Wednesday, July 29, 2026

Dr. Richard Beck acknowledges the temptation to oversimplify our reading of the Bible, but urges us to stay with the tensions it raises:

We find ourselves, as readers [of the Bible], in between competing visions and values, which creates a different set of challenges for us as interpreters of Scripture. A “book, chapter, and verse” approach to reading the Bible is simplistic and inadequate, ­because other books, chapters, and verses sit in tension with the passages we like to share on social media. Quoting isolated Bible verses will inevitably produce lopsided and distorted readings of Scripture….

How, then, are we to engage with the tensions we find in Scripture?

Let me suggest we emulate how Jesus read the Bible. Let’s imitate how he resolved the tensions in the Old Testament.

For example, the debates between Jesus and the Pharisees concerned the tensions … between the Torah and the prophets. You see this especially in Jesus’s Sabbath observance and his welcoming of sinners. Over and over again in­ these cases, the Pharisees pick Leviticus over the prophets. Ritual purity was chosen over ­human compassion. Jesus, by contrast, privileges the prophets. For Jesus, alleviating human suffering takes priority over Levitical prohibition. Overcoming social marginalization is preferred to religious purity.

In Mark 2:23–28, Jesus defends his disciples against criticism from the Pharisees for plucking and eating grain on the Sabbath. Beck explains: 

The hermeneutic Jesus deploys ­here is stunning. Torah observance is intended to promote ­human flourishing. The Sabbath is for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath. According to Jesus, whenever Torah observance interferes with or inhibits ­human flourishing it can be set aside. Let me underline the point if you are missing how Jesus is reading the Torah: Jesus sets aside one of the Ten Commandments to extend compassion in letting his hungry followers eat. This is a regular theme in the gospels, how Jesus consistently sides with the prophetic concern over­ human suffering against Levitical demands for religious observance….

This line from Hosea 6:6—­“mercy, not sacrifice”—is a concise summary of how Jesus read the Torah, the hermeneutical key Jesus deployed to resolve the tensions between the Law and the prophets. Where the Pharisees promoted social distancing and moral quarantine to maintain Levitical purity, Jesus cited the prophetic tradition as justification for his practices of inclusive ­table fellowship. When found in conflict, mercy is to be privileged over sacrifice. In the choice between ­human flourishing or Levitical purity, between the weightier matters of the law or fastidious religious observance, mercy must win out.

Jesus shows us how to read the Bible as the Book of Love. Yes,­ there are a lot of strange and confusing commandments in the Bible. But the Bible itself provides us with a hermeneutical rule whenever we find prohibitions, even one of the Ten Commandments, interfering with ­human flourishing and our compassionate response to ­human suffering. Whenever you face a hermeneutical fork in the road and must decide upon a reading of Scripture, read the Bible like Jesus did. Choose mercy over sacrifice.

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Change the World?

Our task is far more modest

BRIAN ZAHND. JUL 28

St Mary’s Church on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, UK

Change the world! In the church we love that kind of brash rhetoric. What are we gonna to do? We’re gonna to change the world! It’s a sermon title, a song lyric, a conference theme, a youth rally battle cry, a motto for a movement. We’re important people! We’re world-changers! We’re history-makers! I understand the appeal. But I also insist that as far as the church is concerned, the assumption that it is our task to “change the world” is mistaken and wrongheaded.

It’s not our job to change the world. Jesus is the Savior of the world, not us. (The buoyant hope that sustains me in dark days is my conviction that the world really will be saved because Jesus really is the Savior of the world. Apokatastasis, baby!) Changing (or saving) the world is a task belonging to the Son of God. Our task is far more modest: To simply be that part of the world already changed by Christ. As Yves Congar said, “The church is the world as believing in Christ.”

Clarifying our task is important. When we think it is the task of the church to directly change the world, we find the lure of political power impossible to resist. When we assume we are the ones to change the world, we reach for what we imagine to be the most immediate means of effecting change—political power. We’re the good guys, so we should control the sword of Caesar, right? We’re the ethical ones, so we should control legislation, right? We’re the trustworthy ones, so we should be entrusted with coercive political power, right? Wrong! When the church (as an institution) sets out to change the world by political power, it does not change the world, it becomes the world. 

Stanley Hauerwas has said it a million times: “The first task of the church is to make the world the world.” To be a faithful church we must be something other than the world. We must be fundamentally different from the world. But there is nothing more worldly than coveting political power. A church prioritizing political power becomes just another religious iteration of the world as it is. Nothing really changes. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The church is given the keys of binding and loosing forgiveness, not the coercive sword of political power. When Constantine offered political power to the church by making it the state-sponsored church of the empire, the church willingly embraced the offer. It seemed too good to be true. (It was.) Church collusion with the apparatus of the state was probably an inevitable mistake in the fourth century, but it has been our bane ever since. There are always strings attached to Caesar’s gifts. For a seat at the table of political privilege and a hand upon the sword of political power, the emperor expects a kind of allegiance that can only lead to compromise.

Christ is ever and always a challenge to the aspirations of empire, but when we get too cozy with Caesar our willingness to take a prophetic stand quickly evaporates. This is true for both elephants and donkeys. Christians who play for the elephant team and Christians who play for the donkey team both agree that political power is essential, they just disagree on what to do with it. But I’m suspicious of the whole project. Whether offered by Constantine or Charlemagne or Donald Trump, we keep thinking that political power is a gift instead of realizing that it is a poison that will eventually corrupt us. We are like the valiant but tragic Boromir in The Lord of the Rings who thought the One Ring was a gift that could be used for good. In Boromir’s fateful words I hear the church’s recurring justification for the pursuit of political power.

True-hearted Men, they will not be corrupted. And behold! in our hour of need chance brings to light the Ring of Power. It is a gift, I say.

But Boromir’s pragmatic justification for taking possession of the Ring of Power led to his betrayal of the Fellowship. We don’t need Caesar’s sword as the Ring of Power. By the outpouring of the Holy Spirit the church is given the power of co-suffering love, not co-regency with Caesar. The church is not to covet a share in the coercive power of the imperial sword. If Caesar offers it, we must refuse it. We don’t need an invitation to Palatine Hill or the White House. Breakfast with Caesar is always a bad idea—that kind of proximity to worldly power is too great a temptation. We cannot flirt with political power and not be corrupted by it.

My critique of both the Christian Right and the Christian Left is the same. (Caveat: I acknowledge that in the present moment there is no moral equivalency between the two, at least in my view. Nevertheless my critique remains.) My critique is this: 

With both the Christian Right and Left, Christian is reduced to adjective duty in service to the all-important political noun. What really matters is Right or Left politics, while Christian is tacked on as a nice religious accoutrement. When some faction of the church becomes the de facto religious wing of a political party, Jesus is reduced to a mascot who is trotted out on stage to meekly utter his endorsement. I am Jesus Christ and I approve this message. God forbid!

The kingdom of Christ is its own politics, and as such it will never neatly align with any of the political parties of this world. The prime imperative of a political party is to win. But “winning” is not an imperative in the kingdom of God. Partisan political winning too often gets in the way of Christlike love. By their very nature the politics of this world are incapable of embodying the kingdom of heaven. When it comes to the politics of this age Christians need the saving grace of modest expectations.

“For here we have no enduring polis, but we are looking for the polis to come.” –Hebrews 13:14

The church is to be a present and visible anticipation of the polis to come. And I believe it can be. Do you think I’m a romantic idealist? Perhaps I am, but I do see real-life glimmers of kingdom-come day-after-day in the church I’ve been a part of for forty-five years. In actual lived reality the poor are provided for, the rich are taught how to share their wealth responsibly, the immigrants are welcomed and protected, the overlooked are given recognition, the ostracized are given dignity, the losers are lifted up, the winners are taught humility, the addicted are invited into a community of recovery, the grieving are wept with, and sinners of every stripe are given the good news of God’s grace. This is not naïve abstraction or wishful fantasy, this is on the ground justice, this is grace made visible. It’s not a perfect church, but it is a church where mercy and justice have kissed, and where kindness is a culture. If you doubt it, come and see.

What I’m describing is the yeast of the kingdom of God hidden in three measures of flour. It’s not the glory of triumphant political power, it’s yeast. It doesn’t effect change by coercive force but through the quiet miracle of fermentation. It’s not loud or ostentatious; it’s not fearmongering, and it doesn’t hand out voter guides. But the bread still rises, the water still turns to wine. It’s very local, very proximate, very personal, and mostly quiet. It won’t make headlines—it’s too pedestrian for that. And if you say, “That’s how we change the world!” I say, “Shh! Don’t say it out loud! It’s a secret! It’s yeast hidden in the dough. It’s our hidden treasure.” 

We’re not trying to change the world. We’re content to be one tiny corner of the world being slowly, quietly, patiently transformed by Jesus. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

BZ

P.S. This is a hastily dashed-off foray into political theology—the most fraught of all theological territories. And whenever I dare to venture into that tricky territory, I hear my own, Yeah, but… What this piece needs is ten-thousand words of nuance, but I’m not going to do that here. To tell the truth, when I engage in political theology, I agree with about eighty percent of what I say. So if you found something in this piece you disagree with, there’s a twenty percent chance that I disagree with it too. Keep that in mind before you get too mean in the comments. Mercy triumphs over judgement.

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis explains how Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37) to illustrate God’s desire that no one be left alone in their hour of need.

Rabbi Jesus is talking to a religious leader—a lawyer—about what it means to be faithful. Together, they review the Jewish scriptures: The way to live right is to love God with everything you have and love your neighbor as yourself. Looking for a loophole, the lawyer wants to know who qualifies as a neighbor. Jesus answers by telling a story about a man who was robbed, beaten, and left for dead by a marauding gang. A priest and another religious man walked by and, seeing the man on the ground, they did nothing…. But a Samaritan—a mixed-race person considered in ancient times to be an impure enemy of the Jewish people—did not cross the street. Instead, he tended to the wounded man….

In using this story to answer his companion’s question about the definition of neighbor, Rabbi Jesus was getting to what he considered to be the essential laws—love God with all you have and love your neighbor as yourself…. If you want to know what love looks like, Rabbi Jesus is saying, here it is: Love crosses borders and boundaries; it makes new cultural rules; it cares for the stranger. Love turns strangers into friends. [1]

The religious scholar Jonathon Walton considers how Martin Luther King Jr. interpreted the Good Samaritan through a lens of love: 

For Jesus, demonstrating our love for God by seeking the good of others—an ethic known as agape love—sums up the law and the teachings of the Hebrew prophets…. King held neither a romantic nor a friendly conception of love but rather an understanding of love expressed in intentional acts of care and compassion, which is at the core of the Hebrew Bible and the heart of the gospel message. King looked to the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) in his iconic “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” address.

Of course, the parable itself is about agape love, empathy, and identifying your neighbor in the unlikeliest of places…. Jesus subverts conventional wisdom and places empathy in the eyes of the one who would otherwise be considered a foreigner. Jesus wanted to make the point that the Samaritan could see as God sees. The Samaritan saw the victim through the lenses of love….

King’s retelling of this story models the ethical design of the parable. He demonstrates both an ethic of love and empathetic care without reducing one to the other. This is to say, we have the capacity and obligation to do what is right and to show concern for our neighbor whether we feel like it or not. When we strengthen our capacity to identify with others, and thus empathize with them, it is always easier to do right by them. Love and empathy, together, lead to justice.

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The God Who Seeks Us: You’re the Pearl! 

A Homily for the Church of the Magdelen

BRADLEY JERSAK. JUL 26

Lectionary Readings

Psalm 119:129-136
1 Kings 3:5-12
Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33; 44-52

A quiet thread runs through our readings today—
like a river burrowing through soil,
like yeast working through dough,
like a mustard seed pushing upward toward the sun.

It is the thread of holy desire:
of God forming a people in
how to see, how to long, how to choose.
And at the heart of that thread we see Christ,
the Wisdom of God,
the Word made flesh,
the Treasure hidden in the field.

SOLOMON — SEEING

We begin with Solomon, the child king,
uncertain, nervous, overwhelmed?
Humbly aware of his insufficiency.

God visits him in a dream and says,
“Ask what I should give you.”
That question reveals hearts.
Solomon could have asked for wealth, fame, power.
He may have pondered victory over his rivals,
or the glory of building Yahweh’s first temple.

Instead, he asks for “a hearing heart”—
a heart tuned to the frequency of God’s wisdom.
Solomon knows—
without God’s own way of seeing,
even good intentions become crooked,
power corrupts, riches rust, and gold turns to idols,
temptations he would stumble over later,
and that harem… well.

But he does start well.
He asks for the gift that makes all other gifts meaningful:
the ability to see reality as God sees it.
This is where the golden thread begins:
with the wisdom of a hearing heart.
He didn’t seek to be clever or wily;
his desire was to be aligned with God.
A heart learning to want what God wants.

PSALM 119 — DESIRING

The Psalter takes us deeper into that interior landscape.
The psalmist delights in God’s decrees—

He sees God’s Law as the Lamp
that illumines our path through a fraught world.
“The unfolding of your words gives understanding.”

The psalmist has begun to breathe in the beauty of God’s way,
so that obedience became the natural rhythm of that love.
He is discovering that the commands of God are not burdens.
They are invitations—open doors into life.
His heart is being shaped, slowly, lovingly, by the Word of the Lord.

Solomon shows us the human longing for wisdom.
The psalmist shows us the joy of receiving it.

ROMANS 8 — BEING FORMED

Paul in Romans 8 shows us the divine generosity that sustains it.
“We do not know how to pray as we ought,” Paul says.
No failure there; it is an honest confession of our human condition.
Of the limits of our faith. 
Of how life is really, really hard.

But the Spirit meets us precisely there—
in our unknowing,
our weakness,
our sighs too deep for words.

The Holy Spirit intercedes within us,
reshaping our desires from the inside,
aligning our prayers with the heart of Christ.

And then Paul lifts our eyes to the horizon of hope:
“All things work together for good.”
“If God is for us, who can be against us.”
“Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This is wisdom as belonging.
God does not simply teach us what to desire;
he binds us to himself so that our choosing is sustained by grace.
We are held.
We are carried.
We are kept.

CHRIST — THE TREASURE HIMSELF

But most of all,
the parables of our Lord Jesus shimmer with the poetry of the Kingdom.

The mustard seed—small enough to slip through your fingers—
becomes a tree where birds and squirrels
and children (cheery or weary) children find shelter.
The yeast disappears into the dough, yet everything rises.
The treasure hidden in a field, awaiting a buyer.
The pearl of great price, awaiting a seeker.
The net that gathers all kinds, even us.

These parables are about recognition.
In every one of them, something is recognized as precious.
A mustard seed. A measure of yeast.
A treasure buried in a field. A pearl beyond price.
Once its worth is seen, everything changes.
Everything else becomes negotiable.

The merchant or the farmer or the investor
who sacrifices everything
to buy the field
has seen the treasure,
knows its value.

Having recognized its worth, he sells everything
without reluctance or reservation.
This investment brings us joy.
This is freedom.

And here is the heart of the matter:

Christ is the treasure.
Christ is the wisdom.
Christ is the kingdom of God … in person.

He is the mustard seed planted in the soil of our humanity.
He is the yeast working through the dough of our community.
He is the pearl of great price, radiant with the beauty of God.
He is the net that gathers us—all of us—in mercy.

Solomon asked for wisdom;
Christ is the wisdom of God.
The psalmist delighted in the Word;
Christ is the Word made flesh.
The Spirit intercedes for us;
Christ prays for us, day and night, at the right hand of his Father.

This is why, for us,
Christ is more than an ancient prophet, sage, or rabbi
purveying wisdom and revelation, performing powerful miracles.

No. We confess that Jesus IS the Christ
IS the wisdom and the revelation and the power of God.
IS the Love of God from whom nothing can separate us.
IS the kingdom and the power and the glory of God
with us now and forever and ever!

THE DEEPER MYSTERY — YOU ARE THE PEARL

Perhaps the deepest mystery is this:
we may read these parables,
imagining ourselves selling everything
to buy the field
to find the Treasure
to dig up the pearl
But what if the kingdom of God is like this:
That Christ is the merchant,
His riches were the glory of heaven.
The field is this world.
And you are the treasure.
You are the pearl.
You are his heart’s desire.

And he sold everything, sacrificed everything,
he emptied himself to come down
to draw you from the earth
to clean you up
for the display of his splendor.

The mystery is a both/and:
Lover and beloved.
He is our treasure, and we are his.
We seek him, and he sought us.
And now we’ve found one another.

EUCHARIST — RECEIVING

Today, Christ comes to us as simply as a mustard seed,
as quietly as yeast hidden in dough,
as humbly as bread broken
and wine poured out.

Many who come to the Table see only bread and wine.
But faith is the gift of recognizing the Treasure hidden in plain sight.

We come to this table with no claim
to being wise enough,
holy enough,
or spiritual enough.
We come because Christ first desired us.

So we come.
We come with our questions and our weakness.
We come with our joys and our griefs.
We come with our longing for a listening heart.
We come and receive Christ,
the Wisdom of God,
the Word made flesh,
the Pearl of great price,
the Treasure hidden in the field.

As we receive Christ,
may our hearts recognize the Kingdom
already among us.

Amen.

Sunday, July 26, 2026

Father Richard Rohr recalls how he first fell in love with Scripture and devoted himself to its study: 

I was in my first year of seminary when I fell in love with Scripture. I really did. To me, it was God’s self-disclosure of love for us. To be honest, I think my little mind was looking for validation for what I already believed to be true. Early experiences of God’s love and goodness shaped my intuitions before I encountered any formal theology. I devoured Scripture and systematic theology because they gave me the tools for understanding and validating my own experiences and intuitions. Now I knew they were not just my ideas.

During the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the Bible opened up for me even further. The Council said that divine revelation was not God disclosing ideas about God but actually God disclosing Godself. Scripture, and even religion itself, became not mere doctrines or moralisms for me, but love-making, an actual mutual exchange of being and intimacy. It seemed like Scripture was one revelation after another of a loving God and a benevolent universe. 

I remember finding certain passages that would send me into ecstasy for days. For example in 2 Samuel 7, David tells God that he’s going to build God a house, and God turns it around and says, “David, you don’t need to build me a house; I am going to build you a house!” I lived on that particular story, because for me, it was the theme of grace solidified. Now all these years later, I feel like here it is embodied in my own life. It was all true! All I had to do was be open and give my little “yes” to being used by God.

Reading the Bible, we can recognize how true it is that only those who know their need for the Beloved know how to receive the gift of the Beloved without misusing such love. A mutually admitted emptiness is the ultimate safety net for all love, and in the Scriptures, even God is presented as somehow “needing” us, and even “jealous” for our love (Exodus 20:5; 34:14). Basically, love works only inside humility. My father, Saint Francis, fell in love with the “humility” of God, as exemplified through Jesus, a word that most of us would not even think could apply to God.

Fullness or complete self-satisfaction in a person cannot permit love because there are no openings, no give-and-take, and no deep hunger. It is like trying to attach two inflated balloons to one another. Human vulnerability gives the soul an immense head start on its travels—maybe the only start for any true spiritual journey. Thus, the Risen Christ starts us off by revealing the human wounds of God, God’s solidarity with human suffering. God begins with self-disclosure from the divine side, which ideally leads to self-disclosure from our side.

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How Jesus Uses the Scripture

Monday, July 27, 2026

Just because you use Scripture, even in a God-affirming way, does not mean you are using Scripture for life and love, growth and wisdom—and for the sake of God or others.
—Richard Rohr, What Do We Do with the Bible?   

Father Richard describes how Jesus read his own Hebrew Scriptures through the lens of love:  

Jesus never once quotes from nineteen of the books in his own Hebrew scriptures. In fact, he appears to use a very few favorites: Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Hosea, and Psalms.  Jesus appears to ignore most of his own Bible, yet it clearly formed his whole consciousness. That is the paradox. If we look at what he ignores, it includes any passages that appear to legitimate violence, imperialism, exclusion, purity, and dietary laws—of which there are many. Jesus is a biblically formed non-Bible quoter, who gets the deeper stream of God’s unconditional love, the spirit, the trajectory of his Jewish history and never settles for mere surface readings.

When he does once quote Leviticus, he quotes the one positive mandate among long lists of negative ones: “You must love your neighbor as yourself” (see Leviticus 19:18). He openly disagrees with Scriptures that emphasize non-essentials and “mere human commandments” that made their way into what are presented as divine commandments (see Mark 7:1–23 and almost all of Matthew 23). Jesus reduces the 613 clear biblical commandments down to two: love of God and love of neighbor (see Matthew 22:34–40).  

He omits troublesome verses with which he does not agree, as when he drops the final half-verse from the Isaiah scroll when he first reads in the Nazareth synagogue (see Luke 4:18–19). As if to make the point, he “rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant and sits down.” We can imagine them glaring at him for adjusting the Scriptures. They know the final line of Isaiah 61:2b is “to proclaim a day of vengeance from our God.” Jesus ends with verse 2a, which “proclaims the Lord’s day of favor,” and better portrays the God he knows.

Generally speaking, Jesus makes use of his own Scriptures to teach a message of radical inclusivity, mercy, and justice, and to negate the predominant religious messages of exclusion, religious righteousness, and oppression of the underdog, the impure, and the sinner.

Jesus clearly considers “justice, mercy, and good faith” to be “the weightier matters of the Law” (see Matthew 23:23), and many statements such as this seem to indicate he did have a definite hierarchy of values. As Pope Francis indicated, mercy is always right there at the top of Christian values! Not all Scriptures were created equal in Jesus’s mind, which is a great blind spot for most fundamentalists. Jesus seems to teach that you can only tell goodness “by its fruits” (see Luke 6:43–45) and not just by the action itself. Paul then lists these fruits as “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (see Galatians 5:22–23).

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Individual Reflection

Where in your own reading of Scripture have you, like Rohr, been looking for validation rather than transformation?

Group Discussion — choose one:

What passage or verse have you quietly “rolled up the scroll” on — skipped, softened, or stopped reading past — because it didn’t match the God you’ve come to know?

Mary Gauthier sings that “every living thing could use a little mercy now” — including the institutions and people who’ve hurt you. Where does that line comfort you, and where does it provoke you?

Rohr says human vulnerability, not fullness, is what opens us to love. Where has admitted need or emptiness done more for your faith than certainty ever did?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1DeirmRKd7M%3Fsi%3Dvg4iFSxWc5Qqgub7

Thea Bowman: Champion of Black Catholic Identity

Friday, July 24, 2026

The publisher and author Robert Ellsberg introduces Sister Thea Bowman (1937–1990):

Thea Bowman was one of the great treasures of the American Catholic church. As a Franciscan Sister, she managed to integrate the resources of her Catholic faith with her identity as an African American woman. Ablaze with the spirit of love, the memory of struggle, and a faith in God’s promises, she impressed her many audiences not just with her message but with her nobility of spirit. No one she encountered … could fail to catch a measure of her joy and gratitude for the gift of life. She was a particular inspiration to the black Catholic community, helping them to assert their pride of place among the People of God, while also encouraging them to enrich the wider church with the gifts of their distinctive culture and spirituality. [1]

In 1987, Bowman addressed leaders in the American Catholic Church on the theme of “Cosmic Spirituality,” grounding her message in the diversity of our lived reality:

Your conference theme is cosmic spirituality … and it’s the cosmos, the universe, the world in all its diverse spirituality for which we are preparing ourselves and our congregations. Cosmic spirituality means we’re going to have to learn new languages. We’re going to have to learn new rhythm. We’re going to have to learn new ways of glorifying the Lord…. We learn cultures and customs and languages of faith, we learn cosmic spirituality by sharing, by sharing prayer and song and ritual and story, by involving ourselves and participating, by giving and receiving.…

We are the children of the cosmos, the children of the universe … called and sent to transform the cosmos….

Cosmic spirituality means we come together, bring our gifts, bringing our histories, bringing our experience, bringing our positives and negatives, our arts, our skills, our teaching … all that we have and all that we hold….

When you come into my community, my town, my world, will you see God’s glory revealed? When you go to my brothers and sisters, in beautiful Hawaii, will you see his glory? When you experience, when you share the hungers of Ethiopia, the blood flow of Guatemala and Nicaragua, will you see his glory revealed?…

If you believe that you, like Jesus, are called by the spirit to share the spirit in the world to call forth the giftedness of God’s people, say Amen. If you believe that God is able to work in all the brothers and the sisters, in the ones you customarily write off because they don’t read right, they don’t write right, they drink too much, they smoke the wrong thing, they don’t walk right, they don’t talk right, their sexual preferences are not in agreement with the ones you claim. If you believe that God is able to transform the water of my reality into purest wine, if you believe there’s nothing God can’t do, let me hear you say Amen. [2]

References:
[1] Modern Spiritual Masters: Writings on Contemplation and Compassion, ed. Robert Ellsberg (Orbis Books, 2008), 131.

[2] Thea Bowman, “Cosmic Spirituality: No Neutral Ground,” in Twentieth-Century Apostles: Contemporary Spirituality in Action, ed. Phyllis Zagano (Liturgical Press, 1999), 151, 152, 155, 156.

1.

“Our personality is what shows up when we don’t.”

– Russ Hudson, Author on the Enneagram

It seems as though, over the past several years, I have been engaged in an ongoing learning experience about human personality, specifically my own.

The Enneagram has been one of the tools I have come across for self-knowledge and self-compassion.  Since learning that I am an Enneagram 5w4, I have come to understand my tendency to do deep dives into topics, withdraw when I feel emotionally overwhelmed, and be drawn to dark/beautiful music, art, poetry, etc.

When I am not present to the moment, my personality will fall back on the normal habits of an Enneagram 5w4, with all its good and all its bad.

However, when I am present as myself, I don’t need to go on autopilot and can allow myself to be challenged, to grow, to explore new things, and even surprise myself with what I can do or try.

Chances are, the same is likely true for you.  It is probably the same for all of us.  If we are present to the now, as ourselves and not our “programming,” we might be surprised by the life we experience!

2.

“Union with God is not achieved by climbing but by descending.”

– Therese of Lisieux, French Carmelite Nun

Too often, we do not find God because we are looking too “high.”

It may be that God is waiting for us in the “low” places.

What if God is waiting for us among the poor, the destitute, the meek, the poor of spirit?

What if we are missing God because we are too focused on the rich, the well-off, the proud, the strong in faith?

Or, what if the God we have been wanting to meet is actually waiting for us in the deepest caverns of our heart and soul?  What would happen if we never took the time to spelunk such depths within our innermost parts?

This is the mystery of the Cross: God is actually most to be found in the places we least want to find God.

3.

“God, the prophets imagine, is always doing a new thing, creating a way where there is no way, bringing life out of death, light out of very real darkness.”

– Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Scholar

Prophets are masters at imagination.

They do not only pronounce critique or judgment, but they also dream a new way forward if civilization were to follow the precepts of Yahweh.

For them, doom is not the only path forward.  The future need not be bleak.  All that matters is that we call things truthfully what they are and then get to the work of changing the world with our justice-oriented imaginations.

4.

“Pain is the megaphone of God to rouse a deaf world.”

– CS Lewis, English Theologian and Apologist

Pain, darkness, disappointment, etc.  All of these things are means by which God tries to get our attention after all the other means of goodness, beauty, truth, and love do not.

I heard it put a while ago that pain is often a symptom of another deeper issue.

For instance, it is one thing to take Advil to help with knee pain.

It is another thing to realize that knee pain may point to a deeper, perhaps structural, problem within the knee.  However, without the knee pain, we might not take the time to look more closely at our knee’s range of motion.

Of course, that is a simple analogy, but I believe it works in other ways as well.

If we are experiencing other kinds of pain, the problem is not the pain; the problem is what causes the pain.

The problem is not the homeless; the homeless are a symptom of another issue.

The problem is not that people are getting sick; getting sick may point to the need for better, nutrient-rich food.

If we can admit the pain, rather than numb it, we might then be better able to learn what it is trying to teach us.

5.

“Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.”

– Anthony de Mello, Jesuit Priest and Therapist

This is also known as the “apophatic” way.

The “apophatic” way is an approach to talking about God that holds that every possible word we might use to describe God still falls tragically short of the reality of God.

For some, this is terrifying.

For some, it is completely unsettling to know that human vocabulary will never be sufficient to describe “God.”

But that is where I think there is some true beauty, and therefore, some true faith.  Augustine of Hippo also said, “If you can comprehend it, it is not God.”  None of us can ever comprehend the Divine, but thank God we can apprehend God.

May we each approach this infinite mystery we call “God” with more humility, reverence, and honesty, and hold loosely the words and images we use to describe God to ourselves and each other.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UkTQri3a4Gg%3Flist%3DRDUkTQri3a4Gg

Etty Hillesum: A Commitment to Life

Thursday, July 23, 2026

Why is there a war?… Because I and my neighbor and everyone else do not have enough love. Yet we could fight war and all its excrescences by releasing, each day, the love that is shackled inside us, and giving it a chance to live.
—Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life

Father Richard has long drawn comfort and wisdom from the writings of the young Jewish woman Etty Hillesum (1914–1943), believing her to be someone whose contemplative practice and mystical experience led to greater compassion and action in a hurting world. Shortly before her departure for internment at the Westerbork transit camp, Hillesum wrote in her journal:

One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well….You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last. [1]

Hillesum fully accepted the brokenness of reality and chose to love ever more consciously:

Something has crystallised. I have looked our destruction, our miserable end which has already begun in so many small ways in our daily life, straight in the eye and accepted it into my life, and my love of life has not been diminished. I am not bitter or rebellious, or in any way discouraged. I continue to grow from day to day, even with the likelihood of destruction staring me in the face. I shall no longer flirt with words, for words merely evoke misunderstandings: I have come to terms with life.…

By “coming to terms with life” I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich [life]. [2]

Reflecting on Jesus’s words in Matthew 6:34 not to worry about tomorrow, Hillesum writes:

We have to fight them daily … those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies.… The things that have to be done must be done, and for the rest we must not allow ourselves to become infested with thousands of petty fears and worries, so many motions of no confidence in God.… Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world. [3]

References:
[1] An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943, trans. Arno Pomerans (Pantheon Books, 1984), 151.

[2] Hillesum, Interrupted Life, 131–132.

[3] Hillesum, Interrupted Life, 185.

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On January 27, 2010 by Brian Zahnd

Humiliation and Dignity

In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.
-Acts 8:33

Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed
Dignity never been photographed
I went into the red, went into the black
Into the valley of dry bone dreams
-Bob Dylan, Dignity

Life is a struggle. A struggle against humiliation. A struggle to gain dignity. And in the battle against humiliation in the hope of gaining dignity we may experience some triumphs. The dignity of courage. The dignity of wisdom. The dignity of noble gesture. The dignity of rising above base animal instinct and becoming fully human. But in the end its a war we all lose. Death sees to that. Death is the final and ultimate humiliation. In death we are laid low. In death we return to dust. In death we are humiliated. In death we return to the humus. Humiliation and humus are related. We strive for the stars, but we return to the soil. Humus. Humiliation.

Some will say, “All the better for being done with this mortal shell.” But I will have none of it. Neither will the Hebrew prophets. Neither will the Christian apostles. The human body is not a mere “mortal shell” and much less is it a “vile prison of the spirit.” Let the Manichaens talk that way, I won’t go along for the ride. The human body is integral to the human being. And the decay of the human body is a decay of humanity itself. The return of the human body to the humus is the ultimate humiliation of the human. It stinks. Literally.

And this is why the gospel is the Christian belief in the resurrection of the body and not the Gnostic belief of an eternal disembodied soul. In the inaugural sermon of the Christian era the Apostle Peter said this:

“David spoke of the resurrection of Messiah, saying,
He was not abandoned to Hades
Nor did his flesh experience corruption.
This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses.”
-Acts 2:31, 32

Jesus overcame the humiliation of death and decay, not by becoming an eternal, disembodied spirit existing in a non-spacial, non-temporal Platonic heaven, but by resurrection from the dead!

The humiliation of death is conquered by the dignity of resurrection.

In the Greek Orthodox icons of the resurrection, Jesus is never depicted as risen alone, but as bringing Adam and Eve out of the grave with him. Jesus conquered death, not as an individual, but as a representative of the human race. Jesus took death into himself that death itself might be destroyed and that the human race might be liberated from the humiliation of death and brought into the dignity of resurrection.

The eternal life the New Testament speaks of is not the immortality of the soul dreamt of by Plato and it is not the “harps and clouds” angelic existence of popular imagination. When Jesus and the Apostles speak of eternal life they are speaking of a resurrected life — a fully embodied, physical life that has achieved immortality through resurrection. This is the Christian hope. The hope of dignity that rises (literally!) above humiliation.

And so we who believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ labor with the assurance that our labor is not in vain. We are assured that every good thing we do now will somehow carry over into the resurrection. The interruption of death and our interim period of “absent from the body, present with the Lord” will not prevent our good works from carrying over into the new creation.

This makes me happy.

I was never going to be a very good Platonist. And I was certainly never going to be a very happy Platonist. Plato may pine away for the realm of perfect forms, but I want to feel…I want to feel the sun on my face, the wind in my hair and the sand between my toes. I want to be a human, not an angel. I don’t want to be “liberated” by death. It’s not liberation, it’s humiliation. But Jesus Christ has taken the humiliation out of death by his resurrection. The Apostle Paul says it like this:

“When this perishable body puts on imperishablity, and this mortal body puts on immortality,
then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
Death is swallowed up in victory,
Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!”
1 Corinthians 15:53-57

And how is death defeated? Not by going to heaven — that is simply death. Death is defeated by resurrection! That is the whole point of 1 Corinthians chapter 15. It’s amazing (and tragic) that so many have missed this and settled for Plato’s paltry substitute. A Christianity where resurrection is not the central hope and the primary focus of the good news is either a paganized Christianity or a Christianized paganism. Either way it’s not the Christianity of the Apostle Paul.

My faith is founded on bodily resurrection.
(There is no other kind of resurrection.)
My faith is guaranteed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
My hope is that I too will be raised to immortality.
Call me crazy.
But call me a Christian.
For this is what Christians believe.
The dignity of resurrection triumphing over the humiliation of death.

Amen.

BZ

(The painting is The Lamentation of the Dead Christ by Mantegna.)

Howard Thurman: A Worldview of Oneness

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.
—Howard Thurman

Dr. Lerita Coleman Brown (1953–2025) reflects on the legacy of Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman (1899–1981) and the wisdom he continues to offer us today: 

To read a Thurman book, or listen to his deep baritone voice, is to understand why people refer to his writings, sermons, and lectures as living wisdom. More than forty years after his death, Thurman’s words continue to feed … any hearts or souls willing to listen….

Howard Thurman is known as the spiritual adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the civil rights movement. But … this label doesn’t begin to represent the full breadth of his contributions. His quest for a profound experience of the presence of God, of connection to all living things, serves as a model for any spiritual seeker venturing into uncharted territory. Thurman’s witness, through his life, writings, lectures, and sermons, serves as sustenance for the journey. [1]

The interfaith minister and author Liza J. Rankow describes Thurman’s work and witness in this way: 

Thurman’s was a prophetic mysticism that engaged the world rather than withdrawing from it. His mysticism sought to bring the vision glimpsed in what he sometimes called the “creative encounter” into manifestation in human relationships, social institutions, policies, and the practical “for instances” of our lives. He writes, “… [Mystics] must embrace the social whole and seek to achieve empirically the good which has possessed [them] in [their] moments of profoundest insight….” [2]

There is a stereotype of mystics seeking to escape the world, concerned only with the ecstasy of their own experience of union with the Divine; yet in that union is a doorway that opens out into everything and everyone. The experience of oneness brings us back into relationship with the allness. The oneness and the allness inter-be…. Thus we feel deeply the wounds of a battered world, and the suffering and the needs of the people—including, as Thurman puts it in Jesus and the Disinherited, those “with their backs against the wall”—the disenfranchised, the marginalized and the oppressed. Inaction is not an option. The mystic worldview creates an ethical mandate, and it offers a new way to enter the world of social transformation—from the position of oneness rather than dualism. It shifts the paradigm…. Thurman often quoted social union leader Eugene Debs: “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” [3]

Thurman spoke of spiritual disciplines as those practices by which we remove the barriers to our “inner altar”—our place of communion with God. And through this definition, he included activism as a spiritual discipline…. He affirmed the necessity to identify with, and work for the liberation and reconciliation of all parties in order to restore beloved community. 

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A Story In Search of An Ending

A few fleeting thoughts on my latest trip through the Old Testament

BRIAN ZAHND JUL 21

I’ll admit it—I’m a Bible reader. Morning by morning I read the Bible. It’s what I’ve done for half a century. The Bible with coffee is how I begin my day. Fifteen to twenty minutes in each Testament. This is not study; this is not sermon preparation. This is not even what you would call “devotional reading”—this is simply inhabiting the text. 

I regularly make the rounds from Genesis to Revelation to make sure I stay familiar with the terrain of Scripture. I walk through a world where a crafty and loquacious serpent causes a lot of trouble for a couple inhabiting a garden in primordial innocence. A world where a gopher wood floating zoo rides out a global deluge; where Hebrew slaves escape Pharaoh through a parting in the sea; where a shepherd boy slays a giant; where an irascible Tishbite prophet wins a contest by calling down fire from heaven. 

It’s also the world of the sacred myth that really happened. A virgin gives birth; another irascible prophet thunders in the desert; water is turned to wine in Cana of Galilee. Finally the horror of crucifixion on Good Friday is overthrown by the surprise of resurrection on Easter Sunday.

In the closing book of the the Bible I traipse through a strange and apocalyptic world of bloody rivers and bejeweled cities, of monsters from the deep and mighty angels on high, of a New Jerusalem that comes down from heaven with the final consolation of every tear wiped away as all things are made new. 

Of course the Bible is also a book of primitive laws, arcane genealogies, tedious descriptions of a tabernacle, and monotonous lists of who did what when building this or that. It’s a ponderous tome.

Today I finished my latest trip through the Old Testament—a journey that takes me about a year. And here I offer a few off the cuff and undeveloped thoughts about my most recent foray into the First Testament. 

Since I was reading the Old Testament in the order of the Tanakh I finished with Chronicles. This time it really stood out that Chronicles is a carefully sanitized version of Kings. The kings of Judah in particular come off much better in Chronicles than they do in the less-edited book of Kings. For example, David’s sordid actions with Bathsheba and his murderous conspiracy against Uriah are not mentioned at all. And neither are we told about Solomon’s harem or his late-in-life lapse into idolatry. We are simply given a glorious story of a righteous king and his wise son scrubbed of any scandal. I’ll not make any point regarding this, it’s just something I especially noticed.

I also found the unrelenting violence of Joshua, Judges, and Kings exceptionally tiresome—true to the time period, but tiresome nonetheless. After wading through the blood and gore of these books I was happy to move on to the prophets and their holy yearning for the Prince of Peace. 

Whether we end our reading of the Old Testament with the destruction of Jerusalem in Chronicles or the anticipation of the second coming of Elijah in Malachi, we do sense that this is truly a story in search of an ending. And when we turn the page from Malachi (or Chronicles) to Matthew, my, the newness cannot be over emphasized!

Despite all the prophesies and foreshadowing (foreshadowing that we only really see in retrospect), nothing fully prepares us for the arrival of Jesus. Malachi got it right when he described the sudden appearance of Messiah as a sunrise with healing rays. But even this prophecy does not fully prepare us for how utterly different Jesus is to all who have come before. Nothing adequately prepares us for the stunning arrival of the Christ. No one in the previous Testament is like him. Yes, I know he’s the Seed of Abraham, the prophet like unto Moses, the Son of David—but still, Abraham and Moses and David are like Jesus in the sense that the stars at night are like the sun at high noon. My latest reading of the Old Testament accentuated the newnessof the New Testament.

(Yes, I do refer to the first Testament as the “Old Testament” rather than the “Hebrew Scriptures.” The Hebrew Scriptures are the sacred text of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people have every right to read their own Scriptures in their own way. I fully respect that. But I read the Hebrew Scriptures as a Christian. I approach this first Testament as one already believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah. As such I am going to read these texts in the same manner as the first Christians whose only Bible was what they simply called the Scriptures—and they looked for Jesus on every page. That too is how I read the first Testament. So I describe the Hebrew Scriptures as the canonical text of the Jewish people and the Old Testament as the Christian reading of the Hebrew Scriptures.)

And now another reading of the Old Testament is complete. It’s a long and winding journey covering millennia; there are ups and downs; thrilling moments and stretches of tedium; the brutality of bronze age warfare and the beauty of the Hebrew poets. But always there is the longing, the waiting, the yearning for the One who is to come.

Turn the page…

Matthew 1:1 – The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

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

Individual Reflection:
Where in your life are you still in the “waiting” chapters, and where has the newness already broken in without you fully registering it?

Group Discussion — choose one:
Where do you feel most alive right now, and does that aliveness pull you toward the world or away from it?
What would it cost you to say, with Debs, “while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”?
What part of your own story still feels unfinished, still searching for its Matthew 1:1?

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Father Richard recounts how he came to know the work of Thomas Merton (1915–1968): 

Thomas Merton has been a primary teacher and inspiration to me ever since I read his book The Sign of Jonas as a teenager. He was one of the most influential American Catholics of the twentieth century. It was Merton who reintroduced the Christian contemplative tradition to the Western church in the 1950s and 1960s. By living a contemplative life, Merton grew in love for God and all of God’s children and creation—so much so that he became committed to doing what he could for the common good. Amidst the societal disruptions of the 1960s, it was not enough for him to simply pray. He also devoted himself to action—writing, teaching, and collaborating with others—though he never lost his deep yearning for solitude and contemplation. [1]

As Merton began to seriously wrestle with the injustices plaguing the United States and the world, he published Seeds of Destruction, a book urging Christians to reflect on their moral responsibility to take a stand on issues such as racism, war, and poverty. His words speak to our moment as well. Merton writes: 

The contemplative life is not, and cannot be, a mere withdrawal, a pure negation, a turning of one’s back on the world with its sufferings, its crises, its confusions and its errors…. 

I hold that the contemplative life of the Christian is not a life of abstraction, of secession, in order to concentrate upon ideal essences…. The freedom of the Christian contemplative is … the freedom to go out and meet God in the inscrutable mystery of [God’s] will here and now, in this precise moment in which [God] asks [humanity’s] cooperation in shaping the course of history according to the demands of divine truth, mercy and fidelity.

The monastic flight from the world [or what Father Richard calls ‘the system’] into the desert is not a mere refusal to know anything about the world, but a total rejection of all standards of judgment which imply attachment to a history of delusion, egoism and sin … a definitive refusal to participate in those activities which have no other fruit than to prolong the reign of untruth, greed, cruelty and arrogance…. 

Therefore it seems to me to be a solemn obligation of conscience at this moment of history to take the positions which are … in vital relation with the obligations I assumed when I took my monastic vows. To have a vow of poverty seems to me illusory if I do not in some way identify myself with the cause of people who are denied their rights and forced, for the most part, to live in abject misery. To have a vow of obedience seems to me to be absurd if it does not imply a deep concern for the most fundamental of all expressions of God’s will: the love of [God’s] truth and of our neighbor. 

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

Welcome to Bradley Jersak’s Substack! In the parable of the prodigal son(s), I love the verse, “And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.” That’s my story. I hope that in the posts to follow, you’ll see it shine through. 

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Hellsoap Preaching

And the Evolution of Divine Fire

BRADLEY JERSAK. JUL 19

Fr. David Harvey: “Don’t know if you’re preaching the lectionary this weekend, but notice that Nestle Aland thinks that “The furnace of fire” in Matthew 13 is a direct quote from LXX Daniel 3:6’s fiery furnace. This means that Jesus is alluding to a fire that quite literally didn’t burn up the only people we know that were thrown into it. (Accompanied by the Son of God — who sowed the seed).”

Me: Amazing find. Thinking that along with the restorative/purgative judgement of Malachi 3 – the refiners fire and launders soap. 

We don’t hear enough hellsoap preaching!

I wrote the following in 2017… I think it still works:

The Evolution of Divine Fire

I came across the citation from St Athanasius (via creativeorthodox.com) that beautifully compares the resurrection of Christ to a fire that completely consumes death as if it were dry straw. The comparison reminded me of the range and frequent use of fire as imagery associated with the person or acts of God. A brief survey serves as a healthy meditation, not only on the various comparisons, but also how these evolve with our illumination by the Spirit, who is also linked with fire at times.

Ancient peoples would have experienced fire as destruction before they ever learned to employ it for light or heat, and when the fire of destruction would fall from heaven as lightning or burst from the earth via volcanoes, our forefathers connected the dots between destructive fire and the person and wrath of God. They assumed the fire that devours was sent by God as punishment, as we see in biblical stories like the end of Sodom and Gomorrah. When that fire is used against one’s enemies, it could serve as a powerful vindication that God is on ‘our side’ — as in 1 Kings 18 in Elisha’s showdown with the prophets of Baal or 2 Kings 1 when he calls for fire to kill Ahaziah’s troops.

But fire was not only seen as destructive. We have other passages where fire is employed for its cleansing properties. Malachi regards the judgements of God as a gold refiner’s furnace, purging the gold or silver of ‘dross’ or impurities. Similarly, Paul in 1 Cor. 3 describes the fire of God consuming all that is combustible in us … poor motives, for example, as if they were wood, hay and stubble. But again, this is only so the gold, silver and precious stones of our true selves will shine brightly through the old tarnish. Hebrews 12 says that God himself IS this consuming fire. So in the end, the destructive fire is to be welcomed, even if seen as a ‘trial by fire.’

A third sense of fire is associated with the person and work of the Holy Spirit. We hear from John the Baptist that Christ will baptize with the Spirit and with fire, and while I suspect John was thinking of judgement, the New Testament sees that promise fulfilled with the outpouring of the Spirit in tongues of fire on Pentecost. This divine fire not only cleanses but empowers, and gives those who receive it the properties of fire (symbolically light and heat), which is to say, the Spirit inhabits us with glory, transfiguring us from glory to glory, so that we can stand in that glory which is the passionate love of Christ himself.

Some of the early church fathers imagined this using the picture of a sword being forged in the intense heat that makes for the highest quality steel. Placed in the flames, it’s not that the steel would become other than steel, but while in the flames it would bear the heat and glow with the light of the fire itself. So it is, they said, with those forged in the fire of God’s Spirit. Thus, the fire was not destructive, but rather instructive and constructive of ourparticipation in the divine nature.

There are many ‘what about this questions’ that attend divine fire analogies. What about those parables of Jesus where unfruitful branches are cut off and thrown into the fire? Or when the wheat and tares are separated by angels and the weeds thrown into the fire. Rather than skirting these force of these texts too quickly, we need to undergo their force — their fire. Such parables remind us of the same point Lewis makes by using lion imagery for Christ. God is ‘good’ but he’s hardly ‘safe,’ much less ‘tame,’ if by that we imagine we can domesticate him!

But in saying this, let us also assert the first point as most important. God is good. God is love. And thus, for all its other properties, the Divine Fire is the unquenchable Flame of Love (also pictured as the Sun) — the One who radiates the Light and Warmth of Love to those coming in from the cold, dark night of winter.

Thomas Merton: A Monk in Action

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

Father Richard recounts how he came to know the work of Thomas Merton (1915–1968): 

Thomas Merton has been a primary teacher and inspiration to me ever since I read his book The Sign of Jonas as a teenager. He was one of the most influential American Catholics of the twentieth century. It was Merton who reintroduced the Christian contemplative tradition to the Western church in the 1950s and 1960s. By living a contemplative life, Merton grew in love for God and all of God’s children and creation—so much so that he became committed to doing what he could for the common good. Amidst the societal disruptions of the 1960s, it was not enough for him to simply pray. He also devoted himself to action—writing, teaching, and collaborating with others—though he never lost his deep yearning for solitude and contemplation. [1]

As Merton began to seriously wrestle with the injustices plaguing the United States and the world, he published Seeds of Destruction, a book urging Christians to reflect on their moral responsibility to take a stand on issues such as racism, war, and poverty. His words speak to our moment as well. Merton writes: 

The contemplative life is not, and cannot be, a mere withdrawal, a pure negation, a turning of one’s back on the world with its sufferings, its crises, its confusions and its errors…. 

I hold that the contemplative life of the Christian is not a life of abstraction, of secession, in order to concentrate upon ideal essences…. The freedom of the Christian contemplative is … the freedom to go out and meet God in the inscrutable mystery of [God’s] will here and now, in this precise moment in which [God] asks [humanity’s] cooperation in shaping the course of history according to the demands of divine truth, mercy and fidelity.

The monastic flight from the world [or what Father Richard calls ‘the system’] into the desert is not a mere refusal to know anything about the world, but a total rejection of all standards of judgment which imply attachment to a history of delusion, egoism and sin … a definitive refusal to participate in those activities which have no other fruit than to prolong the reign of untruth, greed, cruelty and arrogance…. 

Therefore it seems to me to be a solemn obligation of conscience at this moment of history to take the positions which are … in vital relation with the obligations I assumed when I took my monastic vows. To have a vow of poverty seems to me illusory if I do not in some way identify myself with the cause of people who are denied their rights and forced, for the most part, to live in abject misery. To have a vow of obedience seems to me to be absurd if it does not imply a deep concern for the most fundamental of all expressions of God’s will: the love of [God’s] truth and of our neighbor. 

Sunday, July 19, 2026

Father Richard Rohr explains why both action and contemplation are part of a fully articulated life of faith: 

The most important word in our Center’s name is not Action, nor is it Contemplation; it’s the word and. We need both compassionate action and contemplative practice for the spiritual journey. Without action, our spirituality becomes lifeless and bears no authentic fruit. Without contemplation, all our doing comes from ego, even if it looks selfless, and it can cause more harm than good. External behavior must be connected to and supported by spiritual guidance. It doesn’t matter which comes first; action may lead you to contemplation, and contemplation may lead you to action. But finally, they need and feed each other as components of a healthy dynamic relationship with Reality.

I used to think most of us begin with contemplation and a unitive encounter with God and are then led through that experience to some sort of action that includes awareness of and solidarity with the suffering in the world. I think that’s true for many people, yet as I read the biblical prophets and observe Jesus’s life, I think the reverse also happens: first action, and then needed contemplation.  

No life is immune from suffering. When we’re in solidarity with people facing pain, injustice, war, oppression, colonization—the list goes on and on—we face immense pressure to despair, to become angry or dismissive. When reality is split dualistically between good and bad, right and wrong, we too are torn apart. Yet when we’re broken, we are most open to contemplation, or nondual thinking. We’re desperate to resolve our own terror, anger, and disillusionment, and so we allow ourselves to be led into the silence that holds everything together in wholeness.  

The contemplative, nondual mind is not saying, “Everything is beautiful,” even when it’s not. However, we may come to “Everything is still beautiful” by contemplatively facing the conflict between how reality is and how we wish it could be. We must face dualistic problems, name good and evil, and differentiate between right and wrong. We can’t be naive about evil, but if we stay focused on this duality, we’ll become unlovable, judgmental, dismissive people. I’ve witnessed this pattern in myself. We must eventually find a bigger field, a wider frame, which is nondual thinking.  

Beginning with necessary, dualistic action and moving toward contemplation seems to be the more common—and for some, perhaps the more trustworthy—path these days. We see this pattern in Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Saint (Mother) Teresa of Calcutta, and many others. Such people enter into the pain of society and have to go to God to find rest for their soul, because their souls are so torn by the broken, split nature of almost everything, including themselves.

Saint Teresa of Calcutta:
A Mother to Many

Monday, July 20, 2026

Father Richard shares his deep respect and admiration for the Missionaries of Charity, the community of sisters founded by Mother Teresa (1910–1987) in Calcutta, India:

In 1988, I spent three days immersed in the life, spirit, and ministries of Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity community at the motherhouse in Calcutta—a year after her death. Our work together ended on October 1, the feast day of her patron, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897). All the four hundred plus local community members returned for this day of teaching, praying, and celebrating in the manner of the poor. It was probably the closest I will ever get to what those first idyllic days must have been like for the early Franciscans: utter joy in Jesus and his gospel, poverty that is almost embarrassing but beautiful, and unquestioned belief in what your life means and in what you are doing.

Through that experience, I finally met a “conservative” yet fully contemporary form of religious life that I could trust. The sisters were not rigid; rather, they were simply devoted women. They did not need security, answers, and order, as we see in most traditionalist movements in the West. In fact, they were willing to live without security, with very few answers to their questions of mind and heart, and amid almost total disorder. All in union—hour by hour—with God. They lived that amazing and rare combination of utter groundedness and constant risk-taking that always characterizes the true gospel.

The sisters don’t waste time fixing, controlling, or even needing to understand what was wrong with other people. Instead, they put all of their time and energy into letting God change them. From that transformed place, they serve and carry the pain of the world, which they are convinced is the pain of God. This is the synthesis on a communal level that I am always seeking. I have encountered it in many individuals, but hardly ever in public and social form.

I do not believe that the lifestyle of the Missionaries of Charity answers all questions or that they are holier than many other Christians I have met. Yet there is a radical and utterly clear gift of God that is revealed through them. I even dared to ask one of the leaders about one of the most common criticisms of Mother Teresa: “Why did Mother not speak out against social injustice? Why did she not point out the evil systems and evil people that are chewing up the poor?”

The answer was calm, immediate, and firsthand. Mother Teresa felt that if she took sides, or played the firebrand, that she could not be what Jesus had told her to be—love to and for all. She said that if she started correcting and pointing out “sinners” she could no longer be an instrument of love and reconciliation for them. Like her patron Thérèse of Lisieux, “her vocation in the church was to be love.” She knew that her primary message had to be her life itself.

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Individual Reflection

What’s one small, unnoticed thing you could do today that would actually cost you something?

Group Discussion — choose one:

1. Mother Teresa refused to “take sides” so she could stay an instrument of love. Where has taking a side cost you your ability to love someone?
2. Rohr says action without contemplation “comes from ego, even if it looks selfless.” Where might that be true of you right now?
3. What would it look like for your own suffering, or solidarity with someone else’s, to lead you into silence instead of into a cause?

Friday, July 17, 2026

The Lutheran priest and author Nadia Bolz-Weber questions how we might follow the Beatitudes:

It can be easy to view the Beatitudes … as Jesus’s command for us to try real hard to be meeker, poorer, and mourn-ier in order that we might be blessed in the eyes of God…. But what if the Beatitudes aren’t about a list of conditions we should try to meet to be blessed? What if they are not virtues we should aspire to?… Maybe the Sermon on the Mount is all about Jesus’s lavish blessing of the people around him on that hillside … who that world—like ours—didn’t seem to have much time for: people in pain, people who work for peace instead of profit, people who exercise mercy instead of vengeance.

Maybe Jesus was simply blessing the ones around him that day who didn’t otherwise receive blessing, who had come to believe that, for them, blessings would never be in the cards…. Doesn’t that just sound like something Jesus would do?

Bolz-Weber offers her own version of beatitudes for people who may not feel blessed today:

Blessed are the poor in spirit. You are of heaven and Jesus blesses you.
Blessed are they for whom death is not an abstraction.
Blessed are they who have buried their loved ones, for whom tears could fill an ocean.
Blessed are they who have loved enough to know what loss feels like.
Blessed are the mothers of the miscarried.
Blessed are they who don’t have the luxury of taking things for granted anymore.
Blessed are they who can’t fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else.
Blessed are the motherless, the alone, the ones from whom so much has been taken….
Blessed are those who no one else notices. The kids who sit alone at middle-school lunch tables. The laundry guys at the hospital. The sex workers and the night-shift street sweepers.
Blessed are the losers and the babies and the parts of ourselves that are so small, the parts of ourselves that don’t want to make eye contact with a world that loves only the winners.
Blessed are the forgotten.
Blessed are the closeted.
Blessed are the unemployed, the unimpressive, the underrepresented….

I imagine Jesus standing there blessing us all because I believe that is our Lord’s nature. Because, after all, it was Jesus who had all the powers of the universe at his disposal but did not consider his equality with God something to be exploited. Instead, he came to us in the most vulnerable of ways, as a powerless, flesh-and-blood newborn. As if to say, “You may hate your bodies, but I am blessing all human flesh. You may admire strength and might, but I am blessing all human weakness. You may seek power, but I am blessing all human vulnerability.”… [Jesus] was God’s Beatitude—God’s blessing to the weak in a world that admires only the strong.

Reference:
Nadia Bolz Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (Convergent Books, 2015), 184, 185–186, 188.

John Chaffee – Five On Friday

1.

“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”

– Frank Herbert, Author of the Dune Series

Currently, I am reading the first Dune book.  I have attempted to read it before, but it did not stick.

This time around, though, it is, and I am rather enjoying it.

One thing that stands out to me is the interplay among social, religious, and technological commentary.  Apparently, Herbert was quite interested in desert mysticism, and that means Dune is suffused with many of those themes and values.

So far, the heroes of the story are disciplined and principled.  Their lives make sense, and they are honorable in the eyes of others.  This is so much the case that one political enemy actually wishes his daughter would marry the said political enemy!

It is very true, though, that in the desert monastic tradition, they held that if you are constantly looking to avoid discipline or morality, then you will become a slave to impulsive desires and be easily manipulated.  To be so wishy washy as to go along and do whatever the desires demand is actually making oneself a slave, which the book shows is quite sad and pitiable.

At some point, perhaps I will give a review of Dune.  I can see why it is a science fiction classic while also raising serious questions and critiques that feel prescient today.

2.

“For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God.  For it is written, ‘As I live, says the Lord, every knee shall bow to me, and every tongue shall εχομολογησεται (exomologesetai) to God.”‘

– St. Paul of Tarsus in Romans 14:10-11

Exomologeo can be translated as “to openly and joyfully profess, to announce with glee, to profess without reservation.”

Rarely do I hear people quote beyond Romans 8, but the later chapters of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome have some really interesting things to say.

I always felt as though this passage challenged the majority of conventional Western Christianity.  Most people, when I tell them about this passage, either did not know it was in the Bible at all or were unaware that it is often translated in an unfavorable way.

Go ahead, read Romans 14:10-11 for yourself in whatever English translation you so choose. 

Let me know what you find.

3.

“Contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real within all that is real.”

– Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk

The Gospel of John is my favorite Gospel.

And, not just for the obvious reason that we share a name!

I believe the NT scholar Raymond Brown was correct when he asked if John’s Gospel is more symbolic and cryptic than the other three.  It just has so much meaning and symbolism packed into it that it is not intentional.

In college, one of my professors said that one of the keys to reading John’s Gospel is the healing of the blind man.  If you pay attention throughout the Gospel, you will see a commentary on those with spiritual sight and those with spiritual blindness.

In fact, what the West calls “spiritual blindness” might be relatively close to what the East calls “illusion.”

In the life of faith, I have most enjoyed and been changed by those “eureka!” moments.  You know, those moments when something shifts, and you see something that you have always seen in a completely new way.  If that has ever happened to you, then you know that it feels like a blindfold has been taken off, and you can see something clearly.

In Christianity, this is known as “contemplation.”  Contemplatio is the Latin word the early church used for prayer.

I do not know about you, but it certainly feels to me like modern society is more interested in keeping us entertained and shopping rather than gaining spiritual sight and seeing the deeper Reality before us.

4.

“What are kingdoms without justice? They’re just gangs of bandits.”

– St. Augustine of Hippo in The City of God

Christianity is absolutely interested in Justice.

It truly boggles my mind that some people do not believe this is the case.

There is not much worse than a Christianity that excuses and then goes so far as to say that injustice is not worth fighting against with every fiber within.

Without Justice, according to St. Augustine, we are just “gangs of bandits.”

That sounds very much like the Wild West, if you ask me.

5.

“Sin has not a particle of substance. It is ‘no-thing,’ and can only be known through the pain that it causes.”

– Julian of Norwich in The Showings of Divine Love

The older I get, the more I think about vices and virtues.

The world has enough vices, and I really don’t need to contribute to that side of the fence.  What the world needs is for you and me to both contribute to the virtues.

That said, I kind of understand how both conservatives and liberals lament how sin is understood today.

Sure, the conservative side seems to highlight or prioritize individual sins and to emphasize that we are each accountable for our own actions.  Meanwhile, the progressive side seems to highlight or prioritize corporate sins committed by entire groups of people.  In a very real sense, both individual and corporate sins wreck the world.

But into all of this also comes the wisdom of Julian of Norwich.

We know a sin is a sin because of the pain it causes.  Sometimes we don’t know what is going on in the moment, but in the aftershock of it all, it becomes apparent.

Julian seems intent on saying that sin is not a thing; it has no ontological basis or existence.  It is not a “thing” like a table or a chair, or an uncle, whose existence depends on God.  Rather, sin is “no-thing.”  It is a vacuum, said some of the early desert monastics.  Sin is the absence of goodness, of healing, of truth.

We know an act is good because it protects and mends, just as we know a sin is a sin because it creates victims and fractures what was once whole.

Actually, the Apostle Paul said something poignant about this…

“Love does no harm to a neighbor.  Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.” – (Romans 13:10)

I guess from this we can also say that if a “love” causes “harm” then it actually isn’t the fulfillment of the law?

Who knows?  I am likely rambling at this point.  The longer I type, the less articulate I feel.

Goodness, I am still figuring out what love is myself… so who am I to talk?

But… at least I have a decent grasp on what defines sin from Julian of Norwich.