A Visit from Thérèse

Friday, October 2, 2026

Father Richard shares an experience he had while on pilgrimage to the convent where Thérèse of Lisieux lived:

Our small group of five visited the infirmary where Thérèse died. I stood nearest the window. I could see the black hole in the bushes that Thérèse likened to her own soul when she was in pain, dying of tuberculosis, and trying to believe that Jesus still loved her. The sister guiding our tour was telling us the story of Thérèse’s death when she suddenly paused and said, “We have a visitor!” The way she said it, we all got goose bumps!

We followed the sister’s gaze and saw by the window a beautiful orange and yellow butterfly. It was only April 3, way too early for butterflies in northern France. She said, “Let it out, let it out!” Since I was closest to the window, I tried to open the latch, but I didn’t understand how it worked and just kept struggling with it. All of a sudden, I felt as though I were levitating. I had to look down at my feet to make sure I was still on the ground. I was definitely standing there, but I felt such ecstatic feelings of presence, joy, love, and power. All the blood seemed to flow out of my head.

The sister could only see me from behind. She asked, “What’s wrong? Open the window. The butterfly wants out! The butterfly wants out!” I finally got the window open, and the butterfly flew away. I turned around and the others said my face was white. “What just happened?” I asked, even though I knew I had just been visited. I don’t know how else to say it: Thérèse was there.

Before she died, Thérèse promised to spend her heaven doing good on earth. [1] Whether we believe in miracles of the saints or not, it seems like everybody who loves Thérèse has some miraculous story. She gets involved in our lives. I think she is present in millions of lives. There is something beautiful happening through this woman who said she wanted to perfect “the science of love.” [2]

My own experience in her convent felt like an affirmation of what I truly believe and what has been a lot of my message. The little way is the spirituality of imperfection; we come to God not by doing it right, but by doing it wrong. It’s not a matter of doing great things. Whenever we act in conscious love, this is the little way. And I think whatever we do in conscious union and love is prayer. So many of our Catholic saints are examples of heroic martyrdom; the message they give is, “If I am perfect, then God will love me.” Because I was so programmed to think that way, I really needed to be released from that pursuit of perfection. Thank God both Thérèse and Francis of Assisi did that for me!  

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John Chaffee 5 On Friday

1.

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone.”

– Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk and Activist

This is an important thing to remember as someone who leans toward introversion.

Starting in college, I tried my hardest to be extraverted…  So much so that I ended up winning Homecoming King my senior year.  Goodness, that is wild to think about.  The problem was that it was not fully or truthfully who I was… but I didn’t know it then.

Following college was 20 years of working in church jobs that demanded a kind of extraversion or social mode of being.  I would leave events and feel utterly exhausted, oftentimes taking naps before waking up to get myself a dinner.

It was somewhere in the last 8 years when I realized that all of it was to teach me to have a healthy rhythm and balance between solitude and community.  When one is overdone to the exclusion of the other, we can get rather bent out of shape.

In some respects, I had to learn that my need for solitude was not a result of anti-social behavior while also learning that just being in front of crowds did not mean I necessarily had community.

If love is our true identity, then it can only be found after solitude shows me my true self, and that true self is seen and celebrated by a community (not a crowd) of other true selves who also wish to be seen and celebrated.

2.

“To be spiritual is to be a breathing being…the opposite of spiritual is not secular…it’s suffocation.”

– Padraig o Tauma, Irish Poet-Theologian

I had the good fortune of meeting Padraig a few years ago at St. Joseph’s University near Philly.  He was stateside doing poetry readings and it was delightful.

There is something about the arts that does a better job, in my opinion, than theo-logic at describing God/faith/the spiritual life/death/etc.  Poetry just seems to unlock something within me in a way that other disciplines do not.

3.

“By learning you will teach, by teaching you will understand.”

– Latin Proverb

Let’s be honest, many of us do not fully understand something until we accidentally find ourselves having to teach it.

Then,

The teaching itself unlocks different aspects of what we thought we learned and we come to understand it on a completely new level.

Now, I can say that I thought I understood Christianity but that is not the full picture.

However, after living enough of life and having to teach it in a classroom setting where students can push back, debate, or dialogue about it, I admit to have learned so very much by being a teacher of it.  Sure, giving sermons is good and fine but that is still in a monological mode of delivery (at least in white churches).

And, I do not doubt that there is still an infinite amount more for me to learn by teaching.  If anything, teaching has helped me in my own formation more than I can probably comprehend.

4.

“When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

– Mark 2:5

This story has shown itself to me a few times over the past two weeks and I do not know why.

There must be some alchemy, some teaching, some wisdom about it that is beckoning to be learned/integrated by some deeper level within myself.  After all, the stories that grip us, grip us for a reason.

The setting here in Mark 2 is that there is a paralytic who wants to be healed by Jesus, but there is a large crowd that is obscuring or blocking the way.  There is no statement that the paralytic man has faith at all, only that his friends have faith.  The friends then conspire to bust a hole in the ceiling and lower their friend down into the crowded room to where Jesus is.

In essence, someone who cannot help themselves is helped by those around him and Christ allows the one without faith to be the beneficiary of the others who do.

Honestly, this story walks all over the lines we commonly draw.

Perhaps that is why we chose to record this story for future generations after it happened.

5.

“The church of Christ ecumenically embraces the whole inhabited earth. She is not a tribal religion, nor a Western religion, nor a white religion, but the church of all humanity.”

– Jurgen Moltmann, German Theologian

Jurgen Moltmann passed away this week on June 3rd at 98 years old.  He is considered an important voice in the world of Christian theology.  Why?  Because he was one of the first theologians to seriously engage theology in the aftermath of WWII.

As a 16-year-old German, he was forcefully drafted into the German army in 1943 and became disillusioned with nationalism, violence, and war.  Then, he was kept as a POW for several years after the war during which he was gifted a copy of the New Testament.  This eventually paved the way for him to study Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others.

Jurgen Moltmann’s book The Crucified God shook me.  It takes up the topic of God in a way that continues to inspire me.  Moltmann’s thesis in that book was that God is not Aristotelian (omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent) in the way that we conventionally think.  No, that understanding of God is incompatible with Jesus, who suffered and was able to be affected by the world around him.

Rather than standing at an impassible and unchanging distance, the Christian God enters into pain, suffering, and death with the Creation.

In light of the concentration camps, brutalities of war, and the death toll of the Holocaust, Moltmann’s contribution to the world of theology was like a fresh breath of co-suffering love and hope.

This past week on the internet I have seen nothing but positive statements about this pastor-theologian, who seems to have been as quality of a person as was his contributions to theology.

If you have any chance today, look up The Crucified God, Theology of Hope, or The Church in the Power of the Spirit.  They are considered his most influential pieces.

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James Finley

Thérèse of Lisieux: The Way of Love

A Childlike Nature

Then children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them, but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” —Matthew 19:13–14

James Finley unpacks how Thérèse of Lisieux understood our calling to be like “little children”:

Thérèse entered the monastery at fifteen, and she began her novitiate a few months later, which means she took the habit of a cloistered Carmelite sister. She took the devotional name of Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face….

Thérèse’s emphasis on childhood and the child Jesus in her teaching doesn’t at all suggest that we’re not to mature into adults but rather see that there are certain childlike qualities that are the essence of spiritual maturity. How can we, as adults, cultivate these childlike qualities as a way to deepen our experience and response to God’s presence in our life?

Thérèse writes in her autobiography, “Jesus deigned to show me the road that leads to this Divine Furnace, and this road is the surrender of a little child who sleeps without fear in its father’s arms.” [1] She calls it a divine furnace—and other mystics speak this way as well—so that we imagine a red-hot stove. You put a drop of water on the stove and it vanishes. This is such a deep love and complete trust that all fear vanishes. We’re infinitely loved by God and held by God in an infinite love that completely and utterly transcends any source of fear, any source of sadness. The child is like an infant in complete trust and safety, sound asleep in the arms of God. We’re resting in the midst of a fear, in the midst of the sadness, but we’re grounded in this love that transcends the fear and transcends the sadness.

It’s our eternal destiny: an eternal oneness with the eternal love of God as the beloved. For Thérèse, the way we enter into this mystery experientially is to accept it. But we have to accept it as a small child accepts. It’s good for us to try to accept it, but as long as we’re trying to accept it, we’re not yet accepting the way a child accepts. When parents love their child, the child doesn’t try to accept that they’re loved. The child is loved because children are acts of acceptance in our midst. That’s what makes children so disarming, and it’s what makes child abuse so painful and deep….

It seems to me that the question in response to Thérèse’s teaching is: “How can we learn to go beyond trying to an act of acceptance?” I think this is why Thérèse’s spiritual path is called “the little way.” It’s not a big, overwhelming experience. It’s about calibrating our hearts to such subtlety that the sovereignty of this love is realized within us.

A Saint for the Masses

Thursday, October 1, 2026

Feast of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker, had a deep attachment to Thérèse of Lisieux for her “little way” to God, which was open to all, including people living in poverty. Day writes of Thérèse’s widespread appeal:

It was the “worker,” the common man, who first spread her fame by word of mouth. It was the masses who first proclaimed her a saint. It was the “people.” 

When we think of the masses, we think of waves of the sea, of forests, of fields of wheat, all moved by the spirit which blows where it listeth. When we think of the people, we think of the child at school, … the mother working, … the man traveling, the migrant worker, … the soldier, the rich, the bourgeois, the poor in tenements, the destitute man in the street. To a great extent she has made her appeal to all of these.

What was there about her to make such an appeal? Perhaps because she was so much like the rest of us in her ordinariness. In her lifetime there are no miracles recounted, she was just good….

It is the world itself which has canonized her, it is the common people who have taken her to their hearts.

Day describes why Thérèse’s “little way” is so important today:

[Therese] practiced the presence of God and she did all things—all the little things that make up our daily life and contact with others—for [God’s] honor and glory. She did not need much time to expound what she herself called “her little way,” which she said was for all. She wrote her story, and God did the rest. God and the people….

What stands out in her life? Her holiness of course, and the holiness of her entire family. That is not an ordinary thing in this day of post-war materialism [and] delinquency….

With governments becoming stronger and more centralized, the common [person] feels [their] ineffectiveness. When the whole world seems given over to preparedness for war and the show of force, the message of Therese is quite a different one.

She speaks to our condition. Is the atom a small thing? And yet what havoc it has wrought. Is her little way a small contribution to the life of the spirit? It has all the power of the spirit of Christianity behind it. It is an explosive force that can transform our lives and the life of the world, once put into effect….

One can state that this saint, of this day, is releasing a force, a spiritual force, upon the world to counteract that fear and that disaster. We know that one impulse of grace is of infinitely more power than a cobalt bomb. Therese has said, “All is grace.”

She declared, “I will spend my heaven doing good upon earth.” “I will raise up a mighty host of little saints.” “My mission is to make God loved, to make Love loved.”

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Jesus Calling Sarah Young

I am your living God, far more abundantly alive than the most vivacious person you know. The human body is wonderfully crafted, but gravity and the inevitable effects of aging weigh it down. Even the most superb athlete cannot maintain his fitness over many decades. Lasting abundant life can be found in Me alone. Do not be anxious about the weakness of your body. Instead, view it as the prelude to My infusing energy into your being.
     As you identify more and more fully with Me. My Life becomes increasingly intertwined with yours. Though the process of aging continues, inwardly you grow strong with the passing years. Those who live close to Me develop an inner aliveness that makes them seem youthful in spite of their years. Let My Life shine through you, as you walk in the Light with Me.

Psalm 139:14 (NLT)
14 Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
    Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.

Additional insight regarding Psalms 139:13-15: God’s character goes into the creation of every person. When you feel worthless or even begin to hate yourself, remember that God’s Spirit is ready and willing to work within you. We should have as much respect for ourselves as our Maker has for us.

Colossians 1:29 (NLT)
29 That’s why I work and struggle so hard, depending on Christ’s mighty power that works within me.

Additional insight regarding Colossians 1:28,29: The word perfect (in 1:28)  means “mature or completed, not “flawless.” Paul wanted to see each believer mature spiritually. Like Paul, we must work wholeheartedly like an athlete, but we should not strive in our own strength alone. We have the power of God’s Spirit working in us. We can learn and grow daily, motivated by love and not by fear or pride, knowing that God gives the energy to become mature.

Additional insight regarding Colossians 1:28,29: Christ’s message is for everyone; so everywhere Paul and Timothy went, they brought the Good news to all who would listen. An effective presentation of the Good News includes warning and teaching. The warning is that without Christ, people are doomed to eternal separation from God. The teaching is that salvation is available through faith in Christ. As Christ works in you, tell others about him, warning and teaching them in love. Whom do you know that needs to hear this message?

1st John 1:7 (NLT)
7 But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.

Additional insight regarding 1st John 1:7: How does Jesus’ blood cleanse us from all sin? In Old Testament times, believers symbolically transferred their sins to an animal, which they then sacrificed (see a description of this ceremony in Leviticus 4). The animal died in their place to pay for their sins and allow them to continue living in God’s favor. God graciously forgave them because of their faith in him and because they obeyed his commandments concerning the sacrifice. Those sacrifices anticipated the day when Christ would completely remove sin. Real cleansing from sin came with Jesus, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Sin, by its very nature, brings death – this is a fact as certain as the laws of gravity. Jesus did not die for his own sins; he had none. Instead, by a transaction that we may never fully understand, he died for the sins of the world. When we commit our life to Christ and thus identify ourselves with him, his death becomes ours. He has paid the penalty for our sins and his blood has purified us. Just as Christ rose from the grave, we rise to a new life of fellowship with him (Romans 6:4 – “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”).

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Then children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them, but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” —Matthew 19:13–14 
 
James Finley unpacks how Thérèse of Lisieux understood our calling to be like “little children”:   

Thérèse entered the monastery at fifteen, and she began her novitiate a few months later, which means she took the habit of a cloistered Carmelite sister. She took the devotional name of Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face…. 

Thérèse’s emphasis on childhood and the child Jesus in her teaching doesn’t at all suggest that we’re not to mature into adults but rather see that there are certain childlike qualities that are the essence of spiritual maturity. How can we, as adults, cultivate these childlike qualities as a way to deepen our experience and response to God’s presence in our life? 

Thérèse writes in her autobiography, “Jesus deigned to show me the road that leads to this Divine Furnace, and this road is the surrender of a little child who sleeps without fear in its father’s arms.” [1] She calls it a divine furnace—and other mystics speak this way as well—so that we imagine a red-hot stove. You put a drop of water on the stove and it vanishes. This is such a deep love and complete trust that all fear vanishes. We’re infinitely loved by God and held by God in an infinite love that completely and utterly transcends any source of fear, any source of sadness. The child is like an infant in complete trust and safety, sound asleep in the arms of God. We’re resting in the midst of a fear, in the midst of the sadness, but we’re grounded in this love that transcends the fear and transcends the sadness. 

It’s our eternal destiny: an eternal oneness with the eternal love of God as the beloved. For Thérèse, the way we enter into this mystery experientially is to accept it. But we have to accept it as a small child accepts. It’s good for us to try to accept it, but as long as we’re trying to accept it, we’re not yet accepting the way a child accepts. When parents love their child, the child doesn’t try to accept that they’re loved. The child is loved because children are acts of acceptance in our midst. That’s what makes children so disarming, and it’s what makes child abuse so painful and deep…. 
 
It seems to me that the question in response to Thérèse’s teaching is: “How can we learn to go beyond trying to an act of acceptance?” I think this is why Thérèse’s spiritual path is called “the little way.” It’s not a big, overwhelming experience. It’s about calibrating our hearts to such subtlety that the sovereignty of this love is realized within us.

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“I can’t forgive myself.” – Bradley Jersak

Letter to a Condemning Conscience

BRADLEY JERSAK SEP 30

A friend wrote to me, suffering under the crushing weight of a condemning conscience. Assessing the harm done to loved ones can make self-forgiveness seem impossible to the point of perilous. I know that cliff, but I’ve also had really good help through those deep valley. 

The Crushing Weight of Guilt 

I have never found self-forgiveness easy. And when we’ve done harm to others, it probably isn’t meant to be. Not if we are able to hear the impact of our actions and the ripple effects they cause. An honest look in the mirror can sting, but in isolation (“just me and Jesus”), can also become deeply unhealthy. Personally, I have struggled with stuckness, blind spots, mismanaged apologies, and the need to hear God’s forgiveness through the voice and love of another human being. 

The Christian tradition of confession comes from James 5, where we read, “Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.”

“…confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”

—James 5:16

The question then becomes, “If Jesus forgave us, then why confess sin at all?” Some take this to the extreme, even claiming that we should not pray the Lord’s Prayer asking Jesus to forgive us, as if all of Jesus’ teachings are still Old Covenant. Nope.

When we pray the Lord’s prayer, we ask to be forgiven by the One who forgave us already so that we enter the experience of what is already true… so that we “let forgiveness in” to cleanse us from the debilitating weight of guilt and shame.

Similarly, why does Paul say, “You have been reconciled” (already)… but then “therefore, be reconciled” (now)? Same idea: Paul wants us to live into the truth so that it becomes our experience and changes our perspective and our lives.

But there is also the problem of radical individualism—aka alienation. We discover that despite knowing these verses, we have trouble overcoming guilt and shame on our own. We don’t forgive ourselves very well and we get stuck, and very often, even sick. Sometimes, we need to express our wrongdoing to another person and hear from them that we are forgiven. 

Confession

That said, when confessing my faults to others, I discovered the hard way that not everyone is reliable at remaining confidential. Or they don’t listen well. OR they slip into fix-it mode. Or they deepen the shame. It happens.

At some point, the people of God recognized that some have the gift of the Holy Spirit to listen without judgement, to reassure us of Christ’s forgiveness, and to call us back into communion with God. They became what we called “confessors.” It’s troubling how many who take that role are inept or abusive. 

But there are others—spiritual directors, counsellors, therapists, and recovery sponsors who practice forms of confidential confession so that God’s forgiveness is felt deeply enough to heal us.

My Confessors

Some of my convictions about healthy confession grew through the seven years of weekly confession I did with Bishop Varlaam (of blessed memory). When I went to him, he NEVER ever started by interrogating my sin. He would always ask, “What’s troubling you?” What frequently “troubled” me were the accusations of my conscience about my sin. 

But with Varlaam, the goal of confession was always to remind me that the good news of Jesus is that I don’t need to go run and hide like Adam. He would urge me to return as quickly as possible into Jesus’ presence to share what’s bothering me, to hear again that I’m forgiven, to remind me to make amends where necessary, and to proceed to communion with a clean conscience. 

It was always a very tender conversation, focussed specifically on “what’s troubling me,” which is to say the anxiety of being alienated and condemned, not by God, but by the judgments of our conscience. Having a conscience is a good thing. It is meant to function as an inner prophet (like Nathan to David) that identifies our need for healing mercy. But the conscience can also slip and get carried away by ego into judgment and condemnation. 

In confession, Jesus then comes with the good news of forgiveness to and the mediator between us in our conscience.

After checking on any amends I needed to make to others, Bishop Varlaam used to always say, 

“I am a man just like you and I have no power to forgive sins, but with the boldness we have been given because the Lord said, ‘Whatever sins you remit are remitted,” I remind you: you ARE forgiven. Rise in peace.”

Letting Go of Judgment

Based on the above, I wrote my friend (but maybe you, too),

… Of course God forgives us, but forgiving ourselves is harder, especially when we think of those we’ve harmed. But even there, I hope you will allow Christ to bear the burden of that guilt and release those you love into his loving, caregiving arms (picture it). Your well-being is what matters most to them. The rest is details.

I remember the first time I ever went to confession, what really bothered me that day was that despite all my missteps and failings, I was still so judgy of others. And I said this. My confessor replied:

“And who have you judged more than yourself? But as the Apostle said, ‘Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master they will stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.’” (Romans 14:4). 

Somehow, at least for a moment, I felt liberated … and I realized that the accuser was my own conscience, acting above its pay-grade, dethroning Christ from the judgment seat. 

I saw that Christ alone is qualified to judge because he alone can be trusted to deliver the verdict of mercy.

So here’s a message for you today: “You will stand, for the Lord is able to make you stand.”

The Conscience as Mercy’s Emissary

But I thought, then what is my conscience for? How can my conscious act in spiritually, mentally, and emotionally healthy ways? Isn’t that its role? To judge me?

Again, Bp. Varlaam to the rescue: he taught me that when I stumble, I am so prone to shame, and I often run and hide like Adam did. But that only amplifies the shame and I alienate myself. “Instead,” he said, 

“… as quickly as you can, come back into the presence of Infinite Mercy… 
even a ‘Lord, have mercy’ or the Lord’s prayer will do.”

So rather than condemning me, my conscience gets an upgrade, a promotion: it becomes an emissary for the all-merciful One, not to condemn me, but to invite me (ever the prodigal) back to belonging and dignity in the Father’s house. That’s its role.

So it is for you. I’m calling your conscience to serve God by inviting you (again and again) into the warm embrace of the Father who is always for you, always toward you, always running your way … even when a long way off. 

Maybe it’s less about psyching yourself up to forgiving yourself so much as surrendering your regrets to the care of the Forgiver and another human being. 

Hint: that surrender is letting go, which is the essence of self-forgiveness. 

Much love,

Bradley

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The two classic questions about today’s material:
1. What do you want me to know &

2. What do you want me to do

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

The author Gina Loehr describes how God’s love empowered Thérèse of Lisieux to embrace the fullness of her own humanity and that of others: 

Thérèse’s teachings were never scholarly or academic; they were simply the insights she gained through prayerful reflection on her personal experiences.  

Thérèse’s understanding of the significance of love, for example, grew in part out of her experience of longing to do everything for Christ. She had felt the yearning not only to be a Carmelite, a spouse, and a spiritual mother but also to be a missionary, a warrior, a priest, an apostle, a martyr, a crusader, and a papal guard, among other things. In reflecting on the various parts that make up the body of Christ, Thérèse saw herself in all of them. But Thérèse came to an important realization when reflecting on First Corinthians 13, which explains that all the greatest gifts are nothing without love. This led Thérèse to understand that love enabled the apostles to preach and the martyrs to make their great sacrifices. Love kept the body of Christ alive in the world. She wrote in her autobiography, “I understood that love comprised all vocations, that love was everything, that it embraced all times and places…. In a word, that it was eternal!” [1]  

Saint Thérèse embraced the truth that loving Jesus is the goal of life and our most important task. She said, “There is but one thing for us to do … and that is to love, to love Jesus with all the energy of our heart.” [2] Her love for Jesus, though deeply passionate, was not purely emotional. It was fundamentally a choice, a response to his love for her…. Hers was an authentic love, not a fanciful illusion, and thus it brought her deep contentment.   

For Thérèse, love of God and love of the other is of one piece:  

From her youth Thérèse loved Jesus with her whole heart, and she never regretted it. In addition to bringing her personal consolation, this love helped her grow in her relationships with others. She understood that when we give ourselves to God, our hearts don’t lose their natural tenderness, rather that tenderness increases as our hearts become purer and more divine. Thérèse wrote, “In loving Him the heart expands and can give to those who are dear to it incomparably more tenderness than if it had concentrated upon one egotistical and unfruitful love.” [3]  

Loving God enriches not only our experience of human love but also our experience of life. Thérèse was able to see the gifts of her Beloved surrounding her. She was passionately engaged in life. She loved to explore nature and absorb the beauties of creation…. The love overflowing from her heart spilled out in her many poems and plays. Her love for God energized her daily life. She lived as a woman in love: joyful, enthusiastic, smiling.

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Wholeness in a Time of Hypocrisy

What If We Took What Jesus Said and Who Jesus Loved Seriously? 

CHUCK DEGROAT. SEP 27

“Let love be without hypocrisy.” — Romans 12:9

It’s a bit surreal sharing musings from my new book on character formation in a season of non-stop political advertisements. 

I was thinking about this just the other day, reminded again of how we who call ourselves followers of the crucified Lamb miss the point over and over again. I posted this in various social media spaces: 

When people ask me when Christianity’s cozy relationship with narcissistic leadership began, I sometimes sense they’re looking for a recent moment, like the rise of the megachurch, the prosperity gospel, or the advent of social media and digital celebrity. 

History tells a much longer and more troubling story—that we who call ourselves Christian must reckon not only with elevating malignant narcissists into offices that demand integrity, but that we need to reckon with Manifest Destiny, Jim Crow, and the Doctrine of Discovery, that we need to reckon with the Crusades and “Deus vult” (God wills it), that we need to reckon with imperial power and “en toutō nika” (under the sign of the Cross, conquer). 

Reckoning with narcissism and abuse in the church and in our wider culture isn’t about pointing to a few bad apples. It’s about seeing the hollowed-out tree, the root rot, and the putrid soil. 

And, perhaps it’s also about eyes that can once again see the beauty of the way of the Lamb, who did not clamor after power, but became the forgiving victim.

Time and again, we choose power over humility and hypocrisy over wholeness.

Time and again, we heap shame on the the stranger, the widow, and the orphan—the biblical triad which speaks to those most vulnerable to exclusion—alongside the people Jesus so often drew near to—the poor, the socially disgraced, even those marked by sexual shame. 

And time and again, we strain gnats while we’re swallowing camels (Matt. 23:24), failing to see that our elevation of those Jesus repeatedly calls “hypocrites” is far more grievous to the heart of God (see the entire Sermon on the Mount) than just about anything else. 

I think often of the blind guides of Isaiah 56 who only look out for themselves. Scripture has plenty to say about leaders whose hearts are divided. 

We’ve strayed far from Psalm 139’s “Search me and know me, O God.” We’ve strayed far from Jesus’s call to flourishing as wholeness (see the Beatitudes). We’ve strayed far from love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). 

We crave power and the preservation of power—at all costs. We elevate, quite literally, the “play actor,” called “hypocrite” as many as 30 times across the New Testament, 18 times by Jesus. Hypocrite—the one whose life is not whole. 

When I wrote my third book Wholeheartedness back in 2016, I quoted the theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who courageously faced the rising fascism of his day, particularly saddened that a vast majority of church leaders either supported or were quietly complicit with Hitler’s agenda. Yet, while imprisoned by those whose ideology represented a grievous departure from the way of Jesus, he was struck by his own contradictions: 

Who am I? This or the other?

Am I one person today and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,

And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? 

His humility strikes me. It’s easy to point the finger. But we’re invited to do our own soul searching. 

We are in a season of massive reckoning within our culture and church. A parade of play actors march before us, in political ads and offices, in pulpits, and various platforms. And if we’re honest, the hypocrite lives within us too. 

Do we crave power more than we long for humility? 

Are we excusing hypocrisy at the expense of wholeness? 

Might we be casting out the very people Jesus loves and elevating the very ones he critiques? 

These days as I’m seeing political ad after political ad, I’m prone to mutter a “Lord, have mercy” or a “How Long, O Lord?” It’s wearying. As I said in that post, narcissism and abuse in the church and in our wider culture isn’t about pointing to a few bad apples. It’s about seeing the hollowed-out tree, the root rot, and the putrid soil. In other words, the leaders we choose don’t come out of nowhere—they’re formed, and it’s time to interrogate that formation along with the systems that produce bad fruit. 

But I’m also offering another prayer: “Search me and know me, O Lord.” Because, the deep reformation of life and character we long for really does begin with each of us. 

Who You’re Becoming: The Slow and Courageous Work of Character Change in a Narcissistic Age comes out October 20.

Sunday, September 27, 2026

On the CAC’s Turning to the Mystics podcast, Father Richard Rohr reflects on his first encounter with the writings of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) as a young man:  

When I entered seminary in the years just before Vatican II, many of my professors were very legalistic. What else could they be when that’s all our religion had given us? But I picked up a very small book about Thérèse of Lisieux, a young, French Carmelite nun, by a Carmelite priest named Pere Liagre. He summarized her teachings so simply and so well! Now remember, I’m nineteen years old and I’m looking for inspiration and guidance. When I closed the book, I thought, “This is not what my professors are saying. This changes everything!” In Thérèse’s time, there was a heresy called Jansenism that led to perfectionism and severe legalism, which did untold damage to the spirituality of the French church. Thérèse came along and broadsides it without even trying to. She was just being guided by love. This young French woman with calm inner authority said, “You know what? The legalism and negativity aren’t true.” Thérèse taught that “Jesus does not demand great actions from us but simply surrender and gratitude.” [1] 

It was her underlying spirituality, complemented by Francis of Assisi and Franciscanism, that got me through the seminary. It wasn’t the academic teaching I was being given by the professors, which was still tainted with legalism, and where the unspoken premise was basically, “If you’re perfect, if you do it right, God will love you.” That was the underlying assumption, and it was—and still is—utterly false. I guess I trusted Thérèse because what she wrote felt like common sense to me. Most of my confessors were legalists, and I would just quietly think to myself, “Okay, they’re going to say that, but I know it’s not true.” 

It was an important antidote to my own inclination to perfectionism as a “one” on the Enneagram (although I didn’t have the language for it at the time). We “one’s” set a standard of perfection by our own self-centered definition, and so we’re always defeated. We define the rules and then we can’t live up to them. Thérèse is the best counterweight to any theology or spirituality of perfectionism. She was my liberation. I just didn’t believe in it anymore. It simply wasn’t true.  

In her autobiography Story of a Soul, Thérèse tells a story of standing at the bottom of the staircase and lifting her little foot, trying to reach heaven. She pictures God as Father standing at the top of the staircase, beckoning “Come on, come on, come on.” Her leg is so tiny, and it can’t even reach the first step—but she keeps trying like a toddler would, and then at a certain point, God runs down the steps and carries her up like a divine elevator. At nineteen, that became my first intimation of a good, serious metaphor for how grace works. All God needs is our desire, then God does all the rest.

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The Beauty of a Little Flower

Monday, September 28, 2026

Jesus set before me the book of nature; I understood how all the flowers [God] has created are beautiful, how the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy…. If all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked out with wildflowers. And so it is in the world of souls.  
—Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul 

On the CAC’s Turning to the Mystics podcast, James Finley describes how Thérèse of Lisieux embraced ordinariness, the beauty of the little flower, as a path to God: 

Thérèse was not an ecstatic mystic. It’s almost as if she was so deep in the divinity of the intimacy of ordinariness itself—with such clarity—that it makes her extraordinary. That’s what makes her accessible to us. Because we’re ordinary. How can we find God’s oneness with us in the midst of the ordinariness of ourselves? I think that’s why she touches us so. [1] 

Thérèse sees herself in some way as a little flower growing in God’s garden, which is why she’s sometimes called the Little Flower. She says that there is glory in the rose and the orchid and all of that, but imagine a field filled with wildflowers in the springtime—thousands and thousands of flowers, and that God knows the littleness of each one and is personally loving each one into existence. Furthermore, God knows what that little flower is and the intricacy of its design, like the subtle scent of the violet. God eternally knows the violet to be hidden with Christ in God forever, so God is eternally contemplating the little flower in God. God is completely presencing Godself in the little flower. 

Now, let’s say there is a mountain and you’re holding a grain of sand in your hand and comparing it to the mountain. The mountain is so immense and the grain of sand is so tiny; but since God cannot be diminished in any way whatsoever, the infinite presence of God is presencing itself in your hand through that little grain of sand, as much as in the mountain. Like the mountain, it is nothing without God. We don’t see this in ego consciousness, but in meditative prayer states we can sense the incomprehensible stature of the simplicity of things. We’re the simple soul, but the stature of our simplicity is divine because we’re God’s beloved. 

I think Thérèse lived in this kind of luminosity, this gentle glow. She was not an ecstatic mystic having visions, but it’s like the divinity of the simplicity of herself that she so graciously shares with us invites us into the graciousness of our own simplicity. Thérèse is stunning by the radicality of her simplicity, which brings us to the radicality and the divinity of our simplicity and how we are to live by it and to walk in it day by day.

God of Love, Act of Faith

Friday, September 25, 2026

The spiritual life keeps us aware that our true house is not the house of fear, in which the power of hatred and violence rule, but the house of love, where God resides.
—Henri Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons

Activists Ken Butigan and Patricia Bruno understand faith to be the center of all healing works of nonviolence:

We live in the midst of a system of violence… Shall we go along with its degrading destructiveness? Shall we become violent ourselves? In the face of this violence, we are invited to enflesh God’s longing for a world in which both the woundedness and sacredness of every person is revered….

The transforming power of nonviolence begins and ends with the presence of God. It is this presence which breaks the spiral of violence. It is this presence that heals and unifies what has been separated and broken…. The spirit of our unifying God is present when conflict is resolved, when the script of violence is re-written to embrace the sacredness of all parties, and when creativity is used to break the spiral of retaliation.

The God of Love is our ultimate reality. God’s love is endlessly poured out upon us, vivifying and transforming us. Aware of this, Christian nonviolence challenges the violence system’s overt and covert claim that it is life’s bottom line and that even God is subject to the logic of violence. Christian nonviolence actively resists this belief as idolatry. God is not bound by the violence system. God’s love is able to break every chain, to transform every form of domination or injury, to heal every separation and fragmentation. God, not violence, is the beginning and end of all that is.

Nonviolence is a vocation to which Christians are called:

Our vocation as Christians is to respond to God’s call to join in the divine dance of compassionate and nonviolent love, collaborating with God’s healing power to fashion the conditions for true peace. In this spirit, we are called to a ministry of active nonviolence in our homes, in our work-places, in our churches, in the streets, in the larger world, and in our own selves. This means that nonviolence is not simply a tool or a tactic. It is a spiritual journey that, with God’s love, overturns the violence system in our own lives and in the life of the world….

To engage in active nonviolence is both an act of faith in the God of Love and a way of experiencing the God of Love.

Reference:
“Seven Principles of Christian Nonviolence” in From Violence to Wholeness, Ken Butigan with Patricia Bruno eds. (Pace e Bene Franciscan Nonviolence Center, 1999), 46–47.

Image credit and inspiration: Richard Bell, untitled (detail), 2022, photo. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a wall bearing color instead of division, we practice a love that reaches toward the other, refusing to choose a single side.

1.

“No one can have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”

– St. Cyprian, 3rd-Century Bishop in North Africa

This is an old one.

You may have heard the question, “Can you be a Christian alone on an island?”

The right answer is this: “Of course you can, but why would you want to?”

A major aspect of the Christian faith is community, of being part of a collective that loves you personally and in which you can love others.  We all need people who can help give witness to our lives with us.  For the early Patristics, this community is known as the Church.

Note: I am not saying the Institution that might call itself the “Church.”

Years ago, when I worked on a church staff, I felt a strange nuance in all our staff meetings.    We would talk about what was “good for the Church,” and I often disagreed.  It really bothered me that I disagreed so much or hit pushback, until I realized that sometimes we were talking about what might “help our people to grow,” and other times we actually meant what might “help the 503c non-profit to stay open.”

Over the years, I came to realize that the church building is simply the location where Church might happen, but that doesn’t guarantee Church will always happen.  There have been many times when I swung in hammocks with friends, talking about life, faith, and struggles, that felt more like “Church” than sitting in pews.  After all, Christ is present wherever two or three are gathered in his name, right?

So when you read this quote, don’t think it necessarily means that if God is your Father, you must have the Institution as your Mother.  Rather, I think it means we each need a community (even if unofficial) of other believers we can depend on, celebrate with, and bear witness to one another’s lives before this mystery we call “God.”

2.

“Noticing helps you realize that your life is already suffused with the presence of God. Once you begin to look around and allow yourself to take a chance to believe in God, you will easily see God at work in your life.”

– Fr. James Martin, Jesuit Priest

Theologians might disagree, but I think it is true… We each will see more of God in our lives if we simply choose to notice God more often.

Think of how often we decide God is not present and (unsurprisingly) don’t see God working.

I guess it can be a self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecy, huh?

3.

“God is at home; it’s we who have gone out for a walk.”

– Meister Eckhart, 13th-CenturyGerman Preacher

It would have been an interesting experience to have Meister Eckhart as your local preacher.

He was poetic, paradoxical, and mystical, and he was likely so far developed in his faith that he had to find creative ways to share his insights.  In fact, he often would invent new words in German to help his congregation understand what he was trying to get across.

His teachings were so advanced that he was eventually censored and sent to Rome for an inspection of his teachings to determine whether he was teaching heresy.  Unfortunately, he died of an illness while traveling for that very tribunal or court hearing.  He then sat in an almost purgatorial limbo between being orthodox and a heretic until, in recent years, it was declared that he was, in fact, not a heretic.

For Eckhart, God is always home and always our home, but we have left ourselves and become strangers to God.  The solution, then, is to come home to ourselves and rediscover the fact that God has always been with us.

4.

“When something dies is the greatest teaching.”

– D.T. Suzuki, Zen Master

The liminal spaces between things always teach us the most.

When a relationship ends, a job falls apart, an opportunity disappears, or someone dies, we’re also in the most fertile ground for learning.

In fact, some people theorize that we can ONLY change, grow, and learn in those liminal spaces.

This is probably why we prefer things to be static, unchanging, and consistent.  It takes serious work to keep moving through life’s unknowns.

This reminds me of Richard Rohr’s book, Falling Upward, which reminds us of the ancient spiritual truth that “the way down is up.”  In theological terms, we might call this having a “theology of the cross.”  Through mistakes, failures, diminishments, losses, deaths, relapses, and so forth, we learn the most and are best able to make corrections, succeed, grow, gain, and live.

Perhaps we just need to let things fall apart that need to, so we can glean what we need from the experience and move on.

5.

“The foundation of philosophy [wisdom] is not the setting forth of clever words, but the ordering of life.”

– St. John Chrysostom, 4th-Century Bishop of Constantinople

A life well-lived is its own proof and sermon.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

Thursday, September 24, 2026

Father Richard Rohr explains that so-called “redemptive violence” usually only perpetuates the cycles of violence Jesus came to stop:

Jesus has no part in any “myth of redemptive violence,” as some have called it, even though redemptive violence is the primary storyline of history, and even of much of the Bible (conquering the promised land, the wars of the kings of Israel, and the acts of Saul, David, Herod, and the like). Jesus’s story, instead, becomes a pattern of redemptive forgiveness. 

Jesus’s life and teaching are starkly opposed to that perennial, universal mistake that is probably happening every three minutes in most human minds and hearts: the instinct to destroy what we perceive as the source of the problem. In that sense, he really is the “Savior of the World” (John 4:42), because that violence is the world’s primary agenda, which he unmasks and then resolves with a quite different agenda. If we do not learn this, it is hard to believe there is much future for our world.

To oppose violence, he has to diminish the very things that people tend to absolutize, because our absolutes are normally what we use to justify our violence. This is especially true when it comes to group identity. Jesus speaks critically against his own group whenever they try to use his message for oppositional thinking or group arrogance, or to justify violence. How different Christian history would have been had we listened to him!

This is Jesus’s simple message: Holiness is no longer to be found through separation or exclusion, but through the radical inclusion and forgiveness of the supposedly contaminating element. Any exclusionary system only lays the solid foundation for violence in thought, word, and deed. So, he has to lead us on a new path of forgiveness, inclusion, and sacrifice of our self-identity.

What Leviticus 16–27 describes as the “law of holiness”—separation from sinful people, the rejection of certain actions and things—is turned around in Jesus so that the very acts of separation, superiority, and rejection are in fact the sins! 

I believe Jesus is teaching us that if we put our energy into choosing the good—instead of the negative and largely illusionary energy of rejecting the bad—we will overcome evil in a much better way and will not become evil ourselves. This is exactly what he does on the cross, and I believe it is at the heart of his message. At our center in New Mexico, we have taken it as one of our central axioms that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” 

More than anything else, this is how Jesus reformed the laws of religion and undercut the basis for all violent, exclusionary, and punitive behavior. He became the forgiving victim so we would stop creating victims ourselves. He became the falsely accused one so we would be careful whom we accuse. 

Reference:
Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media, 2022), 161, 162, 163–164.

Image credit and inspiration: Richard Bell, untitled (detail), 2022, photo. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a wall bearing color instead of division, we practice a love that reaches toward the other, refusing to choose a single side.

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

By MAXELCAT | Published: FEBRUARY 5, 2015

Gregory on divine grace and the human response

According to Burns, Gregory believed that salvation was universal because the entire human race was required to make up the divine image of God. If all people received the divine image, then if any are missing he thought that the whole image could not be ‘re-presented.’[49]  In one of his commentaries Gregory underlines this by saying ‘God will be all in all, and all persons will be untied together in fellowship of the Good, Christ Jesus our Lord.’[50]

Gregory, in his Great Catechism speaks of Christ identifying with fallen humans saying that he had ‘in mind to share our human condition’ which here refers to the boundaries of birth and death that all of us pass through.[51]

Gregory saw the two processes of purification and growth within salvation. Purification of the body was only fully achieved at the resurrection and worked by the grace of God through Christ.[52] In baptism a person ‘symbolically anticipates death and resurrection in Christ, and commits himself to free his soul from vice and passion.’[53] This implies that a person can indeed cleanse his soul from the effects of sin, and enable the ‘soul’s beauty [to] again appear.’[54]

For Reflection:

From Google AI

The Interconnected Divine Image: Gregory argues that the “divine image” is only complete when every human being is included. If salvation requires the entire human race to “re-present” God’s image, how does this change how you view your personal connection to people outside your immediate community or faith tradition?

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Father Richard reminds us that embodying nonviolence requires facing the structures of violence in our culture, church, and world: 

I think corporate evil can only be opposed by corporate good. We cannot look the other way when it comes to systems and structures of violence. While we have collectively grown in our consciousness of the need for protest, to oppose injustice, and to make our voices heard, as individuals, we often still feel helpless against the mammoth evils we’re facing today. That explains the psychic numbing that so many people experience. It may appear passive, but it is often paralysis—the result not of bad will as much as simply not knowing what to do. 

I worked a lot in German-speaking countries where people are aware that their bishops failed to stand up to Hitler. The bishops responded with appeasement, believing they had to protect the institution. They feared the Nazis would persecute the church, even though Jesus promised exactly that: persecution! We seem to have assumed that the individual must live the gospel but that the corporate church doesn’t have to. We Christians expected individuals to be poor while the institution remained rich. This cannot be right. We have to live the gospel not just individually but institutionally, socially, and corporately. 

Having traveled and taught in many countries, I have learned to recognize many of the beautiful aspects of the United States. We have historically enjoyed many privileges in terms of freedom, education, and resources. Yet I have also seen America’s shadow side, particularly our insistence on individuality. If our prayer journey does not lead us to a collective sense of servanthood and responsibility for the world, I think we will have failed in our willingness to deal with the violence of the world. I think the violence will continue as long as much of the world views us as a part of an oppressive system. In many respects, they’re not wrong! Only one thing is more difficult to deal with than the individual ego, and that’s the corporate ego, which is usually more disguised, protected, and denied. Unless we’re willing to face it, we will continue to participate in cycles of anger, hatred, and violence rather than healing and justice. [1]  

Richard ties our acceptance of violence to the belief that Jesus’s violent death was necessary for God to forgive us:  

Our commonly accepted atonement theory—especially as accomplished through the life, suffering, and death of Jesus—reaffirmed our narrow notion of retributive justice and legitimated a notion of “good and necessary violence” all the way down. As long as we employ any retributive notion of God’s justice, we trade our distinctive Christian message for the cold, hard justice that has prevailed in most cultures throughout history. We offer no redemptive alternative to history but actually sanctify the very “powers and principalities” that Paul says unduly control the world (Ephesians 3:9–10, 6:12). We stay inside of what some call the “myth of redemptive violence,” which might just be the dominant story line of history. [2]

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Message from a Vicarious Father,

Some of you don’t have a father anymore.
Some of you never knew your father.
Some of you wish you hadn’t known your father.
Some of you had cruel fathers, sick fathers,
busy fathers, unfaithful fathers.

But what is almost certain is that 
all of us have father wounds.

I know I do (and have done some work).
I know my kids do (and have done some work).

Some experience repentance, forgiveness or reconciliation
with their fathers, with themselves, or with their fathers
in this life.

Many don’t. Many can’t.

Nevertheless,
for those whose fathers have never said it but should have,
I have two things to say
as a dad with my own wounds,
as a dad who has inflicted wounds.

I didn’t earn the right to say this.

Nevertheless,
you may need to hear it.

First, for the wounds inflicted…
in knowledge or in ignorance
through actions or neglect
through roars or through silence
directly or indirectly
through shame or violence or betrayal
to you or your siblings or your mother
subtle or overt
and for all the ways a father can fail
to be a father…
for the wounds inflicted,
for the 10,000 paper cuts and the deepest gouges,
for the toxins infused so deeply they feel like they’re you,
for the moral stumbling blocks and emotional land mines inherited,

I am sorry. 
I cannot fix you.
But I can say that I’m so, so sorry.
It should never have happened.
But it did. 
Lord, have mercy.

And if your own father can never say these words,
or even feel them in his heart,
or make amends,
or repair what’s broken,
I am sorry. Truly sorry.

I hope reading those offers some measure of solace.
And maybe some safe, healthy father you know and trust
would be willing to read this message aloud to you, even vicariously.
I hope you’ll find that father and let him.

Second, for those whose ears have never heard these words,
whose hearts have never felt them,
I want you to know that 
I’m proud of you.

And the heavenly Father who is safe and kind and gentle,
who is unlike the father images who wounded us, 
who has endured the scorn of seeing the word “father” tainted
and become a trigger…
the Father who is “especially fond to you”
and would come to you as The Shack’s black female “Papa”
the One Who sees your life from conception to completion—
that One deeply loves you today, 
as you are.

Not in a way you need to earn it
or need to account for the ‘why.’

Just because.

For all those times when you waited anxiously 
to hear those words
or despaired because you knew you never would,

I am telling you now
because it’s okay to let go
(or begin to let go)
of the burden of guilt or shame or grief
of your father wounds.

You can stop holding your breath now.
It’s okay to inhale and to sigh
and inhale again and again
to receive a Father’s blessing.

You can look up. 
Make eye contact.
In my spirit, I see you.
And I’m proud of you.

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

The Palestinian Quaker Jean Zaru bears witness to her commitment to nonviolent resistance:    

I call myself a Quaker or a Friend. And Friends, throughout history, have maintained a testimony to nonviolence. War, we say, is contrary to the teachings of Christ. Therefore, we are challenged to live in the presence of that power which wins through love rather than through war. This is no easy testimony. It has three aspects:   

1. To refuse to take part in acts of war ourselves.   
2. To strive to remove the causes of war.   
3. To use the way of love open to us to promote peace and to heal wounds.   

As Quakers we believe that there is something of God in every person. Why, then, is it so hard for us to see what is of God in one another? Both sides in any conflict often have difficulty seeing the other at all, let alone seeing that of God in the other.…   

Living under military occupation has forced me to go through deep self-searching. I have been confronted with three loyalties. The first loyalty is to Christ, who calls us to love our enemy. The second loyalty is to our fellow human beings wherever they are in need or trouble. The third loyalty is to our country, its people, and its way of life…. No one can set rules for us to follow, but what we can do is testify that, in our experience, the spirit of God leads us into truth and gives us the guidance and courage we need in every situation…. 

It requires great self-denial and the surrendering of our selves to God to be committed to peace and to nonviolent action to bring about change. This technique may have no immediate positive effect, and it may lead to outward defeat. Whether successful or not, it will bring suffering. But if we believe in nonviolence as the true way of peace and love, we must make it a principle not only of the individual but also of national and universal conduct.  

Zaru writes of the ongoing commitment necessary to live out nonviolent struggle for justice: 

I believe that we are called to conversion: to be converted to the struggle of women and men everywhere who have no way to escape the unending fatigue of their labor and the daily denial of their human rights and human worth. We must be converted, so to speak, to a new vision of human dignity, what we call “that of God” in each person, even in those we oppose…. 

Ultimately, I have learned that the nonviolent struggle for justice is one struggle, and that action to subvert violence and strengthen human rights in one place is an action on behalf of all people everywhere.

I have managed to find peace within—without having to embrace with approval the violence around me. Love of one’s enemies forces me to recognize that my enemy, too, is a child of God. This realization is necessary if our enemies are ever to make the changes we are requiring of them. It is really only in the light of love that I am liberated to work for peace and freedom.

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From A Beautiful Year. Diana Butler Bass

(Referring to Matthew 20:1-16 The parable of the Generous Landowner)

Are you envious because I am generous?

Those words fly like arrows from the page to my heart. Of the seven deadly sins — pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust — envy is my secret and, admittedly, most shameful companion. Writers are prone to it, constantly weighing ourselves and our work against others, nursing wordy dissatisfaction in our souls.

I wish that weren’t true — it is hard to confess. But, having lived more than a few decades now, I know myself pretty well.

Envy is not jealousy. Jealousy is a kind of protective impulse. One is jealous if a lover seems inappropriately attentive to another. You might be jealous to guard your reputation against attack or jealous in defense of familial honor.

Envy is resentment, a passionate spite that can become cancerous hostility. Joseph Epstein, in a brilliant little book, called envy “a self-poisoning of the mind, envy is usually less about what one lacks than about what other people have.” Envy grows from rivalry — when we are unable to see our own gifts without comparing them to the gifts of others. Capitalism thrives on envy. Envy drives marketing and advertising, is the emotional engine of influencer culture, and elevates some humans to god-like celebrity so that other, lesser beings might, eventually, dash them on the rocks for the fun of it.

And there is Jesus, wandering through Judaea with his followers, teaching them in parables. Shortly before he told the disciples this story, they’d encountered a rich young man. “What must I do to be saved?” Jesus said, “Go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you shall have a treasure in heaven, and come follow me.” The young man went away sadly; he was jealous for his wealth and possessions. Jesus turned to his friends, and said, “I tell you, it is easier for a camel to enter in through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.”

The disciples looked at him, astonished and shocked. They asked, “How then can anyone be saved?” But I suspect they were secretly pleased. Who, after all, really likes the idea of Elon Musk going to heaven?

Jesus pivoted from that encounter with the words, “But many who are first will be last, and the last first,” to this parable — a story of a rich landowner who does something good with his money and is met by his workers’ grumbling, ingratitude, and envy.

---

It is amusing to think of Jesus praising a landowner who pays all his workers the same while sounding vaguely like Karl Marx — “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” — in one of the New Testament’s greatest take-downs of capitalism. But, ultimately, the workers who showed up early in the day don’t inspire admiration. They resent that the landowner has given everyone the same wage. And they begrudge the workers who showed up late: Why them? Why not us?

There it is: envy. Jesus didn’t even have to put the word in the landowner’s mouth because it is so obvious. The disciples who, just a short time ago, might have secretly rejoiced when Jesus sent the rich guy away, now find themselves on the back foot. Surely they identified more with workers being treated unjustly than a landowner sharing his cash with abandon to those who showed up late. Why them? Why not us?

“I am not being unjust to you,” the landowner said, “did you not agree to this wage? Take what is yours and go; but I wish to give to the last workers what I also give to you.”

I’ve always wondered why the lectionary doesn’t pair this text with the story of Cain and Abel, because I’m convinced the disciples would have immediately thought of it. Theologians may argue about the sin committed by their parents, but few disagree about this violent tale of sibling rivalry. The elder brother, Cain (whose name in Hebrew folklore meant “acquisition”), envies his younger brother, Abel, when the LORD favors the younger’s offering. Cain is furious and full of rage. Why him? Why not me?

The LORD says, “Why are you angry?” and reminds Cain that the terms of the offering are the same for both siblings — “If you do well, will you not be accepted?” He sounds not unlike the landowner in the parable.

Are you envious because I am generous? I did as I did, it wasn’t unjust to you. If you do well, you will be accepted, just like your brother.

Jesus left his story open-ended. We’ve no idea what the resentful workers did upon leaving the vineyard. Did they take their wages, now with grateful hearts instead of anger? Did they go and beat up the late workers and take what they believed was theirs? We don’t know. We’re left to guess. Jesus’ final — and predictably ambiguous — word on the tale is: So the last will be first, and the first will be last.

But there is no guessing about Cain and Abel. The older brother, the one who was first and always wanted to remain so, acted on his envy: “Cain rose up against his brother, Abel, and killed him.”

The story, where the last’s offering is accepted before that of the first brother turns into the first slaughtering the last. Envy to rage to murder. No wonder it is called a deadly sin. That’s the path.

Since the beginning, rivalry has fueled death. Envy is a murderer — of our own souls, of others, and of the possibility of communion and community. Envy drives us to have more, to take what we think we deserve, to beat others at the game. God may promise provision, that each one sit under the vine and fig tree, but we can’t enjoy the abundance of our own vine without wanting our neighbor’s vineyard. Envy destroys our capacity for gratitude — and fixates our being on that nagging, horrible question: Why them? Why not me?

Dorothy Sayers wrote, “Envy is the great leveler: if it cannot level things up, it will level them down. . . At its best, Envy is a climber and a snob; at its worst it is a destroyer — rather than have anyone happier than itself, it will see us all miserable together.” Envy isn’t just a personal sin. It is one of shared consequences, a communal deadly sin.

We don’t often think of envy as one of the taproots of the climate crisis. How, might I ask, is it not? The never-ending race to outdo one another, living endlessly in comparison to others, to level ourselves up and tear others down, has had devastating consequences by creating our cultural and economic cycle of consumption and waste. Indeed, scientists at the National Institutes of Health studied the connection between envy and environmentalism.

While they allowed for something they called “benign envy” (scientists are permitted such; theologians are not), they discovered that “people who are high in malicious envy tend to engage in more environmentally harmful activities rather than living a sustainable life.” Their conclusions were two-fold:

First, individuals should be aware that upward social comparisons could be the antecedent of environmentally harmful behavior, especially when inferiority, hatred, and anger deplete limited self- control. Secondly, malicious motivations are not only harmful to personal mental health but also detrimental to the natural environment and climate change.

Envy kills everything.

I feel like the disciples shouting at Jesus: How then can anyone be saved?

“Love does not envy,” wrote St. Paul. Love of God, love of neighbor. Love seeks not its own way. Poetically spiritual and psychologically sound. Dwell on love, dwell in love — and watch the resentments drain away. Practicing love rearranges the heart. Love opens the possibility of empathy, sympathy, and compassion instead of envy, resentment, and malice.

And what Jesus said, of course: So the last will be first, and the first will be last. Envy drives us to elevate ourselves over others by either beating them at the game or beating others down. But the question in this parable — Are you envious because I am generous? — calls us to remember that we are all recipients of a wild generosity. Manna that falls like rain; watercourses in the desert; lilies of the field — the gifts of God for all the people of God.

Envy inhibits gratitude. However, the reverse is also true: gratitude is an antidote to envy. And that is the central point of Jesus’ little story.

Are you envious because I am generous? Don’t you understand? Gifts call forth thanks. Bask in gratitude for the generosity of the vineyard. There is no need for first and last. All are welcome, all provided for. Here is the garden without rivalry, without death. Abundant life.

When Cain’s envy consumed him, when he killed Abel, blood cried out from the ground. That poisoned Earth now cries to us: Put away your resentments of one another, knowing that you all dwell in the same vineyard, and tend to the healing, renewing work at hand.

Love God. Love one another. Love the Earth.

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For Reflection:

What do you see as the thru-line between these two pieces? Which one invites you most to Surrender? Or is it the thru-line between the two?

Sunday, September 20, 2026

Father Richard Rohr reflects on nonviolent resistance as the primary Christian response to a world of violence:  

Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) observed that every world religion knows that Jesus taught nonviolence, lived nonviolently, and died a nonviolent death except one: Christianity! We don’t get it because it’s too close to home.  

The Sermon on the Mount is perhaps the least quoted of Jesus’s teachings. It’s his major teaching, but Christians mostly pretend the Sermon on the Mount never happened. I’ve come to believe that understanding Jesus’s nonviolent teaching is almost impossible apart from a contemplative stance. The calculative and dualistic mind is incapable of living inside of the participatory mystery of our life in this world and in God. We simultaneously carry the burden of evil and the weight of glory. 

Military solutions are accepted routinely as a matter of necessity even though first-century Christians would have considered that abominable. We have combined God and country, and the flag is often right there by the tabernacle. In most Christian countries, they’re pretty much inseparable.   

The gospel and the church both teach nonviolent resistance. Some call it gentle firmness. I believe that it is the Christian moral response. It does not imply absolute pacifism or deny the right to legitimate self-defense, but it requires creative and constant firmness in opposition to evil. Each of us is complicit in this mystery of evil, violence, and harm. Seeking to justify wars, people say, “Well, someone has to die”—but the gospel says, “First of all, it’s you!” Jesus tells us to die to ourselves (see Luke 9:24). This process requires us to agree to carry some of the burden of sin and pain of the world. 

Isaiah says, “All the nations are as nothing before [God]; they are accounted by [God] as less than nothing and emptiness” (40:17). Boundaries are not engraved in the earth.  Because God is the God of all the earth, our first allegiance is to that universality— beyond nations and boundaries. 

The journey of contemplative prayer leads us to a sense of universality, of bearing the burden and resisting the violence of the entire world and not just that of our own country. To be a true Christian, I think, means to be a giant juggler of all kinds of contradictions, all kinds of absurdities, all kinds of death, and all kinds of life. We are each being led to a depth of universal God experience that allows us, in our own spirit, mind, and heart, to know a gospel response to the world’s violence. I don’t think there’s any way we can call ourselves Christians without aiming for nonviolence as our ideal.

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Nonviolence: An Excess of Love 

Monday, September 21, 2026

International Day of Peace

The priest and theologian Emmanuel Katongole considers how nonviolence reflects God’s love, modeled and experienced in the life of Jesus:

In a world addicted to violence, a commitment to nonviolence cannot but sound like both a crazy idea and a dangerous utopian fantasy…. Our imaginations have been dulled into believing the inevitability of violence. We have come to think that only violence will either make us safe or prevent the bad guys from harming us and those we love.  

This is a lie…. I know this firsthand. I grew up in Uganda under the brutal dictatorship of Idi Amin (1925–2003). After my high school education, I decided to join the “liberation war” to fight Idi Amin. Looking back, I realize it was only by God’s grace that I was saved from this lie of liberation through violence, for the liberation war did indeed succeed in ousting Idi Amin from power. However, our “liberators” would soon turn into murderous dictators, and we needed another liberation war to get rid of the “liberators.” This is a story that has been repeated all over Africa—fighting to end fighting….  

God creates, governs, and redeems the world in a nonviolent way. This is what is unique about God, as we have come to know God through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ: an all-powerful (omnipotent!) God who becomes human and suffers a violent death on the cross; a God who responds to evil through an excess of love. This is the way of God, the strange logic of the Gospel. As Archbishop Emmanuel Kataliko (1932–2000) reminded the Christians of Bukavu during a Lenten message in 2000: “The logic of the Gospel is a logic not of power, but of the cross. God has chosen the weak of the world to undermine the strong…. The only response to the excess of evil is the excess of love.” [1]  

The excess of love is what shapes a revolution—a revolution of nonviolent love—into which God invites Christians. For, as Pope Francis reminds us, “The Son of God, by becoming flesh, summoned us to the revolution of tenderness.” [2]…  

This revolution of nonviolent love is not a utopian fantasy. There are many stories of Christians whose lives bear witness to this revolution of tenderness and from whom we can learn the requirements of the way of nonviolence….  

[Archbishop] Christopher Munzihirwa was pointing to this revolution when, shortly before he was assassinated, he reminded the people of Bukavu that every Christian is invited to enter “the way of Christ.” For Munzihirwa, entering the way of Christ was not simply a pious exhortation; it was an invitation into a social vision and engagement that leads to “the construction of true and durable peace.” [3]…  

Surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, perhaps we too can dare to not only say no to violence, but to respond to violence through an excess of love. When we do so, we find ourselves as part of the revolution of tenderness. 

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Individual Reflection

Where in your life right now are you waiting for someone else to change, apologize, or lose before you’ll consider what it would cost you to be the one who dies first?

Group Discussion — choose one

Where have you let your national identity and your Christian identity fuse together, and what would it actually cost to pull them apart?

Katongole says the only response to an excess of evil is an excess of love — where does that sound not inspiring, but impossible, to you right now?

Who’s the person or situation you’ve most recently decided only force (physical, verbal, political) could stop — and what would nonviolent resistance actually look like there, concretely?