A Deeper Way of Love

CAC faculty member Brian McLaren describes how Jesus centers love as the path for us to follow:  

Of the many radical things said and done by Jesus, his unflinching emphasis on love was most radical of all. Love was the greatest commandment, … his prime directive—love for God, for self, for neighbor, for stranger, for alien, for outsider, for outcast, and even for enemy, as he himself modeled. The new commandment of love [John 13:34] meant that neither beliefs nor words, neither taboos, systems, structures nor the labels that enshrined them mattered most. Love decentered everything else; love relativized everything else; love took priority over everything else—everything. [1]

Theologian Norman Wirzba finds inspiration in the story of Óscar Romero’s conversion to deeper love:  

What love requires from us and how our hearts need to be transformed are movingly illustrated in the life of Oscar Romero [1917–1980], the former archbishop of San Salvador. Romero came to this realization about the personally transforming nature of love in a profound but costly way…. In his role as priest and then bishop, he assumed that the ways of God were in fairly close alignment with the priorities of the Roman [Catholic] magisterium and the Salvadoran government. For him, at this time, Jesus was not a revolutionary figure. Romero saw in Jesus someone who could be used to defend his country’s status quo…. 

It was by opening himself to the love of God expressed by the common people that Romero found the courage to change and align himself with love. He decided to live in solidarity with the poor and learn from them the ways of love and the ways of God. Poor people, rather than professors, would now be his teachers….  

In the sermon just preached [minutes before his assassination], Romero had said that Christ’s gospel teaches that: 

One must not love oneself so much as to avoid getting involved in the risks of life that history demands of us, and that those who try to fend off the danger will lose their lives, while those who out of love for Christ give themselves to the service of others will live, like the grain of wheat that dies, but only apparently. If it did not die, it would remain alone. The harvest comes about only because it dies, allowing itself to be sacrificed in the earth and destroyed. Only by undoing itself does it produce the harvest [see John 12:24]. [2] 

As Romero had come to see, love does not allow people to flee or shield themselves from the pain or the troubles of this life. Genuine lovers move deeply into the life-and-death dramas of this world, like a plant that sinks roots deep into fertile soil, and there give themselves wholly to the flourishing of life. To withhold oneself from love is to withhold oneself from participating in a complete life.…

Love is the outbound movement that trains people to heal injustice and kindly embrace the world. [3]

References:  

[1] Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World’s Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian (New York: Convergent Books, 2016), 42.

[2] Óscar Romero, homily, March 24, 1980, in Voice of the Voiceless: The Four Pastoral Letters and Other Statements, by Óscar Romero, trans. Michael J. Walsh, anniversary ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1985, 2020), 209–210.

[3] Norman Wirzba, Way of Love: Recovering the Heart of Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2016), 4–5, 6, 7.

Image credit: A path from one week to the next—Benjamin Yazza, Untitled 6. Jenna Keiper, Taos Snow. Benjamin Yazza, Untitled 2. Used with permission. Click here to enlarge image.

Like ever-changing light in snow, we open to surprises on the way of Jesus.

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Story from Our Community:

I came to prayer and spirituality after a difficult time in my life. At first, the process of prayer was awkward and foreign to me, but I kept at it. Not clear what direction to take, each morning, I prayed for God to show me the way. One morning, I awoke from a dream with Philippians 2:5 stuck in my mind. Not being a Bible reader, I had no idea what it meant. I found a Bible and read the passage—the message was quite clear: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.” I was struck by the profundity of the message. Since then, one day at a time, I have tried to honor it by reading the Daily Meditations and engaging in a practice of contemplation. I’ve found myself changed in a wonderful way. —Terry L.

The First Season of Faith

CAC teacher and author Brian McLaren writes about the passionate innocence that characterized his “first half of life” as a young Christian:

Many of us have memories of when our spiritual lives first came alive—the season of our “first love.” For example, in those initial months after my [powerful spiritual] experience … I felt the Bible speak to me as never before. The simplest word or phrase would stir my soul…. I started wearing a big wooden cross around my neck, and I carried a big, green Living Bible on top of my high-school books—in hopes that someone would ask me about either of them, so I could “bear witness” to my exuberant, contagious faith. I loved to insert “Praise the Lord!” into my speech as often as possible—which elicited “Amen!” from my Christian friends and surprise or annoyance from my other friends. Speaking of my Christian friends, we could often be found huddling in a stairwell … praying for a miraculous intervention of some sort. And our prayers, it seemed to us, were answered way beyond the statistical norm. We seemed to “live and move and have our being” [Acts 17:28] in the holy glow of God’s presence. It was spiritual springtime, and we assumed it would never end.

McLaren charts growth in the spiritual life as coming to greater fullness when we move beyond the simplicity of that first season:

Just as all higher mathematics depends on learning basic arithmetic, and just as all more sophisticated music depends on mastering the basics of tempo, melody, and harmony, the spiritual life depends on learning well the essential lessons of this first season, Simplicity. If these lessons aren’t learned well, practitioners will struggle in later seasons. But if in due time this season doesn’t give way to the next, the spiritual life can grow stagnant and even toxic. Nearly all of us in this dynamic season of Simplicity tend to share a number of characteristics. We see the world in simple dualist terms: we are the good guys who follow the good authority figures and we have the right answers; they are the bad guys who consciously or unconsciously fight on the wrong side of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. We feel a deep sense of identity and belonging in our in-group…. This simple, dualist faith gives us great confidence.

This confidence, of course, has a danger, as the old Bob Dylan classic “With God on Our Side” makes clear: “You don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.” [1] The same sense of identification with an in-group that generates a warm glow of belonging and motivates sacrificial action for us can sour into intolerance, hatred, and even violence toward them. And the same easy, black-and-white answers that comfort and reassure us now may later seem arrogant, naive, ignorant, and harmful, if we don’t move beyond Simplicity in the fullness of time.

References:

[1] Bob Dylan, “With God on Our Side,” The Times They Are A-Changin’ (New York: Columbia, 1964).

Brian D. McLaren, Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 29, 30.

A hawk judges its environment for survival and eventually takes flight.

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Story from Our Community:

After a slow decline from dementia, my wife of forty years lost her ability to speak. Although we lost verbal communication, it was during that time we experienced a deeper intimacy than at any time before. It was clear that she loved me and that she knew I loved her. There was something in her that connected with me and something in me that connected with her. Words were not necessary. Love unified us beyond anything words could describe. Love was our conversation. Those last days with Jan were the most challenging and the most precious of our marriage. I will always treasure them. —Elton N.

Jesus’ Prophetic Lineage

CAC teacher Brian McLaren says that we understand Jesus more clearly when we consider him through the lineage of his Jewish faith and the Hebrew prophets:

What seems to have happened in Christian history is that we have tried to understand Jesus primarily through his descendants, meaning when we want to understand Jesus, we say, “What did Paul say about Jesus? What did Augustine say about Jesus? What did Aquinas say about Jesus? What did Martin Luther or John Calvin or John Wesley say about Jesus?” We try to understand Jesus by studying what people said after his life. I think it would be much better for us to understand Jesus forwards in the sense of, “Look at his ancestors; look at the lineage into which he came.” Does that make sense? Place Jesus in the context of his history and his story.

When we do that, we understand that for Jesus growing up as a Jew, he was entering into a realm of people like patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and the people who gave birth to a new people. Of course, we should add Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel and the others.… Then come these other figures called prophets. Moses really is seen as the first prophet and then there are many, many others, Amos maybe being almost a prototypical prophet. These are people who have some experience of listening to God and then speaking for God. They generally are confronting oppression and injustice and proclaiming liberation and warning and promise and imagination. [1]

Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, names ways Jesus’ life and actions echoed those of prophets familiar to her from her religious upbringing:

Jesus fusses at priests, just like Amos. Jesus tells parables, just like the prophet Nathan and a number of rabbis whose stories appear in postbiblical Jewish sources. Jesus heals and raises the dead; so too Elijah and Elisha. Jesus survives when children around him are slaughtered, just like Moses. I didn’t have to read Matthew 2–7 to know that the rescued baby would take a trip to Egypt, cross water in a life-changing experience, face temptation in the wilderness, ascend a mountain, and deliver comments on the Law—the pattern was already established in Shemot, the book of Exodus. [2]

In spite of many similarities between Jesus and the Jewish prophets, Levine stresses that the Gospel writers view Jesus as more than a prophet:

Although Jesus himself may be perceived as heir to the legacy of Amos and Jeremiah, the Gospels present him as more than a prophet. He is, according to the Evangelists, the Son of God, who adds something new to the prophetic concern for justice. He goes well beyond the role of Isaiah and Micah, who seek what is called in Hebrew t’shuvah, return and repentance. Jesus of the Gospels seeks something new, specifically, following him. He is important not only because of what he says, but also because of who he is. [3]

References:

[1] Adapted from Brian D. McLaren, “Jesus as Prophet,” July 2022, CAC Living School curriculum. Unpublished material.

[2] Amy-Jill Levine, The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 3.

[3] Levine, The Misunderstood Jew, 110.

Image credit: A path from one week to the next—Benjamin Yazza, Untitled 8, 13, and 7. Used with permission. Click here to enlarge image. Jesus used the mystery and variety of the natural world to teach us.

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Story from Our Community:

As I look back over my 70 years, paradoxically many of the most peaceful times of my life were when I reached the end of my strength, when I had no strategies whatsoever left to “fix” things. It was when my teenage son went into a deep depression requiring hospitalization; when my second marriage fell apart; when I required major surgery but had no health insurance. In the times when I felt completely empty and keenly aware of my lack of any power or control, I found strength and peace in throwing myself in Jesus’ arms. Finding real power through weakness rings absolutely true for me. —Jo S.

Anger Does Its Work

Prophets are often known for their anger against injustice. CAC teacher Brian McLaren makes a connection between anger and love:  

I think about things I love … birds, trees, wetlands, forested mountains, coral reefs, my grandchildren … and I see the bulldozers and smokestacks and tanks on the horizon.  

And so, because I love, I am angry. Really angry.  

And if you’re not angry, I think you should check your pulse, because if your heart beats in love for something, someone, anything … you’ll be angry when it’s harmed or threatened.  

To paraphrase René Descartes (1596–1650): I love; therefore, I’m angry. […]

Anger makes most sense to me through an analogy of pain. What pain is to my body, anger is to my soul, psyche, or inner self. When I put my hand on a hot stove, physical pain reflexes make me react quickly, to address with all due urgency whatever is damaging my fragile tissues. Physical pain must be strong enough to prompt me to action, immediate action, or I will be harmed, even killed.  

Similarly, when I or someone I love is in the company of insult, injustice, injury, degradation, or threat, anger awakens. It tells me to change my posture or position; it demands I address the threat.

McClaren shares scriptural passages that urge us not to react in anger, and describes how contemplative practice can direct our anger into loving action:  

Don’t be overcome with evil. Overcome evil with good. (See Romans 12:21).  

When someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other cheek. (See Luke 6:29).  

Do not return evil for evil to anyone. (See Romans 12:17).  

Bless those who persecute you. Bless, and do not curse. (See Romans 12:14).  

In each case, we’re given alternatives to our natural reactions, alternatives that break us out of fight/flight/freeze, mirroring, and judging. In the split second when we take that long, deep breath, we might breathe out a prayer: “Guide me, Spirit of God!” We might pause to hear if the Spirit inspires us with some non-reactive, non-reflexive response. […]

Anger does its work. It prompts us to action, for better or worse. With time and practice, we can let the reflexive reactions of fight/flight/freeze, mirroring, and judging pass by like unwanted items on a conveyor belt. Also, with practice, we can make space for creative actions to be prompted by our anger … actions that are in tune with the Spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control (see Galatians 5:22) … actions that overcome evil with good and bring healing instead of hate.  

So, yes, you bet I’m angry. It’s a source of my creativity. It’s a vaccination against apathy and complacency. It’s a gift that can be abused—or wisely used. Yes, it’s a temptation, but it’s also a resource and an opportunity, as unavoidable and necessary as pain. It’s part of the gift of being human and being alive.

Reference:

Brian D. McLaren, “Anger, Contemplation, and Action,” Oneing 6, no. 1, Anger (Spring 2018): 84, 85, 89, 90. Available in print and PDF download.

Image credit: A path from one week to the next—Benjamin Yazza, Untitled 10, 8, and 13. Used with permission. Click here to enlarge image.

Prophetic truth catalyzes us to stop avoiding uncomfortable truths.

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Story from Our Community:

My husband, my soulmate, with whom I prayed everyday, died recently from a heart attack. My husband was a man of great insight and loved to listen to me read your Daily Meditations out loud. He called this ritual of ours his “coffee with God.” We did everything together. He would sit and meditate and also use the prayer cards from the many funerals we attended and pray for each person according to the month of their passing. I continue to read the Daily Meditations to help me deal with his loss. I am delighted to join you on this next “path” because I desperately need to accept his passing. We were married for 52 years. —Helen M.

Jesus’ Person-to-Person Ministry

Richard writes about how Jesus’ ministry reveals that true conversion stems from relationship, not words; from experience, not belief:

The ego loves to use words, but the primary way we communicate “the reign of God is at hand” is by our presence. Jesus clearly modeled this. It seems that Jesus and his disciples took up residence in people’s homes and lived as closely as possible to the people. In their ministry, healing and preaching are so intertwined that we could say that there has been no real proclaiming of the kingdom, no authentic conversion, unless there is healing in some real sense.

Understandably, many of us have come to rely on an impersonal medium like the printed word. But the only way words can have any effect on our lives is if a person is coming across through this medium. When I am preaching, teaching, or writing, I have to try to give myself away; I have to let others encounter me in some real way. That’s the only experience that will make any of my words halfway believable. Jesus gave us words, but more significantly, he gave his “flesh” for the life of the world—in the way he lived and the way he died.

In Luke’s Gospel, all of Jesus’ rules of ministry—his “tips for the road”—are very interpersonal. They are based on putting people in touch with people. Person-to-person is the way the gospel was originally communicated. Person-in-love-with-person, person-respecting-person, person-forgiving-person, person-touching-person, person-crying-with-person, person-hugging-person: that’s where the Spirit is so beautifully present. [1]

Brian McLaren describes how Jesus’ invitation to participate in “God’s kingdom” impacts relationships, person by person:

The same thing happens with teachers, politicians, lawyers, engineers, and salespeople who take seriously their identity as participants in the kingdom of God. The way they teach, the way they develop public policies, the way they seek justice, the way they design and work with resources from God’s creation, the way they buy and sell—all of these are given dignity in the context of God’s kingdom, and soon, transformation begins to happen. After all, when you see your students, constituency, clients, or customers as people who are loved by God and as your fellow citizens in God’s kingdom, it becomes harder to rip them off or give them second best. And when enough people begin to live with that viewpoint, in little ways as well as big ones, over long periods of time, things truly change. . . .

Life for them now is about an interactive relationship—reconciled to God, reconciled to one another—and so they see their entire lives as an opportunity to make the beautiful music of God’s kingdom so that more and more people will be drawn into it, and so that the world will be changed by their growing influence. Everyone can have a role in this expanding kingdom. [2]

References:

[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Good News According to Luke: Spiritual Reflections (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1997), 140–141.

[2] Brian D. McLaren, The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth That Could Change Everything (Nashville, TN: W Publishing Group, 2006), 82, 83.

Explore Further. . .

Read Brian McLaren on the kingdom of God.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Benjamin Yazza, Untitled 05 (detail), United States, photograph, used with permission. Benjamin Yazza, Untitled 12 (detail), United States, photograph, used with permission. NASA, Galaxy NGC 4013 (detail), 2020, United States, photograph, public domain. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

Image inspiration: Infinitesimal. Massive. Incomprehensibly expansive. It is all connected: everything is a part of the whole, seen or unseen. Nothing stands alone.

Story from Our Community:

My grandparents and parents always spoke about the Holy Spirit as if it were at the dinner table with us—as commonly and casually as any friend or relative. The family expression of “just ask the Holy Spirit,” was used for problems, prayer requests, special intentions, and of course, gratitude. We all understood that the Holy Spirit was a breath of the Divine that lived among us. Some of my favorite moments with my grandmother began when she would say: “Let’s put on the kettle on.” I knew then that it was time to share our concerns, hopes, and sorrows together and that the Holy Spirit would accompany us in that conversation and connection. I believe this way of viewing the Holy Spirit has blessed several generations of our family by giving us a sense that our lives our constantly accompanied by the Divine.
—Martha M.

Prayer for our community:

God, Lord of all creation, lover of life and of everything, please help us to love in our very small way what You love infinitely and everywhere. We thank You that we can offer just this one prayer and that will be more than enough, because in reality every thing and every one is connected, and nothing stands alone. To pray for one part is really to pray for the whole, and so we do. Help us each day to stand for love, for healing, for the good, for the diverse unity of the Body of Christ and all creation, because we know this is what You desire: as Jesus prayed, that all may be one. We offer our prayer together with all the holy names of God, we offer our prayer together with Christ, our Lord, Amen.

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Faith: Weekly Summary

Sunday
The major heresy of the Western churches is that they have largely turned the very meaning of faith into its exact opposite. True faith involves not knowing and even not needing to know, but we made faith demanding to know and insisting that we do know!
—Richard Rohr

Monday
Our faith, frail as it is sometimes, is also flexible. It is self-correcting as we have profound encounters with people who are different from us and are exposed to new experiences and ideas.
—Molly Baskette

Tuesda y
Belief, the act of holding a set or system of beliefs, is not the same thing as faith, even though we often use the words imprecisely and interchangeably.
—Brian McLaren

Wednesday
It is not that the Annunciation leads Mary out of doubt and into faith; it is that her encounter with the angel leads her out of certainty and into holy bewilderment. Out of familiar spiritual territory and into a lifetime of pondering, wondering, questioning, and wrestling.
—Debie Thomas

Thursday
Both Jesus’ and Paul’s notion of faith is much better translated as foundational confidence or trust that God cares about what is happening right now. This is clearly the quality that Jesus fully represents and then praises in other people.
—Richard Rohr

Friday
I would just be there with homeless youth in a state of not knowing and trust. Paying attention to what was, bearing witness to their pain, helping them to hold their pain, and often breaking with them as a result of what I was witnessing.
—Adam Bucko

Concrete Participation

Father Richard invites us to find an embodied method of prayer as a way to participate more fully in our faith:

Most of religious and church history has been largely preoccupied with religious ideas, about which we could be wrong or right. When faith is all about ideas, we do not have to be part of it; we just need to talk correctly about it. We never have to dive in and illustrate that spiritual proof is only in the pudding.

The spiritual question is this: Does one’s life give any evidence of an encounter with God? Does this encounter bring about through us any of the things that Paul describes as the “fruits” of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22)? Are we any different from our surroundings, or do we reflect the predictable cultural values and biases of our own group?

The “participatory turn” of faith is learning from concrete practices, personal disciplines, and interactive dialogues that change the seeker and allow and encourage the encounter itself. Many Christians today are rediscovering prayer beads, prayer of quiet, icons, contemplative sits, Taizé chants, charismatic prayer, walking meditation, Zen chores, extended silence, solitude, and disciplined spiritual direction. Up until now, someone could have a doctorate in theology as a Catholic or Protestant and not really know how to pray or even enjoy prayer or experience union with God. They could recommend it officially to others and maybe even define it; now we know that we must personally live our faith.

Today, find some way to dive into your faith and experiment with ways of opening yourself to transformation, to encounter, to conscious participation in God.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self  (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2013), 108–109, 111.

Explore Further. . .

Read Brian McLaren on growing in faith through doubt.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Benjamin Yazza, Untitled 09 (detail), United States, photograph, used with permission. Tory Hallenburg, Walking on Water (detail), 2018, United States, photograph, Unsplash. Carrie Grace Littauer, Untitled 10 (detail), 2022, United States, photograph, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

Image inspiration: Venturing beyond the monochrome of certainty, we walk into water and on ground we cannot always see. Our ripples spread beyond ourselves into this movement of faith.

Prayer for our community:

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Faith, Beliefs, and Revolutionary Love

In his book Faith After Doubt, Brian McLaren describes four stages of the faith journey—Simplicity, Complexity, Perplexity, and Harmony—through which we move repeatedly over the course of our lives. As we grow in faith, our specific beliefs become less important than the revolutionary love to which we are called:

I have all kinds of mixed feelings about slogans. They often oversimplify and therefore mislead. But they’re pithy and memorable and therefore have some value. So, acknowledging my mixed feelings, I’d like to offer this pair of slogans to summarize the heart of our message so far:

Faith before doubt: it’s about correct beliefs.

Faith after doubt: it’s about revolutionary love.

In other words, the journey of faith through Simplicity and Complexity involves learning and perfecting beliefs. The journey of doubt through Perplexity involves questioning not only specific beliefs but the whole belief system approach to faith. Then, the journey into Harmony is a journey beyond beliefs into revolutionary love.

By revolutionary love, I mean love beyond: love that goes beyond myself to my neighbor, beyond my neighbor to the stranger, alien, other, outcast, and outsider; beyond the outsider to the critic, antagonist, opponent, and enemy; and even beyond the human to my non-human fellow creatures. In short, revolutionary love means loving as God would love: infinitely, graciously, extravagantly. To put it in more mystical terms, it means loving with God, letting divine love fill me and flow through me, without discrimination or limit, as an expression of the heart of the lover, not the merit of the beloved, including the correctness of the beloved’s beliefs.

Now I need at this point to make clear that I am not against beliefs. Beliefs are necessary. They are interesting. They are unavoidable. But belief, the act of holding a set or system of beliefs, is not the same thing as faith, even though we often use the words imprecisely and interchangeably. To explore the difference, let’s consider the insight of Alan Watts [1915–1973], a twentieth-century philosopher of Eastern religions who tried to capture the difference between faith and belief like this:

We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception. [1]

References:

[1] Alan W. Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (New York: Vintage Books, 1951, 1968), 24.

Brian D. McLaren, Faith after Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do about It (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021), 116–117.

Explore Further. . .

Read Brian McLaren on faith, beliefs, and doubt.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Venturing beyond the monochrome of certainty, we walk into water and on ground we cannot always see. Our ripples spread beyond ourselves into this movement of faith.

Story from Our Community:

Last year when my faith was in tatters, a friend sent me the link to the CAC Daily Meditations after a chance meeting. I had just started receiving help for a stressful and frightening family situation. It was extraordinary how the Daily Meditations complemented my inner work over the course of 12 months. Embracing a non-dual way of thinking has helped me realize that I am fully known and fully loved—and it has become a bedrock for building a new and healthier way of being. This afternoon, I had a beautiful, real, and free conversation with my daughter who was almost estranged from me 18 months ago. My heart is full of gratitude. —Jackie B.

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Prayer for our community:

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We Don’t Need to Know

This Advent season, Father Richard writes of how we grow in faith by letting go of our need for certainty:

The major heresy of the Western churches is that they have largely turned the very meaning of faith into its exact opposite. True faith involves not knowing and even not needing to know, but we made faith demanding to know and insisting that we do know! The original sin, brilliantly described, warned us against this temptation at the very beginning.

We hear our story of humanity’s original sin in Genesis 2. But this sin, as we’ve called it, really doesn’t look like a sin at all. In fact, wanting knowledge feels like virtue. Haven’t you ever wondered about that? “You may indeed eat of all of the trees in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat” (Genesis 2:16–17). Why would that be a sin? It sounds like a good thing!

In seminary, we called it moral theology. We ate bushels from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, trying to decide who was good and who was bad. On other levels, our knowledge unfortunately refined and even created the very judgmental mind that Jesus strictly warned us against (see Matthew 7:1–2).

When we lead off with our judgments, love will seldom happen. Religion is almost always corrupted when the mind, which needs to make moral judgments about everything, is the master instead of the servant.

Some would think that is the whole meaning of Christianity: to be able to decide who’s going to heaven and who isn’t, who is holy and who is unholy. This is much more a search for control than it is a search for truth, love, or God. It has to do with ego, which needs to pigeonhole everything to give itself that sense of “I know” and “I am in control.”

I guess God knew that religion would take this direction. So, God said, “Don’t do it. Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” God is trying to keep us from a lust for certitude, an undue need for explanation, resolution, and answers. Frankly, these things make biblical faith impossible.

It seems that God is asking humanity to live inside of a cosmic humility. In that holding pattern, instead of insisting on dividing reality into the good and the bad, we bear the ambiguity, the inconsistencies, and the brokenness of all things. It is our ultimate act of solidarity with humanity and with the world.

When we are allowed to name certain individuals as “bad,” persecution, scapegoating, and violence almost always follow. When we too easily presume that we are one of the “good” people, we largely live in illusion and prejudice. I say this as a religious person, but religion has been the justification of much of the violence in human history. God wanted to undercut that very violence at the beginning.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, rev. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2008, 2022), 36–38.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on humility and a “beginner’s mind.”
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: Venturing beyond the monochrome of certainty, we walk into water and on ground we cannot always see. Our ripples spread beyond ourselves into this movement of faith.

Story from Our Community:

I was moved by the Daily Meditations about the Quest for the Holy Grail, specifically the emphasis on having the right questions rather than the right answers. This spoke to me since over the past 5 years, I have nursed lingering questions about why my daughter decided to end her life at just 18 years old. I used to search for answers that explained her mental state but I am coming to accept the simple truth that I will never really have the answer. I pray that in her present state she now understands the mystery of her life. —Brian L.

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Prayer for our community:

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The Future of Christianity: Weekly Summary

Sunday
For centuries, Christianity has presented itself as an “organized religion”—a change-averse institution that protects and promotes a timeless system of beliefs that were handed down fully formed in the past. Yet Christianity’s actual history is a story of change and adaptation.
—Brian McLaren

Monday
Jesus never told us to put our trust in the larger institutions of culture or even the church. We must recognize that they are also subject to the paschal mystery, the dying and the rising of all things.
—Richard Rohr

Tuesday
There are all these gifted people around but they didn’t have any power within church structures, which made people like me realize that the real power was not in the structure of the church, but in the living church. The gifted prophets in our midst.
—Barbara Holmes

Wednesday
Our faith has been about the communities faithfully modeling a way of being in the world, of being in relationship with each other and with the prisoner and the hungry. It has been about Amos, standing up to the establishment in the name of God and in the name of justice. So, I believe that the future of Christianity is indeed its past and present.
—Nontombi Naomi Tutu

Thursday
The question—“What is the future of Christianity?”—must be held in relation to other questions. Right now, the most significant of those questions is: “What is the future of humankind?”
—Diana Butler Bass

Friday
One of the things that the Second Vatican Council taught us in the religious orders, and this was certainly from the Holy Spirit, is that we were each to go back to our founders and say, “What did Francis form the Franciscans for?” Francis didn’t accuse the system of being inferior. He just went out and did it better.
—Richard Rohr

Allowing Ourselves Not to Know

Before beginning to discuss the future of the church and Christianity, Brian McLaren invited the more than three thousand attendees of The Future of Christianity webcast to a fifteen-minute period of silence and contemplation. We share his invitation at the end of this week’s meditations, hoping it brings a spirit of openness to your faithful reflection this week:

This is a delicate moment to address deep issues in the Christian faith. If we come in with a set of unchallenged assumptions, we can pretty much predict how the outcomes will be in our thinking. That’s why we’d like to take a few moments now, as we begin this time of reflection together, to invite you to settle into a silence. And in that silence, to be willing to say, “I have a lot of ideas. I have a lot of opinions. But I am not my ideas and opinions, and if I allow myself to be captive to my current ideas and opinions, my horizons will be really limited.”

As we sink into this silence, we’ll hear the chatter of our own thoughts, the debates and questions of our own thoughts, and in a sense when we see those arising, we can say, “Oh yes, those are my own existing assumptions.” Maybe I can just let them be, and in humility open my heart to wisdom beyond my own. Wisdom that might come to us through the faculty, through our interaction, through the discussion that will happen, but also wisdom that may just come to you. May we dare to hope that our hearts, open to the Spirit of God, could not only receive answers to our questions about the future of Christianity, but that our hearts could be so changed in this time together, our minds and hearts and desires opened, clarified, maybe even purified. So that the future can be different.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Reference:

Adapted from Brian McLaren, introduction to The Future of Christianity: A Virtual Summit, Center for Action and Contemplation, recorded live on August 23, 2022. Note: This segment is not included on the YouTube video cited in other meditations this week.

Watch the Future of Christianity summit with CAC faculty.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Christopher Holt, Newgrange Triple Spiral (detail), 2014, Ireland, photograph, Wikimedia. Joanna Kosinska, Untitled (detail), 2017, photograph, Unsplash. Nasa and ESA, M104 Sombrero Galaxy (detail), 2003, United States, photograph, Wikimedia. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.

Image inspiration: From a past shrouded by time, we hold the known candle of our present moment toward an unknown and expansive future. Past, present, and future— Christ is present in each.

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Courage to Ask the Question

In a recent webcast, CAC faculty joined together to discuss the future of Christianity. Brian McLaren opened the conversation:

Our question that brings us together today is the question of the future of Christianity. This is a question that I have lived with really my whole adult life. I sensed it was part of my calling or vocation to live with and wrestle with this question.

And I think we should realize there are some people who would find it dangerous that we are even asking this question, because to raise the question of the future of Christianity suggests that the future might be different than the past or the present. And there are a lot of people who are very, very invested in making sure the future is exactly the same as the past or the present. And I think the question is also dangerous within each of us, depending on how we answer it. If we were to look at some positive trends and say, “Oh, the future of Christianity is bright! The future of Christianity is wonderful,” there’s a certain way that that kind of positive and even wishful thinking could then give us, inside of the privacy of our own minds, permission to say, “Everything’s going to be fine. I can return to my previously scheduled apathy and complacency.”

There’s another way of answering the question that says, “The future of Christianity is [bleak] and terrible and hopeless.” And we could succumb to a kind of despair or a cynicism that would allow us to say, “Nothing I can do about it. It will be what it will be. It’s out of my hands.” And that would allow us to return to our previously scheduled apathy and complacency.

But there’s another way of asking this question and engaging it with an open heart, an open imagination, an open mind. And that’s a way that leads to a sense of empowerment for us to be open to the ways that the future of Christianity could be influenced by what we know our story begins with: one person impacting twelve people who impacted several hundred more [and so on].

McLaren finds hope for Christianity’s future in viewing its past as an ever-evolving movement:

For centuries, Christianity has presented itself as an “organized religion”—a change-averse institution . . . that protects and promotes a timeless system of beliefs that were handed down fully formed in the past. Yet Christianity’s actual history is a story of change and adaptation. We Christians have repeatedly adapted our message, methods, and mission to the contours of our time. What might happen if we understand the core Christian ethos as creative, constructive, and forward-leaning—as an “organizing religion” that challenges all institutions (including its own) to learn, grow, and mature toward a deepening, enduring vision of reconciliation with God, self, neighbor, enemy, and creation? [1]

References:

[1] Brian D. McLaren, The Great Spiritual Migration: How the World’s Largest Religion Is Seeking a Better Way to Be Christian (New York: Convergent, 2016), 3.

Adapted from Brian McLaren, “The Question of the Future of Christianity,” in The Future of Christianity: A Virtual Summit, Center for Action and Contemplation, streamed live on August 23, 2022, YouTube video, 1:56:18.

Explore Further. . .

Watch the Future of Christianity summit with CAC faculty.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image inspiration: From a past shrouded by time, we hold the known candle of our present moment toward an unknown and expansive future. Past, present, and future— Christ is present in each.

Story from Our Community:

There was a time when I considered leaving the Church. The Daily Meditations have freed me to continue my spiritual journey honestly. Yesterday at Mass, as often happens these days, I was overcome by an intimate and passionate welling up inside of me. As I observed the rich ritual and the beautiful statues, time seemed to stand still, and I literally felt grace filling me and spilling into the space and people around me. I thought of the hundreds of times I have sat in a Catholic church, surrounded by loved ones and strangers. I felt the comfort of my long-ago deceased parents and their constant gifts of love. Richard Rohr’s words, whether in books, the Daily Meditations, videos or other means, have been a great source of inspiration and comfort, especially when doubt, anxiety, and fear creep in. Thank you! —Jody G.

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Faith: Weekly Summary

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The Future of Christianity: Weekly Summary

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A Deeper Way of Love

The First Season of Faith

Jesus’ Prophetic Lineage

Anger Does Its Work

Jesus’ Person-to-Person Ministry

Faith: Weekly Summary

Faith, Beliefs, and Revolutionary Love

We Don’t Need to Know

The Future of Christianity: Weekly Summary

Courage to Ask the Question

Category Archive

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