Encountering God in the Bible: Weekly Summary

Sunday
The marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is for the sake of a love affair between God and the soul. —Richard Rohr

Monday
One way to read the entire Bible is to note the gradual unveiling of our faces, the gradual creating of “persons” capable of relationship with God and all others. We grow from infants totally receiving love, to teenage love, to infatuation, to adult communion. Biblical spirituality has the potential of creating persons who can both receive and give out of love, and love that is perfectly free. —Richard Rohr

Tuesday
Revelation occurs not in the words and statements of individuals, but in the conversation among individuals and God. —Brian McLaren

Wednesday
Friendship is contingent on love—real love: compassion, empathy, reaching out, going beyond what we imagine is possible. That is the command: love. And if we reach out in love, friendship is the result, even friendship with God. —Diana Butler Bass

Thursday
It’s not about becoming spiritual beings nearly as much as about becoming human beings. The biblical revelation is saying that we are already spiritual beings; we just don’t know it yet. The Bible tries to let you in on the secret, by revealing God in the ordinary. —Richard Rohr

Friday
The power of God’s words works as leaven in the heart, awakening us to a personal experience of the presence of God that Scripture reveals. —James Finley

Lectio Divina with Poetry

CAC Board member Drew Jackson is a pastor and poet, whose poems reflect his deep understanding of and relationship with Scripture. We invite you to engage in the practice of lectio divina with his poem “Of Earth and Sky,” based on the genealogy of Jesus offered in Luke 3:23–38, using this guideline from Father Richard:

Read the following passage slowly four times. With the first reading (perhaps aloud), listen with your heart’s ear for a phrase or word that stands out for you. During the second reading, reflect on what touches you, perhaps speaking that phrase or word aloud or writing it in a journal. Third, respond with a prayer or expression of what you have experienced and to what you are called. Fourth, rest in silence after the reading. [1]

Of Earth and Sky

Let me tell you about the ancestors,
she said to me as I sat and relaxed
myself into Grandma’s lap. She was
sharp, and even in her old age
her memory could search
into the far reaches of the past.

I can’t stay up too late, not like I used to.
And then she proceeded to tell me tales
of Greats and Great Greats who did some
great and not-so-great things. Our family
tree is filled with triumph and struggle.
The imperfections make it beautiful.

They’re all just human, you know, just like you.
She poked her frail finger into the flesh of my pectoral.
My kin, of the earth—the humus—yet filled with the breath
of God. Is this not what it means to be adam?

Never forget who you come from,
she said before calling it a night. Her words
implied that this sort of remembrance
would keep me grounded, but also keep me going.
Soaring high when they try to keep me down.
I won’t forget that I am of earth and sky.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

References:
Ilia Delio, Keith Douglass Warner, and Pamela Wood, Care for Creation: A Franciscan Spirituality of the Earth (Cincinnati, OH:

[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, A Spring within Us: A Book of Daily Meditations (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2016), 30.

From God Speaks Through Wombs: Poems on God’s Unexpected Coming, a book of poetry by Drew Jackson. Copyright ©2021 by Drew Edward Jackson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, PO Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515. www.ivpress.com

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard’s book What Do We Do with the Bible?
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Barbara Holmes, Untitled 17 & 20 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States, used with permission. Warren K. Leffler, Civil rights march on Washington, D.C., 1963 (detail), Photograph, public domain. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

The creative team at CAC sent a single-use camera to core teacher Dr. Barbara Holmes as part of an exploration into contemplative photography. Her photos are featured here together with historical images in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story. 

Image Inspiration: The Bible reveals the ongoing work of liberation by God and God’s people. It is a bridge to our understanding of God moving through the ordinariness of time and space. Just like this river: symbolizing the continuing story of the struggle for justice as it flows around and through this freedom fighter of the 1960s.

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.

Listen to the prayer.

Reading with the Divine Presence

Lectio divina is a contemplative way of reading and relating to Scripture and other sacred writings. The medieval monk Guigo II (d. 1188) names the four steps of this foundational contemplative practice:

One day when I was busy working with my hands I began to think about our spiritual work, and all at once four stages in spiritual exercise came into my mind: reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation. These make a ladder for monks by which they are lifted up from earth to heaven. It has few rungs, yet its length is immense and wonderful, for its lower end rests upon the earth, but its top pierces the clouds and touches heavenly secrets. [1]

James Finley has taught extensively on lectio divina and Guigo II. In the most recent season of his podcast Turning to the Mystics, he describes the intention to be present to God that underlies all lectio divina practice:

We sit in prayer, renewing our faith that we’re sitting there in God’s presence all about us and within us, closer to us than we are to ourselves. And we’ve come here with no other intention, but a kind rendezvous with God, as a way to turn to God to help us to deepen our experience of God’s presence in our life. That’s why we’re there. It’s a moment of intimacy, of devotional sincerity, of deepening this union with God in prayer. [2]

Finley explains Guigo’s instructions for transformative reading:

The power of God’s words works as leaven in the heart, awakening us to a personal experience of the presence of God that Scripture reveals. Read in this way, the Scriptures are one long love letter from God. Each verse tells the story of the love that perpetually calls us to itself. . . .

The first rung of the ladder is that of reading the Scriptures as a way of seeking God. Then, in the midst of a quiet, sincere seeking, there is the graced event of coming upon words that embody that which we seek. As we read, we come upon something of God’s presence in that which we are reading. And in coming upon that which we seek, we descend into the depths of our awakened heart, from which there emerge thoughts, images, and connotations that simply flow out, without being seized or grasped hold of in any way. . . .

Daily meditation practice goes best as we learn to stand firmly on the first rung of the ladder to heaven. By this I mean learning to be attentive to God’s voice reverberating in a poem, a novel, the refrains of a song, a report on the evening news, or a conversation overheard in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. In learning to stand firmly on the first rung of the ladder to heaven, we learn to be receptive and open to God, uttering us into existence as we wash out a pot, or fix a broken gate, or slip off our shoes at the end of the day. [3]

References:
[1] Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks: A Letter on the Contemplative Life, and Twelve Meditations, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1978), 81–82.

[2] Adapted from James Finley with Kirsten Oates, “Guigo II: Dialogue One,” November 8, 2021, in Turning to the Mystics, season 4 (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2021) podcast, MP3 audio.

[3] James Finley, Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 82, 83, 87.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to James Finley explore lectio divina through the writings of the monk Guigi II on the Turning to the Mystics podcast.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image Credit: Barbara Holmes, Untitled 17 & 20 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States, used with permission. Warren K. Leffler, Civil rights march on Washington, D.C., 1963 (detail), Photograph, public domain. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

I stayed stuck until I stopped using “me” as the starting point. The Bible says I should pray for the forgiveness I grant others (Matthew 6:12,14-15). Loving a friend is easy; loving my enemy is the measure (Matthew 5:43-48). The Kingdom is already here (Luke 17:20-22), and I can’t see it through my physical eyes (John 3:3). Putting these principles into practice was first humiliating and then humbling. I wanted others to be punished or corrected, but I wanted to get off the hook. “Forgiving” myself never transformed me. Giving forgiveness, and receiving it, has.
—Christopher H.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

God Is Revealed in Our Lives

Father Richard points out how the Bible is filled with stories of people encountering God—regardless of whether they got everything right or everything wrong!

Let’s state it clearly: One foundational and yet revolutionary idea of the Bible is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in history, in the concrete incarnations of life. God does not hold out for the pure, the spiritual, the right idea, or the ideal anything. Apparently, the biblical God would much rather be in relationship than merely be right in solitude! This is why Jesus stands religion on its head.

But it is also why we have to go through the seemingly laborious, boring, or even disturbing books of the Bible, such as Joshua, Judges, Kings, Chronicles, Leviticus, Numbers, and Revelation. We hear in these books about sin and war, adulteries and affairs, kings and killings, intrigues and deceits—the tragic and sad events of human life along with the ordinary and wonderful. Those books, documenting the life of real communities, of concrete and regular people, are telling us that “God comes to us disguised as our life” (a wonderful line I learned from my dear friend and colleague, Paula D’Arcy). But for most “religious” people this is actually a disappointment!

In the Bible, we see God using the very wounded lives of very ordinary people, who would never have passed the tests of later Roman canonization processes. Moses, Deborah, Elijah, Paul, and Esther were at least complicit in murdering; David was both an adulterer and a liar; there were rather neurotic prophets like Ezekiel, Obadiah, and Jeremiah; an entire history of ridiculously evil kings and warriors—yet all these are the ones God works through. They are not summarily dismissed.

God’s revelations are always concrete and specific. They are not a Platonic world of ideas and theories about which we can be right or wrong. Revelation is not something we measure, but something or Someone we meet! All of this is called the “mystery of incarnation.”

Our temptation now and always is to trust in our faith tradition of trusting in God instead of trusting in God. They are not the same thing! Often our faith is in our tradition in which we can talk about people who have trusted God in the past. That’s a sad way to avoid the experience itself, to avoid scary encounters with the living God, to avoid the ongoing Incarnation.

It’s not about becoming spiritual beings nearly as much as about becoming human beings. The biblical revelation is saying that we are already spiritual beings; we just don’t know it yet. The Bible tries to let us in on the secret, by revealing God in the ordinary. That’s why so much of the text seems so mundane, practical, specific, and, frankly, unspiritual! The principle of the Incarnation proclaims that matter and spirit have never been separate. Jesus came to tell us that these seemingly different worlds are and always have been one.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2008), 16–17, 19.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to Richard’s homily on The Return to the Ordinary.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Can We Be “Friends” with God?

Author and scholar Diana Butler Bass describes friendship with Jesus as something that—contrary to some popular opinion—is the mark of a mature faith. Friendship with God is at the heart of the biblical story:

The Bible tells a different story about friendship with God, especially in the Hebrew scriptures. Friendship is anything but immaturity; it is a gift of wisdom: “In every generation [wisdom] passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets” (Wisdom of Solomon 7:27). Two of Israel’s greatest heroes, Abraham, the father of faith, and Moses, the liberating prophet, are specifically called friends of God. In Isaiah 41:8, God refers to Abraham as “my friend,” a tradition that carries into the New Testament (James 2:23). Of Moses, Exodus says: “The Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (33:11), a very rare intimacy, for such close proximity to the divine usually meant death (33:20). . . .

The point is that friendship with God establishes the covenant—and that Israel is freed from bondage into a new family forged by friendship through the law given by Moses. Friendship with God is not a biblical side story; rather, it is central to the promises and faithfulness of being a called people, in which all are friends, companions, intimates, siblings, and beloved.

Early Christians, most of whom were Jews, knew all of this and extended the idea of divine friendship to Jesus. The New Testament vividly recounts the closeness of Jesus’s circle of friends, women and men transformed through their relationship with him. . . .

Butler Bass understands the “Our Father” prayer of Jesus to be ultimately about our mutual friendship with God:

Indeed, Jesus instructed his friends to pray to “Abba” (as we can assume he himself prayed), a term most often rendered as “Father” in English, but one that contains shades of meaning denoting intimacy and familiarity, including that of fraternal relations like “brother” or “companion,” and is related to the Hebrew word for “friend” (ahab), used to describe Abraham.

Thus, Jesus introduces his friends (the disciples) to his other friend (God) in the daily prayer known as the “Our Father,” perhaps the spirit of which is better captured by “Our Father-Friend” or just “Our Friend.” This idea of “Our Friend in heaven” was a revolutionary one, as Jesus, acting as a mediator of divine companionship, collapsed the sacred distance between God and us. . . .

Friendship is contingent on love—real love: compassion, empathy, reaching out, going beyond what we imagine is possible. That is the command: love. And if we reach out in love, friendship is the result, even friendship with God. Friendship is mutual, a hand extended and another reaching back. . . . Friendship is an eternal circle, the ceaseless reaching toward one another that strengthens us and gives us joy.

Reference:
Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence (New York: HarperOne, 2021), 3–4, 14.

Explore Further. . .

Read meditations from Mirabai Starr, Brian McLaren, and more on friendship and grace.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Story from Our Community:

As a society, we have forgotten justice for those in need. In the Bible, Jesus taught that the greatest commandment is to love God with all our hearts and the second is to love our neighbor as ourselves. By letting our neighbor live in poverty and without nourishment is not love. In Galatians, Paul says, “They only asked us to remember the poor—the very thing I also was eager to do.” Sometimes, I think that we remember the poor, but that is all.
—Russell C.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Revelation through Relationship

Using the book of Job as an example, CAC teacher Brian McLaren suggests that God’s revelation through the Bible comes from the ongoing dialogue and relationship the Bible inspires between God and ourselves. He teaches:

Revelation occurs not in the words and statements of individuals, but in the conversation among individuals and God. . . .

Revelation accumulates in the relationships, interactions, and interplay between statements. . . .

To say that the Word (the message, meaning, or revelation) of God is in the biblical text, then, does not mean that you can extract verses or statements from the text at will and call them “God’s words.” It means that if we enter the text together and feel the flow of its arguments, get stuck in its points of tension, and struggle with its unfolding plot in all its twists and turns, God’s revelation can happen to us. We can reach the point that Job and company did at the end of the book, where, after a lot of conflicted human talk and a conspicuously long divine silence, we finally hear God’s voice. . . .

As we listen and enter into the conversation ourselves, could it be that God’s Word, God’s speaking, God’s self-revealing happens to us, sneaks up, surprises and ambushes us, transforms us, and disarms us—rather than arms us with “truths” to use like weapons to savage other human beings? Could it be that God’s Word intends not to give us easy answers and shortcuts to confidence and authority, but rather to reduce us, again and again, to the posture of wonder, humility, rebuke, and smallness in the face of the unknown? . . .

If we want the Bible to be a constitution, it isn’t enough. It isn’t at all. Nor is it enough as a road map for successful living, as a set of blueprints for building a life, institution, or nation, or as an “owner’s manual” . . . . But as the portable library of an ongoing conversation about and with the living God, and as an entrée into that conversation so that we actually encounter and experience the living God—for that the Bible is more than enough. . . .

I hope [this approach] will try to put us in the text—in the conversation, in the story, in the current and flow, in the predicament, in the Spirit, in the community of people who keep bumping into the living God in the midst of their experiences of loving God, betraying God, losing God, and being found again by God. In this way, by placing us in the text, I hope this approach can help us enter and abide in the presence, love, and reverence of the living God all the days of our lives and in God’s mission as humble, wholehearted servants [Richard: and friends, I might add] day by day and moment by moment. Even now.

References:
Brian D. McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 89–90, 91, 93, 96–97.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to Richard’s teaching on Jesus’ use of Scripture, CD, MP3.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

A Deepening Intimacy

Father Richard shares that right relationship is the central theme of most biblical stories:

It seems that this YHWH who is uncovering and showing Godself in the Bible desires not just images or ideas, but even persons with whom God can be in very concrete and intimate relationship. God is creating, quite literally, some friends for God! Jesus became the full representation of one who accepted and lived that friendship. In fact, he never seemed to doubt it. That must be at the core of our imitation of Jesus, and exactly how we become “partners in his triumph” (2 Corinthians 2:14).

Yet God does not settle for mandated or fear-based relationships, but rather desires willing and free relationships with “friends” (John 15:15). It is called a “new covenant” (Jeremiah 31:31; Luke 22:20), but one that is still a quite new and unbelievable possibility for most people.

One way to read the entire Bible is to note the gradual unveiling of our faces, the gradual creating of “persons” capable of relationship with God and all others. We grow from infants totally receiving love, to teenage love, to infatuation, to adult communion. Biblical spirituality has the potential of creating persons who can both receive and give out of love, and love that is perfectly free.

We all fear and avoid intimacy, it seems. It is too powerful and demands that we also “have faces,” that is, self-confidence, identity, dignity, and a certain courage to accept our own unique face. Then we have a greater challenge—once we have discovered our own face, we must be willing to give it away to another.

The biblical tradition says that truth is found not in abstract concepts, but in an encounter with otherness. As in the Trinity, trust is a relationship of love with what we gaze upon. Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995) said the only thing that really converts people is “the face of the other.” [1] The face of YHWH for Moses, the face of a lover for Jacob, the face of an accuser for David, the face of the enemy for Judith, these change people’s “truth.” It is relationship, “the face of the other,” that transforms us, converts us, and gives us our deepest identity. Not book knowledge!

In the philosophical traditions in which Western Christians have been educated up to now, truth is formed and found by the private mind and its collections of agreed-upon ideas. Identity can be achieved autonomously, with a certain kind of self-sufficiency. Thus, we speak of the “self-made person” and familiar cultural truth.

Jesus instead defines truth itself as relational rather than conceptual. He says “I am the truth” (John 14:6) and then immediately describes himself as one who is in absolute relationship with his “Father” (14:7, 9–10) and the Spirit who is in relationship to both (14:16–18). This rearranges the world of religion from arguments over ideas and concepts into a world of encounter, relationship, and presence to the face of the other. That changes everything.

References:
[1] See Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas, ed. Jill Robbins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001) for an introduction to his work.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality  (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2008), 53–54, 56, 61.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on the great themes of Scripture in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Story from Our Community:

I became a believer at a young age, fully involved in evangelical church life. However, I increasingly felt conflict with literalist readings of the Bible. After personal difficulties, I sat in a church listening to Evening Prayer, which rekindled my faith. I realized that God’s providence and purposes were much larger than I could comprehend. God was and is there and waiting for me.
—Rob B.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

A School of Relationship

Father Richard opens this week’s meditations by sharing his early love of the Scriptures:

The Bible first opened up for me in the 1960s when the Second Vatican Council said that divine revelation was not God disclosing ideas about God but God actually disclosing Godself. Scripture and religion became not mere doctrines or moralisms for me, but love-making, a mutual exchange of being and intimacy. The marvelous anthology of books and letters called the Bible is for the sake of a love affair between God and the soul and corporately between God and history.

We could say that the original blueprint for everything that exists is relationship. John’s word for that was Logos (John 1:1). In other words, the first blueprint for reality was relationality. It is all of one piece. How we relate to God reveals how we eventually relate to everything else. And how we relate to the world is how we are actively relating to God, whether we know it or not (1 John 4:20). How we do anything is how we do everything!

Thus, we must read the whole Bible as a school of relationship. The Bible is slowly making humanity capable of living inside of what Charles Williams (1886–1945) called “co-inherence.” [1] All creation is in the end drawn and seduced into the Great Co-inherence. “I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be too,” Jesus says (John 14:3). Salvation is giving us a face capable of receiving the dignity of the divine gaze, and then daring to think that we could gaze back.

I believe that we can only safely read Scripture—which is a dangerous book in the wrong hands—if we are somehow sharing in the divine gaze of love. A life of prayer helps us develop a third eye that can read between the lines and find the golden thread which is moving toward inclusivity, mercy, and justice. A hardened heart, a predisposition to judgment, a fear of God, any need to win or prove ourselves right will corrupt and distort the most inspired and inspiring of Scriptures—just as they pollute every human conversation and relationship. Hateful people will find hateful verses to confirm their obsession with death. Loving people will find loving verses to call them into an even greater love of life. And both kinds of verses are in the Bible!

The late Christian author Rachel Held Evans encourages reading the Bible with a willingness to engage in the mutual process of inspiration:

Inspiration is not about some disembodied ethereal voice dictating words or notes to a catatonic host. It’s a collaborative process, a holy give-and-take, a partnership between Creator and creator. . . . God is still breathing. The Bible is both inspired and inspiring. Our job is to ready the sails and gather the embers, to discuss and debate, and like the biblical character Jacob, to wrestle with the mystery until God gives us a blessing. [2] [I could not agree more and it saddens me that more do not see what Rachel so clearly saw. —Richard]

References:
[1] Williams described co-inherence as “a natural fact as well as a supernatural truth” that applies to humanity as well as the Trinity in his book The Descent of the Dove: A History of the Holy Spirit in the Church, published in 1939.

[2] Rachel Held Evans, Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again (Nashville, TN: Nelson Books, 2018), xxiii–xxiv.  

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Essential Teachings on Love, selected by Joelle Chase and Judy Traeger (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018), 77, 100, 120, 85.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard’s book What Do We Do with the Bible?
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Encountering God in the Bible: Weekly Summary

Reading with the Divine Presence

God Is Revealed in Our Lives

Can We Be “Friends” with God?

Revelation through Relationship

A Deepening Intimacy

A School of Relationship

Category Archive

come visit

Stay connected

explore more

Encountering God in the Bible: Weekly Summary

Reading with the Divine Presence

God Is Revealed in Our Lives

Can We Be “Friends” with God?

Revelation through Relationship

A Deepening Intimacy

A School of Relationship

Category Archive

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