin.” When we’re separated from our deepest being, we are in a state of sin or alienation. When we are disconnected from our true self in God, we look for various false and addictive ways to fill our emptiness. The small or false self is who we think we are, but our thinking does not make it so. It is our identity created through culture, education, class, race, friends, gender, clothes, and money. That’s all that Adam and Eve had once they left the garden where they walked with God. But let’s not feel too bad for them or even guilty ourselves. It seems that we have to leave the garden. We have to create a false self to get started; the trouble is that we take it far too seriously. It is always passing away—in stages and then all at once at death. Only the true self is eternal. We all suffer from a terrible case of mistaken identity.

The true self is characterized by communion and deep contentment. It’s okay, right here, right now. The true self is the realigned self; and religion’s main purpose is to lead us to experience this self, which is who we are in God and who God is in us. It has to do with participating in a Universal Being that is beyond our being. Ultimately, our lives are not about us. We are about life! That doesn’t mean we stay in the true self twenty-four hours a day. Life is three steps forward and two steps backward. Yet once we know the big picture, we will never be satisfied with the little picture.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “True Self, False Self,” Radical Grace 25, no. 4, (2012): 39, 40, 41.

On This Current Moment – John Chaffee

September 23, 2025  Posted by johnqchaffee

I’m not sure why I am writing this.

I feel compelled to, but I’m not sure why. I am a mystery to myself. Is this my attempt to share some truth, or is this some means by which I am looking for validation? I contain multitudes… I am a walking contradiction at all times. In our current era of social media and internet use, I question whether anything I say here will be shared with anyone who doesn’t already agree with me.

All that said, I would like to share something with you. Consider these the thoughts of an incomplete individual who is still learning how to integrate and incarnate paleo-orthodoxy today.

Here is what I believe and hope to humbly share:

Any rhetoric that creates an Us vs Them thinking is inherently diabolical, anti-Christian, and utterly unbecoming of anyone who believes in Christianity’s claim of tearing down the wall of separation and creating one new humanity (Ephesians 2).

Any Us vs Them thinking is diabolical in the deepest and truest sense of the word. It originates from the Greek word Διαβολος, which breaks down etymologically as Δια- (Dia- meaning “two”) and Βολλω (Bollo- meaning “I throw”). Anything is therefore “diabolical” if it takes one thing and breaks it down into two and throws them apart.

The current political discourse is inherently diabolical. When I read the news, all I can see is the scapegoat mechanism happening, the throwing of all blame, shame, anger, and fury at some “other” individual or collective. To define who you are by who you are collectively casting out is the way of the “old humanity” and not the way of the “new humanity” of Ephesians 2, mentioned above.

The solution to the issues of our day is a deep and meaningful return to Christianity by the Christians. I say this knowing that conservative-leaning people would applaud this part. At the same time, a deep and meaningful return to Christianity by the Christians might throw some people off. Other, progressive-leaning people would applaud the same statement for different reasons.

Last night, I had a great conversation with three men younger than me, and at the end of the conversation, I encouraged them to re-read the entire New Testament with entirely fresh eyes. One of the problems of Christianity is that we defer to what our religious and political parties tell us about what it is all about. And, in a world where those lines are becoming more and more blurred, I want to echo the words of Shane Claiborne and say, “What if Jesus actually meant what He said?”

For Christians (and that is the only people group for whom I am remotely qualified to speak), the way forward is always a deeper return to the words of Jesus. And, I would add that the words of Jesus are more conservative than the progressives would ever admit, and also more progressive than conservatives would ever admit.

There is goodness, beauty, truth, and love that must be protected, but it is not protected by scapegoating, ostracising, eliminating, or killing our “enemies.” Christ was to be the last Crucified One. It is utterly unbecoming and a massive missing of the point to be Christians who then want to “crucify” others. That is not the way of Christ, that is the way of the Διαβολος.

The Glory of God in Us

Thursday, August 27, 2026

Father Richard first encountered the concept of the true self and false self from the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915–1968), who had a mystical experience on the corners of Fourth and Walnut (now Fourth and Muhammed Ali Boulevard) in Louisville, Kentucky. Merton wrote:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak [God’s] name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our [birthright]. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere. [1]

Father Richard reflects:

Most people spend their entire lives living up to the mental self-images of who they think they are, instead of living in the primal “I” that is already good in God’s eyes. But all we can “pay back” to God or others or ourselves is who we really are. This is what Merton is describing above. It’s a place of utter simplicity. Perhaps we don’t want to go there because it is too simple and almost too natural. It feels utterly unadorned. There’s nothing to congratulate myself for. I can’t prove any worth, much less superiority. There I am naked and poor. After years of posturing and projecting, it will at first feel like nothing.

But when we are nothing, we are in a fine position to receive everything from God. As Merton says, our point of nothingness is “the pure glory of God in us.” If we look at the great religious traditions, we see they all use similar words to point in the same direction. The Franciscan word is “poverty.” The Carmelite word is nada or “nothingness.” The Buddhists speak of “emptiness.” Jesus speaks of being “poor in spirit” in his very first beatitude (Matthew 5:3).

A Zen master would call the true self “the face we had before we were born.” Paul would call it who we are “in Christ, hidden in God” (Colossians 3:3). It is who we are before we’ve done anything right or anything wrong, before we even have a conscious thought about who we are. Thinking creates the separate self, the ego self, the insecure self. The God-given contemplative mind, on the other hand, recognizes the God self, the Christ self, the true self of abundance and deep inner security.

References:
[1] Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday & Company, 1965, 1966), 142.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer (Crossroad Publishing, 2003), 76‒78.

Image Credit and inspiration: Mick Haupt, untitled (detail), 2022, photograph. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. A shattered mirror reveals the light within each broken piece. Letting go of the false self is not a loss, but a breaking through that allows more light in.

=============================================================================

Unseen Existences – Brian Zahnd

A Brief Q&A

NOV 06, 2025

Q. What prompted you to write Unseen Existences? Was there a particular moment or experience that made you realize the need for this book?

I began to notice that with a desire for a “this world” faith (a desire with which I fully concur) many theological circles had overcorrected to the point that heaven had gone missing from any serious consideration. But without heaven as the spiritual world of unseen existences Christian theology is rendered incoherent. Without metaphysics Christianity is reduced to mere ethics. Or to put it more severely, Christianity without transcendence degenerates into politics. We need to recover heaven—not the escapism of The Late Great Planet Earth and its successors; not the sensationalism of “my thirty minutes in heaven;” not the sentimentalism of kitschy social media memes—but heaven as the awareness of the spiritual world enfolded into the material world all around us. This was my motivation for writing Unseen Existences.

Q. Many people today struggle with belief in anything beyond the material. How would you invite skeptics or disenchanted Christians to rediscover the “unseen”?

To quote Nick Cave, “We must take our subtle spiritual intuitions seriously and view them as the quintessence that underlies the ordinary world. The rejection of the sacred is the fundamental reason for our existential discontent.” Our modern existential discontent will not be healed unless we remember what our ancestors knew: A spiritual world underlies what we think of as the ordinary world. Furthermore, philosophical materialism has the embarrassing problem of being unable to account for matter itself! With just a modicum of thought most people recognize that meaning must be derived from something that transcends the material world. If all there is is matter, not much really matters. I want to encourage people to lean into what they already intuit in the deepest part of their being. In a world where existential discontent is a genuine phenomenon I want to offer something constructive. Not a trite solution but a gesture in the direction of where I believe hope can be found. What is needed is a pilgrimage—a pilgrimage of the soul toward the homeland where we’ve never been. If our pilgrimage is true, it is a journey inspired by wonder, waymarked by beauty, and ultimately a quest for a forgotten realm called heaven.

Q. How do you see this book fitting into your broader body of work?

In many ways Unseen Existences is the natural successor to When Everything’s on Fire.

Q. If readers only take away one thing from Unseen Existences, what do you hope that one thing is?

I’m going to be ambitious and hope that readers can take away two things from Unseen Existences: Our true home is in the unseen world of heaven, and life is a pilgrimage of the soul toward our true home of union with God.

BZ

The True Seed Within

Wednesday, August 26, 2026

The words, “not I, but Christ” urged me to come home to myself more fully, to the petaled truth buried deep within.
—Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits

The author Sue Monk Kidd reflects on her midlife discovery of the concept of the true self: 

Over and over again God calls you and me … to the cultivation of what Meister Eckhart called the “true seed” within us. God calls us to tend what lies seeded in the soul, this kernel of our truest nature—the God-image or True Self….

Throughout our lives we create patterns of living that obscure this identity. We heap on the darkness, constructing a variety of false selves. We become adept at playing games, wearing masks as if life were a masquerade party. This can go on for a long while. But eventually the music of the True Self seeks us out. Sooner or later (often in midlife), we’re summoned back to the garden. We’re called to soul-work….

The soul wants to be acknowledged and nurtured. The True Self wants to bloom and grow. And the way to begin this spiritual flowering is to confront your false selves—the ego patterns you have created—and come home to who you really are inside.

Monk Kidd compares soul work to the art of whittling: 

The art of soulmaking is taking our lives in our hands and—with all the love and discernment we can muster—gently whittling away the parts that don’t resemble the True Self. In spiritual whittling, though, we don’t discard the shavings. Transformation happens not by rejecting these parts of ourselves but by gathering them up and integrating them. Through this process we reach a new wholeness.

Spiritual whittling is an encounter with Mystery, waiting, the silence of inner places—all those things most folks no longer have time for. I’ll be honest. As I began my own spiritual whittling, I often clung to my “block of wood” resistantly. After all, wasn’t I fine just as I was?…

But there were also days when I felt drawn to try, when I yearned to discover how I was living falsely….

The writings of Thomas Merton encouraged me. He envisioned much of the spiritual life as whittling away the false self in order to become the True Self. He called the struggle for authenticity a “contemplative crisis” and insisted that no one can avoid it, that eventually we all “get the treatment.” According to Merton, “One’s actual self may be far from ‘real,’ since it may be profoundly alienated from one’s own deep spiritual identity. To reach one’s ‘real self’ one must, in fact, be delivered from that illusory and false ‘self’ whom we have created.” [1]

How real am I, I asked myself. What are the illusions I’ve created? What false selves do I need to pare away? Those are the whittling questions. Taken seriously, they’re tough and agonizing. “We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves,” wrote Merton. [2]

=====================

The following introduces the work of Wayne Jacobsen. And how he is beginning to use AI to assist readers in finding his thoughts from his life in writing, speaking and teaching. (A dozen books and over 1000 podcasts). Like all of us, he is nervous about AI and shares some examples of it’s use here….

What Does it Mean to Make Disciples?08/25/2026 A few weeks ago, we introduced the new Trail Guide at Lifestream and The God Journey websites with some trepidation. It’s a chatbot loaded with all the information from those websites and My Friend Luis, as well as all my books. It can help people search those resources as well as summarize my thoughts on a variety of topics drawn from my writings and podcasts.I get that some people are deeply concerned about AI and its future, and question my use of it here. I appreciate those concerns, which is why I keep a close check on the Trail Guide. As long as it’s helpful, we will keep it available.  But it is on a short leash, should something go awry. Weekly, I get to review a log of the questions and answers from the previous week to ensure that all is well. Rest assured, however, that I do not see the names of anyone asking questions, since the Trail Guide does not ask for, nor does it retain, any identifying information about who is interacting with the Trail Guide. So, how is it working?  Better than I could have hoped. I’m fascinated by how it can pull from so many sources and come up with summaries that are accurate and helpful, as well as provide additional links if people want to explore the answer a bit more deeply. The way people are using the Trail Guide is exactly what I hoped for. It allows you to access my content and explore topics that might interest you.For those who haven’t tried it yet, here are a few examples of what it does: Q: What does Wayne teach about making disciples? Trail Guide: Wayne’s understanding of discipleship is quite different from what most people have been taught. He sees it not as a program or a set of practices to master, but as learning to follow Jesus himself—and that happens through relationship, not religious instruction. In Learning to Follow the Shepherd, Wayne pushes back against the idea that discipleship means building a relationship with God through intellectual principles or becoming like a particular teacher.The real goal, he says, is to become a follower of Jesus—to reflect the Father’s nature in the world. That means learning to listen to his voice and follow him, not following a person or a program. What makes discipleship real, in Wayne’s view, is conversation and relationship. In The Approval Addiction, he reflects on how Jesus discipled his friends by talking with them about what mattered most—not performing for an audience, but inviting them into genuine friendship. The goal of a good teacher, he says, is to enable people to do what he’s done and even more, not to create dependency on himself.This comes through clearly in So You Don’t Want to Go to Church Anymore? Wayne’s novel about a disillusioned pastor learning from a stranger who bears an uncanny resemblance to John the apostle. The story shows discipleship as it really works: asking questions, helping someone see what they haven’t seen before, and pointing them toward Jesus rather than toward yourself.Wayne also teaches that real discipleship happens when people learn to recognize the Father’s voice in their own lives—not when they’re told what to believe or how to behave. In The Church Jesus Modeled, he contrasts this with the religious approach of making “good practitioners of Christianity” through programs. True discipleship, he says, is about helping people discover Jesus’s voice and learn to follow him—so they don’t need you anymore.Sources: The Approval Addiction (#566), The Church Jesus Modeled (#809), Learning to Follow the Shepherd This exchange made me laugh as a typo, or autocorrect, caused some initial confusion, but the Trail Guide finally understood:Q: Tell me about living from foldersTrail Guide: I’m not finding where Wayne takes up “living from folders” directly in the material I have at hand. That phrase doesn’t surface in his books, articles, or podcast episodes that I can see.Could you say a bit more about what you mean? Once I understand what you’re getting at, I can point you toward what Wayne has said that might speak to it. Q: FullnessTrail Guide: I’d love to help, but I’m not quite sure what you’re asking about. When you say “fullness,” are you wondering about: Living in the fullness of God’s love and the Father’s affection? Experiencing fullness in your relationship with Jesus day to day? Something else entirely? A quick word would help me point you toward what Wayne has written that speaks to what’s on your heart.Q: Living from fullness. Trail Guide: Living from fullness is one of Wayne’s most central themes — and it’s the opposite of what most of us have been taught to do. The heart of it is this: fullness isn’t something you achieve or figure out. It’s not about keeping rules or getting your life in order first. You’re already rooted in Christ, already complete in him. The work is learning to live from that reality instead of constantly reaching outside yourself — to your job, your relationships, your circumstances, money, respect — trying to fill a hole that only God can fill.When your fullness comes from the Father’s love and presence, everything changes. You stop needing things from people or situations to make you whole. That frees you to love others without desperation, to respond to life from a full tank rather than an empty one. As Wayne puts it, when you’re full in God, you can live toward others in genuine love — what he and Tobie van der Westhuizen call “the justice of love” — instead of using them to get what you’re missing.The practical side is simple but profound: when you notice discontent rising, when you’re grasping for something outside yourself, pause and redirect your heart. “I want my fullness to be in you,” not in that thing, that person’s approval, that outcome. Over time, that reorienting becomes a way of life. Wayne explores this beautifully in Living from Fullness (#1009), and it’s woven through Just Love and his teaching on Affection Presence And Fullness. You might also find the curated page How can I live every day in the Father’s love? a rich place to explore this theme more deeply.Sources: Living from Fullness (#1009), Affection Presence And Fullness And sometimes I ask it a question, just to see how it will answer:Q: How does the business model behind religious institutions distort the authenticity of its message?Trail Guide:Wayne sees the business model behind religious institutions as fundamentally at odds with the gospel itself. Once money enters the picture—salaries to pay, buildings to maintain, growth metrics to hit—the machinery takes over, and the message gets distorted almost inevitably.In “Monetizing Ministry,” Wayne traces how this happens. When an institution depends on donations and revenue, decision-making revolves around economics rather than the Spirit’s leading. Large donors gain leverage. Pastors are forced to sign non-compete clauses. Publishers become publicly traded corporations chasing shareholder profits. The result is that we’ve moved from serving God’s kingdom to building our own—valuing size, influence, money, and notoriety instead of the obscurity, servanthood, and flexibility that actually mark Jesus’s way.The deeper problem is that money always wins out, even among those who start with the best intentions. Jesus said you cannot serve God and money, but we’ve convinced ourselves we can blend them. We can’t. The business model doesn’t just distort the message—it replaces it. Instead of inviting people into genuine encounter with the Father, institutions resort to pressure and manipulation, framing attendance as obligation and threatening spiritual danger for those who leave.What gets lost is authenticity itself. When people have to perform to please leadership whose success depends on their obedience, when guilt and fear become the tools of “accountability,” the relational heart of the gospel—living loved, known by the Father—disappears. The machinery grinds on, but the life is gone.If this resonates with you, “Finding Church”explores what authentic church actually looks like when it’s freed from institutional frameworks, and the curated page “Where will I find the church Jesus is building?” gathers Wayne’s best work on this theme.Sources:  Monetizing Ministry, Finding ChurchThe post What Does it Mean to Make Disciples? first appeared on Lifestream | Wayne Jacobsen.  This post is published at Lifestream.org. View the original post at https://www.lifestream.org/what-does-it-mean-to-make-disciples/ Other recent posts: When Tragedy Shakes Your Faith Just Love — Audiobook Now Available The Love that Changes Everything Will You Help Us Again in Kenya? How the Early Church Viewed Salvation

Releasing Our False Self

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Richard Rohr appreciates the purpose the false or egoic self serves, while encouraging us not over-identify with it.  

Our false self is not our bad self, our inherently deceitful self, the self that God does not like or we should not like. Actually, our false self is quite good and necessary as far as it goes. It just does not go far enough, and it often poses and substitutes for the real thing. That is its only problem, and that is why we call it “false.” Various false selves (temporary costumes) are necessary to get us all started, but they show their limitations when they stay around too long. If a person keeps growing, their various false selves usually die in exposure to greater light.

Our false self, which we might also call our small or separate self, is our launching pad: our body image, our job, our education, our clothes, our money, our success, and so on. These are the functional trappings of ego that we all use to get us through an ordinary day. However, they are largely projections of our self-image and our attachment to it.

When we are able to move beyond our false self—as we are invited to do over the course of our lives—it will feel precisely as if we have lost nothing. While this “moving beyond” almost always entails some suffering, it ultimately feels like freedom and liberation. When we are connected to the Whole, it lessens our need to protect or defend the mere parts. We no longer need to compare and compete. We are now connected to something inexhaustible.

To not let go of our false self at the right time and in the right way is precisely what it means to be stuck, trapped, and addicted to our self. (The traditional word for that was sin, the result of being separate from the Whole.) Discovering the true self is not just a matter of chronological age. Some spiritually precocious young people see through the false self rather early, while some old men and old women are still dressing it up. If all we have at the end of our life is our separate or false self, there will not be much to eternalize. These costumes are transitory and impermanent, useful to us in our development, but also largely created by the mental ego. The false self is what changes, passes, and dies when we die. Only our true self lives forever.

Before we have encountered our true self, our false self is who we think we are. But our thinking does not make it true. The false self is primarily a social construct to get us started on life’s journey. It is a set of agreements made during childhood with our parents, family, neighbors, school friends, partner or spouse, and religion. Jesus might call it an “old wineskin,” which he points out cannot hold any new wine (Mark 2:22).

====================

The Song of Songs and Exegetical Mysticism

lecture one 

CHRIS EW GREEN. AUG 23

What, exactly, is the Song of Solomon doing in our Bibles? How are we to pray with it or preach or teach on it, given that God is never named, nothing even remotely religious is called for, and what the poems do describe is, well, disturbingly sexy? 

One approach is simply to let it be what it is, accepting that God means to embarrass us. Rowan Williams has suggested that the one thing we must not do is “explain it away by allegory,” reducing the erotic to the merely symbolic.

The woman in the Song of Songs is neither a virgin, nor a mother, nor a prostitute, so she escapes all the usual stereotypes attached to her gender; she is allowed to express her desire in unambiguously erotic language, as indeed is the man. “Love one another fervently”—yes, certainly; but “with a pure heart”? Not so much. For this isn’t an allegory of desire: it’s the real thing. Passion fierce as the grave, love strong as death, raging flames…

It has become a familiar critique, the one Williams suggests. Ancient and medieval Jewish and Christian readers, the majority of them, at least, felt the need to spiritualize the poem because they were deeply ambivalent toward sex and sexuality. The Song itself, however, has no such qualms. It forces the reader to face the naked truth of desire. As human beings, we are, as C.S. Lewis famously put it, made for need-love as well as gift-love; so, we actually do need both to want and be wanted, both to get what we want and to give satisfaction to others. That, Williams, argues, is what the Song reveals. He ends the homily with a call to let ourselves be needy, to long for God and to love like God, passionately, unashamedly, refusing to be satisfied with anything less: 

Love is not for the faint-hearted. That’s the charge laid against the church in Laodicea, in our second reading. They are too lukewarm, too dispassionate. There may be purity in their hearts, but there is no fervour. God’s love demands more. It is uncompromising, bringing with it “reproof and discipline” for those who do not give everything. But it is not self-indulgent. For God’s love treats us as absolutely real. God wants our fulfilment, our satisfaction and completion. God wants us to be who we are, who we are called to be; complete with our unruly bodies and our messy desires. Whether it is a person or a principle we want most, to love them—with a pure heart, fervently—is the most Godlike thing we could ever do.

Williams is not wrong. Too many readers have been scandalized by the Song’s eroticism, and repelled by the naughtiness/knottiness of human sexuality. But I would contend that that discomfort is more modern than it is ancient. It was a Protestant theologian, after all, who so famously set erosand agape into total contrast. 

I agree too that the Song is not an allegory. The text does not speak of one thing meaning another. Indeed, it is because it is not an allegory that the Song is ripe for a particular kind of allegorical interpretation. As Williams makes clear in the closing words of his homily, it precisely because the Song is about these lovers and their love that it reveals what is true of God’s love affair with us. The letter of the Song does not hide the spirit we are meant to receive but is wholly inspired by it, the flesh of the letter quickened, flushed with desire, luminous in longing. 

Origen and Gregory and the other great allegorists knew this. They read the Song as the celebration of the marriage of the divine and the human, agape and eros, gift and need. So, whatever the errors and excesses of their methods ,and notwithstanding their sometimes quite serious misunderstandings and anxieties about sexuality and embodiment, they still come nearer than we do to the sacred heart of the Song. For they come to the text knowing that all things are what they are only in Christ, in his divine-human heart. They come knowing that that because of him all things are related to all other things, held in at-one-ment. They come knowing that that must be so, because the Father has created all things simply by the giving of the Son to Mary and her family, her people, her friends. The Father speaks no Word other than the Son, and in speaking him calls every creature into being. In the words fo the master preacher: “the Father always speaks the Son in unity and pours forth all creatures in him.”¹

All things have come into being in him, the uncreated Word, eternally begotten before all ages with and in the same Spirit who overshadows his mother in the fulness of time. Because of him, because of how he is who he is, nothing exists by or for itself, self-grounded and self-fulfilled, but exists instead for him and with him. Therefore, everything—truly, everything—is capable of bearing and revealing everything else. As Nicholas of Cusa says, going beyond even Anaxagoras: “all is in all and each in each” because “God is the actuality of all things” (On Learned Ignorance 2.5.117-118). This is why in the Song the garden is a body and the body a garden, the man a cedar and the mountain into which the cedars reach their roots, a king and a pillar of smoke, and the woman a grande city, an army arrayed with banners, her eyes doves, her neck a balustrade, their kisses, goblets of wine. 

Perhaps tautegory, then, is what we should say the Song is, not allegory. Or even better: it is all-egory. The lovers in the Song do not represent a bride and bridegroom; they are the Bride and Bridegroom. And precisely in their wanting and finding, their trysts and romances, we know and are known. 

Franz Rosenzweig, in a lengthy meditation on the Song in The Star of Redemption, speaks for the traditional reading, the tried-and-true appreoach that led to the canonization of the text in the first place: 

The allegory of love, as allegory, goes through the whole Revelation. It is the allegory that keeps coming up in the Prophets. But it is supposed to be more than an allegory. And it is so only when it appears without a “this means,” without any reference to that for which it is supposed to be the allegory. So it is not enough that the relationship of God to man is presented in the allegory of the lover and the beloved; God’s word must immediately hold the relationship of the lover to the beloved, without the signifier making any allusion at all to the signified. And so we find it in the Song of Songs. It is no longer possible to see in that allegory “only an allegory.” The reader seems to be confronted here with the choice either of allowing the “purely human,” purely sensuous meaning, and then of asking himself by what surprising error these pages managed to get into the word of God, or of recognizing that here, precisely in the purely sensuous meaning, the deeper significance is hidden, immediately and not “only” in the allegorical form.²

Modern biblical criticism called into question what the synagogue and the church had always known, inventing a rift between the “original” fully human love poems and the supposedly later mystical interpretations of it. This hermeneutics of disjunction (it is not enough to speak of it as suspicious) sundered what God had joined together, as Rosenzweig explains: 

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Song of Songs was recognized as a love song, and at the same time immediately as a “mystical” poem. One simply knew that the I and You of inter-human language are also quite simply the I and You between God and man. One knew that in language the difference between “immanence” and “transcendence” is extinguished. It is not although but because the Song of Songs was an “authentic,” that is to say a “worldly” love song, that it was an authentic “spiritual” love song of God’s love for man. Man loves because, and as, God loves. Man’s human soul is the soul awakened and loved by God.³

Like Wittgenstein a decade or so later in his response to Frazer’s Golden Bough, Rosenzweig recognized biblical criticism’s main failing as its refusal to be honestly critical of its own aims and methods. Through the “hopelessly arbitrary and venturesome character of textual criticism,” the “I and You of the lyric” is reduced into the “He and She of the epic,” a reduction that is done, quite intentionally, to generate distance from the holy. 

The language of the Revelation of the soul had something disquieting in it for the spirit of that century, which modeled all according to its image in order to make it something objective and worldly. At first, the denial of the word of God had still taken place in an exuberant joy for the word of man, now qualified by “pure,” but it lost no time in taking revenge on the word of man, which, detached from its immediate, living, trustful union with the word of God, hardened into the dead objectivity of the third person.⁴

We should have listened to Rosenzweig. But we did not. Too many of us, including “conservatives,” invented or adopted methods and (more importantly) attitudes that could not help but distort the truth we were supposedly seeking. Like a restorer using the wrong solvent, we damaged and deface—and at times erased altogether—the very image we sought to renew. “The dead objectivity of the third person”—that is the dead giveaway, the ugly smear left by the hermeneutics of disjunction and its pseudo-scientific “findings.” 

The traditional ways of reading knew that the reading of Scripture is always an I-Thou exchange—communion, intercourse—not an I-It enterprise. For Origen and the other allegorists who follow him as he follows Hebrews, following Paul, following Jesus, spiritual exegesis, far from turning away from reality, is instead always about “encountering the Logos who speaks in the text.”⁵ They could expect such an encounter because they believed that the “opening of the Scriptures” was a mystical reality, as indeed all realities are, and not some “subjective” experience happening only in the heart and mind of the individual via some reader-response meaning-making process. It is not as if in reading the text and finding some meaning in it we have met the Lord. No, the Word speaks in the words so that the Scriptures are fulfilled in our hearing. Gregory, in one of his homilies on the opening chapter of the Song, says plainly that “the words of the present passage are a participation in divinity itself…”⁶ Think of what that must mean. 

Ben Myers has identified this approach to reading Scripture as “exegetical mysticism,” a way of knowing and being that refuses to separate being from knowing, a form of attention ordered toward first-person intimacy not third-person mastery. Christ is no idea to be grasped, the canonical texts not artifacts of a now-dead history, teaching never a matter of analyzing and applying information. The Word is the Word, and we have been captured by the sight and sound of him, as the Shulamite is captured by the sight and sound of her beloved. What we call “interpretation,” then, is nothing less than lived communion with him, born of hearing what was once said about him as what he is saying now, speaking for himself to us in the words of his friends.

Laboring over a difficult passage, the reader suddenly catches a glimpse of the divine Logos and “perceives him to be present” in the text. As Christ “draws near to [the] senses” he “illuminates the things that are obscure,” so that the soul sees him clearly. He “leaps” over the text toward the expectant soul… In the disciplined contemplative reading of scripture, “the hand of the interior soul” reaches out and touches the living Word.⁷

This, then, is the crux of the matter, the determining factor in our approach to the Song: the human body cannot not speak of God and our ache to be in secret with God, especially in the acts and angst of love, because the God who created the body reveals himself as love by what is done to his body. Now, thanks to the Spirit, what is true of his body is true of all bodies, including yours and mine, and true of the body of these sacred texts. For, when all is said and done, we are ourselves and they are themselves just because we are all his—no, more than that: because we are him, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.

Sunday, August 23, 2026

Father Richard Rohr encourages us to look within to discover our true self, the presence of God within us: 

We are all looking for something utterly reliable, something loyal and true, something we can always depend on. In John’s very short second letter in the New Testament, the writer offers us an invitation to discover what we are looking for when he writes of “the truth that lives within us that will be with us forever” (2 John 2). Most of us know little about this truth, so we end up as St. Augustine admits in his Confessions: “Late have I loved you, Beauty so very ancient and so ever new. Late have I loved you! You were within, but I was without.” [1]

We are right to go inside; otherwise, we become lost in an outer and revolving hall of mirrors, as Augustine confesses above. But the question is, “Which inside?” I use the language of the true self and the false self, which many have found quite helpful in talking about this concept. [2] It is good and necessary to pull back into our true self, but it is quite a disaster if we pull back into our egoic or false self for too long (or, worse, never leave it). The confusion comes because both true self and false self feel like our “self.” One might be called truly “centering,” while the other is the more common “ego centering.” This reveals the core of the problem. Jesus and most other great spiritual teachers make it very clear that there is a self that has to be found and one that has to be let go of or even “renounced” (Mark 8:35; Matthew 10:39, 16:25; Luke 9:24; John 12:25).

We might call the true self our soul, and we might call the false self our ego, our small or separate self. In finding our true self, we will have found an absolute reference point that is both utterly within us and utterly beyond us at the very same time. This grounds the soul in big and reliable truth. “My deepest me is God!” St. Catherine of Genoa shouted as she ran through the streets of town, just as Colossians had already shouted to both Jews and pagans, “The mystery is Christ within you—your hope of Glory!” (1:27).

Once discovered, the healthy inner authority of the true self can be balanced with the outer authority of Scripture and Tradition. Our experience can be validated by others’ experience. That’s what assures us that we are grounded in reality, not a fantasy. That God is both utterly beyond us and yet totally within us at the same time is the exquisite balance that most religion seldom achieves, in my opinion. 

==================

Recognizing Our True Self

Monday, August 24, 2026

Father Richard describes the characteristics and purposes of the true self in greater depth:

Searching for and rediscovering the true self is the fundamentum, the essential task that will gradually open us to receiving love from and giving love to God, others, and ourselves. We are created in the image of God from the very beginning (Genesis 1:26–27).

You and I (and every other created thing) begin with a unique divine DNA, an inner destiny as it were, an absolute core that knows the truth about our being. This true believer is tucked away in the cellar of our being, an imagoDei that begs to be allowed, to be fulfilled, and to show itself. “You were chosen in Christ before the world was made—to stand before God in love—marked out beforehand as fully adopted sons and daughters” (see Ephesians 1:4–5). This is the true self. Historically, it was often called “the soul.”

Jesus revealed and accepted a paradox in his entire being: Human and divine are not separate, but one! His life shouted it. I wonder why we so resist our same destiny. For most of us, this seems just too good and too dangerous to be true. There is so much contrary evidence! Many clergy fight me on this, even though it is quite constant in the Tradition. Is it because we are afraid to bear the burden of divinity? As Marianne Williamson says: “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” [1] Maybe we realize subconsciously that if we really believed that we are temples of God (see 1 Corinthians 3:16, 6:19; 2 Corinthians 6:16), then we would have to live up to it.

The true self is the Divine Indwelling, the Holy Spirit within us. I would say that the true self is precisely the divine part of us that is great enough, deep enough, gracious enough to fully accept the human part of us. If we are merely human, we will tend to reject our embarrassingly limited humanity. Think on that!

Paradoxically, immense humility, not arrogance, characterizes someone who lives from their true self. They simultaneously know they are a child of God, but they also know that they didn’t earn it and are not worthy of it. They know it’s entirely a gift (see Ephesians 2:8–9 and throughout the Pauline writings). All they can do is thank Somebody Else, occasionally weep with joy, and kneel without any hesitation.

The true purpose of mature religion is to lead us to ever new experiences of our true self. If religion does not do this, it is junk religion. Every sacrament, every Bible story, every church service, every sermon, every hymn, every bit of priesthood, ministry, or liturgy is for one purpose: to allow us to experience our true self—who we are in God and who God is in us—and to live a generous life from that Infinite Source.

==============

Thinking About It:

If God is already present within you, what part of you would you need to become quiet enough to hear—and what part of you might you need to let go?

Engaging in Good Trouble

Friday, August 21, 2026

Father Richard finds in the prophets an invitation to follow their path of disrupting injustice:

When prophets see that the status quo is not working, they encourage what I call “holy disorder,” a scenario in which the fundamental conditions and relationships of the group are disrupted (as when the Israelites were conquered by the Babylonians or persecuted by their enemies). This disruption can take positive form or negative form. Either God outgrows our present, limited understanding and we grow with God, or we regress due to our inability to love and trust what is happening. Then society reverts to legalism and formality until it ultimately disintegrates. From these disruptions, a new order arises (what I call “reorder”), in which human relations can work at a higher level that is more imaginative, less dualistic, and usually less violent than the first order or the reactive disorder.

The process of allowing and creating holy disorder is surely what Representative John Lewis called getting into “good trouble.” He was referring to the good and necessary trouble of civil disobedience in the pursuit of racial justice, but his philosophy is equally powerful when we think about the prophets. For them, good trouble and holy disorder could draw forth better things—an entirely different consciousness characterized by more justice, more mercy, greater closeness to God. Of course, the process is never linear, and it never stops. The new reorder soon becomes a new order, and we need prophets to keep us from idolizing the new status quo. The only thing more dangerous and more common than narcissism is group narcissism. We have always needed a mechanism for positive change that is organic and comes from within. We must ask, Why has critical thinking always had to come from outside our religious systems and hardly been allowed from within? This is a major problem.

We have tried to reform religion with the same codes of violence and willpower used by corporations, monetary systems, landowners, and nation-states, often leaving the egos and self-interests of hierarchs quite in control. Further, we have a tendency to minimize evil, attacking it in individual “bad guys” instead of exposing and convicting the intergenerational lies that consume most cultures: things like pride, deceit, power, war, and greed.

This, more than any other reason, is why Christianity did little to reform or evolve the Roman, Holy Roman, Russian, French, Spanish, English, or American empires, but instead slept comfortably with every one of them. The evils that ate us alive were seldom called evil because the “priestly” groups were intent on enforcing ritual requirements and purity codes—in which Jesus and the prophets showed little or no interest. Once we lose the prophetic analysis, most evil will be denied, disguised, or hidden among the rules and rituals of religion and the law itself. This is how truth is “discerned” in a dualistic world: by winning the purity and identity contests.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage (Convergent Books, 2025), xvi–xvii.

Image Credit and Inspiration: Valentin Walter, untitled (detail), 2019, photo. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Water flowing steadily over stone echoes Amos’s call for justice to roll down like an ever-flowing stream, and Isaiah’s promise of a peace that outlasts every obstacle in its path.

John Chaffee – Five on Friday, 8-21-26

1.

“God meant for things to be much easier than we have made them.”

– Dorothy Day, Founder of The Catholic Worker

Man, isn’t this the truth?

We are so quick to blame God for the problems in our lives when we should be looking at our own behavior and holding one another accountable for living well.

Add into the mix the fact that we are each immature, acting on partial knowledge, failing to see how we are all connected, dealing with hurts, addictions, or traumas, and it is easy to see that we have made our lives rather difficult.

Sure, we might be angry with God that God did not make a cosmos without pain, but pain is an inevitable part of a universe that is still (even 13.8 billion years later) learning how to be a universe.

2.

“To go against self is the beginning of salvation.”

– Early Desert Monastic Saying

After all, Jesus said, “Pick up your cross daily and follow Me.”

3.

“Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst.”

– CS Lewis, English Author and Apologist

I completely agree.

When we have taken the faith and refuse to allow it to accuse and convict us of things that we need to change, we become living mockeries of the faith we claim allegiance to.

In Christian theology and practice, building on the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, we have the terms “cheap grace” and “costly grace.”

“Cheap grace” is grace that excuses whatever we do in life and makes no claim on us to change how we live.  For Bonhoeffer, this is an abomination and a distortion of the faith.

On the flip side is “costly grace,” which offers us true grace alongside the demand that we give up “living as we want” and submit to a higher ethical standard.  I do not remember where, but someone said, “Spiritual maturity happens when we choose to bend the knee before a Mystery larger than ourselves, rather than to continually fall into greater and greater self-destructive habits.”

I am not aware that CS Lewis or Dietrich Bonhoeffer ever communicated, but I have a feeling that they would have agreed on many points about how a Christian ought to live.

4.

“A saint is not someone who never sins, but one who sins less and less frequently and gets up more and more quickly.”

– Bernard of Clairvaux, The “Last of the Church Fathers”

The saint is simply someone who knows how to apologize, learn from their mistakes, change how they live, and make amends like a pro.

5.

“Let no one deceive you, monk, with the notion that you can be saved while a slave to sensual pleasure and self- esteem.”

– Maximus the Confessor, Syrian Monk and Theologian

Maximus the Confessor has been a growing influence on my life.

He lived in the 7th century AD and was a major proponent of the Chalcedonian Creed, which emphasized Jesus’ two natures (human and divine) as fully coexistent within him.

And, born out of his deep commitment to the early creeds of the church, Maximus also developed a rather robust ethical framework.

If we are still slaves to our pleasures and the need for the approval of others, then we are in an incredibly dangerous place.

The inability to deny ourselves every so often, and instead chasing headlong into whatever gives us a little squirt of dopamine, will lead us and those around us into pain.  Think about a toddler who cannot do any amount of impulse control and will seek whatever soothes their own discomfort… If we are like that, then we have much growing up to do.

Add on top of that the need to be liked?  The need to get other people’s approval even though we are impulsively chasing after whatever soothes us?

Wow, that’s a recipe for self-destruction, isn’t it?