A Generous Life and Death 

Friday, November 6, 2026

Drawing on the wisdom of Henri Nouwen, Father Ron Rolheiser explores the opportunity to give one’s life, and even one’s death, away for the sake of others:

In one of his last books, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring, Henri Nouwen says that at a certain point in our lives, the question is no longer “What can I still do so that my life makes a contribution?” Rather, it becomes “How can I live now so that my death will be an optimal blessing to my family, the church, and the world?” and the central question should not be “How much time still remains?” but rather “How can I prepare now so that my dying will be a new way for me to leave a warm, nurturing, and blessing spirit behind for those who have loved me and whom I have loved?” [1]

For Nouwen, this is predicated on the fact that our lives belong not just to us but also to others. This is also true of our deaths. If we die with guilt, shame, anger, or bitterness, that will be part of what we leave to the world, and it will burden the lives of our family and friends. If we die unreconciled, in bitterness, most every memory we leave behind will cause unease, pain. And that will be our legacy. Conversely, if we die at peace, reconciled with our loved ones and the world, with a warm and grateful heart, then that warmth and love will be the spirit we leave behind, and most every memory of us will bring others warmth so that our dying in peace and reconciliation will then be our last gift—a wonderful, lasting one—to our loved ones. Giving our deaths away as a gift to our loved ones means that at some point in our lives, we need to stop focusing on our agenda and begin to focus on our obituary, on what kind of spirit we will leave behind. [2]

Rolheiser looks to Jesus’s life and death as a model for our own:

Ultimately, all the invitations in the Gospel can be summarized in one word—“surrender.” Our final human and spiritual task is to let go and, like Jesus in his final act, hand over our spirits in an act of love and trust. But this is also the most difficult task in life….

Dying is the ultimate surrender in trust, and it besets us un-invited. However, God and nature have arranged that the natural debilitations that come with aging give us lots of practice in letting go, long before our deathbeds…. One of our salient spiritual and human tasks as we age is to learn how to let go, how to surrender, so that the spirit we breathe out with our last breath or (ideally) long before our last breath is one that, like Jesus’s last breath, issues forth without bitterness as it says, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” [3]

References:
[1] Henri J.M. Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (HarperOne, 1994), xvi.

[2] Ronald Rolheiser, Insane for the Light: A Spirituality for Our Wisdom Years (Image, 2026), 12–13.

[3] Rolheiser, Insane, 46, 47

Image credit and inspiration: Ines Iachelini, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, China. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a pomegranate broken open, we are invited to share the abundance that has grown in us over the years, offering our gifts freely to the beloved community.

John Chaffee – Five On Friday 11-6-26

1.

“The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching.“

– James Cone, Author of The Cross and the Lynching Tree

This is a shocking statement, but I believe it is true.

One thing that has helped my personal theology and even spirituality is reading figures from church history who were not of European descent.  Yes, much of church history and publication has been from the perspective of European thinkers and theologians, but that can only take us so far.

My interior life has been deeply enriched by reading African American, South American, Japanese, Russian, and Egyptian theologians.

This quote above, from James Cone, is a great example of why it is necessary to read theology from the vantage points of other cultures and perspectives.  Unless we put ourselves in the lives/contexts/vantage points of others, we might miss major insights that help us better understand God and what it means to be human.

The Cross and the Lynching Tree is considered a modern classic.  I strongly encourage you to read it if you can.

2.

“A fish cannot drown in water,
A bird does not fall in air.
In the fire of creation,
God doesn’t vanish:
The fire brightens.
Each creature God made
must live in its own true nature;
How could I resist my nature,
That lives for oneness with God?“

– Mechthilde of Magdeburg

One of the most difficult things is to be what we are.

A tree has no problem being a tree.

A dog has no problem being a dog.

A beetle has no problem being a beetle.

However, we humans have immense difficulty just being human.

Something like an echo of Genesis 3, we often try to run away from being human, just like Adam and Eve, who sought to be something other than what they were.

The older I get, the more I see that healthy spirituality centers on the task of “being human.”  To be exactly and properly what we are, with all the glories and struggles of being human, is THE spiritual task.

It’s funny.  We are so desperate to avoid being human that we fail to recognize that God became human.  By trying to be something other than human, we actually miss the greatest commonality we have with God.

3.

“It is well and good, Lord,
If all things change,
Provided we are rooted in You.“

– St. John of the Cross, 16th Century Spanish Mystic

The past few months have been a fair amount of settling into new patterns or a new way of life.  Since we moved in January, we’ve experienced each season in the new house for the first time.  Not only that, but as a professor, one semester feels completely different from another, and that’s still different from what summer is like.

Everything changes; nothing ever stays the same for very long.

Adaptability is the name of the game…

And adaptability comes more easily the more grounded we are in God, who is faithful, consistent, and for us.

4.

“Let nothing disturb you;

Let nothing make you afraid;

All things pass;

But God is unchanging,

Patience

is enough for everything.

You who have God

lack nothing.

God alone is sufficient.“

– St. Teresa of Avila, 16th Century Spanish Mystic

I realize that this quote from Teresa of Avila comes up often.

In fact, I think I have used this subject line for this week’s 5 on Friday more than once.

For a moment, I felt bad about that, thinking that it was a cop-out to repeat a quote so many times.

But I am not so sure.

It is a timeless piece of wisdom that Teresa of Avila shares in the poem above.  It reads a little bit like a Christian Zen statement.  It is a poem of detachment, acknowledging that we get flustered by life and that God is enough for each moment.

Maybe this quote jumps out at me so often because I let many things in life “disturb” me.  I let many things make me “afraid.”  I have a difficult time with things that are “passing.”

Perhaps you do as well?

5.

“Few are guilty, but all are responsible.“

– Abraham Joshua Heschel

This sentiment is similar to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s: “We are responsible to all for all.”

This is radical ownership.

This is extreme culpability.

We are each individually responsible to all for the evil that some do.  We are all in this together.  None of us can fully wash our hands of the evils that happen in the world.  We are the One Mystical Body of Christ, and we cannot dare to cut ourselves off from one another.

I belong to you.

You belong to me.

We belong to one another, and therefore, we are responsible to everyone else for everything that one of us does.

Again, this might sound extreme, but what would our world look like if we had such a sophisticated sense of responsibility and global ethics?

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Ripening: Aging with Grace

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Thursday, November 5, 2026

READ ON CAC.ORG

To ripen into an elder, into a being that is more than simply elderly, … is a deliberate, thoughtful, sustained choice.  
— Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging 

Buddhist teacher Kathleen Dowling Singh (1946–2017) considers the opportunity aging offers us to know our authentic selves:  

Aging can offer us the time to deliberately reorient ourselves toward the inner life, an infinitely more reliable refuge than anything the world can offer. To open these inner vistas is to enter a time of awakening, to lighten our attachment to self, the cause of all our unease. We have the opportunity to, first, recognize that living attached to our own sense of self is a small, confined, and stressed way to live and, then, to wholeheartedly engage in practices that will free that myopic attachment…. 

Using these last years of our life as a time to awaken can help us cope and even grow in love and wisdom as we confront decline, illness, and loss…. We can give ourselves, finally, the experience of freedom and illumination and grace while still in the midst of life. We can, also, with our own spiritual ripening, offer all those younger ones who follow behind us in our spiritually impoverished culture the witness that awakening is possible…. 

We can, if we so choose, dedicate these last years to waking up. [1] 

For Singh, choosing to awaken to reality is a gift in service to others: 

Opening deeply to the truth of our own aging is wise. Opening deeply to the truth of our own impermanence is wise. Although such opening may not come easily at first—we all know how the ego tends to resist vulnerability—it is important to do so if we wish to mindfully use the time remaining to us…. 

To live a life of an elder is to ripen into being that is more than simply elderly, more than just old. It involves ripening into clear-eyed acceptance of the way things actually exist. That ripening involves, for each of us, many difficult reckonings in the multifaceted, multidimensional understanding that everything that can be lost will be lost….  

If we are to claim the last years of life as years that hold the possibility of awakening into equanimity and lightness, into the very embodiment of grace, we need to bear witness to the ripening of that possibility. Not only would it be a blessing for each of us, it would be a blessing for a world starving for such witnessing….  

Mindful of impermanence, the breath-by-breath arising and abiding and falling of each moment, we can remain in remembrance of our longing to exist in wisdom and love and compassion. We can remain in our intention to ripen into the spiritual maturity that is our birthright to cultivate. There is no more noble way to spend these years than to become an elder, to bear witness to the world as placeholders for peace, love, wisdom, and fearlessness. [2] 

Brad Jersak
THE RANSOM: Excerpt from A More Christlike God

Jesus once said, “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”(Mark 10:45). And Paul writes to Timothy that Jesus “gave himself as a ransom for all people” (1 Tim. 2:6).

In modern times, we associate ransoms with the demands of a kidnapper who wants payment for someone they hold in bondage. In this case, giving oneself in exchange for a prisoner, like we see in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Aslan gives himself over to the witch Jadis to be slain on the stone table in exchange for the life of Edmund. She is able to leverage this deal because under the law, someone must die. Again, seeing it this way can be a bit confusing, and in fact, it’s actually problematic on three counts. Specifically,

a. Was the ransom paid to God? If Christ’s life was given in ransom (or redemption), the church fathers reasoned that the ransom could not be paid to God, because God is not the slaveholder. The Book of Hebrews makes that clear: “by his death he [broke] the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Heb. 2:14-15).

Lewis’s tale solves this problem because he doesn’t picture God requiring the payment. The witch is the one who demands punishment—a life for a life—leveraging the law of sin and death against Aslan. As in the New Testament, Aslan gives his own life and, in the end, “a deeper magic [self-giving love] from before the dawn of time” resurrects an innocent killed in place of a traitor.

b. Was the ransom paid to Satan? While some of the church fathers dabbled with this theory (i.e., a ransom paid to Satan), they ultimately reject this idea too. The truth, they said, is that God owes the devil—the thief—nothing. The prolific theologian Origen (182- 254 AD) starts out with a ransom to Satan, but like Lewis, treats Christ’s offering to Satan as a trap, where Jesus’ humanity is the bait. The devil takes the bait, but Christ’s divine nature and supernatural love overcome—it’s too hot to handle— and Jesus emerges from death along with all those Satan had held in his dungeon.

The truth is that Jesus utterly judged and defeated Satan on the Cross (John 12:31; 16:11; Col. 2:15). There’s no deal-making going on here. In another of his metaphors, Jesus said,

26 If Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. 27 In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house without first tying him up. Then he can plunder the strong man’s house. —Mark 3:26-27

In this metaphor, there is no deal on the table, no careful trap being set. Jesus describes his ministry in terms of an overpowering home invasion where he storms Satan’s house, immobilizes him, binds him up and plunders his goods (namely, all those he had enslaved). This echoes the Exodus backstory, when God plundered Pharaoh of his slaves and Egypt’s gold (Exod. 12:36). Rather than paying Satan or Pharaoh, quite the reverse is true: he ransacks their territory and leaves them penniless.

A ransom?

Christ ‘gave his life as a ransom’ (Matt. 20:28). But to whom?

Not to God, for God is not the slave-holder.

Not to Satan, for God owes Satan nothing.

Not to the Law, for mercy trumps Law.

Jesus ransoms us from death, paying with his life. 

But Christ owed death nothing either, and so conquers it. 

c. Was the ransom paid to the Law? Origen and Lewis both hint at a third possibility—that the ransom meets the demands of some law. That is, the enemy’s leverage was an appeal to the rightful requirements of the law. Sometimes passages from Leviticus and Hebrews are quoted as proof-texts:

For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life. —Lev. 17:11

In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. —Heb. 9:22

And yet the Bible also insists on these five points:

• 1. There is no law or principle of justice higher than God to which he is beholden. ‘Justice’ is not a god to whom Yahweh must bow or appease with blood. Nor is God’s ‘Law’ some retributive principle that binds him. The whole point of the prophetic Book of Hosea is exactly this: that God is utterly free to forgive sinners—to show mercy to the guilty. He is able to respond to legal demands for punishment with a counter-verdict: complete pardon based in God’s own grace.
• 2. Similarly, there is no judgment or statute that cannot be trumped by mercy, for mercy triumphs over judgment. On the scale of justice, mercy is always an ‘older magic’ than retribution or sacrifice.
• 3. In fact, even well before the Cross, Israel could testify to the mercy of God. God had not treated them as their sins deserved. They had received superabundant compassion and mercy (Ps. 103:10-12) rather than tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye justice. 
• 4. Rather than blood sacrifice or burnt offerings, the response God looks for is “a broken heart and a contrite spirit” (Ps. 51:16-17).
• 5. Further, legal provisions existed for a ransom (basically paying a fine) that would cover the debt for some crimes. But the Bible is clear: Under the law, “No one can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom for them—the ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough—so that they should live on forever and not see decay” (Ps. 49:7-9). You could ransom people from debts and slavery, but who could pay you out of the grave?

Here we have our answer to whom or what was paid as ransom in exchange for our lives. When Jesus gave his life for ours, to whom did he give it? The life of Christ was given over to death itself. But, as in the case of Satan, Christ did not ‘owe’ death anything. He did not ‘owe’ Hades (the Greek god of death) a life. Instead, death is the gate by which Jesus entered Hades (death) and plundered its captives. In Psalm 49 we read, “But God will redeem me from the realm of the dead; he will surely take me to himself ” (v. 15). The early church (drawing from texts such as Matt. 27:52-53; Eph. 4:8; 1 Pet. 3:18-20; 4:6) called this victory raid ‘the harrowing of Hades’ and celebrated Christ’s posthumous saving work on ‘Holy Saturday.’

So, in Christ, the ransom metaphor points to the rescue of those taken by death and held in the grave. The ransom ‘price’ is Jesus’ life—Death (personified) is paid—but ‘payment’ might be too strong a word because Death can’t hold him. And so, in John’s Revelation, Jesus announces: “Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last. I am the Living One; I was dead, and now look, I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades” (Rev. 1:17-18).

Finally, let me ask you: If Jesus now holds the keys of death and Hades, what do you think he’ll do with them? In ransoming us, he also frees us from bondage and into lives of liberty.

A Windfall of Delight

Wednesday, November 4, 2026

Those who bless the world in the lifelong process of learning to ripen … are those who have mastered the art of sustained effort, infused with a surrender to hidden sources of grace. 
— James Finley  

CAC faculty member James Finley shares his thoughts on spiritual maturity as a form of ripening: 

We ripen in holiness and spiritual fulfillment as we learn to sit in the sun of God’s mysterious, sustaining presence that energizes and guides our efforts, bringing us to realms of grace that are beyond, way beyond, anything we can achieve by our own efforts alone…. 

The lifelong process of ripening brings about a corresponding ripening of our ability to understand the fundamentals in a wiser, peace-giving manner…. As a person ripens in unsayable intimacies in God, they ripen in a paradoxical wisdom. They come to understand God as a presence that protects us from nothing, even as God unexplainably sustains us in all things. This is the mystery of the cross…. It does not mean that God prevents the tragic thing, the cruel thing, the unfair thing, from happening. Rather, it means that God is intimately hidden as a kind of profound, tender sweetness that flows and carries us along in the intimate depths of the tragic thing itself—and will continue to do so in every moment of our lives up to and through death, and beyond….  

We might say that, as fruit ripens, it fulfills itself in giving itself to us. In a similar way, we do not undergo the transformative process of ripening for ourselves alone, but rather that our transformed presence might be a source of nurture to others. 

Then too, there is the fruit that, in remaining unharvested, falls onto the ground and dies. The lesson here is in Jesus’s words, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it brings forth fruit…” (John 12:24). 

And so it is with us. As we grow old we realize that, in all we have been through, Love has been using us for its own purposes. And for this we feel immensely grateful. We know, too, that our inevitable passing away, in which we fall into the ground and die, is not the end of our ripened and transformed life. It is rather our passage into an infinite and deathless fulfillment. Saint John of the Cross [1542–1591] talks about a windfall of delight. [1] When fruit becomes very ripe, the slightest wind can cause it to fall to the ground. This is also true of us, and not just in the sense in which we learn to be undone and fulfilled in all the unexpected little blessings that come to us throughout the day. The windfall of delight pertains as well to our last breath, which we know and trust will send us falling forever into the deathless depths of God. 

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John 10:10 and the Problematic of Divine Violence 

BRADLEY JERSAK

OCT 29, 2026

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A Very Problematic Hermeneutic:
“It is God who kills, steals, and destroys, 
but Jesus came to give life to the full.”

—Wm. Paul Young

During a conversation with Paul Young (author of The Shack and Return to the Shack), he observed how common it is for Bible readers to infer disturbing theologies of divine violence that undermine Jesus’ revelation of God. He also noted dangerous ethical corollaries among Christians that result from these missteps.

First, you’ll note that Paul is obviously riffing off Jesus’ words in John 10:10:

“The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy;
I have come that they have life,
and have it to the full.

Jesus’ claim is indeed central to both our theology and our hermeneutic (interpretive system). Paul and I believe that when Jesus spoke, he spoke as the Word of God—or as Brian Zahnd says, “Jesus is what God has to say about himself.” 

That’s not a scandalous thought for any Christian who remembers Jesus’ words, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). The epistle to the Hebrews doubles down: “He is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Hebrews 1:3). 

To creedal Christians from Jerusalem to Alaska, from Argentina to India, the confession is that God is one—and that Father, Son, and Spirit share one ousia (being or essence). The conviction is that Jesus reflects the same nature of the God he reveals, and conversely, that God is known through the Son who has made God known. Theology 101 speaks of three persons sharing one divine identity, so Jesus can say “I AM” and claim God’s very character. 

To those who accept and conserve the ancient faith, John 10:10 becomes a powerful theological statement, although the math is profoundly simple:

1. 1. Jesus says, “It is the thief who is the death-dealer. I am the life-giver. 
2. 2. Jesus says, “To see me is to see the Father.”
3. 3. Thus, “God is not the death-dealer. That’s the thief. God is the life-giver.”

Destructive Theological Inferences 

And yet… another theology emerged and became dominant in the Protestant West (though not only there) that abandons Jesus’ claims in just the way Paul Young describes. It proclaims God as a death-dealer, punisher, and destroyer—a vengeful God exacting justice through never-ending violence from whom Jesus must come to save us. 

Do you see the theological problems in this model? 

1. 1. God is not like Jesus. God is wrath. Jesus is a redeemer. 
   God is who we’re redeemed from.
2. 2. Jesus does not share one essence, nature, or character with God.
   Jesus and God are not one. They are different. 
3. 3. Jesus is not the perfect image of God. Jesus is other than God.
   Jesus is not God.

Dubious Interpretive Methods

And so on. How do Christian theologians slip into such obvious, egregious errors? This involves a basic hermeneutical error: departing from the “Emmaus Way” of reading Scripture, where a Christian reading of the Old Testament must always begin with Jesus as the means and end of interpreting the Bible. 

In this case, we start with John 10:10 as a theological non-negotiable and read the Old Testament through Jesus’ picture of God. God is not a death-dealer; God is a life-giver. Okay, so then what about Old Testament narratives of divine violence? 

Indeed, what about them? Years ago, Archbishop Lazar Puhalo put it this way (some readers will recall): Any Scripture that claims to reveal God must bow to the living God when he came in the flesh. In other words, descriptions of God enacting or commissioning stealing, killing, or destroying must be subordinated to Christ, our final authority for faith and practice. 

Then what do we do with those texts that seem to say otherwise? The fathers and mothers of the Great Tradition trained us and modeled how to read those texts long ago, so our modern amnesia is actually without excuse. (I review their approach thoroughly in A More Christlike Word). 

We must not start our reading with the destruction texts and treat them as primary, infallible descriptions of God, nor read them literally without reference to Jesus, who said, “You have heard it say, but I [God’s self-revelation] say [otherwise]…” That’s the crack we trip over, inevitably landing us in the Christological errors mentioned above.

Dangerous Ethical Corollaries

I mentioned up front that Paul also exposed some dangerous ethical corollaries connected to these theological and hermeneutical stumbles. It boils down to imagining ourselves as God’s appointed agents of divine violence. With God as the author of destruction and wrath against the wicked, how do these divine judgments take effect in this world? 

Christians often attribute divine design to pandemics, geological calamities, and catastrophic weather… but we rarely stop at leaving retribution to ‘natural law’ or ‘acts of God.’ We have a track record of appointing ourselves as God’s executioners, whether on foreign crusades or domestic death rows. Rather than “overcoming evil with good” (as per Romans 12), we take a two-step approach: first, the loyalist church affirms death-dealing via the state sword (Romans 13), then campaigns to assume control of the state and so wield it ourselves (via Christian nationalism). 

This hideous outcome starts somewhere… but it also goes nowhere if we, as theologians, Bible interpreters, and peacemaking disciples of the Life-Giver, plant ourselves firmly in the good news gospel of John 10:10.

Tuesday, November 3, 2026

Life is a process of emptying and moving into the oneness of life and death. It is living through dying. 
—Sally Severino 

Dr. Sally Severino writes of the process of aging as an opportunity to more fully experience union with God.  

Human beings are meaning-making creatures. Our lives take on new meaning with age. As human longevity has increased, aging no longer means inevitable decline, deterioration, or disability. It is a time to become more authentically ourselves—to be more freely who we really are in the fullness of our ripening. 

Spiritually, my childhood entailed baptism and confirmation—a time when I experienced God as parent. During mid-life my relationship with God became an understanding of God as partner. During senior life my relationship with God has taken the form of realizing the oneness of all life, including my journey toward oneness with God. This is consistent with what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung described as the seven tasks of aging: 

1. accepting death as a part of life 
2. reflecting on one’s life 
3. limiting one’s time and energy 
4. letting go of ego dominance 
5. bringing opposites within us together into wholeness 
6. finding meaning in one’s life 
7. engaging our unused potentials in “dying with life” 

In other words, we empty ourselves in imitation of Jesus. When we are totally empty and only God is within us, then we recover our true selves. 

When we realize God as our true being, we realize our true selves. All we need to do is open our eyes to the goodness we have possessed all along. In seeing this goodness, we can die to “our” life and live the unique expression of God we were created to be. We can let God act in and through us.  

Severino describes how, by fully welcoming our oneness with God, we can offer our lives to the world:  

We are not only the recipients of divine love; we are also the dispensers of love in the world. When we are one with Christ, our hearts and souls are full of a compassion that then flows out into the world through Christ…. 

We are each given the mind of Christ and the ability to give this gift to others.All we need to do is become aware, be grateful, and share our uniqueness with the world around us. Christ encourages us to do as he did—to act freely, expressing our gift in each unrepeatable moment of our lives. The spirituality of aging is a process of becoming increasingly Christlike—of emptying ourselves until only God lives within us. Just as we are each a unique image of Christ in the world, so too is our ripening process unique. God is always knocking, wanting to enter our lives. All we need to do is open. 

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the neuroscience of deep character change

(in a day of quick fixes) 

CHUCK DEGROAT NOV 1

It can be confusing to distill what real change looks like amidst the abundance of resources out there. 

Should I add new spiritual practices? 

Should I focus on my emotional health? 

Should I try to change my everyday habits? 

While all of these things are important, there is an underlying neuroscientific wisdom that holds much of it together—the body’s innate wisdom, which we can cooperate with for the sake of deep character change. 

Here are five high-level principles that lay a foundation for deep change. 

1. Regulation precedes maturation

Your nervous system profoundly influences how you perceive the world and respond relationally. And as I say in the new book, it’s almost impossible to change when your body is locked in threat mode. 

Threat mode is a body in dysregulation, with little capacity to adapt or grow. It’s a survival orientation, where your internal resources are bound up in self-protection rather than connection and growth. 

So, we need to create the conditions for growth by turning down your threat system and expanding your inner capacity for change. Otherwise, we may be inadvertently overwhelming your system with haphazard attempts at change. 

The change process often begins here—by working on creating the relational and internal safety that allows for a body to inhabit a new way of being in the world. 

2. Character is patterned

Neuroscience teaches us that what fires together, wires together. And repeated experiences strengthen neural pathways…the very pathways that shape your habitual ways of thinking, feeling, reacting, and relating, and which become your character. 

I know it’s common today to see books on character engaging ancient virtues—and I appreciate that—but these can become abstract. Character is anything but abstract. It’s who you’ve become over time. This is why insight or behavioral modification alone doesn’t produce lasting change. 

Your habits weren’t born overnight—and through the wisdom of neuroplasticity, you can slowly begin to reshape them. But this often requires more time and patience that we’re willing to invest amidst many other microwavable interventions. 

3. Character is formed and re-formed in connection

Your nervous system developed within your closest relationships, and continues to develop over a lifetime in the context of relationship. Those habits—as I said, they didn’t emerge overnight. They evolved based on the relative safety and connection you experienced. Who you are didn’t happen yesterday—you’ve been ‘becoming’ for quite a long time!

So, character maturation isn’t an individual achievement nor is it gained through mere self-help effort. To change, you’ll need to experience safety, trust, vulnerability, and belonging—and where there has been significant moral failure or betrayal, significant accountability. 

Creating the proper relational conditions is critical for real change.

4. There is a story your brain is telling you

Your brain is predictive. It actively interprets incoming data based on previous experiences. And in time, it forms a story. 

“Keep your guard up. You never know what’s coming.”

“If you want something done right, do it yourself.”

“Never let them see you sweat.”

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

“If I’m not in control, everything will fall apart.”

These stories can feel like objective reality when they’re simply ways you’ve learned to inhabit your world—for some really good reasons, I’m sure. But these stories do not need to define your future. 

Your body can learn a new way of being in the world and a new and better story to live within. 

5. You become what you behold

Character change depends, in large part, on what you attend to. When you’ve lived for years in threat mode—within whatever story that requires you to inhabit—you attend to the world in a braced and vigilant way. Your attention narrows. You control what’s in front of you. You tend to fight or flee. And it’s almost impossible to hold space for beauty, goodness, and gratitude. 

People are often surprised when I invite them to pay attention to what they’re paying attention to. But this simple act of intentional attention can begin to reshape reality. By doing this, you can make what has been invisible visible, bringing conscious attention to what has become habitual, engaging the prefrontal cortex, strengthening your capacity for self-awareness and emotional regulation, and increasing your sense of agency. 

In time, you’ll behold a whole new reality. 

In sum, character change is not about an exhausting attempt to reach for what feels like some unattainable and abstract virtue. It’s more about cultivating a capacity for deep change, through internal and relational safety and regulation, through intentional attention, through a growing awareness of your story and your state. 

Deep change is possible—but it’s a much more satisfying process when it’s a process that cooperates with your nervous system rather than fighting against it, which is so often the case when we simply apply behavioral or spiritual interventions willy-nilly. 

Character change, in the end, cooperates with your God-created, embodied wisdom. And it reveals that what you most deeply long for is possible, not least because God made this pathway of transformation possible in-and-through the unique way he designed you.

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Individual Reflection

Which of your scars is still doing the work of a wall?

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Group Discussion — choose one

1. Which of your patterns are ripening with age, and which are just hardening?
2. Where has your spiritual practice been one more quick fix laid over a body still braced for threat?
3. What have you been beholding lately, and what is it making you into?

Sunday, November 1, 2026

All Saint’s Day

Father Richard Rohr uses the language of “ripening” to describe the process of aging with wisdom and grace: 

The word “ripening” helps us move beyond any exclusive concern with physical aging, because our concerns are much more than that. We want to talk about notions of maturity, eldership, staging, sequencing, growth, and direction. Where is this thing we call “life” headed? Who sets the standard? Is there any standard?  

Unless we can somehow chart this trajectory, we have no way to discern growth or maturity, and no ability to discern what might be a full, fuller, or fullest human response. Neither do we have any criteria for discerning an immature, regressive, or even sick response. There must be a direction to ripening, but we must also recognize that any steps toward maturity are by necessity immature. An understanding of ripening basically teaches us the wisdom of timing, love, and patience, and allows us to be wise instead of judgmental.  

If I am to believe the novels, myths, poems, and people I have met in my life, old age is almost never described as an apex of achievement as one sits atop a summit with the raised arms of a victorious athlete. It is almost always something else—and usually something other than what was initially imagined or even hoped for. 

Ripening reveals much bigger or very different horizons than we realize. The refusal to ripen leads to what T.S. Eliot spoke of in “The Hollow Men,” lives that “end not with a bang but with a whimper.” I trust that we are willing to move toward our own endless horizons and not waste time in whimpering, trusting that we are, in fact, being led. Life—your life, my life, all life—is going somewhere, and somewhere good. We do not need to navigate the river, for we are already flowing within it. 

Ripening, at its best, is a slow, patient learning, and sometimes even a happy letting go—a seeming emptying out to create readiness for a new kind of fullness—which we are never sure about. If we do not allow our own ripening, an ever-increasing resistance and denial sets in, an ever-increasing protection around an over-defended self. At our very best, we learn how to hope as we ripen, to move outside and beyond self-created circles. Youthful hopes have concrete goals, whereas the hope of older years is usually aimless hope, hope without goals, even naked hope—perhaps real hope. 

Such stretching is the agony and the joy of later years, although one can avoid both of these rich experiences too. Old age, as such, is almost a complete changing of gears and engines from the first half of our lives, and does not happen without many slow realizations, inner calmings, lots of inner resistance and denials, and eventual surrenders. All of them by God’s grace work with our ever-deepening sense of what we really desire and who we really are.  

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A Spirituality of Ripening 

Monday, November 2, 2026

All Soul’s Day

Father Richard describes how a spirituality of ripening allows us to hold greater paradox through an increasing awareness of our union with God:  

Reality, fate, destiny, providence, and tragedy are slow but insistent teachers. The horizon of old age seems to be a plan that God has prepared as inevitable and part of the necessary school of life. What is gratuitously given is also gratuitously taken away, just as Job slowly came to accept. And sometimes we remember that his eventual pained response was “Blessed be the name of the Lord!” (Job 1:21). We all live in the same cycle of unrequested birth and unrequested death. Someone else is clearly in control, yet most of our lives are spent accepting and surrendering to this truth, and in trusting that this “someone” is good and trustworthy besides. It is the very shape of faith and the entire journey of faith.  

If we are to speak of a spirituality of ripening, we need to recognize that it is always (and I do mean always) characterized by an increasing tolerance for ambiguity, a growing sense of subtlety, an ever-larger ability to include and allow, and a capacity to live with contradictions and even to love them! I cannot imagine any other way of coming to those broad horizons except through many trials, unsolvable paradoxes, and errors in trying to resolve them.  

Without such a gradually renewed mind and heart, we almost certainly will end with a whimper—not just our own, but also that of the disappointed souls gathered around our sick bed or gravestone. Too many lives have indeed been lives of “quiet desperation” and God must surely rush to console and comfort all humans before, during, and after their passing. Many put off enlightenment as long as they can.  

The ripening of mind and heart is most basically a capacity for nondual consciousness and contemplation. Many might just call it a growth in compassion, but surely no growth in compassion is likely unless one learns how to forgive as a very way of life, and to let go of almost everything as we first imagined it had to be. This is possible as our understanding of faith deepens, requiring a careful pairing of not-knowing (the apophatic way) with knowing (the kataphatic way). The Jewish and Christian traditions balanced our so-called knowing with trust, patience, allowing, waiting, humility, love, and forgiveness, which is very nearly the entire message, and surely the core message, necessary for the possibility of ripening. Otherwise, we all close down, and history freezes up with all of its hurts, memories, and resentments intact.  

So my guidance after over eighty years of life is a simple reminder to recall what we will be forced to learn by necessity and under pressure anyway—the open-ended way of allowing and the deep meaning that some call faith. To live in trustful faith is to ripen; it is almost that simple. 

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Individual Reflection

What would your hope look like if it had no goal attached?

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Group Discussion — choose one

1. Where do others see an over-defended self in you that you’re only beginning to notice?
2. Which contradiction in your life have you stopped trying to resolve, and could you ever come to love it?
3. Does “aimless hope” feel like freedom to you, or like giving up?

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.”

Love Is the Law 

Thursday, October 29, 2026

Public theologian Rachel Held Evans (1981–2019) considers how Jesus understood love as the ultimate fulfillment of God’s law:

Jesus made it clear that he did not come to abolish the laws of the Torah, “but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). The life and teachings of Jesus, then, embody all that these laws were intended to be. Jesus is what the living, breathing will of God looks like. This includes compassion for the poor, esteem for women, healing for the sick, and solidarity with the suffering. It means breaking bread with outcasts and embracing little children. It means choosing forgiveness over retribution, the cross over revenge, and cooking breakfast for the friend who betrayed you. As Elton Trueblood put it, “The historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that. It means that God is like Jesus.” [1]

When Jesus was challenged by the experts on the Law to give an answer for what Scripture is all about, he offered a very straightforward, very Jewish response. Quoting Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19, he replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37–40).

This is the point of every liberation, every wandering through the desert, every law about oxen and yeast and blood. To love is to honor God and keep God’s commandments. Love is the law that liberates slave and slaveholder alike. Love is the ultimate deliverance story, for only love can sustain the sojourner out of Egypt, through the desert, up the mountain, and into the promised land.

The truth is, you can bend Scripture to say just about anything you want it to say…. We all go to the text looking for something, and we all have a tendency to find it. So the question we have to ask ourselves is this: are we reading with the prejudice of love, with Christ as our model, or are we reading with the prejudices of judgment and power, self-interest and greed? Are we seeking to enslave or liberate, burden or set free?…

This is why there are times when the most instructive question to bring to the text is not, What does this say? but, What am I looking for? I suspect Jesus knew this when he said, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7).

If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons. If you want to heal, you will always find the balm. With Scripture, we’ve been entrusted with some of the most powerful stories ever told. How we harness that power, whether for good or evil, oppression or liberation, changes everything.

References:
[1] Elton Trueblood, cited in Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity (HarperCollins, 2010), 114.

Rachel Held Evans, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again (Nelson Books, 2018), 55–57.

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.

Love Indivisible: John the Beloved on the Union of God, neighbor, and sibling

BRADLEY JERSAKOCT 25

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Love Indivisible in John the Beloved 

The First Epistle of John the Beloved is a treasury of challenges to every assumption that would sabotage Love’s work in our lives and world. Read closely, it calls for a fearless self-examination that rattles religious presumptions and prepares us to hear the radical claims of divine love. Along those lines, I invite you to notice the “fusion of two loves” that push our notions of “divine union” to the n^th degree.

The Fusion of Divine and Human Love

First, let’s notice how John fuses divine and human love. John learned from Jesus that the whole of the Law and Prophets can be expressed in a two-fold summary command: love God with your whole heart and love your neighbor with the same concern you have for yourself. John had witnessed Jesus unite love for God and neighbor in practice, such that the two loves became an indivisible fusion.

John boldly asserts that we cannot claim to love God while we still hate our human siblings. To imagine love for God but not our neighbor is, to John, a delusion. And living as if we could is hypocrisy—a lie. Strong words, but consider: in John, loving our neighbor IS loving God; it’s how you love God. More than a “should,” an obligation, or implication. More than an application or corollary to the Great Commandment. John has moved beyond a two-step “first you love God (via devotion), then you love your neighbor (via kindness, etc.).”

No. That would still imply a separation between God and humanity. It would overlook the radical union of Christ with his human family with whom he shares “one substance.” Jesus showed us that to love the poor, naked, hungry, sick, and imprisoned is to love him. In Christ and to Christ, ‘they’ are ‘Me.’

So too, he interrogates Paul, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” Notby way of analogy. And not indirectly. To persecute ‘them’ is to ‘murder Me.’To kill the other—whether the foreign enemy, the murderer on death row, or the war child—is to murder him.

The union of God and humanity is complete. We literally cannot know or love God apart from encountering him in every ‘them’ Jesus calls ‘Me.’ Cannot. I don’t just mean we should not see them as separate. They just aren’t. The union of God and humanity makes the separation impossible. Eventually, hopefully, unthinkable.

There is no “Love God” category AND “love neighbor.” 
In Christ, the two loves are fused in hypostatic union.

The Fusion of Neighbor and Sibling

When I spoke of fusing love for God and neighbor in John’s epistle, I deliberately imported the language of neighbor. But that’s not right; John does not mention our neighbor. He speaks of “one another” (allēlōn – 6x) and “brother(s)/sister(s)” (adelphos/adelphē – 15x). Since John’s heart and theology are gender universal, I’ll use the inclusive term “siblings.” 

As a child literalist with a King James Bible, I knew John was at least addressing my relationship with my one and only actual human brother, Rodney. I’ve told the story somewhere of the Sunday School poster I posted on my wall, “You cannot love God and hate your brother.” That’s short for the admonition:

“Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate a brother or sister are liars, 
for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, 
cannot love God, whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4:20, NRSVUE)

I left the poster on my wall for months, undergoing its work on me because I genuinely wanted to love God, but I knew I was often impatient, unkind, and sometimes cruel to Rodney. I wanted to do better.

While John didn’t mean for my obedience to be that exclusive, many of us still assumed “brother” referred to our Christian brothers and sisters. In fact, some streams of Christian theology not only narrow our love from all our neighbors to ‘the elect,’ but pull the same stunt with God! They claim that “God is notlove” by nature and does not love everyone—God, they say, is only love in the experience of the elect.

In this model, God’s love and ours are directed not at our neighbor, but specifically at our Christian brothers and sisters—John seems to urge love for a specific faith community of Christian believers. But history demonstrates this constricted love reopens the door to misuse and violence toward the feared minority, the despised stranger, and enemy other (a worrisome trend again today). 

Universal Siblings

I want to offer an alternative reading of 1 John that I believe better reflects the same author who proclaimed, “God so loved the world.” This is John’s transformative takeaway from the revelation of God’s love in Christ. So I propose a second fusion: rather than seeing “siblings” as the faith-bearing subgroup within the broader human population, John’s vision of love is that in Christ, all neighbors are now revealed as siblings. 

Practically, the Sikh hymn (and title of Valarie Kaur’s book) teaches us to “See no stranger.” Just as John sees love of God and neighbor as one indivisible act, so he replaces the language of neighbor with sibling because there is no difference. We look at the world in terms of strangers, enemies, and neighbors (categories of difference), but in Christ, we are one, a united family of siblings—including Jesus. He is not ashamed to call us siblings, and we must honor all humanity as siblings too. 

In Christ, my neighbor is now my sibling. 
And all are in Christ, not because they ‘became Christian,’ 
but because in his incarnation, he became human, 
united to every human person.

My Brother’s Keeper?

I’ll close by revisiting the biblical archetype of Cain, who famously asked God (ever so defensively), “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Today, I hear Jesus, piercing our eyes and hearts with this sober reply, “No. You are their sibling. And they are Me.”

Wednesday, October 28, 2026

Summarizing the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37), Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King reflects on how we define our neighbor: 

Who is my neighbor? “I do not know his name,” says Jesus in essence. “He is anyone toward whom you are neighborly. He is anyone who lies in need at life’s roadside. He is neither Jew nor Gentile; he is neither Russian nor American; he is neither Negro nor white. He is a ‘certain man’—any needy man—on one of the numerous Jericho roads of life.” So Jesus defines a neighbor, not in a theological definition, but in a life situation.  

What constituted the goodness of the good Samaritan? Why will he always be an inspiring paragon of neighborly virtue? It seems to me that this man’s goodness may be described in one word—altruism. The good Samaritan was altruistic to the core…. The Samaritan was good because he made concern for others the first law of his life.… 

Man-made laws assure justice, but a higher law produces love…. The good Samaritan represents the conscience of [humankind] because he also was obedient to that which could not be enforced. No law in the world could have produced such unalloyed compassion, such genuine love, such thorough altruism…. 

More than ever before, my friends, [people] of all races and nations are today challenged to be neighborly. The call for a worldwide good-neighbor policy is more than an ephemeral shibboleth…. No longer can we afford the luxury of passing by on the other side. Such folly was once called moral failure; today it will lead to universal suicide. We cannot long survive spiritually separated in a world that is geographically together. In the final analysis, I must not ignore the wounded man on life’s Jericho Road, because he is a part of me and I am a part of him. His agony diminishes me and his salvation enlarges me.  

In our quest to make neighborly love a reality, we have, in addition to the inspiring example of the good Samaritan, the magnanimous life of our Christ to guide us. His altruism was universal, for he thought of all [people], even publicans and sinners, as brothers. His altruism was dangerous, for he willingly traveled hazardous roads in a cause he knew was right. His altruism was excessive, for he chose to die on Calvary, history’s most magnificent expression of obedience to the unenforceable.  

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A Jesus Follower’s Voter Guide

Something to carry with you into next Tuesday

BEAU STRINGEROCT 27

Election Day is one week from today, and if you’re feeling a little worn out by the whole thing, you’re definitely not alone. I have had several conversations lately with folks who feel anxious about this season, and a lot of them have told me it’s hard to know how your faith fits into all of it.

So, I made something for you. 

It’s a short guide with eight truths about Jesus and how they might shape the way we think about casting a vote. I put it together as a simple image so it’s easy to save, print, or pass along to someone who might need it.

Big shout out to Brian Zahnd, whose own Christian voter’s guide inspired me to write this one.

I kept each point simple, and every one of them centers on Jesus. Something he said or did, or something the church has confessed about him from the very beginning. From there I trust you to connect the dots for your own life and your own ballot. I refuse to endorse anyone. 

My hope is that this helps you walk into the voting booth remembering who you belong to. The earliest followers of Jesus lived under an empire that asked for their loyalty, and they kept right on saying “Jesus is Lord.” That confession is ours too, next Tuesday and every day after.

And whatever the results are a week from now, I hope you’ll wake up on Wednesday knowing what is true. Jesus is still risen. The worst thing is never the last thing. Every neighbor you pass is still made in the image of God. And the kingdom he talked about is still quietly growing all around us.

If you’d like a prayer to carry with you, here’s one you’re welcome to borrow:

God of every nation and every neighbor, give me clear eyes and a kind heart as I vote. Help me care most about the people you care about. Keep me from fear and from contempt. And whatever the results are, remind me that my hope rests in you. Amen.

Tuesday, October 27, 2026.

Richard Rohr maps the expansion from self-love and group love to the gospel call of universal love: 

We’re told by developmental psychologists that there’s a staging in our growth in love. We have to start with self-love and respecting the self. If we don’t respect ourselves, we won’t know how to respect anybody else. 

Then God moves us to group love, family love, which is basically the love of people who are connected to us or who are like us. A lot of people don’t even get there. They don’t know how to love their family or those close to them or those in their group. 

From there, God moves us to the third level, which is universal love. I’m afraid a much smaller number of people get to this place. As we see in politics, in our country, and throughout the world, at best most people just get to the second stage of knowing how to love people who are like them: their race, their nationality, their religion, their political party. When we stay at this second stage of group love, we clearly don’t create a healthy society. We can look at countries and politics the world over to witness how this is true.  

In Acts 10, we discover that even Peter had to be taught by the Holy Spirit how to grow in love. Peter was at the stage of group love, believing that God only loved the Jewish people. And then this strange thing happened where the Holy Spirit fell upon gentiles! Peter looked around and said, “Oh my gosh! God seems to be for everybody and not just for the Jewish people!” He understood that it was okay to include gentiles into what eventually became known as the church. In spite of this, most of church history has not really imitated Peter’s insight. We pulled back into group think and group love. 

Peter said, “In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. In any country, whoever fears God and acts uprightly is acceptable” (Acts 10:34–35). At that moment he became both a Jewish and Christian heretic! Peter himself began to recognize that God works with all people of goodwill — not just people in his group. But he had to be pushed there. Little by little, God leads him to universal love. 

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The Best Days of Our Lives

Ten Years Later

BRIAN ZAHND OCT 27

My shadow with Peri walking on ahead on the Camino de Santiago.

Ten years ago today Peri and I completed our first 500-mile pilgrim walk across Spain on the Francés route of the Camino de Santiago. It changed our lives. This is not hyperbole, it’s just a stone-cold fact. Peri has written a memoir of our experience—Every Scene By Heart. The following is my brief reflection on those blessed days ten years ago.

Finding my initials in El Acebo, population 37.

It was a long walk across Spain—the best days of our lives. We knew it while we were doing it. Even when we were beset with blisters and worn down by fatigue, we would turn to one another and say, “This is the best thing we’ve ever done.” While walking thousand-year-old paths made holy by the feet of millions of pilgrims, we found respite “far from the madding crowd” of modernity. For forty days and forty nights our lives were reduced to the blessed simplicity of walking from town to town, from church to church, from shelter to shelter, always moving a bit closer to Santiago. We didn’t dart here and there, back and forth in a frenzy; we didn’t speed through the world in cars, trains, and planes; we just moved steadily westward, no faster than foot-speed. And with the simplicity and the slowing down came that which we miss most in our high-speed, high-tech, high-stress age: Peace.

We had come to the Camino to escape the quadrennial madness that falls upon America during presidential elections. We had come to the Camino for our first sabbatical in thirty-five years of ministry. We had come to the Camino in hope of finding healing for our overwrought souls. And on the Camino we found all we were looking for and more. It’s not often that a much-anticipated experience exceeds our expectations, but the Camino de Santiago was better than we had dared to hope. It was a gift from God; a five-hundred mile walk deep into the grace of Christ.

As it became known that we planned to walk the Camino, people who had already had their own Camino contacted us; they were as eager to tell us of their experience as we were to gain what advice we could. Over time I noticed that these Camino veterans tended to say the same three things in their own way:

1. It’s harder than you think.
2. You will love it.
3. It will change you.

Taking a break near the village of Trabadelo, population 321.

Today, ten years after our arrival in Santiago, I can say that all three prophecies were precisely true. It was harder than I anticipated—as Peri’s memoir makes clear. And I did love it. Even when I had seventeen blisters I was aware that I loved the privilege of being a pilgrim on this wonderful journey. And, most importantly, I know the Camino has changed me. I found a peace on the Camino that I’m still consciously aware of today.

Over those five-hundred miles I shed a layer of skin—a layer that was too easily blistered by anxiety. At Cruz de Ferro I laid down a burden I have not retrieved—I left it at the base of an iron cross and there it remains. 

At Cruz de Ferro, where pilgrims lay down a small stone they have carried on the Camino, representing something they want to let go of.

Those long walks through the lovely mountains of the Pyrenees, the vineyards of Navarra, the plains of the Meseta, and the wooded hills of Galicia brought me to a new place of calm and contentedness. This was an answer to prayer. The Camino was a forty-day, five-hundred-mile prayer, and with the Amen offered in the Cathedral of Santiago I found a new depth of the peace of God which surpasses all understanding. Thank you, Camino. Thank you, Peri. Thank you, Jesus.

Buen Camino.

BZ

Loving God, Self, and Others 

Sunday, October 25, 2026

One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied, “The first is this: … ‘You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”  
—Mark 12:28–31  

In this homily, Father Richard Rohr considers Jesus’s response to the question, “Which is the first of all the commandments?”:  

I don’t think any of us really know how to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We might want to love like that, but how do we put all the parts of ourselves together and actually do it? It takes our whole lives to figure out what Jesus’s words might even mean. Then Jesus says, “You must love your neighbor as you love yourself” (Mark 12:31). Do any of us do that? Do we really love other people? Do we really give them as much attention as we give to ourselves? I don’t think so.  

Imagine how different the world would be if we just obeyed that one commandment to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. It would be the most mighty political and social upheaval imaginable. The world would be radically different if human beings really treated other people as they would like to be treated. We can take this as a simple rule of thumb: What would I want from that person right now? What would be helpful for me to receive?Well, there’s the commandment—our obligation to do for others!   

It’s so simple that we can see why we put all our attention on the Ten Commandments, or the hundreds of other regulations culture and religion place on us. It’s much easier to worry about things that keep us “pure,” so to speak, but are of little consequence.   

I think the scribe is asking a very good question. After all is said and done, it comes down to loving God and loving our neighbor—and that implies loving ourselves. If I said this without quoting Jesus, I could be accused of oversimplifying or ignoring some of the important commandments. Thank God, Jesus said it first. He taught that it’s all about love. In the end, that’s all we’re all going to be judged for. Did we love? Did we love life? Did we love ourselves? Did we love God? Did we love our neighbor? Concentrating on love takes just about our whole lifetime, so we won’t have much time left over to worry about what other people are doing or not doing. Our job is to love God, love ourselves, and love our neighbor.  

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Sacred Service  

Monday, October 26, 2026

Interspiritual teacher Mirabai Starr centers Jesus’s teaching to love one’s neighbor as oneself in his Jewish tradition:  

The second-century Talmudic master Rabbi Akiva said that the entire essence of the Torah could be summed up by Leviticus 19:18 “Love your neighbor as yourself.” There is a famous story in the Talmud about Rabbi Hillel, another spiritual genius of this lineage. A Gentile came to a rabbi named Shammai and said that he would convert to Judaism if Shammai could teach him the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Infuriated, the rabbi chased the man away. Hillel, however, balanced on one leg and said, “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Now go and study it.” The Gentile converted on the spot. 

While Judaism takes it on faith that the ultimate Divine Being transcends all attributes and defies all description, it also affirms that God is intimately concerned with the human predicament. If human beings are made in God’s image and if His nature is one of infinite compassion, then efforts to act with kindness and to defend the persecuted are as vital to spiritual life as are prayer and Torah study. To love God is to love each other and to see each other as having been created in Her image, just as we ourselves have been…. 

Mercy is the root that blossoms into living acts of chesed (lovingkindness) and tzedakah (righteousness). Tzedakah can be confused with charity. But it is not about grand gestures of beneficence. If we are spiritually attuned, giving becomes a natural outflow of our recognition of the interdependence of all life. To withhold what we have from others is to violate the gifts the Holy One has given to us. Not only that, but acts of tzedakah are said to sanctify God: our righteousness makes the Holy One holy! 

Jesus’s teaching invites us to express who we are by how we act:   

Jesus reminded his Jewish followers that the most important of all the Holy One’s prescriptions are “to love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength” and “to love your neighbor as yourself.” Following these two commandments requires a balance between reaching upward toward the divine mystery and manifesting our commitment to the sacred in each other. 

In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ calls his disciples “the salt of the earth.” By carrying his message of love to all they touch, they will serve to bring out the true flavor of the spiritual life and preserve what is best in the human experience. Sacred service in the name of love, he promises, is worth far more than worldly fame and material fortune. The divine commission is to stand up in our righteousness and radiate our light to the world. 

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Individual Reflection

Of the three (God, neighbor, yourself), which one do you quietly leave out?

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Group Discussion — choose one:

1. Rohr says we fuss over purity because it costs less than love. What’s your version of that?
2. Starr says withholding what we’ve been given violates the gift. What are you holding back, and from whom?
3. Hillel’s answer fit on one foot. Why do we keep needing more legs to stand on?