Love Is Who We Are
Friday, October 30, 2026
Father Richard identifies our ability to love as the very foundation of our being:
The most powerful, most needed, and most essential teaching is always about love. Love is our foundation and our destiny. It is where we come from and where we’re headed. As Saint Paul famously says, “So faith, hope, and love remain, but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13).
My hope, whenever I speak or write, is to help clear away the impediments to receiving, allowing, trusting, and participating in a foundational Love. God’s love is planted inside each of us as the Holy Spirit who, according to Jesus, “will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you” (John 14:26). Love is who we are!
All I can do is remind you of what you already know deep within your true self and invite you to live connected to this Source. John the Evangelist writes, “God is love, and whoever remains in love, remains in God and God in him or her” (1 John 4:16). The biblical creation story says that we were created in the very “image and likeness” of God, who is love (Genesis 1:26; see also Genesis 9:6). Out of the Trinity’s generative, loving relationship, creation takes form, mirroring its Creator.
We have heard this phrase so often that we don’t understand the existential shock of what “created in the image and likeness of God” means for us. If this is true—and I believe it is—our family of origin is divine. It is saying that we were created by a loving God to be love in the world. Our core is original blessing, not original sin. Our starting point is positive and, as is written in the first chapter of the Bible, it is “very good” (Genesis 1:31). We do have a good place to return home to. If the beginning is right, the rest becomes considerably easier, because we can know and trust the clear direction of our life’s trajectory.
We must all overcome the illusion of separateness. It is the primary task of religion to communicate not worthiness but union, to reconnect people to their original identity “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The Bible calls the state of separateness “sin.” God’s job description is to draw us back into primal and intimate relationship. “My dear people, we are already children of God; what we will be in the future has not yet been fully revealed, and all I do know is that we shall be like God” (1 John 3:2). [1]
Love is who we are. When we don’t live according to love, we are outside of being. We’re not being real. When we love, we are acting according to our deepest being, our deepest truth. We are operating according to our dignity. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Orbis Books, 2018), 12–13.
[2] Rohr, Essential Teachings, v.
Image credit and inspiration: Samuel Oakes, untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Broadway, UK. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like bread offered to someone beyond the frame, we are invited to reach out to an unseen neighbor, both giving and receiving blessing.
| John Chaffee – Five On Friday 10-30-26 |
1.
“Whenever anything disagreeable or displeasing happens to you, remember Christ crucified and be silent.“
– St. John of the Cross, 16th Century Spanish Mystic
This one is a bit difficult for me.
Why?
Because in my own head, I know I am a complainer.
This probably leads well into the next quote.
2.
“The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian Philosopher
We likely all have internal narratives about the world around us. It is not easy to observe what’s happening around us without also giving it an interpretation that SEEMS to make sense to us.
I am not conversant in neuroscience, but I would bet our interpretations of the world are automatic and instantaneous. It takes a relatively mature person to even question our own interpretations. Ask yourself: how often do you question your own read of things?
That said, what if Krishnamurti is correct? What if the ability to simply observe the world around us is the highest form of intelligence?
Imagine this… We watch something happen, and the only thing we say is, “Huh, how about that?”
Is it even possible to be that detached from the present moment? Can we simply be an observer? Is that even the goal? At best, we can only theorize an interpretation of why something happened.
Honestly, even writing this is raising more questions for me.
I’ll have to reflect on this more.
3.
“Christian life is not a life divided between times for action and times for contemplation. No. Real social action is a way of contemplation, and real contemplation is the core of social action.”
– Henri Nouwen, Dutch Catholic Priest
Henri Nouwen was a master at getting to the core issue, wasn’t he?
As I understand it, each of us tends to be one or the other, living primarily as a contemplative or an active. This means we settle into one way of living and often neglect the other.
As a contemplative, I must be intentional about being more active.
Meanwhile, others are naturally active and must be intentional about being more contemplative.
It doesn’t matter which one you are; all of us must work toward becoming integrated active contemplatives or contemplative activists.
4.
“It’s not about right belief; it’s about right practice.”
– Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal Priest and Author
In seminary, I was encouraged to be as “orthodox.” Fortunately, my schooling didn’t emphasize this enough to make me fundamentalist in my orientation to faith, but it did encourage me to do good scholarship on my own faith.
I am grateful for my schooling. Looking back, I believe it did many things well.
However, since seminary, I have certainly encountered people who use orthodoxy as the highest metric for gauging someone’s faith.
Not only is this wrongheaded, but I believe it misses the forest for the trees.
The primary terms here are “orthodoxy” (right belief) and “orthopraxy” (right practice or action).
If my “orthodoxy” leads me to have an unloving, critical, vindictive, scapegoating, self-permissive/self-condemnatory “praxy” then something is wildly off.
However, if my “orthopraxy” leads me to go back and re-evaluate the “orthodoxy” I was holding onto, then I might just find myself being led toward the “orthodoxy” that Jesus had.
I have no idea if I am ranting or making sense to anyone but myself, but another way to say this might be… If a tree (orthodoxy) bears bad fruit (bad orthopraxy), it is time to cut the tree (bad orthodoxy) down.
5.
“Fauxnerability is what happens when we learn the language of healing but stop short of the surrender healing requires. Fauxnerability is what happens when we become experts in talking about suffering without having experienced the dark night. Fauxnerabilty is what happens when we disclose to soothe our nervous systems rather than to be truly known. Fauxnerability is what happens when honest words are performative rather than a manifestation of authentic presence.“
– Chuck DeGroat, Author and Therapist
Fauxnerability. That’s Chuck’s word for performative and false vulnerability.
I feel as though I am on a constant learning journey or path about vulnerability. At times, I think I am good at it, and then more life happens, and I realize my tendency to “self-protectively” isolate. Of course, that is an oxymoron because isolation is considered a war crime. Isolation is not protective, healthy, or holy.
In fact, many orders of Christianity would not permit monks to become hermits if they were going into the hermitic life for the wrong reasons. They must first be proven healthy and holy.
True vulnerability is most likely showing up to the present moment in the fullness of our whole being, with our strengths but even more so with our weaknesses and lack.
I rather enjoy the work of philosopher Pete Rollins, who teaches…
“The secret of the lack… is the lack of the secret.”
What does this mean?
We are all looking for a cure-all secret recipe to take away our sense that we are lacking, incomplete, or less than.
However, the real secret to the lack is realizing there is a “lack of a secret.” There is no cure-all secret recipe. Our sense of lack, our sense of being incomplete, our sense of being less-than is BECAUSE we think there is a secret fulfillment that we are not currently owning.
But what are the closing words of the Parable of the Running Father in Luke 15?
“Son, I am always with you, and everything of mine is already yours.”
