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.

Thursday, July 16, 2026

Blessed are those who are persecuted in the cause of justice, the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you.… Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.
—Matthew 5:10–12

Father Richard considers how this beatitude challenges Jesus’s listeners to prepare for the consequences of following him:

Up until now Jesus has been talking generally, saying “Blessed are the poor, meek, merciful,” and so on. But following this beatitude he says, “Blessed are you when people revile and persecute you.” He’s likely talking about what’s going on right in front of him. He continues teaching what could really be called the ninth beatitude, although it more likely is an explanation of the eighth. Persecution has begun to happen to the believing community, and he’s encouraging them to “rejoice and be glad.” Persecution for the cause of justice is inevitable. Instead of seeking to blame someone for their well-earned scars, he is telling them two clear things: You can be happy—and you can be happy now! The self that Jesus proclaims is so grounded that it can consider persecution an asset.

Jesus appears to be saying that the disciples’ response is a prophetic action itself. To live joyfully in the midst of misunderstanding and persecution points beyond our smaller “kingdoms” to the larger kingdom of God. Jesus promises us that when we live joyfully under persecution, the world won’t understand. In fact, it will hate us. Many before me have said that a clear sign that something is the true gospel is if it engenders criticism and a spreading of falsehoods, what we used to call “calumny.” Goodness can never be attacked directly; the messengers or the motivation must be discredited.

Luke’s Gospel presents the same message in the opposite form: “Alas for you when the world speaks well of you! This was the way their ancestors treated the false prophets” (Luke 6:26 emphases added). Too much praise or widespread acceptance is probably an indication that something is not the full gospel. In either case, Jesus clearly knew that his teaching would turn conventional values on their head.

Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is not about maintaining the status quo. “Bad” people didn’t kill Jesus; conventional wisdom crucified him. Jesus taught an alternative way of being instead of the maintenance of the social order. When we can weep, when we can identify with the humble ones, when we can make peace, when we can be persecuted and still be joyful—then we are doing it right. The Beatitudes are describing what holiness looks like in the kingdom of God. 

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 150–151, 152.

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Caude Response to the Prompt, “Can you provide a brief devotional that studies Matthew 5: 10-12?“

Blessed Are the Persecuted — Matthew 5:10–12

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…”

This is the hardest beatitude to accept, because it doesn’t describe a virtue we cultivate — it describes a wound we suffer. The other beatitudes speak of inward qualities: poverty of spirit, mourning, meekness, hunger for righteousness, mercy, purity of heart, peacemaking. But this final beatitude turns outward. It’s not about who you are, but about how the world responds to who you are.

Notice the progression Jesus makes. He moves from a general statement (“those who are persecuted”) to something startlingly personal: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” The pronoun shifts from third person to second person. Jesus isn’t offering a detached theological observation — he’s looking into the eyes of people who will actually suffer this, and calling them blessed before it happens.

Why would opposition be a sign of blessing rather than a sign of failure?

Because it means your life has become legible as belonging to Christ. Cultures generally don’t organize resistance against people who blend in seamlessly with their values. Persecution — whether it’s outright hostility or the quieter forms of exclusion, mockery, or being misunderstood — often means your commitments have become visible enough to provoke a reaction.

But notice the qualifier: “falsely, on my account.” This isn’t a blank check to feel persecuted whenever we face criticism, especially criticism we’ve earned through our own arrogance, insensitivity, or genuine wrongdoing. The blessing is specifically for suffering that comes from faithfulness to Christ and to justice — not from being difficult, self-righteous, or careless with others.

“Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven.”

This is a strange command. Not “endure” or “grit your teeth through it,” but rejoice. Jesus adds a reason: “for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” You’re in good company. The line of the faithful — Elijah, Jeremiah, Isaiah — was rarely a line of the comfortable. Suffering for righteousness doesn’t mean you’ve drifted from God’s path; it may mean you’re walking directly on it.

Something to sit with today:
Where in your life has faithfulness cost you something — a friendship, a reputation, a sense of ease? Can you receive that cost not as evidence that something has gone wrong, but as a strange kind of confirmation that something has gone right?

A closing thought: the reward Jesus names isn’t relief from persecution — it’s the kingdom of heaven itself, already present tense (“theirs is” not “theirs will be”). The blessing isn’t only future. It’s now.

Peacemaking Is Not Keeping the Peace

Wednesday, July 15, 2026

Blessed are the peacemakers: they shall be recognized as children of God.—Matthew 5:9

This beatitude places Jesus in a lineage of peacemakers who reject the false promises of violence. Father Richard writes:

This beatitude in Matthew’s Gospel is the only time the word peacemakers is used in the whole Bible. Peacemakers literally are the “ones who reconcile quarrels.” We can clearly see Jesus is not on the side of the violent but on the side of the nonviolent. Jesus is saying there must be a connection, a clear consistency, a constant unity between means and ends. There is no way to peace other than peacemaking itself. 

To this day, many think we can achieve peace through violence. We’ve all witnessed actions coming from the logic “We’ll stop killing by killing.” It’s a common way to think, even though it’s in opposition to all great religious teachings. Our desire for immediate control leads us to disconnect the clear unity between means and ends. The peace we are “keeping” is a false peace. Jeremiah the prophet would say about our “peacekeeping” wars what he said to Israel’s leaders: 

“Peace! Peace!” they say, whereas there is no peace. 
They should be ashamed of their loathsome deeds. 
Not they! They feel no shame, they do not even know how to blush. 
—Jeremiah 8:11–12 

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus defines peace in a different way, what we call Pax Christi, the peace of Christ. The Pax Romana creates a false peace by sacrificing others; the Pax Christi waits and works for true peace by sacrificing the false self of power, prestige, and possessions. [1]

The pastor Rich Villodas makes a distinction between peacemaking and peacekeeping:

Peacemakers are those who work for right relationships at the expense of their comfort. We don’t usually choose this route, nor do we understand what it really means. Jesus does not say, “Blessed are the peacekeepers.” [But] what’s the difference between peacekeeping and peacemaking?…

Peacekeeping tries not to rock the boat, avoids conflicts, and is superficial. It ensures that no one gets upset. That’s not real peace. When, out of fear, we avoid conflict and appease people, we are false peacemakers….

Here’s the thing with peacekeeping: sooner or later, it brings chaos—not peace—into your life. Peacemaking is quite different. Peacemakers don’t avoid conflict; in fact, sometimes peacemaking creates it. We see this with Jesus. As the epitome of love, he wasn’t always nice—at least not in the way modern people visualize niceness….

He burst into the temple and flipped over tables because poor, vulnerable people were being taken advantage of (see Matthew 21:12). When he saw the Pharisees putting yokes of religious condemnation on people, he confronted the religious leaders with harsh words. As Jesus’s life reveals, peacemaking is often met with resistance.

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Every Sparrow Still Falls

And Every Sparrow Still Finds a Home

BRADLEY JERSAK

JUL 15, 2026

Your Father in Heaven Sees Every Sparrow that Falls

Even the sparrow finds a home

and the swallow a nest for herself,

where she may lay her young,

at your altars, O Lord of hosts,

my King and my God.

—Psalm 84:3

⁶ Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight. ⁷ But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.

—Luke 12:6-7

In the Psalms and in Jesus’ teaching, we hear that God’s care extends to all, even down to the smallest sparrow. And if God sees them, we know we’re not forgotten, even the least and most vulnerable among us. If God can number the hairs on your head, then never fear that your name and circumstances escape heaven’s notice. 

I have always needed this assurance. That I’m seen, that my prayers are heard, that my life is in God’s care.

“But the Sparrow Still Falls”

“There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists.”

“So God just leaves?”

“No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.”

“Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: ‘Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.’”

“But the sparrow still falls.”

—Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (New York: Villard Books, 1996).

The sparrow still falls. 

I know this. I have seen them fall. 

So do the dwindling hairs on my head. I see it in the mirror.

If God can count them, then it’s in the subtraction ledger. 

That God cares and sparrows still die matters to me. 

God cares for tiny, vulnerable people. Good. And they still die.

God cares. And babies still die. 

Of crib death and malnutrition and sniper bullets. 

Just as I needed assurance of God’s care, I also need that reality to be acknowledged.

Any faith that refuses to name the truth—that stubborn fact—is going to be worthless to us when we need it most. It’s not real. I would rather grieve than delude myself.

But I can also get stuck there. I may practice acceptance of life on life’s terms, but if I think God simply watches the sparrows and babies die and does nothing, I lose hope and my prayers whither to a cynical evasion of trusting that God or prayer or life even matter. 

That’s haunted me since my unravelling in 2008. Part of that trauma has yet to leave my body. But then…

“The Father Falls WITH Each One of Them”

I sometimes go to Bp. Chris E.W. Green for confession. This topic was one of those times. Here we were on Iona a year ago.

He happened to be immersed in Matthew’s version of the sparrow text: 

²⁹ Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. ³⁰ And even the hairs of your head are all counted.

Matthew 10:29-30

Not a sparrow falls “apart from your Father.” 

Not a baby, not an addict, not a cancer patient, not a lonely senior.

No one dies “apart from your Father.”

Chris made this radical observation that—how do I say it?—did something, effected something, changed something in me. He said,

+Chris: The text says not even a sparrow falls without the Father, which suggests NOT that the Father “knows” in some detached, objective way that the sparrow has died but that the Father falls with each one of them, and breaks the fall. 

How does the Father have this knowledge? Because all things, including each sparrow, are in his Son in such a way that what happens to them is known by him as his own. 

All the deaths are his. 

But what do you mean, “breaks the fall”? He doesn’t. They fall. They die. 

+Chris: All deaths are his. As all lives are his. 

And he will destroy death so that we can have his life as his own. 

This is eternal life. That’s how it felt to my heart, anyway.

I’m not saying I understand what that means. I’m saying that it did something. 

I think what it did was help me to overcome the real contradiction between “God cares” and “God watches but does nothing.” 

Whatever theological work we do is secondary to how he gets closer to Jesus’ intended meaning: that nothing escapes God’s notice, happens outside God’s care, or is untouched by God’s life. Nothing. 

God’s Indiscriminate Care — the Sun and the Rain

Jesus also revealed that God’s care is indiscriminate. God’s hospitality and generosity are all-embracing and without favouritism. This is how God is love, how God is “perfect,” and to emulate God’s all-embracing kindness is what being children of our heavenly Father means. 

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,⁴⁵ so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. ⁴⁶ For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? ⁴⁷ And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? ⁴⁸ Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. 

God causes the rain to fall on thirsty crops and the sun to shine to make them sprout, grow, and become ripe for harvest. Weil writes,

God created the universe and his Son, our First-born brother, created beauty for us. The beauty of the world is the tender smile of Christ to us through matter. He is really present in universal beauty. Love of this beauty proceeds from God and descends into our souls and goes out to God present in the universe. It is something like a sacrament.

—Simone Weil, Awaiting God

And Floods and Tornadoes and …

The kindness of God does NOT direct the rain and shine for the good and withhold it from the wicked. The rain is for everyone. The sun is for everyone.

And the raging floods.

And the violent tornadoes.

And the scourging droughts.

And the earthquakes…

Some of these effects are surely the impact of human folly and our mismanagement of the world. But that argument only goes so far. Not every weather pattern or seismic tremor started as a result of factory smog, oil refineries, frackers, or data centres. And even when they are, their destructive effects aren’t limited to the billionaires who profit from them. 

Again, as sparrows still fall to the ground, so too, many hurricanes make landfall. 

Hopefully, we’re past the superstitious notion that God literally sends adverse weather to punish a particular demographic sin de jour. And can dispense with questions like, “Why did God let the hail stones smash my righteous mother’s windshield?” 

But we still wonder, “If God didn’t really send the tornadoes and the floods, is it still true that God sent the sun and the rain?” We might say that saying God created the universe for our good, including favourable conditions for life on our planet, that doesn’t mean God micromanages every wave in the sea, every cloud in the sky, or this morning’s heat index on my grandchildren’s block. But there’s a more important response, or rather, two-fold response.

Christ: Under the Rubble and Digging through It

First, where is Christ in the midst of our unnatural wars and natural disasters? Dr. Munther Isaac answers, “Christ is IN the rubble.” He’s buried beneath the broken blocks of collapsed apartment blocks, hospitals, and schools… in the same sense that no sparrow falls apart from the Father. 

Second, Christ is in the rubble in the hands and hearts of first responders, good neighbours, and family members frantically digging through the twisted rebar and shattered concrete, hoping beyond hope to retrieve loved ones or at least their bodies. 

Even when someone’s child or grandchild is certainly gone, they keep digging because, like Christ, their death is their death, and the Good Shepherd never stops searching, even in death, so that death will not be the final word. 

In Christ, the Father’s love is assured. 

Every sparrow that falls will yet find a home, 

and every swallow a nest for her young in the Temple of God. 

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Blessed are the pure in heart: they shall see God.
—Matthew 5:8

Richard Rohr explores Jesus’s metaphor, connecting the eyes and the heart:

In this beatitude, Jesus is saying, “When the heart is right, seeing will be right.” He ties together heart and sight. We might have heard the saying, “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”—so is God. All we need to do is keep the lens clean and the heart pure. If our heart is cold, our vision is distorted. If we hold coldness and unforgiveness, the desire to do violence with words or actions, or avert our loving gaze so that another will feel our rejection, we will not be able to see clearly. Our heart is not pure. Jesus calls us to purity of heart with the promise that correct seeing will follow. [1]

The author and spiritual director Carl McColman reflects on what Jesus might have meant by “purity of heart,” calling it “the beatitude that points toward the goal of every restless heart—to see God”:  

Over the centuries, purity has been used for religious and political control. It can be a dangerous concept—used to justify genocide like the Shoah (Holocaust) as well as a code word for controlling people’s sexual behavior. But the word Jesus uses—­the Greek word katharoi— carries a different meaning. Katharoi is a root of the word catharsis. Catharsis, in the annals of Western mysticism, is the necessary first step on the journey toward union with God. Here pure not only suggests a freedom from contaminating elements; it also could simply be rendered as clean. We might rephrase the beatitude as “Blessed is a free and cleansed heart, for it shall see God.”

“Seeing God” doesn’t happen automatically. The God of love is gentle and not willing to force the divine presence on those who just don’t want it. Most of us are a paradox: we want it, and we don’t want it. We have mixed hearts, hearts that know the only true rest is in God but nevertheless remain invested in all sorts of other pleasures—­some perfectly benign and others not so good. With this reality in mind, it’s important to read Jesus’s beatitude as a challenge as well as an invitation—­not as an accusation or a shaming.

Jesus knows that no human being has a perfectly clean (pure) heart. But in his wisdom, he’s asking, “Are you willing to show up? Are you willing to do the work? Are you willing to clean up your mess?” To answer yes to these questions is to commit to the path…. There’s the cleansing right there. Are we willing to begin to let go of gratuitous cynicism, nursed resentments, dispiriting bitterness, and the kind of negativity that leaches away our energy and gives us nothing in return? Letting go of those kinds of afflictive thoughts launches us on the journey of catharsis, of inner cleansing, that prepares us to receive the presence of the One who is already there

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BZ with BZ on the 4th of July

Reflections On A Special Night with Bob Dylan

BRIAN ZAHND JUL 6

I spent the 4^th of July at Starlight Theatre in Kansas City, Missouri with another BZ—Bobby Zimmerman. Although sixty-four years ago the other BZ walked into the St. Louis County courthouse in Hibbing, Minnesota and legally changed his name to Bob Dylan. Once, when asked what influence Dylan Thomas had exerted on him to adopt the name of the Welsh poet, the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman merely quipped, “I’ve done more for Dylan Thomas than he ever did for me.” And that’s probably true.

As is well documented, I’ve been an ardent fan of Bob Dylan for over fifty years, and of course I’ve been to many a Bob Show, as I call them. But for the last few years quirks of schedule have caused me to miss the Dylan shows. Either I was out of the country when he would come to Kansas City or nearby, or I would just miss him by a few days for some date in Europe. Last year Peri and I had tickets to see Dylan at the Thunder Ridge Nature Arena near Branson, Missouri—a four-hour drive. We left right after church on a Sunday and arrived just in time for the show to be cancelled due to a thunderstorm that rolled through and wrecked a lot of equipment. Oh, well.

But then the stars finally aligned. Bob Dylan at Starlight Theatre on the 4^th of July—his most recent tour date in what has been popularly dubbed as the Never Ending Tour ever since Dylan began touring more-or-less nonstop in June of 1988. Over the past thirty-eight years Dylan has performed nearly four thousand shows—that’s over a hundred shows a year. That would be impressive for any artist, but for someone who is now halfway into their ninth decade it’s truly astounding. Bob Dylan is the truest and most traveled of all the troubadours. You don’t really have to go to Dylan—wait long enough and he’ll come to you.

Geographically that is. Artistically you come to Dylan on his terms. He’s not going to “play the hits,” he’s not going to try to ingratiate himself to the audience, he’s not going to endear you with lively repartee between songs. In fact he’s not going to speak a word. No, “Hello, Kansas City.” No, “Let me introduce the band.” Not even a single, “Thank you.” These days the songs do all the talking for him. And that’s just fine. At eighty-five I believe Dylan has finally become what he always wanted to be when he first left Hibbing at eighteen—a wizened old bard who has nothing to offer but his songs.

So meet the artist on his own terms. You can’t say you saw Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre, but you can say you saw Dylan at Starlight Theatre. Or at Mystic Lake Amphitheater in Shakopee, Minnesota if you go see him tonight. These days I always wonder if the latest leg of the Never Ending Tour will be Dylan’s finale. But just last night Dylan posted the first shows of a fall tour in Europe. The Never Ending Tour kicks off again in mid-October in Oslo and Bergen. So to all my newfound friends in these recently visited cities, do yourself a favor and go see Dylan when he shows up in your neighborhood.

One of the things that continues to amaze me about a Dylan show is how many young people attend. Not long ago I took a fourteen-year-old grandson to see ZZ Top, and I’m convinced he was the youngest person there by about fifty years. It was all old folk. Not so at a Dylan show. Young people continue to find the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll and want to see the legend in the flesh. Good for them. 

So I saw Dylan once again. This time on the 250^th birthday of America. To be honest that’s the most American thing (in a good way) that I can think of. The only way it could have been more American is if the ghost of Johnny Cash had joined his old friend on stage for a duet of “Girl from the North Country.” Lucinda Williams and the John Doe Folk Trio were the openers. Both were excellent, and both made cryptic and not so cryptic references to the difficult time America is passing through on a jubilee anniversary. Many in the crowd were there for the solace they knew they would find in the songs of the one who wrote,

They say that patriotism is the last refuge
To which a scoundrel clings
Steal a little and they throw you in jail
Steal a lot and they make you king

Then at about the time that “the evening shadows and the stars appear” the headliner took the stage. There was no introduction. The giant screens were turned off. Our phones were put away. (As we had been warned to do in no uncertain terms.) Dylan took his place behind a piano at the back of a nearly dark stage. He wore a hoodie pulled down low. Dylan wasn’t there to be seen. If he could get away with it, I think Dylan would perform behind a screen—like an Orthodox priest performing mysteries behind an iconostasis. The octogenarian minstrel from Minnesota didn’t want to be seen but he did want to sing us his songs. A stripped down four-piece band is all Dylan needs these days. (A shout-out to Chicago guitarist Joel Paterson who was playing just his fifth show with Dylan—he was brilliant!) The whole performance was magical and better than I could have hoped for.

The first words we heard sung were, To be alone with you, just you and me . . . And it felt that way. On the third song the crowd sang along with “It Ain’t Me, Babe”—a song that Dylan was performing for the 1,153rd time since the first time he performed it in 1964. In “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” the fourth song, Dylan sang the line, There’s a rumbling in the skies—indeed there was. Starlight Theatre is located in Swope Park, and fireworks were booming overhead for the whole show. The “bombs bursting in air” provided a strange, but maybe these days an apropos, juxtaposition as Dylan softly sang,

Sitting on my terrace lost in the stars
Listenin’ to the sound of the sad guitars
Been thinking it over and I’ve thought it all through
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you.

The highlights for me in the ninety-minute set were “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” “Crossing the Rubicon,” and “Under the Red Sky.” Lately Dylan has been closing with the achingly beautiful “Every Grain of Sand.” But on this night the eighty-five-year-old Noble Laureate closed with a gorgeous rendition of “I Shall Be Released.” In the late autumn of his life the lyrics take on a more poignant meaning than when they were written sixty years ago.

They say everything can be replaced
Yet every distance is not near
So I remember every face
Of every man who put me here
I see my light come shining
From the west down to the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released.

BZ

Sunday, July 12, 2026

Father Richard Rohr considers how the Beatitudes build on the wisdom of the Ten Commandments:

The Beatitudes are paradoxical “commandments.” They don’t tell Christians what to do; they tell them what they will be like if they are living in the kingdom: They will be poor in spirit, pure in heart, merciful and gentle peacemakers; they will thirst for what is right and be persecuted because of it, and they will mourn. Not a very happy prospect! And yet the Beatitudes call discipleship a happy life. Why? Because when we live in right relationship with God and one another, we are comforted, our hunger is satisfied, we are shown mercy, and we see God; and so, we are called God’s children, and we live under God’s reign!

The Beatitudes are as concerned about a new way of relating as the Ten Commandments were in the ancient days of Israel. The commandments spoke of showing honor to God and to one’s parents, of not killing, lying, stealing, cheating, or being jealous. The Beatitudes take nothing away from this revelation, but they do add something new. Instead of asking us to obey rules, they invite us to a lifestyle based on vulnerability, self-emptying, and cooperation.

Yet if we ask most Christians what it means to be moral, they think of the Ten Commandments, not the Beatitudes! They think in terms of legalistic morality. But to follow Jesus is to follow him out of the legality of systems and into living in a much larger truth. It’s to move to a more mature level of faith, where we discover God much more as lifegiver than lawgiver. [1]

The law makes us aware of problems. It gives a certain basic order to society and a framework within which people can live their lives. But what if people just obey the law and nothing more? Is there any law that requires you to make friends? Is there any law that compels you to fall in love? Is there any law that says you have to have agency, accomplish something, or be happy? Is there any law that states people have to care about you when you are suffering? Of course not! Almost everything that makes life enjoyable and satisfying comes from people going beyond the legal minimum. It’s going beyond the letter of the law that makes life worth living.

The same is true in our spiritual life. The framework of the commandments provides a basic and needed regularity in our spiritual life. We need such a “container” if we are ever to move beyond commandments and discover blessings. We can’t expect to be blessed with the happiness of living in the reign of God if we never obey God’s laws. Yet even God’s laws are not an end in themselves. Living within them simply frees us to hear the call of the Spirit to the more radical spiritual life of the Beatitudes. [2]

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Mercy Endures Forever

Monday, July 13, 2026

Blessed are the merciful: They shall have mercy shown them.
—Matthew 5:7

Father Richard teaches that mercy is the essence of who God is:

Mercy is like the mystery of forgiveness. By definition, mercy and forgiveness are unearned, undeserved, and not owed. If it isn’t all those three, it won’t be experienced as mercy. If we think mercy is mandatory, or that it must be earned, we lose the mystery of both mercy and forgiveness. I believe with all my heart that mercy and forgiveness are the whole gospel.

The experience of forgiveness or mercy is the experience of a magnanimous God who loves out of total gratuitousness. There’s no tit for tat with God, no buying or selling in the temple. We cannot buy or sell God’s love by worthiness or achievement. Salvation is God’s lovingkindness, a lovingkindness that is “forever.” Read Psalm 136 for an ecstatic description.

More than a description of something God does now and then, mercy is who God is. According to Jesus, “Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13; 12:7). The word mercy is hesed in Hebrew: “the steadfast, enduring love which is unbreakable.” Sometimes the word is translated as “lovingkindness” or “covenant love.” God has made a covenant with creation and will never break the divine side of the covenant. It’s only broken from our side. God’s love is steadfast. It is written in the divine image within us. We are the ones who instead clutch at our sins and punish ourselves instead of surrendering to the divine mercy. The refusal to be forgiven is a form of pride. It is saying, “I’m better than mercy. I’m only going to accept it when I’m worthy and can preserve my so-called self-esteem.” Only the humble person can live in and after mercy.

Clarence Jordan (1912–1969), an activist for racial and economic justice, considers the economic outcome of being immersed in God’s mercy:

The word translated “mercy” … isn’t a cold, condescending kind of mercy such as one in power might extend to his victim in return for gratitude or service. It is warm, compassionate, tender, and never seeks to barter. It is almost exactly the same word that Jesus uses later on in the Sermon in referring to “almsgiving.”… Jesus rescued that world from the mere act of proudly pitching a coin to a beggar and made it into a whole attitude of life.

By “the merciful” he means those who have an attitude of such compassion toward all [people] that they want to share gladly all that they have with one another and with the world…. To them, [people] are no longer beggars to whom one gives a part, but brothers [and sisters] with whom one shares all. This concept of charity, or mercy, led some of the early Christians to a state of voluntary poverty in which “All the believers were together and held all things in common” (Acts 2:44).

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Individual Reflection:
Where in your life right now are you clutching at law (earning, proving, achieving) instead of surrendering to mercy?

Group Discussion — choose one:

• What would change in how you treat others if you believed mercy was truly unearned and un-owed?
• Where do you resist Jesus’ math — that the kingdom belongs to the poor, the mourning, the persecuted?
• Is there a mercy you’ve been refusing to accept because you don’t feel worthy of it?

Friday, July 10, 2026

Reflecting on the many ways the Beatitudes have been understood, author Debie Thomas clarifies what she believes the Beatitudes are not:

People who know little else about Jesus know the Beatitudes. Some folks read them as lines of poetry. Some consider them a rule of life. Others find them naïve and impractical. Having grown up in the church, I’m familiar with the ways the Beatitudes are often misread and misused. I want to start there, by naming what they are not:

The Beatitudes are not sentiments. It’s easy in our consumerist culture to allow a word like “blessing” to become greeting card fodder, bland and meaningless. (“I’m so #Blessed.”) But the Beatitudes are not meant to settle and soothe us; they’re meant to startle us awake. Yes, they are pastoral, and yes, they give us hope. But Christian hope is not a sedative. Christian hope gets us up and out the door.

The Beatitudes are not to-do items. They are not suggestions, instructions, commandments, or quid pro quos. There is nothing transactional about them, nothing that smacks of a “should,” a “must,” or an “ought.” It is emphatically not the case that if I try very hard to be poorer, sadder, meeker, hungrier, thirstier, purer, more peaceable, and more persecuted than I am right now, God will like, love, reward, and appreciate me more than God already does.

The Beatitudes are not shame tactics. The point is not to read Jesus’s litany of blessings for the poor and the disenfranchised and walk away feeling like an overprivileged wretch. The takeaway Jesus intends for his listeners is neither shame nor self-condemnation. The last thing Jesus’s Beatitudes should do is defeat us.

The Beatitudes are not permission slips for passivity. To use Jesus’s teachings about sorrow, meekness, poverty, and persecution to keep oppressed people oppressed is to distort his words and intentions. There is nothing in the Beatitudes that excuses injustice, nothing that relativizes abuse, nothing that frees us to tell suffering people that their suffering is God-ordained and redemptive.

Through Jesus’s example, we learn that the Beatitudes are a vocation for our lives. Thomas points out:

Jesus acts. He doesn’t simply speak blessing; he lives it. Through his words, his hands, his feet, his life, he brings about the very blessings he promises. Insisting that pain in and of itself is neither holy nor redemptive in the Christian story, Jesus works to bring healing, abundance, liberation, and joy to everyone who crosses his path.

This is the vocation we are called to. The work of sharing the blessings we enjoy is not the work of a distant someday. It is the work we’re called to now. The Beatitudes remind us that blessing and justice are inextricably linked. If it’s blessing we want, then it’s justice we must pursue.

Reference:
Debie Thomas, Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories: Reflections on the Life of Christ (Cascade Books, 2022), 120–121, 123–124.

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John Chaffee – Five On Friday, 7-10-2026

1.

“You can save lives by giving someone a hug.”

– Father Greg Boyle, Founder of Homeboy Industries

Every morning at Homeboy Industries, the largest gang rehabilitation program in the world, people gather to share updates, celebrate victories, and share a short reflection.

A recent reflection from their opening meeting included, “You can save lives by giving someone a hug.”

Without sounding too dark or morbid, there are people in this world for whom there was a lack of love shown.  This creates a very wounded individual, and that contributes to their overall unhealth.  And, from there, we all know that incredibly unhealthy people can do tragic acts in society.

It may very well be that showing kindness, giving loving attention, and a sincere hug may not just save the life of the person you are with, but also the lives of others whom they might harm if they did not receive love from you.  Think of mass shooters, people who commit violence with a knife or gun, or anything else that your imagination might bring to mind.

I understand this might seem rather intense to start with, but I find this quite hopeful.

We can save lives by giving people a simple hug.

2.

“We don’t actually fear death; we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.”

– TS Eliot, 20th Century British Poet

One of my deep wounds is the belief that I will not be missed. 

I do not know where the thought originally came from, but there have been events in my life that have seemingly “confirmed” it to me.

Perhaps I am being melodramatic.  Perhaps my Enneagram 4 wing is particularly strong on some days.

One of the ways in which I combat this diabolical thought is by remembering the people who have actually told me they miss me,g and also remind myself that I am perpetually in the memory of God.  Sincere love is not to be taken for granted, and I am glad that my faith reminds me that I am not absent from God and that God is not absent from me.

3.

“Dispassion (apatheia) does not mean that the soul no longer feels the passions, but that it remains undisturbed when they attack.”

– Maximus the Confessor, 7th Century Syrian Monk

This past week, I finished Apatheia in the Christian Tradition: An Ancient Spirituality and Its Contemporary Relevance by Joseph Nguyen SJ.

It was a fascinating read.  In some ways, it is more of a biography of a concept, tracing its evolution as it was passed from one generation to the next.  Beginning with the Stoics, then Evagrius Ponticus, then John Cassian, then Maximus the Confessor, and finally Ignatius of Loyola, it traced how Christian spirituality used “apathy” as a spiritual discipline.

Apatheia is the practice of being appropriately detached from the strong emotions and passions that cause us and others pain and suffering.  Contrary to modern thought, the early church’s teaching on Apatheia is not about being completely unemotional but about being detached from immature emotions and replacing them with mature love, wisdom, and joy.

If you are the kind of person whose emotions sometimes get the better of you, I highly encourage you to check out Nguyen’s book.

4.

“It’s not about right belief; it’s about right practice.”

– Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal Priest

I mean, let’s be honest…

Here is a theological question for you…

According to how we think about God, how wrong is “too wrong”?

This singular question came to me about 15 years ago, and it changed the way I thought about many things.

Jesus himself did not seem to place the same emphasis on doctrine, orthodoxy, or belief as we do today.

Jesus seemed more interested in orthopraxy.  That is probably why he was able and willing to meet with people whom the religious elite of his day dared not associate with.

In The Parable of the Good Samaritan, the hero of the story is not the one with the “right orthodoxy” but the one with “right practice.”

Rather than trying to prove to ourselves, one another, or God of our own “orthodoxy,” perhaps we need to stop and look at our own lives and ask ourselves if we have the “right practice” of the Christian faith.

5.

“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov

According to my Kindle, I am 52% through my re-read of The Brothers Karamazov.

It took me almost a year to get through it the first time.

And, since then, I have failed at other re-reads, but this current one seems to be going well! 

It is a fascinating read, even if it is difficult.

The quote above summarizes several of the book’s plotlines.  Much of the story is about the love between brothers, sons and fathers, lovers and beloveds, God and humanity.  For Dostoyevsky, love is not a simple, easy, or sentimental thing alone.  Rather, it is the chief virtue that somehow holds the world together, forgives the world for being broken, and gives perpetual hope toward the rapscallions and ragamuffins.

Perhaps once I finish my re-read, I will share more about the book and what stood out to me this time around.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1r6jInaS-zY%3Fsi%3DbYm_n9NozFRDn6WZ

Thursday, July 9, 2026

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice: They shall have their fill.
—Matthew 5:6

Father Richard connects righteousness with justice:

This beatitude is both spiritual and social. Most Bibles to this day soften this beatitude: “hunger and thirst for what is right” or “for righteousness” are the more common and, I would argue, faulty translations. But the word in Greek clearly means “justice.” Notice that the concept of justice is used halfway through the Beatitudes and again at the very end. It’s a couplet reiterating the point: To live a just life in this world is to have identified with the longings and hungers of the poor, the meek, and those who weep. This identification and solidarity are already a profound form of social justice. [1]

The peace activist John Dear, who has spent his life working for nonviolence, writes about this beatitude:

Righteousness is not just the private practice of doing good; it sums up the global responsibility of the human community to make sure every human being has what they need, that everyone pursues a fair sense of justice for every other human being, and that everyone lives in right relationship with one another, creation, and God….

Jesus instructs us to be passionate for social, economic, and racial justice. That’s the real meaning of the Hebrew word for justice and the Jewish insistence on it. Resist systemic, structured, institutionalized injustice with every bone in your body, with all your might, with your very soul, he teaches. Seek justice as if it were your food and drink, your bread and water, as if it were a matter of life and death, which it is…. Within our relationship to the God of justice and peace, those who give their lives to that struggle, Jesus promises, will be satisfied….

How do we hunger and thirst for justice? By making global justice a priority in our lives. This beatitude requires us to join a grassroots movement that fights one or two issues of injustice and to get deeply involved in the struggle. Since all issues of injustice are connected, fighting one injustice puts us squarely in the struggle against every injustice. As Martin Luther King Jr. said over and over again, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Befriend the victims of systemic injustice, side with them, listen to their stories, let their pain break your heart, join the movements to end injustice, tithe your money to the cause, and commit yourself to the struggle….

While [it] may take a long time, our nonviolent persistence and truth-telling will eventually win out and bear the good fruit of justice. Truth is on our side; God is on the side of justice. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” Martin Luther King Jr. said famously, “but it bends toward justice.” [2]

References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount (Franciscan Media, 2022), 142–143.

[2] John Dear, The Beatitudes of Peace: Meditations on the Beatitudes, Peacemaking and the Spiritual Life (Twenty-Third Publications, 2016), 61–62, 66, 69.

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AI Resonse to the Prompt: “Short Devo On Justice of God”

Biblical justice goes far beyond legal fairness; it is the active pursuit of making things right, defending the vulnerable, and reflecting God’s unconditional love in our daily relationships. It requires a heart that is equally committed to grace and righteousness. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Scripture

“He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” — Micah 6:8

Reflection

When we think of “justice,” it’s easy to think of a courtroom, punishment, or getting even. Yet, the biblical concept of justice (often paired with righteousness) is profoundly relational. It is about how we treat our neighbors, especially those on the margins. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

True biblical justice is inextricably linked with mercy. We are not asked to simply point out where others fall short, but to step into the gap, carrying each other’s burdens, and demonstrating the grace we have so freely received. When we pursue justice God’s way, it ceases to be a harsh demand; it becomes a way of life defined by love, humility, and restoration. [1, 2, 3]

A Prayer for Today

Lord, help me to see the people around me through Your eyes. Give me the courage to stand up for what is right, the grace to show mercy, and the humility to walk beside You in everything I do. Let my actions reflect Your heart today. Amen. [1, 2]

Land for the Humble

Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Blessed are the gentle: They shall have the earth as their inheritance.
—Matthew 5:5

Father Richard explains why the third beatitude would have been simultaneously shocking and comforting to Jesus’s listeners:

The third beatitude is almost taken verbatim from Psalm 37:11: “The humble shall have the land for their own.” Some translate “gentle” as “the nonviolent,” but perhaps the most familiar translation is “the meek.” There’s an irony here. If there was one hated group in the Palestine of Jesus’s day, it was landlords—those who possessed the land. Nobody possessed land except by violence and oppression, by holding onto it and making all the powerless peasants pay a portion of their harvest. The landlords certainly weren’t meek or gentle, so Jesus is turning that around and saying, “No, it’s you, humble ones, who are finally going to possess the land.” [1]

Author Micha Boyett considers how Jesus’s listeners would have understood the paradox of the meek “inheriting the land”:   

[Jesus] says that those who have no power and those who choose to give up their power are the ones who inherit the earth, which could also be translated as “the land.” The people sitting before him … are certainly not landowners. They are most likely what we could consider today to be sharecroppers, working the land for a wealthy owner, who didn’t need to get his hands dirty….

“Makarioi [Greek for “happy”] are the powerless ones,” Jesus says. “They shall have the earth as an inheritance.” They will recognize that the earth has always been theirs. He is getting at something essential to the spiritual life: our ownership is temporal. According to the psalmist, human beings are like the leaves of grass, here for a moment and then, poof, gone. We’re all stewards here, and the land remains long after we’ve become the dust we came from. Only the divine one possesses it. In God’s dream for the world, possession is an illusion. When we humble ourselves, when we release our hands from all that we have tried to control and cling to, we discover that those who possess the land are the ones living under the illusion. But the ones who release their power and the ones who never had power to begin with inherit the really real….

This feels like the secret Jesus is letting his listeners in on: the power we’re born into and the power we gain throughout our lives is a mirage. In the really real, power can only be shared…. Meekness—the upside-down possibility that when we let go of the power we hoard, power grows wide enough to share. When the few in power release their hold on the land, everyone has space to spread out and flourish. Meekness is the way toward an earth where we live in peace, where resources are shared, where everyone has enough. [2]

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Sarah Young

Jesus Calling: July 8th

When you seek My Face, put aside thoughts of everything else. I am above all, as well as in all; your communion with Me transcends both time and circumstances. Be prepared to be blessed bountifully by My Presence, for I am the God of unlimited abundance. Open wide your heart and mind to receive more and more of Me. When your Joy in Me meets My Joy in you, there are fireworks of heavenly ecstasy. This is eternal life here and now; a tiny foretaste of what awaits you in the life to come. Now you see only a poor reflection as in a mirror, but then you will see face to Face.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

John 15:11 (NLT)
11 I have told you these things so that you will be filled with my joy. Yes, your joy will overflow!

Additional insight regarding John 5:11: When things are going well, we feel elated. When hardships come, we sink into depression. But true joy transcends the rolling waves of circumstances. Joy comes from a consistent relationship with Jesus Christ. When our lives are intertwined with his, he will help us walk through adversity without sinking into debilitating lows and manage prosperity without moving into deceptive highs. The joy of living with Jesus Christ daily will keep us levelheaded, no matter how high or low our circumstances.

1st Corinthians 13:12 (NLT)
12 Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Additional insight regarding 1st Corinthians 13:12: When Paul wrote of “full understanding,” he was referring to when we must see Christ face to face. God gives believers spiritual gifts for their lives on earth to build up, serve, and strengthen fellow Christians. The spiritual gifts are for the church. In eternity, we will be made perfect and complete and will be in the very presence of God. We will no longer need spiritual gifts, so they will come to an end. Then, we will have a full understanding and appreciation for one another as unique expressions of God’s infinite creativity. We will use our differences as a reason to praise God! Based on that perspective, let us treat each other with the same love and unity we will one day share.

Tuesday, July 7, 2026

READ ON CAC.ORG

Blessed are those who mourn: They shall be comforted.
—Matthew 5:4

Father Richard reflects on the sacred nature of our ability to grieve—our own pain and that of the world:

In this beatitude, Jesus is describing the state of those who weep, those who have something to mourn about. They feel the pain of the world. Jesus is saying that those who can grieve, those who can cry, are those who will understand by coming closer to the heart of God.

Jesus praises the weeping class, those who can enter into solidarity with the pain of the world and not try to extract themselves from it. Weeping over our sin and the sin of the world is an entirely different mode than self-hatred or hatred of others. The weeping mode, if I can call it that, allows us to bear the pain of the world without looking for perpetrators or victims. Instead, we recognize the tragic reality in which both sides are trapped. Tears from God are always for everybody, for our universal exile from home. [1]

New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine describes how Jesus’s listeners would have heard echoes of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah’s message of consolation:

The beatitude has a particular resonance for Jesus’s followers that also draws from the Jewish tradition…. The passage Jesus partially cites as part of his address to the Nazareth synagogue in Luke 4, reads,

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me …; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners … ; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion—to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit…. [Isaiah 61:1–3]

[Isaiah] comforts the mourners in Zion by telling them that theirs is not the last generation, that what they may not see to fruition, their children and their children’s children will. To mourn in Israel means that we are not alone; we have not only our friends and relatives but also the previous generations and the generations to come. And we take comfort in that. [2]

Father Richard recognizes mourning as a quality that connects the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes:

Mourning might be thought of as the prophetic “way of tears,” a letting down of our defenses, in stark contrast to our more common ways of heroic willpower, commandment, obedience, force, anger, and legitimated violence. It takes an initial tender vulnerability (“wounding”) to defeat our ego and to open us to full consciousness—which must include the scary unconscious! It is a movement, frankly, from the Ten Commandments to the eight Beatitudes. A movement that the prophets illustrated for us twenty-five hundred years ago, and that we need—out of desire and desperation—to recover today.

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Sacred Storytelling

All the world’s a stage…and the church is too.

BRIAN ZAHND JUN 30

All the world’s a stage.
–William Shakespeare

We humans are story-crafting, storytelling, story-loving creatures. What we do best with the gift of human language is to tell a story. And this storytelling appears to be something of a miracle. I say a miracle, because the origin of the human capacity for complex language is a mystery that continues to baffle philologists, philosophers, and anthropologists, leading some thinkers in the field to claim that the reality of complex human language cannot be explained as a gradual, emergent phenomenon. Increasingly it appears that life, mind, and language did not and cannot arise from a purely materialist cause; rather it is a gift from elsewhere. In All Things Are Full of Gods David Bentley Hart writes, 

No anthropologist, no matter how diligent, has ever discovered some intermediary form of communication . . . no philologist, no matter how clever, has ever been able to fabricate a plausible pre-linguistic system of signification, or even a primitive form of language lacking the essential features of fully developed tongues.

In other words, language doesn’t seem to evolve from the ground up, it seems to be bestowed from above. In whatever way it came into being, the capacity for complex human language is unquestionably central to what it means to be human. We humans are the storytellers. While other animals are capable of communicating basic information about danger, food, courtship, and the like, the human animal is composing the Iliad, Hamlet, and Moby Dick.

We spend an enormous amount of our life telling, reading, hearing, and watching stories—from grand fantasy epics like The Lord of the Rings to the mildly interesting anecdote told to co-workers at the office. All we have to do is hear or read the words “Once upon a time” and our interest is piqued with the hope that we can once again be enchanted by some captivating tale. We’re always game for a good story. That’s why at this very moment all over the world hundreds of millions of stories are being disseminated and consumed—a bit of embellished family folklore repeated by grandma for the umpteenth time, a young girl in her bedroom reading A Wrinkle in Time, a commuter on a subway listening to a Harry Potter audiobook, the twelve movies showing at the local cineplex, the masses scrolling through Netflix trying to decide what story will entertain them tonight. This is what we do.

There is a reason why Homer, Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling are some of the most famous people in history: they rank among our greatest storytellers. Why are Tom Hanks, Morgan Freeman, and Meryl Streep so well-known, so beloved, and so well-compensated? Because they are so gifted and skilled at playing roles in some of our favorite stories. We have an innate love of stories and a remarkable ability to remember stories. If we hear the names Romeo and Juliet or Bonnie and Clyde, an unbidden narrative immediately arises in our imagination. To remember something all we need to do is hear it in the form of a story. From forty-thousand-year-old paleolithic cave art to the Theatre of Dionysus in ancient Athens to the flat screen television in your living room, storytelling has always occupied a central place in the human experience.

All of this indicates that our love for story comes from a deeper place than a fleeting desire for a bit of entertaining diversion. Our love of story is rooted in our search for meaning. Having been summoned out of the dread void of nonbeing we find ourselves hurled into the astounding phenomenon of existence. We have come to be. We are here. We exist. But what does is it all mean? Is there a purpose to it all? To avoid the despair that Søren Kierkegaard called the sickness unto death, we need to believe that our life is more than an absurd and meaningless cosmic accident tumbling out of a random assortment of atoms. We have our physical senses by which we experience the world around us; we have our self-consciousness through which we can contemplate on a deep level our own existence; but what do we make of this? Coherence requires some sort of narrative structure. To prevent life from being just one damn thing after another we need a story. Story is the essence of meaning. 

We want our life to have a narrative, and we want our story to be part of something beyond our own atomized existence. We want to belong, to have our part in some bigger story. Absent a metanarrative to interpret our reason for existing and our place within history, the yawning abyss of nihilism awaits. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s dark novel Demons the nihilistic Alexi Kirillov is constantly asserting that nothing matters, and nothing makes any difference. So we are not surprised when Kirillov kills himself. 

Most of us would rather cling to any story, even a tragedy, than to fall into the black hole of meaninglessness where suicide takes on its own logic. In The Lord of the Rings the reason the ever-optimistic Samwise Gamgee doesn’t succumb to despair even in the dark depths of Mordor is because he can muse, “I wonder what sort of tale we’ve fallen into?” Sam can bear up under most any burden as long as he knows he’s part of a story worth telling. Storytellers aren’t mere entertainers, they are evangelists.

This is why post-Enlightenment Christians in the postmodern West need to be reminded of the true nature of the gospel: It’s a story! The gospel is not a set of spiritual laws or abstract theological principles or debated atonement theories. No. The gospel is the story of Jesus Christ. In its most abbreviated form it’s the story of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. A fuller telling of the story takes us from a manger in Bethlehem to an empty tomb in Jerusalem. The biblical Gospels are the gospel. The director’s cut edition is the big story the whole Bible tells—the story that takes us from Genesis to Revelation, from paradise lost to paradise regained, from the alpha of creation to the omega of new creation. To tell the story of Jesus is to preach the gospel.

What we do in church on Sunday morning is not just singing songs, praying prayers, and preaching sermons; rather we are telling a sacred story that others are invited to participate in. There is a sense in which church is a theater for our sacred story—but a theater where everyone is invited to join the performance. Evangelism at its best is akin to the art of storytelling. The possibility of faith arises as we tell the beautiful story of Jesus Christ. We don’t need to cajole or threaten, we just need to tell the story. 

The gospel story itself carries with it the capacity to evoke faith. “So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ.” (Rom 10:17) A good sermon is not a didactic lecture but a well-told story where Jesus is the hero. And because the gospel is the best and greatest of all stories, the church should seek to excel at storytelling—storytelling in sacrament, sermon, liturgy, and even architecture.

Wake Up Dead Man is the third film in the Knives Out detective mystery series. It’s a brilliant dark comedy that surprisingly carries a profound and beautiful Christian message. At a crucial point in the film, the private detective Benoit Blanc meets the young priest Father Judd Duplenticy for the first time. The meeting takes place in the sanctuary of a neo-Gothic Catholic church in upstate New York. As Benoit Blanc admires the architecture, Father Judd asks what he senses in the sanctuary. The agnostic detective demurs in his southern drawl, “It’s like someone has shown a story at me that I do not believe.” Rather than be defensive about Blanc’s critical observation, Father Judd responds like this:

You’re right. It’s storytelling. And this church is not medieval. We’re in New York. Neo-Gothic nineteenth century. Has more in common with Disneyland than Notre Dame, the rites and rituals and costumes, all of it. It’s storytelling. You’re right. I guess the question is, do these stories convince us of a lie? Or do they resonate with something deep inside of us that’s profoundly true? That we can’t express any other way . . . except storytelling.

Wake Up Dead Man writer and director Rian Johnson places in Father Judd’s mouth the perfect answer to a world skeptical of the Christian gospel. Of course, it’s storytelling. But what does it convince us of? A lie or profound truth? Everyone has to decide that question for themselves. The gospel story can bring us to the precipice of decision, but the leap of faith remains within the realm of our own freedom. 

C.S. Lewis as a scholar of literature recognized the mythic qualities in the Christian gospel, but he eventually crossed the chasm of his own skepticism by understanding the gospel as true myth. Alan Jacobs says of Lewis, “He became a Christian not through accepting a particular set of arguments but through learning to read a story the right way. And maybe others could move closer to Christian belief by the same path.”

To preach the gospel is to tell the story of Jesus—not to explain it, but simply to tell it. The magic of The Lord of the Rings or any other great epic is not found in literary analysis, but in the story itself! The same is true of the gospel. Rather than explaining the gospel or making it “practical” or telling hearers how to “apply” it to their life, the primary task of evangelism is to simply tell the evangel as the compelling story that it really is. We don’t need to fully understand the gospel to be drawn into its beautiful mystery. The gospel is not an axiom, it’s an epic—the adventure of God joining humanity in Christ. 

After a lifetime of hearing, reading, and studying the gospel I can’t explain all of it, but I love the story and I believe it. And most important of all, the gospel story has been and is being woven deeply into my own story, which is another way of saying I am being saved.

BZ

Sunday, July 5, 2026

Over the next two weeks, the Daily Meditations will reflect on the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–16), Jesus’s core teachings from the Sermon on the Mount. CAC teacher Brian McLaren sets the scene:

Imagine yourself in Galilee, on a windswept hillside near a little fishing town called Capernaum. Flocks of birds circle and land…. The Sea of Galilee glistens blue below us, reflecting the clear midday sky above.

A small group of disciples circles around a young man who appears to be about thirty. He is sitting, as rabbis in this time and culture normally do. Huge crowds extend beyond the inner circle of disciples, in a sense eavesdropping on what he is teaching them. This is the day they’ve been waiting for. This is the day Jesus is going to pass on to them the heart of his message.

Jesus begins in a fascinating way. He uses the term blessed to address the question of identity, the question of who we want to be. In Jesus’s day, to say, “Blessed are these people” is to say “Pay attention: these are the people you should aspire to be like….” It’s the opposite of saying “Woe to those people” or “Cursed are those people,” which means, “Take note: you definitely don’t want to be like those people….” His words no doubt surprise everyone, because we normally play by these rules of the game:

Do everything you can to be rich and powerful.
Toughen up and harden yourself against all feelings of loss.
Measure your success by how much of the time you are thinking only of yourself and your own happiness.
Be independent and aggressive, hungry and thirsty for higher status in the social pecking order.
Strike back quickly when others strike you, and guard your image so you’ll always be popular.

But Jesus defines success and well-being in a profoundly different way…. He advocates an identity characterized by solidarity, sensitivity, and nonviolence. He celebrates those who long for justice, embody compassion, and manifest integrity and nonduplicity. He creates a new kind of hero: not warriors, corporate executives, or politicians, but brave and determined activists for preemptive peace, willing to suffer with him in the prophetic tradition of justice….

It’s hot in the Galilean sunshine. Still the crowds are hanging on Jesus’s every word. They can tell something profound and life-changing is happening within them and among them. Jesus is not simply trying to restore their religion to some ideal state in the past. Nor is he agitating unrest…. He spurs his hearers into reflection about who they are, who they want to be, what kind of people they will become, what they want to make of their lives.

As we consider Jesus’s message today, we join those people on that hillside, grappling with the question of who we are now and who we want to become in the future…. As we listen to Jesus, each of us knows, deep inside: If I accept this new identity, everything will change for me. Everything will change.

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How Do We Become Poor in Spirit?

Monday, July 6, 2026

How blessed are the poor in spirit: the kingdom of God is theirs.
—Matthew 5:3

Father Richard Rohr explores the first beatitude as a call to interior freedom, a key to participating in the kingdom of God:

What an opening line! It’s crucial, a key to everything Jesus is teaching, or it wouldn’t be the opener. It’s hard to imagine that a saying so radical should become so familiar, so normalized. Matthew may have chosen to soften it from the original phrase that we see in Luke and the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. Luke’s Gospel is for the poor, so he leaves the hard words of Jesus as many scholars believe they were originally spoken: “Blessed are you who are poor” (Luke 6:20).

Matthew, however, was addressing a more stable, even middle-class Jewish community, so he says, “Happy are the poor in spirit.” The truth is still there—poor in spirit means to live without a need for our own righteousness. It’s inner emptiness without a need to bolster our own reputation. For middle class folks, if we’re poor in spirit, we may eventually become poor in fact. In other words, we won’t waste the rest of our lives trying to get rich, because we’ll know better.

Christian Scripture scholars point out that the Greek word usually used for the peasant class is tapeinoi, but that is not the word Matthew and Luke use here. They use the word ptochoi, which literally means “the very empty ones, those who are crouching.” They are the beggars, the nobodies of this world who have nothing left. Jesus is saying, “Happy are you, you’re the freest of them all.”

The higher up we are in the system, the more trapped we are. The more we are outside the system, the freer we are. When we are high up in anything, we are expected to represent it, hold it together, and affirm it. The price of the truth can be very great, so we say what is needed to survive and to be liked inside the group, and to hold the group in unity.

“How blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3), the ones who don’t have to play any of these games. Jesus is recommending a social reordering here, quite different from common practice. Notice how he also uses present tense: “The kingdom of God is theirs” (Matthew 5:3). He doesn’t say “will be theirs.” That tells us that the kingdom of God isn’t later. It’s present tense: We are the free ones now, if we remain without anything to protect or anything we need to prove or defend.

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Individual Reflection

What are you still protecting?

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Group Discussion — choose one:

1. Where in your life are you “high up in the system” — expected to represent, defend, or hold something together?
2. Rohr says the kingdom is present tense, not future — that we’re free now if we have nothing left to prove. Do you believe that, or does it feel like something you’re still earning?
3. What would it cost you to actually become poor in fact, not just in spirit?