Sunday
Sin primarily describes a state of fragmentation—when the part thinks it’s separate from the Whole. It’s the loss of any inner experience of who we are in God.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
In one way, the doctrine of “original sin” was good and helpful in that it taught us not to be surprised at the frailty and woundedness that we all carry. Yet historically speaking, the teaching of original sin started us off on the wrong foot—with a no instead of a yes, with mistrust instead of trust.
—Richard Rohr
Tuesday
I do not believe that sin is the enemy we often make it out to be, at least not when we recognize it and name it as such. When we see how we have turned away from God, then and only then do we have what we need to begin turning back.
—Barbara Brown Taylor
Wednesday
Is the love of God looking down on a sinful world in need of salvation, or does our God see a broken world in pain and in need of healing?
—Greg Boyle
Thursday
There is a difference between having fallen and being fallen. Sin means that we have fallen. It doesn’t mean we are fallen. We may have fallen, but we can get up.
—Danielle Shroyer
Friday
No one can deny that evil is very real, but what many of us now observe as the real evils destroying the world—such as militarism, greed, scapegoating of other groups, and abuses of power—seem very different from what most people call sin, which has mostly referred to personal faults or guilt, or supposed private offenses against God.
—Richard Rohr
Week Ten Practice
Reshaping Our Stories
What we wear out, God refashions. What we rip, God redeems. What we tear, God mends.
—Laurie Brock, Souvenirs of the Holy
Laurie Brock witnesses how God gathers together the “scraps” of our lives, reweaving them into a unified and beautiful whole:
We all have scraps and pieces and parts that have been deeply worn and torn by suffering and crisis and catastrophe. We can unhelpfully frame these events in life as God’s doing. Some theologies say God does the breaking, the tearing apart, so that God’s glory is somehow revealed. I disagree. God allows life to happen, yes, and life means tearing and mending, sowing and reaping, and wounding and healing. But God doesn’t have to get involved for things to rip and break. We humans do a fine job of breaking each other and ourselves, which no doubt shatters God’s heart.
Instead of forever cushioning us from the consequences of personal and community choices with which we wound each other, God imbues creation with the wisdom of quilting. We aren’t all that adept at piecing and reforming. For that, we need God’s quilting prowess. We need God to remind us that no part of our selves and souls is beyond redemption, beyond being useful in another way. Mistakes are pieced together with threads of God’s compassion. Personas we wore when we were younger but no longer fit can be altered. God’s love provides the framework to sew all these parts and pieces into something renewed, refashioned, and redeemed.
God treasures the things we throw away or stop caring about. God adores these scraps of our selves. God longs for us to sit in the holy space long enough to see the quilt that God creates from what we thought were worthless scraps. God touches those scraps like women over centuries. God fingers them, noting the beauty of small patterns. God reshapes our scraps into new things, useful things, even extraordinarily beautiful things.
Reference:
Laurie M. Brock, Souvenirs of the Holy: Encountering God Through Everyday Objects (Broadleaf Books, 2025), 180–181.
Image credit and inspiration: Balint Mendlik, untitled (detail), 2022, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. An arrow missing the center reminds us that sin is not our essence. We may be momentarily disconnected from our true aim, but still able to center the next shot.
