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.”
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.
