Tuesday, October 6, 2026

Sister Ilia Delio describes Francis of Assisi as a nature mystic:  

Francis attained the heights of contemplation through his penetrating vision of creation…. Some regard him as “the first materialist” in the best sense of the word because of the way he looked on the material world—not for what it is but for how it is—God’s creation.  

Francis has been described as a nature mystic, one who finds God in the vast and beautiful fields of nature. A nature mystic is one whose mystical experiences involve an appreciation of creation as God’s handiwork; nature manifests the divine. Francis’s nature mysticism included a consciousness of God, with the appropriate religious attitudes of awe and gratitude…. He took spontaneous joy in the material world, singing its praises like a troubadour poet. With a disarming sense of immediacy, he felt himself part of the family of the creation. 
 
Delio describes how Francis’s conversion deepened as he became more aware of God’s presence in the material world:  

Coming to an awareness of God’s presence in creation was not an immediate experience for Francis but required growth in love. Conversion is a slow, lifelong process. It is a constant effort of moving away from sin-centered attitudes and behaviors toward God-centered relationships. With this movement from sin toward God, there is a gradual change in one’s consciousness or awareness of others and in one’s relationship to others. It took Francis a lifetime to realize his integral relationship to others, not only to humans but to all of creation. The Canticle of Creatures, which sings of Francis’s cosmic fraternity, his integral relationship to all the elements of the universe, was composed in 1225, one year before he died. It took Francis a lifetime to realize that he was truly brother to the sun, moon, stars, fire and water, that is, to the whole cosmos…. 
 
In his Major Legend, Bonaventure describes Francis’s relationship with Christ as one of deepening piety. The word “piety” (pietas) means “blood-related” or “family related.” It can be defined as an attitude of respect toward those to whom one is bound by ties of religion, consanguinity; of relationships between human beings. Bonaventure highlights the idea that, through his relationship with Christ, Francis came to realize his “family” relatedness to everything, including the tiny creatures of creation….  
 
Bonaventure claims that everything in creation “spoke” to Francis of God. He came to “see” God’s goodness in every aspect of creation, so that everything ultimately led him to Christ, the Word of God. That Francis came to “see” God in creation points to the idea that Francis contemplated God in the things of creation. Contemplation is a penetrating gaze that gets to the truth of reality, and Francis came to “see” the truth of things by following the footprints of Jesus Christ.

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Grace is not a race to the finish line

Rethinking quick comebacks and recommitting to the slow work of transformation

CHUCK DEGROAT

OCT 04, 2026

“Appear to be what thou art. Tear off thy masks. The church was never meant to be a masquerade.” —Charles Spurgeon

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“How long will this take?” may be one of the most common questions I’ve heard over 25 years of counseling leaders. Whether it comes amidst a season of burnout, after a massive relational rupture, a major failure, a marriage crisis, or something else, a primary question centers one thing: speed. 

Let’s just name this first: Speed confuses the immediacy of grace with the slow work of becoming. 

Saul encountered grace on Damascus Road, but it took three years in the desert to become Paul. The Israelites were rescued from Egypt, but it took forty years to navigate an 11-day journey home. 

The immediacy of grace does not ignore the slow work of awakening to the depth of personal pain, the extent of relational harm, the awareness of impact, the story of formation, the autonomic dysregulation, the work of repair, the sincerity and specificity of confession, the restoration of trust. 

As I often remind people, the first question isn’t one of speed, it’s can I stay in the discomfort long enough to be changed through it? 

However, this is when the pushback comes. Who are we to put a time limit on God’s grace? 

And yet, in Scripture repeatedly centers wounded sheep over a fallen shepherd. Ezekiel condemns the leaders who “rule harshly” and neglect the weak while God becomes the good shepherd who attends to those wounded. Jeremiah pronounces woe on shepherds who harm the flock. Micah condemns leaders who should know better. Jesus pronounces woe on religious leaders who look and dress the part but compromise justice, mercy, and faithfulness, burdening others. James follows the tradition, reminding leaders that they’ll be judged more strictly. And Peter warns against domineering. Grace is never understood as an escape hatch from accountability; rather grace enables the care of those harmed and a slow path of transformation of the one who did the harm. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer provides us a way forward. In Life Together, he warned of the “pious confession” of those who say what seems to be the right thing, but haven’t confessed with sincerity and specificity. You know the words: “I shouldn’t have done that,” “I’ve made some mistakes,” “That’s just how my Enneagram shows up,” “I know I can be a bit strong, but it’s also your daddy issues,” “I’ve apologized—I don’t know what more you want me to say.” 

Bonhoeffer writes:

Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. In the darkness of the unexpressed it poisons the whole being of a person. This can happen even in the midst of a pious community. In confession the light of the gospel breaks into the darkness and seclusion of the heart. The sin must be brought into the light. 

He goes on to say that people “usually are satisfied when they make a general confession,” reminding his readers that “it is precisely for the sake of this certainty that confession should deal with concrete sins.”

This concreteness goes beyond, “I’ve made some mistakes” or “It was a tough season and I wasn’t leading from my best self.” It names reality: 

I intimidated.

I lied.

I retaliated.

I retreated.

I minimized. 

I managed my image.

And it impacted this person, in this specific way. 

This, according to Bonhoeffer, frees us from the “circle of self-deception.”

But I’d also argue there is yet another level to consider, which invites us to consider the psychology of self-deception. 

Because as I write about in Who You’re Becoming: The Slow and Courageous Work of Character Change in a Narcissistic Age, the kind of specificity and sincerity we’re looking for is impossible when a nervous system is locked in a survival mode. And every single defended person is operating out of this autonomic orientation. 

What we know neurobiologically and physiologically is that it’s impossible to confess, to repair, to own, and to engage humbly when operating in a dysregulated state. And even more, we know that this for many becomes a kind of permanent operating state. It often takes weeks and months alone to begin to see the depths of one’s dysregulation. But the good news is that this often awakens further curiosity: How did I get here in the first place? And how can I cultivate a soul at rest? 

This can’t be rushed. 

This curiosity is often the very beginning of humility. Writing to a young man consumed with status, appearance, and reputation, St. Augustine wrote these words in AD 410: 

“If you should ask me what are the ways of God, I would tell you that the first is humility, the second is humility, and the third is humility. Not that there are no other precepts to give, but if humility does not precede all that we do, our efforts are fruitless.”

Humility is from the latin humus, meaning earth, soil, ground. Humility invites our descent, like a seed lowered into the earth, where life can begin anew. 

Friends, I don’t know when grace became connected to speed. I don’t know when we turned sanctification into a 100-meter dash. Sadly, the long history of the church reveals our penchant for control, efficiency, speed, power, mastery, and more. 

As I say in the new book, grace isn’t a race to the finish line. Sometimes grace looks like enough love and safety and time and care and truth and limits for a person to finally encounter the parts of themselves that charisma and competence had long allowed them to outrun. 

In the end, grace enables us to ask: What am I becoming? 

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Here’s to the slow work of becoming,

Sunday, October 4, 2026

Feast Day of Francis of Assisi 

Father Richard Rohr explains how Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) experienced the natural world as filled with God’s presence:   

In stories of his life, Francis is quoted as talking to or about larks, lambs, rabbits, pheasants, falcons, cicadas, waterfowl, bees, the famous wolf of Gubbio, pigs (whom he praised for generously giving their bodies for our food), and hooked fish that he tried to throw back into the water whenever possible. He addressed inanimate creation too, as if it were indeed ensouled. We know this because his “Canticle of the Creatures” includes fire, wind, water, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, and, of course, “our Sister Mother Earth” herself. [1] 

So-called “nature mysticism” was in fact a worthy first path for Francis and also for Bonaventure, the first Franciscan theologian, who saw all things as likenesses of God (vestigia Dei), fingerprints and footprints that reveal the divine DNA underlying all living links in the Great Chain of Being.  

Creation itself—not ritual or spaces constructed by human hands—was Francis’s primary cathedral, his resting place in God, which then drove him back into the needs of the city. It’s very similar to Jesus’s own movement between desert solitude and small-town healing ministry. The gospel transforms us by putting us in touch with that which is much more constant and satisfying, literally the “ground of our being,” and has much more “reality” to it, rather than theological concepts or the mere ritualization of reality. 

Daily cosmic events in the sky and on the earth are the reality above our heads and beneath our feet every minute of our lives: a continuous sacrament. I find that a preoccupation with religious rituals tends to increase the more we remain untouched by Reality Itself—to which the best rituals can only point.  

Jesus himself commonly points to things like the red sky, a hen, lilies, the fig tree, a donkey caught in a pit, the birds of the air, the grass in the field, the Temple animals (which he released from their cages), and on and on. He was clearly looking at the seemingly “nonreligious” world, ordinary things all around him, and he appeared to do most of his teaching outside.  

In the five-day Men’s Rites of Passage that was a focus of my work for fifteen years, many men discovered that prayers and rituals inside of human-scale buildings made with artificial materials also came to seem very domesticated and controlled. They often perceived that the salvation offered there was also “small” and churchy. Almost without exception, the greatest breakthroughs for the men occurred during extended times of silence in nature, where the human and the merely verbal were not in control—or during rituals that were raw and earthy. 

Rediscovering Our Connection to Nature 

Monday, October 5, 2026

Father Richard Rohr considers how Christianity throughout history lost touch with the natural world as a place of grace and divine presence: 

The sacramental nature of the world was largely lost until its more recent rediscovery by seers that we usually think of as “secular,” “mere” nature mystics, poets, and artists: people like Chief Seattle, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Walt Whitman, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, and others. We Catholics ended up limiting “sacramentals” to things like religious medals, blessed candles, and holy water, instead of honoring the inherent holiness of the earth ores, beeswax, and water that actually formed them. Please think about that! [1]  

We limited the official church sacraments to seven (six for women, subtracting the sacrament of Holy Orders) when “there should be seven hundred,” as an old man once said to me in Tanzania. We ended up actually desacralizingGod’s world without realizing it. The people we called pagans and animists actually had a head start on us, because they at least saw the world as filled with spirits, whereas our world became empty, foreign, and without any natural balm for the soul. In the modern world, wild was always bad, and domesticated was always good. Yet C.S. Lewis said of God (in the character of the lion, Aslan), “He’s wild, you know!” Domesticated, of course, means subservient to us. We liked our world more than God’s world, it seems. 

For much of Christian history, we preached inside of a disenchanted, small, and lonely universe where there was no natural holiness or inherent goodness in anything non-human or non-Christian. I thought Jesus was “the Savior of the world” (John 4:42), not just human souls. We then tried to fill up the loneliness with books and ideas, since the world beneath us and above us had become boring, merely functional, and not subject to the predictability we wanted. 

We grasped for meaning in merely mental ways when it was all around us in tangible and visible ways. We failed to kiss the ground on which we stood and preferred to fly off into the heavens. “The first level of perception,” according to Bonaventure, “is toward exterior material objects,” and only when we see respectfully and lovingly at that level can we “ascend” to his second and third levels of full spiritual seeing. [2] Francis knew and taught that “God does not lose energy by plunging into form,” as Cynthia Bourgeault so forcefully puts it [3], and that true transcendence is to be found in immanence and materiality itself. What a surprise! 

Most of us were trained to be good Platonists, where body and soul are enemies, much more than Christian incarnationalists, where body and soul are friends. And where were we to experience this incarnation? Precisely everywhere and all the time, not just in places defined as sacred, special, churchy, or religious. That is why Paul could confidently tell us we could and should “pray always” (I Thessalonians 5:17). 

A Visit from Thérèse

Friday, October 2, 2026

Father Richard shares an experience he had while on pilgrimage to the convent where Thérèse of Lisieux lived:

Our small group of five visited the infirmary where Thérèse died. I stood nearest the window. I could see the black hole in the bushes that Thérèse likened to her own soul when she was in pain, dying of tuberculosis, and trying to believe that Jesus still loved her. The sister guiding our tour was telling us the story of Thérèse’s death when she suddenly paused and said, “We have a visitor!” The way she said it, we all got goose bumps!

We followed the sister’s gaze and saw by the window a beautiful orange and yellow butterfly. It was only April 3, way too early for butterflies in northern France. She said, “Let it out, let it out!” Since I was closest to the window, I tried to open the latch, but I didn’t understand how it worked and just kept struggling with it. All of a sudden, I felt as though I were levitating. I had to look down at my feet to make sure I was still on the ground. I was definitely standing there, but I felt such ecstatic feelings of presence, joy, love, and power. All the blood seemed to flow out of my head.

The sister could only see me from behind. She asked, “What’s wrong? Open the window. The butterfly wants out! The butterfly wants out!” I finally got the window open, and the butterfly flew away. I turned around and the others said my face was white. “What just happened?” I asked, even though I knew I had just been visited. I don’t know how else to say it: Thérèse was there.

Before she died, Thérèse promised to spend her heaven doing good on earth. [1] Whether we believe in miracles of the saints or not, it seems like everybody who loves Thérèse has some miraculous story. She gets involved in our lives. I think she is present in millions of lives. There is something beautiful happening through this woman who said she wanted to perfect “the science of love.” [2]

My own experience in her convent felt like an affirmation of what I truly believe and what has been a lot of my message. The little way is the spirituality of imperfection; we come to God not by doing it right, but by doing it wrong. It’s not a matter of doing great things. Whenever we act in conscious love, this is the little way. And I think whatever we do in conscious union and love is prayer. So many of our Catholic saints are examples of heroic martyrdom; the message they give is, “If I am perfect, then God will love me.” Because I was so programmed to think that way, I really needed to be released from that pursuit of perfection. Thank God both Thérèse and Francis of Assisi did that for me!  

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John Chaffee 5 On Friday

1.

“Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone.”

– Thomas Merton, Trappist Monk and Activist

This is an important thing to remember as someone who leans toward introversion.

Starting in college, I tried my hardest to be extraverted…  So much so that I ended up winning Homecoming King my senior year.  Goodness, that is wild to think about.  The problem was that it was not fully or truthfully who I was… but I didn’t know it then.

Following college was 20 years of working in church jobs that demanded a kind of extraversion or social mode of being.  I would leave events and feel utterly exhausted, oftentimes taking naps before waking up to get myself a dinner.

It was somewhere in the last 8 years when I realized that all of it was to teach me to have a healthy rhythm and balance between solitude and community.  When one is overdone to the exclusion of the other, we can get rather bent out of shape.

In some respects, I had to learn that my need for solitude was not a result of anti-social behavior while also learning that just being in front of crowds did not mean I necessarily had community.

If love is our true identity, then it can only be found after solitude shows me my true self, and that true self is seen and celebrated by a community (not a crowd) of other true selves who also wish to be seen and celebrated.

2.

“To be spiritual is to be a breathing being…the opposite of spiritual is not secular…it’s suffocation.”

– Padraig o Tauma, Irish Poet-Theologian

I had the good fortune of meeting Padraig a few years ago at St. Joseph’s University near Philly.  He was stateside doing poetry readings and it was delightful.

There is something about the arts that does a better job, in my opinion, than theo-logic at describing God/faith/the spiritual life/death/etc.  Poetry just seems to unlock something within me in a way that other disciplines do not.

3.

“By learning you will teach, by teaching you will understand.”

– Latin Proverb

Let’s be honest, many of us do not fully understand something until we accidentally find ourselves having to teach it.

Then,

The teaching itself unlocks different aspects of what we thought we learned and we come to understand it on a completely new level.

Now, I can say that I thought I understood Christianity but that is not the full picture.

However, after living enough of life and having to teach it in a classroom setting where students can push back, debate, or dialogue about it, I admit to have learned so very much by being a teacher of it.  Sure, giving sermons is good and fine but that is still in a monological mode of delivery (at least in white churches).

And, I do not doubt that there is still an infinite amount more for me to learn by teaching.  If anything, teaching has helped me in my own formation more than I can probably comprehend.

4.

“When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralyzed man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

– Mark 2:5

This story has shown itself to me a few times over the past two weeks and I do not know why.

There must be some alchemy, some teaching, some wisdom about it that is beckoning to be learned/integrated by some deeper level within myself.  After all, the stories that grip us, grip us for a reason.

The setting here in Mark 2 is that there is a paralytic who wants to be healed by Jesus, but there is a large crowd that is obscuring or blocking the way.  There is no statement that the paralytic man has faith at all, only that his friends have faith.  The friends then conspire to bust a hole in the ceiling and lower their friend down into the crowded room to where Jesus is.

In essence, someone who cannot help themselves is helped by those around him and Christ allows the one without faith to be the beneficiary of the others who do.

Honestly, this story walks all over the lines we commonly draw.

Perhaps that is why we chose to record this story for future generations after it happened.

5.

“The church of Christ ecumenically embraces the whole inhabited earth. She is not a tribal religion, nor a Western religion, nor a white religion, but the church of all humanity.”

– Jurgen Moltmann, German Theologian

Jurgen Moltmann passed away this week on June 3rd at 98 years old.  He is considered an important voice in the world of Christian theology.  Why?  Because he was one of the first theologians to seriously engage theology in the aftermath of WWII.

As a 16-year-old German, he was forcefully drafted into the German army in 1943 and became disillusioned with nationalism, violence, and war.  Then, he was kept as a POW for several years after the war during which he was gifted a copy of the New Testament.  This eventually paved the way for him to study Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others.

Jurgen Moltmann’s book The Crucified God shook me.  It takes up the topic of God in a way that continues to inspire me.  Moltmann’s thesis in that book was that God is not Aristotelian (omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent) in the way that we conventionally think.  No, that understanding of God is incompatible with Jesus, who suffered and was able to be affected by the world around him.

Rather than standing at an impassible and unchanging distance, the Christian God enters into pain, suffering, and death with the Creation.

In light of the concentration camps, brutalities of war, and the death toll of the Holocaust, Moltmann’s contribution to the world of theology was like a fresh breath of co-suffering love and hope.

This past week on the internet I have seen nothing but positive statements about this pastor-theologian, who seems to have been as quality of a person as was his contributions to theology.

If you have any chance today, look up The Crucified God, Theology of Hope, or The Church in the Power of the Spirit.  They are considered his most influential pieces.

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James Finley

Thérèse of Lisieux: The Way of Love

A Childlike Nature

Then children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them, but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” —Matthew 19:13–14

James Finley unpacks how Thérèse of Lisieux understood our calling to be like “little children”:

Thérèse entered the monastery at fifteen, and she began her novitiate a few months later, which means she took the habit of a cloistered Carmelite sister. She took the devotional name of Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face….

Thérèse’s emphasis on childhood and the child Jesus in her teaching doesn’t at all suggest that we’re not to mature into adults but rather see that there are certain childlike qualities that are the essence of spiritual maturity. How can we, as adults, cultivate these childlike qualities as a way to deepen our experience and response to God’s presence in our life?

Thérèse writes in her autobiography, “Jesus deigned to show me the road that leads to this Divine Furnace, and this road is the surrender of a little child who sleeps without fear in its father’s arms.” [1] She calls it a divine furnace—and other mystics speak this way as well—so that we imagine a red-hot stove. You put a drop of water on the stove and it vanishes. This is such a deep love and complete trust that all fear vanishes. We’re infinitely loved by God and held by God in an infinite love that completely and utterly transcends any source of fear, any source of sadness. The child is like an infant in complete trust and safety, sound asleep in the arms of God. We’re resting in the midst of a fear, in the midst of the sadness, but we’re grounded in this love that transcends the fear and transcends the sadness.

It’s our eternal destiny: an eternal oneness with the eternal love of God as the beloved. For Thérèse, the way we enter into this mystery experientially is to accept it. But we have to accept it as a small child accepts. It’s good for us to try to accept it, but as long as we’re trying to accept it, we’re not yet accepting the way a child accepts. When parents love their child, the child doesn’t try to accept that they’re loved. The child is loved because children are acts of acceptance in our midst. That’s what makes children so disarming, and it’s what makes child abuse so painful and deep….

It seems to me that the question in response to Thérèse’s teaching is: “How can we learn to go beyond trying to an act of acceptance?” I think this is why Thérèse’s spiritual path is called “the little way.” It’s not a big, overwhelming experience. It’s about calibrating our hearts to such subtlety that the sovereignty of this love is realized within us.

A Saint for the Masses

Thursday, October 1, 2026

Feast of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux

Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker, had a deep attachment to Thérèse of Lisieux for her “little way” to God, which was open to all, including people living in poverty. Day writes of Thérèse’s widespread appeal:

It was the “worker,” the common man, who first spread her fame by word of mouth. It was the masses who first proclaimed her a saint. It was the “people.” 

When we think of the masses, we think of waves of the sea, of forests, of fields of wheat, all moved by the spirit which blows where it listeth. When we think of the people, we think of the child at school, … the mother working, … the man traveling, the migrant worker, … the soldier, the rich, the bourgeois, the poor in tenements, the destitute man in the street. To a great extent she has made her appeal to all of these.

What was there about her to make such an appeal? Perhaps because she was so much like the rest of us in her ordinariness. In her lifetime there are no miracles recounted, she was just good….

It is the world itself which has canonized her, it is the common people who have taken her to their hearts.

Day describes why Thérèse’s “little way” is so important today:

[Therese] practiced the presence of God and she did all things—all the little things that make up our daily life and contact with others—for [God’s] honor and glory. She did not need much time to expound what she herself called “her little way,” which she said was for all. She wrote her story, and God did the rest. God and the people….

What stands out in her life? Her holiness of course, and the holiness of her entire family. That is not an ordinary thing in this day of post-war materialism [and] delinquency….

With governments becoming stronger and more centralized, the common [person] feels [their] ineffectiveness. When the whole world seems given over to preparedness for war and the show of force, the message of Therese is quite a different one.

She speaks to our condition. Is the atom a small thing? And yet what havoc it has wrought. Is her little way a small contribution to the life of the spirit? It has all the power of the spirit of Christianity behind it. It is an explosive force that can transform our lives and the life of the world, once put into effect….

One can state that this saint, of this day, is releasing a force, a spiritual force, upon the world to counteract that fear and that disaster. We know that one impulse of grace is of infinitely more power than a cobalt bomb. Therese has said, “All is grace.”

She declared, “I will spend my heaven doing good upon earth.” “I will raise up a mighty host of little saints.” “My mission is to make God loved, to make Love loved.”

________________________________________

Jesus Calling Sarah Young

I am your living God, far more abundantly alive than the most vivacious person you know. The human body is wonderfully crafted, but gravity and the inevitable effects of aging weigh it down. Even the most superb athlete cannot maintain his fitness over many decades. Lasting abundant life can be found in Me alone. Do not be anxious about the weakness of your body. Instead, view it as the prelude to My infusing energy into your being.
     As you identify more and more fully with Me. My Life becomes increasingly intertwined with yours. Though the process of aging continues, inwardly you grow strong with the passing years. Those who live close to Me develop an inner aliveness that makes them seem youthful in spite of their years. Let My Life shine through you, as you walk in the Light with Me.

Psalm 139:14 (NLT)
14 Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!
    Your workmanship is marvelous—how well I know it.

Additional insight regarding Psalms 139:13-15: God’s character goes into the creation of every person. When you feel worthless or even begin to hate yourself, remember that God’s Spirit is ready and willing to work within you. We should have as much respect for ourselves as our Maker has for us.

Colossians 1:29 (NLT)
29 That’s why I work and struggle so hard, depending on Christ’s mighty power that works within me.

Additional insight regarding Colossians 1:28,29: The word perfect (in 1:28)  means “mature or completed, not “flawless.” Paul wanted to see each believer mature spiritually. Like Paul, we must work wholeheartedly like an athlete, but we should not strive in our own strength alone. We have the power of God’s Spirit working in us. We can learn and grow daily, motivated by love and not by fear or pride, knowing that God gives the energy to become mature.

Additional insight regarding Colossians 1:28,29: Christ’s message is for everyone; so everywhere Paul and Timothy went, they brought the Good news to all who would listen. An effective presentation of the Good News includes warning and teaching. The warning is that without Christ, people are doomed to eternal separation from God. The teaching is that salvation is available through faith in Christ. As Christ works in you, tell others about him, warning and teaching them in love. Whom do you know that needs to hear this message?

1st John 1:7 (NLT)
7 But if we are living in the light, as God is in the light, then we have fellowship with each other, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, cleanses us from all sin.

Additional insight regarding 1st John 1:7: How does Jesus’ blood cleanse us from all sin? In Old Testament times, believers symbolically transferred their sins to an animal, which they then sacrificed (see a description of this ceremony in Leviticus 4). The animal died in their place to pay for their sins and allow them to continue living in God’s favor. God graciously forgave them because of their faith in him and because they obeyed his commandments concerning the sacrifice. Those sacrifices anticipated the day when Christ would completely remove sin. Real cleansing from sin came with Jesus, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Sin, by its very nature, brings death – this is a fact as certain as the laws of gravity. Jesus did not die for his own sins; he had none. Instead, by a transaction that we may never fully understand, he died for the sins of the world. When we commit our life to Christ and thus identify ourselves with him, his death becomes ours. He has paid the penalty for our sins and his blood has purified us. Just as Christ rose from the grave, we rise to a new life of fellowship with him (Romans 6:4 – “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”).

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Then children were being brought to him in order that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples spoke sternly to those who brought them, but Jesus said, “Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.” —Matthew 19:13–14 
 
James Finley unpacks how Thérèse of Lisieux understood our calling to be like “little children”:   

Thérèse entered the monastery at fifteen, and she began her novitiate a few months later, which means she took the habit of a cloistered Carmelite sister. She took the devotional name of Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face…. 

Thérèse’s emphasis on childhood and the child Jesus in her teaching doesn’t at all suggest that we’re not to mature into adults but rather see that there are certain childlike qualities that are the essence of spiritual maturity. How can we, as adults, cultivate these childlike qualities as a way to deepen our experience and response to God’s presence in our life? 

Thérèse writes in her autobiography, “Jesus deigned to show me the road that leads to this Divine Furnace, and this road is the surrender of a little child who sleeps without fear in its father’s arms.” [1] She calls it a divine furnace—and other mystics speak this way as well—so that we imagine a red-hot stove. You put a drop of water on the stove and it vanishes. This is such a deep love and complete trust that all fear vanishes. We’re infinitely loved by God and held by God in an infinite love that completely and utterly transcends any source of fear, any source of sadness. The child is like an infant in complete trust and safety, sound asleep in the arms of God. We’re resting in the midst of a fear, in the midst of the sadness, but we’re grounded in this love that transcends the fear and transcends the sadness. 

It’s our eternal destiny: an eternal oneness with the eternal love of God as the beloved. For Thérèse, the way we enter into this mystery experientially is to accept it. But we have to accept it as a small child accepts. It’s good for us to try to accept it, but as long as we’re trying to accept it, we’re not yet accepting the way a child accepts. When parents love their child, the child doesn’t try to accept that they’re loved. The child is loved because children are acts of acceptance in our midst. That’s what makes children so disarming, and it’s what makes child abuse so painful and deep…. 
 
It seems to me that the question in response to Thérèse’s teaching is: “How can we learn to go beyond trying to an act of acceptance?” I think this is why Thérèse’s spiritual path is called “the little way.” It’s not a big, overwhelming experience. It’s about calibrating our hearts to such subtlety that the sovereignty of this love is realized within us.

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“I can’t forgive myself.” – Bradley Jersak

Letter to a Condemning Conscience

BRADLEY JERSAK SEP 30

A friend wrote to me, suffering under the crushing weight of a condemning conscience. Assessing the harm done to loved ones can make self-forgiveness seem impossible to the point of perilous. I know that cliff, but I’ve also had really good help through those deep valley. 

The Crushing Weight of Guilt 

I have never found self-forgiveness easy. And when we’ve done harm to others, it probably isn’t meant to be. Not if we are able to hear the impact of our actions and the ripple effects they cause. An honest look in the mirror can sting, but in isolation (“just me and Jesus”), can also become deeply unhealthy. Personally, I have struggled with stuckness, blind spots, mismanaged apologies, and the need to hear God’s forgiveness through the voice and love of another human being. 

The Christian tradition of confession comes from James 5, where we read, “Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.”

“…confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”

—James 5:16

The question then becomes, “If Jesus forgave us, then why confess sin at all?” Some take this to the extreme, even claiming that we should not pray the Lord’s Prayer asking Jesus to forgive us, as if all of Jesus’ teachings are still Old Covenant. Nope.

When we pray the Lord’s prayer, we ask to be forgiven by the One who forgave us already so that we enter the experience of what is already true… so that we “let forgiveness in” to cleanse us from the debilitating weight of guilt and shame.

Similarly, why does Paul say, “You have been reconciled” (already)… but then “therefore, be reconciled” (now)? Same idea: Paul wants us to live into the truth so that it becomes our experience and changes our perspective and our lives.

But there is also the problem of radical individualism—aka alienation. We discover that despite knowing these verses, we have trouble overcoming guilt and shame on our own. We don’t forgive ourselves very well and we get stuck, and very often, even sick. Sometimes, we need to express our wrongdoing to another person and hear from them that we are forgiven. 

Confession

That said, when confessing my faults to others, I discovered the hard way that not everyone is reliable at remaining confidential. Or they don’t listen well. OR they slip into fix-it mode. Or they deepen the shame. It happens.

At some point, the people of God recognized that some have the gift of the Holy Spirit to listen without judgement, to reassure us of Christ’s forgiveness, and to call us back into communion with God. They became what we called “confessors.” It’s troubling how many who take that role are inept or abusive. 

But there are others—spiritual directors, counsellors, therapists, and recovery sponsors who practice forms of confidential confession so that God’s forgiveness is felt deeply enough to heal us.

My Confessors

Some of my convictions about healthy confession grew through the seven years of weekly confession I did with Bishop Varlaam (of blessed memory). When I went to him, he NEVER ever started by interrogating my sin. He would always ask, “What’s troubling you?” What frequently “troubled” me were the accusations of my conscience about my sin. 

But with Varlaam, the goal of confession was always to remind me that the good news of Jesus is that I don’t need to go run and hide like Adam. He would urge me to return as quickly as possible into Jesus’ presence to share what’s bothering me, to hear again that I’m forgiven, to remind me to make amends where necessary, and to proceed to communion with a clean conscience. 

It was always a very tender conversation, focussed specifically on “what’s troubling me,” which is to say the anxiety of being alienated and condemned, not by God, but by the judgments of our conscience. Having a conscience is a good thing. It is meant to function as an inner prophet (like Nathan to David) that identifies our need for healing mercy. But the conscience can also slip and get carried away by ego into judgment and condemnation. 

In confession, Jesus then comes with the good news of forgiveness to and the mediator between us in our conscience.

After checking on any amends I needed to make to others, Bishop Varlaam used to always say, 

“I am a man just like you and I have no power to forgive sins, but with the boldness we have been given because the Lord said, ‘Whatever sins you remit are remitted,” I remind you: you ARE forgiven. Rise in peace.”

Letting Go of Judgment

Based on the above, I wrote my friend (but maybe you, too),

… Of course God forgives us, but forgiving ourselves is harder, especially when we think of those we’ve harmed. But even there, I hope you will allow Christ to bear the burden of that guilt and release those you love into his loving, caregiving arms (picture it). Your well-being is what matters most to them. The rest is details.

I remember the first time I ever went to confession, what really bothered me that day was that despite all my missteps and failings, I was still so judgy of others. And I said this. My confessor replied:

“And who have you judged more than yourself? But as the Apostle said, ‘Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master they will stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.’” (Romans 14:4). 

Somehow, at least for a moment, I felt liberated … and I realized that the accuser was my own conscience, acting above its pay-grade, dethroning Christ from the judgment seat. 

I saw that Christ alone is qualified to judge because he alone can be trusted to deliver the verdict of mercy.

So here’s a message for you today: “You will stand, for the Lord is able to make you stand.”

The Conscience as Mercy’s Emissary

But I thought, then what is my conscience for? How can my conscious act in spiritually, mentally, and emotionally healthy ways? Isn’t that its role? To judge me?

Again, Bp. Varlaam to the rescue: he taught me that when I stumble, I am so prone to shame, and I often run and hide like Adam did. But that only amplifies the shame and I alienate myself. “Instead,” he said, 

“… as quickly as you can, come back into the presence of Infinite Mercy… 
even a ‘Lord, have mercy’ or the Lord’s prayer will do.”

So rather than condemning me, my conscience gets an upgrade, a promotion: it becomes an emissary for the all-merciful One, not to condemn me, but to invite me (ever the prodigal) back to belonging and dignity in the Father’s house. That’s its role.

So it is for you. I’m calling your conscience to serve God by inviting you (again and again) into the warm embrace of the Father who is always for you, always toward you, always running your way … even when a long way off. 

Maybe it’s less about psyching yourself up to forgiving yourself so much as surrendering your regrets to the care of the Forgiver and another human being. 

Hint: that surrender is letting go, which is the essence of self-forgiveness. 

Much love,

Bradley

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The two classic questions about today’s material:
1. What do you want me to know &

2. What do you want me to do

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

The author Gina Loehr describes how God’s love empowered Thérèse of Lisieux to embrace the fullness of her own humanity and that of others: 

Thérèse’s teachings were never scholarly or academic; they were simply the insights she gained through prayerful reflection on her personal experiences.  

Thérèse’s understanding of the significance of love, for example, grew in part out of her experience of longing to do everything for Christ. She had felt the yearning not only to be a Carmelite, a spouse, and a spiritual mother but also to be a missionary, a warrior, a priest, an apostle, a martyr, a crusader, and a papal guard, among other things. In reflecting on the various parts that make up the body of Christ, Thérèse saw herself in all of them. But Thérèse came to an important realization when reflecting on First Corinthians 13, which explains that all the greatest gifts are nothing without love. This led Thérèse to understand that love enabled the apostles to preach and the martyrs to make their great sacrifices. Love kept the body of Christ alive in the world. She wrote in her autobiography, “I understood that love comprised all vocations, that love was everything, that it embraced all times and places…. In a word, that it was eternal!” [1]  

Saint Thérèse embraced the truth that loving Jesus is the goal of life and our most important task. She said, “There is but one thing for us to do … and that is to love, to love Jesus with all the energy of our heart.” [2] Her love for Jesus, though deeply passionate, was not purely emotional. It was fundamentally a choice, a response to his love for her…. Hers was an authentic love, not a fanciful illusion, and thus it brought her deep contentment.   

For Thérèse, love of God and love of the other is of one piece:  

From her youth Thérèse loved Jesus with her whole heart, and she never regretted it. In addition to bringing her personal consolation, this love helped her grow in her relationships with others. She understood that when we give ourselves to God, our hearts don’t lose their natural tenderness, rather that tenderness increases as our hearts become purer and more divine. Thérèse wrote, “In loving Him the heart expands and can give to those who are dear to it incomparably more tenderness than if it had concentrated upon one egotistical and unfruitful love.” [3]  

Loving God enriches not only our experience of human love but also our experience of life. Thérèse was able to see the gifts of her Beloved surrounding her. She was passionately engaged in life. She loved to explore nature and absorb the beauties of creation…. The love overflowing from her heart spilled out in her many poems and plays. Her love for God energized her daily life. She lived as a woman in love: joyful, enthusiastic, smiling.

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Wholeness in a Time of Hypocrisy

What If We Took What Jesus Said and Who Jesus Loved Seriously? 

CHUCK DEGROAT. SEP 27

“Let love be without hypocrisy.” — Romans 12:9

It’s a bit surreal sharing musings from my new book on character formation in a season of non-stop political advertisements. 

I was thinking about this just the other day, reminded again of how we who call ourselves followers of the crucified Lamb miss the point over and over again. I posted this in various social media spaces: 

When people ask me when Christianity’s cozy relationship with narcissistic leadership began, I sometimes sense they’re looking for a recent moment, like the rise of the megachurch, the prosperity gospel, or the advent of social media and digital celebrity. 

History tells a much longer and more troubling story—that we who call ourselves Christian must reckon not only with elevating malignant narcissists into offices that demand integrity, but that we need to reckon with Manifest Destiny, Jim Crow, and the Doctrine of Discovery, that we need to reckon with the Crusades and “Deus vult” (God wills it), that we need to reckon with imperial power and “en toutō nika” (under the sign of the Cross, conquer). 

Reckoning with narcissism and abuse in the church and in our wider culture isn’t about pointing to a few bad apples. It’s about seeing the hollowed-out tree, the root rot, and the putrid soil. 

And, perhaps it’s also about eyes that can once again see the beauty of the way of the Lamb, who did not clamor after power, but became the forgiving victim.

Time and again, we choose power over humility and hypocrisy over wholeness.

Time and again, we heap shame on the the stranger, the widow, and the orphan—the biblical triad which speaks to those most vulnerable to exclusion—alongside the people Jesus so often drew near to—the poor, the socially disgraced, even those marked by sexual shame. 

And time and again, we strain gnats while we’re swallowing camels (Matt. 23:24), failing to see that our elevation of those Jesus repeatedly calls “hypocrites” is far more grievous to the heart of God (see the entire Sermon on the Mount) than just about anything else. 

I think often of the blind guides of Isaiah 56 who only look out for themselves. Scripture has plenty to say about leaders whose hearts are divided. 

We’ve strayed far from Psalm 139’s “Search me and know me, O God.” We’ve strayed far from Jesus’s call to flourishing as wholeness (see the Beatitudes). We’ve strayed far from love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). 

We crave power and the preservation of power—at all costs. We elevate, quite literally, the “play actor,” called “hypocrite” as many as 30 times across the New Testament, 18 times by Jesus. Hypocrite—the one whose life is not whole. 

When I wrote my third book Wholeheartedness back in 2016, I quoted the theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who courageously faced the rising fascism of his day, particularly saddened that a vast majority of church leaders either supported or were quietly complicit with Hitler’s agenda. Yet, while imprisoned by those whose ideology represented a grievous departure from the way of Jesus, he was struck by his own contradictions: 

Who am I? This or the other?

Am I one person today and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,

And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? 

His humility strikes me. It’s easy to point the finger. But we’re invited to do our own soul searching. 

We are in a season of massive reckoning within our culture and church. A parade of play actors march before us, in political ads and offices, in pulpits, and various platforms. And if we’re honest, the hypocrite lives within us too. 

Do we crave power more than we long for humility? 

Are we excusing hypocrisy at the expense of wholeness? 

Might we be casting out the very people Jesus loves and elevating the very ones he critiques? 

These days as I’m seeing political ad after political ad, I’m prone to mutter a “Lord, have mercy” or a “How Long, O Lord?” It’s wearying. As I said in that post, narcissism and abuse in the church and in our wider culture isn’t about pointing to a few bad apples. It’s about seeing the hollowed-out tree, the root rot, and the putrid soil. In other words, the leaders we choose don’t come out of nowhere—they’re formed, and it’s time to interrogate that formation along with the systems that produce bad fruit. 

But I’m also offering another prayer: “Search me and know me, O Lord.” Because, the deep reformation of life and character we long for really does begin with each of us. 

Who You’re Becoming: The Slow and Courageous Work of Character Change in a Narcissistic Age comes out October 20.

Sunday, September 27, 2026

On the CAC’s Turning to the Mystics podcast, Father Richard Rohr reflects on his first encounter with the writings of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) as a young man:  

When I entered seminary in the years just before Vatican II, many of my professors were very legalistic. What else could they be when that’s all our religion had given us? But I picked up a very small book about Thérèse of Lisieux, a young, French Carmelite nun, by a Carmelite priest named Pere Liagre. He summarized her teachings so simply and so well! Now remember, I’m nineteen years old and I’m looking for inspiration and guidance. When I closed the book, I thought, “This is not what my professors are saying. This changes everything!” In Thérèse’s time, there was a heresy called Jansenism that led to perfectionism and severe legalism, which did untold damage to the spirituality of the French church. Thérèse came along and broadsides it without even trying to. She was just being guided by love. This young French woman with calm inner authority said, “You know what? The legalism and negativity aren’t true.” Thérèse taught that “Jesus does not demand great actions from us but simply surrender and gratitude.” [1] 

It was her underlying spirituality, complemented by Francis of Assisi and Franciscanism, that got me through the seminary. It wasn’t the academic teaching I was being given by the professors, which was still tainted with legalism, and where the unspoken premise was basically, “If you’re perfect, if you do it right, God will love you.” That was the underlying assumption, and it was—and still is—utterly false. I guess I trusted Thérèse because what she wrote felt like common sense to me. Most of my confessors were legalists, and I would just quietly think to myself, “Okay, they’re going to say that, but I know it’s not true.” 

It was an important antidote to my own inclination to perfectionism as a “one” on the Enneagram (although I didn’t have the language for it at the time). We “one’s” set a standard of perfection by our own self-centered definition, and so we’re always defeated. We define the rules and then we can’t live up to them. Thérèse is the best counterweight to any theology or spirituality of perfectionism. She was my liberation. I just didn’t believe in it anymore. It simply wasn’t true.  

In her autobiography Story of a Soul, Thérèse tells a story of standing at the bottom of the staircase and lifting her little foot, trying to reach heaven. She pictures God as Father standing at the top of the staircase, beckoning “Come on, come on, come on.” Her leg is so tiny, and it can’t even reach the first step—but she keeps trying like a toddler would, and then at a certain point, God runs down the steps and carries her up like a divine elevator. At nineteen, that became my first intimation of a good, serious metaphor for how grace works. All God needs is our desire, then God does all the rest.

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The Beauty of a Little Flower

Monday, September 28, 2026

Jesus set before me the book of nature; I understood how all the flowers [God] has created are beautiful, how the splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet or the delightful simplicity of the daisy…. If all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked out with wildflowers. And so it is in the world of souls.  
—Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul 

On the CAC’s Turning to the Mystics podcast, James Finley describes how Thérèse of Lisieux embraced ordinariness, the beauty of the little flower, as a path to God: 

Thérèse was not an ecstatic mystic. It’s almost as if she was so deep in the divinity of the intimacy of ordinariness itself—with such clarity—that it makes her extraordinary. That’s what makes her accessible to us. Because we’re ordinary. How can we find God’s oneness with us in the midst of the ordinariness of ourselves? I think that’s why she touches us so. [1] 

Thérèse sees herself in some way as a little flower growing in God’s garden, which is why she’s sometimes called the Little Flower. She says that there is glory in the rose and the orchid and all of that, but imagine a field filled with wildflowers in the springtime—thousands and thousands of flowers, and that God knows the littleness of each one and is personally loving each one into existence. Furthermore, God knows what that little flower is and the intricacy of its design, like the subtle scent of the violet. God eternally knows the violet to be hidden with Christ in God forever, so God is eternally contemplating the little flower in God. God is completely presencing Godself in the little flower. 

Now, let’s say there is a mountain and you’re holding a grain of sand in your hand and comparing it to the mountain. The mountain is so immense and the grain of sand is so tiny; but since God cannot be diminished in any way whatsoever, the infinite presence of God is presencing itself in your hand through that little grain of sand, as much as in the mountain. Like the mountain, it is nothing without God. We don’t see this in ego consciousness, but in meditative prayer states we can sense the incomprehensible stature of the simplicity of things. We’re the simple soul, but the stature of our simplicity is divine because we’re God’s beloved. 

I think Thérèse lived in this kind of luminosity, this gentle glow. She was not an ecstatic mystic having visions, but it’s like the divinity of the simplicity of herself that she so graciously shares with us invites us into the graciousness of our own simplicity. Thérèse is stunning by the radicality of her simplicity, which brings us to the radicality and the divinity of our simplicity and how we are to live by it and to walk in it day by day.

God of Love, Act of Faith

Friday, September 25, 2026

The spiritual life keeps us aware that our true house is not the house of fear, in which the power of hatred and violence rule, but the house of love, where God resides.
—Henri Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons

Activists Ken Butigan and Patricia Bruno understand faith to be the center of all healing works of nonviolence:

We live in the midst of a system of violence… Shall we go along with its degrading destructiveness? Shall we become violent ourselves? In the face of this violence, we are invited to enflesh God’s longing for a world in which both the woundedness and sacredness of every person is revered….

The transforming power of nonviolence begins and ends with the presence of God. It is this presence which breaks the spiral of violence. It is this presence that heals and unifies what has been separated and broken…. The spirit of our unifying God is present when conflict is resolved, when the script of violence is re-written to embrace the sacredness of all parties, and when creativity is used to break the spiral of retaliation.

The God of Love is our ultimate reality. God’s love is endlessly poured out upon us, vivifying and transforming us. Aware of this, Christian nonviolence challenges the violence system’s overt and covert claim that it is life’s bottom line and that even God is subject to the logic of violence. Christian nonviolence actively resists this belief as idolatry. God is not bound by the violence system. God’s love is able to break every chain, to transform every form of domination or injury, to heal every separation and fragmentation. God, not violence, is the beginning and end of all that is.

Nonviolence is a vocation to which Christians are called:

Our vocation as Christians is to respond to God’s call to join in the divine dance of compassionate and nonviolent love, collaborating with God’s healing power to fashion the conditions for true peace. In this spirit, we are called to a ministry of active nonviolence in our homes, in our work-places, in our churches, in the streets, in the larger world, and in our own selves. This means that nonviolence is not simply a tool or a tactic. It is a spiritual journey that, with God’s love, overturns the violence system in our own lives and in the life of the world….

To engage in active nonviolence is both an act of faith in the God of Love and a way of experiencing the God of Love.

Reference:
“Seven Principles of Christian Nonviolence” in From Violence to Wholeness, Ken Butigan with Patricia Bruno eds. (Pace e Bene Franciscan Nonviolence Center, 1999), 46–47.

Image credit and inspiration: Richard Bell, untitled (detail), 2022, photo. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a wall bearing color instead of division, we practice a love that reaches toward the other, refusing to choose a single side.

1.

“No one can have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother.”

– St. Cyprian, 3rd-Century Bishop in North Africa

This is an old one.

You may have heard the question, “Can you be a Christian alone on an island?”

The right answer is this: “Of course you can, but why would you want to?”

A major aspect of the Christian faith is community, of being part of a collective that loves you personally and in which you can love others.  We all need people who can help give witness to our lives with us.  For the early Patristics, this community is known as the Church.

Note: I am not saying the Institution that might call itself the “Church.”

Years ago, when I worked on a church staff, I felt a strange nuance in all our staff meetings.    We would talk about what was “good for the Church,” and I often disagreed.  It really bothered me that I disagreed so much or hit pushback, until I realized that sometimes we were talking about what might “help our people to grow,” and other times we actually meant what might “help the 503c non-profit to stay open.”

Over the years, I came to realize that the church building is simply the location where Church might happen, but that doesn’t guarantee Church will always happen.  There have been many times when I swung in hammocks with friends, talking about life, faith, and struggles, that felt more like “Church” than sitting in pews.  After all, Christ is present wherever two or three are gathered in his name, right?

So when you read this quote, don’t think it necessarily means that if God is your Father, you must have the Institution as your Mother.  Rather, I think it means we each need a community (even if unofficial) of other believers we can depend on, celebrate with, and bear witness to one another’s lives before this mystery we call “God.”

2.

“Noticing helps you realize that your life is already suffused with the presence of God. Once you begin to look around and allow yourself to take a chance to believe in God, you will easily see God at work in your life.”

– Fr. James Martin, Jesuit Priest

Theologians might disagree, but I think it is true… We each will see more of God in our lives if we simply choose to notice God more often.

Think of how often we decide God is not present and (unsurprisingly) don’t see God working.

I guess it can be a self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecy, huh?

3.

“God is at home; it’s we who have gone out for a walk.”

– Meister Eckhart, 13th-CenturyGerman Preacher

It would have been an interesting experience to have Meister Eckhart as your local preacher.

He was poetic, paradoxical, and mystical, and he was likely so far developed in his faith that he had to find creative ways to share his insights.  In fact, he often would invent new words in German to help his congregation understand what he was trying to get across.

His teachings were so advanced that he was eventually censored and sent to Rome for an inspection of his teachings to determine whether he was teaching heresy.  Unfortunately, he died of an illness while traveling for that very tribunal or court hearing.  He then sat in an almost purgatorial limbo between being orthodox and a heretic until, in recent years, it was declared that he was, in fact, not a heretic.

For Eckhart, God is always home and always our home, but we have left ourselves and become strangers to God.  The solution, then, is to come home to ourselves and rediscover the fact that God has always been with us.

4.

“When something dies is the greatest teaching.”

– D.T. Suzuki, Zen Master

The liminal spaces between things always teach us the most.

When a relationship ends, a job falls apart, an opportunity disappears, or someone dies, we’re also in the most fertile ground for learning.

In fact, some people theorize that we can ONLY change, grow, and learn in those liminal spaces.

This is probably why we prefer things to be static, unchanging, and consistent.  It takes serious work to keep moving through life’s unknowns.

This reminds me of Richard Rohr’s book, Falling Upward, which reminds us of the ancient spiritual truth that “the way down is up.”  In theological terms, we might call this having a “theology of the cross.”  Through mistakes, failures, diminishments, losses, deaths, relapses, and so forth, we learn the most and are best able to make corrections, succeed, grow, gain, and live.

Perhaps we just need to let things fall apart that need to, so we can glean what we need from the experience and move on.

5.

“The foundation of philosophy [wisdom] is not the setting forth of clever words, but the ordering of life.”

– St. John Chrysostom, 4th-Century Bishop of Constantinople

A life well-lived is its own proof and sermon.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

Thursday, September 24, 2026

Father Richard Rohr explains that so-called “redemptive violence” usually only perpetuates the cycles of violence Jesus came to stop:

Jesus has no part in any “myth of redemptive violence,” as some have called it, even though redemptive violence is the primary storyline of history, and even of much of the Bible (conquering the promised land, the wars of the kings of Israel, and the acts of Saul, David, Herod, and the like). Jesus’s story, instead, becomes a pattern of redemptive forgiveness. 

Jesus’s life and teaching are starkly opposed to that perennial, universal mistake that is probably happening every three minutes in most human minds and hearts: the instinct to destroy what we perceive as the source of the problem. In that sense, he really is the “Savior of the World” (John 4:42), because that violence is the world’s primary agenda, which he unmasks and then resolves with a quite different agenda. If we do not learn this, it is hard to believe there is much future for our world.

To oppose violence, he has to diminish the very things that people tend to absolutize, because our absolutes are normally what we use to justify our violence. This is especially true when it comes to group identity. Jesus speaks critically against his own group whenever they try to use his message for oppositional thinking or group arrogance, or to justify violence. How different Christian history would have been had we listened to him!

This is Jesus’s simple message: Holiness is no longer to be found through separation or exclusion, but through the radical inclusion and forgiveness of the supposedly contaminating element. Any exclusionary system only lays the solid foundation for violence in thought, word, and deed. So, he has to lead us on a new path of forgiveness, inclusion, and sacrifice of our self-identity.

What Leviticus 16–27 describes as the “law of holiness”—separation from sinful people, the rejection of certain actions and things—is turned around in Jesus so that the very acts of separation, superiority, and rejection are in fact the sins! 

I believe Jesus is teaching us that if we put our energy into choosing the good—instead of the negative and largely illusionary energy of rejecting the bad—we will overcome evil in a much better way and will not become evil ourselves. This is exactly what he does on the cross, and I believe it is at the heart of his message. At our center in New Mexico, we have taken it as one of our central axioms that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” 

More than anything else, this is how Jesus reformed the laws of religion and undercut the basis for all violent, exclusionary, and punitive behavior. He became the forgiving victim so we would stop creating victims ourselves. He became the falsely accused one so we would be careful whom we accuse. 

Reference:
Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan Media, 2022), 161, 162, 163–164.

Image credit and inspiration: Richard Bell, untitled (detail), 2022, photo. Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Like a wall bearing color instead of division, we practice a love that reaches toward the other, refusing to choose a single side.

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By MAXELCAT | Published: FEBRUARY 5, 2015

Gregory on divine grace and the human response

According to Burns, Gregory believed that salvation was universal because the entire human race was required to make up the divine image of God. If all people received the divine image, then if any are missing he thought that the whole image could not be ‘re-presented.’[49]  In one of his commentaries Gregory underlines this by saying ‘God will be all in all, and all persons will be untied together in fellowship of the Good, Christ Jesus our Lord.’[50]

Gregory, in his Great Catechism speaks of Christ identifying with fallen humans saying that he had ‘in mind to share our human condition’ which here refers to the boundaries of birth and death that all of us pass through.[51]

Gregory saw the two processes of purification and growth within salvation. Purification of the body was only fully achieved at the resurrection and worked by the grace of God through Christ.[52] In baptism a person ‘symbolically anticipates death and resurrection in Christ, and commits himself to free his soul from vice and passion.’[53] This implies that a person can indeed cleanse his soul from the effects of sin, and enable the ‘soul’s beauty [to] again appear.’[54]

For Reflection:

From Google AI

The Interconnected Divine Image: Gregory argues that the “divine image” is only complete when every human being is included. If salvation requires the entire human race to “re-present” God’s image, how does this change how you view your personal connection to people outside your immediate community or faith tradition?

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

Father Richard reminds us that embodying nonviolence requires facing the structures of violence in our culture, church, and world: 

I think corporate evil can only be opposed by corporate good. We cannot look the other way when it comes to systems and structures of violence. While we have collectively grown in our consciousness of the need for protest, to oppose injustice, and to make our voices heard, as individuals, we often still feel helpless against the mammoth evils we’re facing today. That explains the psychic numbing that so many people experience. It may appear passive, but it is often paralysis—the result not of bad will as much as simply not knowing what to do. 

I worked a lot in German-speaking countries where people are aware that their bishops failed to stand up to Hitler. The bishops responded with appeasement, believing they had to protect the institution. They feared the Nazis would persecute the church, even though Jesus promised exactly that: persecution! We seem to have assumed that the individual must live the gospel but that the corporate church doesn’t have to. We Christians expected individuals to be poor while the institution remained rich. This cannot be right. We have to live the gospel not just individually but institutionally, socially, and corporately. 

Having traveled and taught in many countries, I have learned to recognize many of the beautiful aspects of the United States. We have historically enjoyed many privileges in terms of freedom, education, and resources. Yet I have also seen America’s shadow side, particularly our insistence on individuality. If our prayer journey does not lead us to a collective sense of servanthood and responsibility for the world, I think we will have failed in our willingness to deal with the violence of the world. I think the violence will continue as long as much of the world views us as a part of an oppressive system. In many respects, they’re not wrong! Only one thing is more difficult to deal with than the individual ego, and that’s the corporate ego, which is usually more disguised, protected, and denied. Unless we’re willing to face it, we will continue to participate in cycles of anger, hatred, and violence rather than healing and justice. [1]  

Richard ties our acceptance of violence to the belief that Jesus’s violent death was necessary for God to forgive us:  

Our commonly accepted atonement theory—especially as accomplished through the life, suffering, and death of Jesus—reaffirmed our narrow notion of retributive justice and legitimated a notion of “good and necessary violence” all the way down. As long as we employ any retributive notion of God’s justice, we trade our distinctive Christian message for the cold, hard justice that has prevailed in most cultures throughout history. We offer no redemptive alternative to history but actually sanctify the very “powers and principalities” that Paul says unduly control the world (Ephesians 3:9–10, 6:12). We stay inside of what some call the “myth of redemptive violence,” which might just be the dominant story line of history. [2]

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Message from a Vicarious Father,

Some of you don’t have a father anymore.
Some of you never knew your father.
Some of you wish you hadn’t known your father.
Some of you had cruel fathers, sick fathers,
busy fathers, unfaithful fathers.

But what is almost certain is that 
all of us have father wounds.

I know I do (and have done some work).
I know my kids do (and have done some work).

Some experience repentance, forgiveness or reconciliation
with their fathers, with themselves, or with their fathers
in this life.

Many don’t. Many can’t.

Nevertheless,
for those whose fathers have never said it but should have,
I have two things to say
as a dad with my own wounds,
as a dad who has inflicted wounds.

I didn’t earn the right to say this.

Nevertheless,
you may need to hear it.

First, for the wounds inflicted…
in knowledge or in ignorance
through actions or neglect
through roars or through silence
directly or indirectly
through shame or violence or betrayal
to you or your siblings or your mother
subtle or overt
and for all the ways a father can fail
to be a father…
for the wounds inflicted,
for the 10,000 paper cuts and the deepest gouges,
for the toxins infused so deeply they feel like they’re you,
for the moral stumbling blocks and emotional land mines inherited,

I am sorry. 
I cannot fix you.
But I can say that I’m so, so sorry.
It should never have happened.
But it did. 
Lord, have mercy.

And if your own father can never say these words,
or even feel them in his heart,
or make amends,
or repair what’s broken,
I am sorry. Truly sorry.

I hope reading those offers some measure of solace.
And maybe some safe, healthy father you know and trust
would be willing to read this message aloud to you, even vicariously.
I hope you’ll find that father and let him.

Second, for those whose ears have never heard these words,
whose hearts have never felt them,
I want you to know that 
I’m proud of you.

And the heavenly Father who is safe and kind and gentle,
who is unlike the father images who wounded us, 
who has endured the scorn of seeing the word “father” tainted
and become a trigger…
the Father who is “especially fond to you”
and would come to you as The Shack’s black female “Papa”
the One Who sees your life from conception to completion—
that One deeply loves you today, 
as you are.

Not in a way you need to earn it
or need to account for the ‘why.’

Just because.

For all those times when you waited anxiously 
to hear those words
or despaired because you knew you never would,

I am telling you now
because it’s okay to let go
(or begin to let go)
of the burden of guilt or shame or grief
of your father wounds.

You can stop holding your breath now.
It’s okay to inhale and to sigh
and inhale again and again
to receive a Father’s blessing.

You can look up. 
Make eye contact.
In my spirit, I see you.
And I’m proud of you.