Sunday
We grow spiritually by passing beyond some perfect Order, through an often painful and seemingly unnecessary Disorder to an enlightened Reorder or “resurrection.” This is the “pattern that connects.”
—Richard Rohr
Monday
I was always being moved toward greater differentiation and larger viewpoints, and simultaneously toward a greater inclusivity in my ideas. God always became bigger and led me to bigger places where everything could finally belong.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
Jesus was calling for a radical disruption in his religion, a great spiritual migration, and a similar disruption and migration are needed no less today in the religion that names itself after him.
—Brian McLaren
Wednesday
An evolving faith is a resilient and stubborn form of faithfulness that is well acquainted with the presence of God in our loneliest places and deepest questions. And an evolving faith has room for all the paths you may navigate.
—Sarah Bessey
Thursday
Apparently, God enjoys doing this because it never stops happening: Every original Order learns to include an initially threatening Disorder, which morphs into and creates a new Reordering, and we begin all over again.
—Richard Rohr
Friday
This season will require us to recover ancestral wisdom and practices that we lost or undervalued, repair the deep breaches in our interpersonal and communal relationships, and reimagine the possible by stretching ourselves and daring to dream something different into being.
—Jennifer Bailey
Week Thirty-Five Practice
A Prayer for Those Who Thought They Knew
The betrayal of a belief is not the same thing as ceasing to believe. —James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Author Cole Arthur Riley offers a prayer for those who have left spiritual spaces of certainty:
God of wisdom,
It’s hard to know what to say to a God claimed by those who have wounded us. Can we trust you? We have known what it is to exist in spiritual spaces that are more interested in controlling us than loving us. To have the room turn against us when our beliefs diverge from the group’s. We thank you for giving us an interior compass, an intuition that no longer trusts spirituality that feels like captivity. Free us from those spaces. But as we depart, keep us from relinquishing our own connection to the divine. Help us to approach you slowly in the safety of our own interior worlds before granting another spiritual space access to us. And when we’re ready, guide us into new and safe communities—communities capable of holding our deepest doubts, our beliefs, the fullness of uncertainty, without being threatened. May we approach shrewdly and carefully, for our own protection, as we search for spaces that honor the whole of us.
Ase.
Riley offers this prayer to use with the breath:
INHALE: I am free to not know.
EXHALE: I can rest in mystery.
INHALE: I may not know what I believe,
EXHALE: but I know it will sound like dignity.
INHALE: My doubts are sacred.
EXHALE: God, stay close as I wander.
Reference:
Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human (New York: Convergent, 2024), 81.
Image credit and inspiration: Jenna Keiper, cracked stained glass (detail), 2020, photo, Albuquerque. Click here to enlarge image. Like this cracked stained glass, sometimes we have to let the old structures deconstruct in order to make room for the new.
