Everyone Belongs: Weekly Summary

Sunday
The gospel is before all else a call to live differently, so that life can be shared with others. —Richard Rohr

Monday
The absolute religious genius of Jesus is that he utterly refuses all debt codes, purity codes, religious quarantines, and the searching for sinners. He refuses to divide the world into the pure and the impure, much to the chagrin of almost everybody—then and now. —Richard Rohr

Tuesday
The Eucharistic meal is meant to be a microcosmic event, summarizing at one table what is true in the whole macrocosm: we are one, we are equal in dignity, we all eat of the same divine food, and Jesus still and always “eats with sinners.” —Richard Rohr

Wednesday
Jesus’s identity as one of the least of these is not a romantic, charitable notion; it is Jesus’s reality. The homeless, the poor, the incarcerated are Jesus’s friends, family, disciples, and followers, and Jesus himself. —Jessica C. Williams

Thursday
I found a sense of kinship with my LGBTQIA+ colleagues, and my heart expanded. Their stories and their struggles converted me from “What does the Bible say?” to new questions: What is the context in which the Bible says that? And does that make sense? And is that right? And does it square with Love? —Jacqui Lewis

Friday
Fellowship is a kind of belonging that isn’t based on status, achievement, or gender, but instead is based on a deep belief that everyone matters, everyone is welcome, and everyone is loved, no conditions, no exceptions. —Brian McLaren

A Litany of Belonging

At many of the Center’s conferences, we read the following call and response with those gathered, both in person and online. We invite you to read it aloud to yourself and feel truly welcomed—all parts of you, especially those that culture or church have denigrated.

We would like to let you know that you belong:

People on all parts of the continuum of gender identity and expression, including those who are gay, bisexual, heterosexual, transgender, cisgender, queer folks, the sexually active, the celibate, and everyone for whom those labels don’t apply. Response: I belong.

People of African descent, of Asian descent, of European descent, of First Nations descent in this land and abroad, and people of mixed and multiple descents and of all the languages spoken here. Response: I belong.

Bodies with all abilities and challenges. Those living with any chronic medical condition, visible or invisible, mental or physical. Response: I belong.

People who identify as activists and those who don’t. Mystics, believers, seekers of all kinds. People of all ages. Those who support you to be here. Response: I belong.

Your emotions: joy, fear, grief, contentment, disappointment, surprise, and all else that flows through you. Response: I belong.

Your families, genetic and otherwise. Those dear to us who have died. Our ancestors and the future ones. The ancestors who lived in this land, in this place, where these buildings are now . . . we honor you through this work that we are undertaking. Response: I belong.

People who feel broken, lost, struggling; who suffer from self-doubt and self-judgment. Response: I belong.

All beings that inhabit this earth: the two-legged, the four-legged, winged and finned, those that walk, fly, and crawl, above the ground and below, in air and water. Response: I belong.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Reference:
Adapted from Diversity Welcome, Training for Change.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on growing into belonging.
Listen to Jacqui Lewis and Wajahat Ali discuss loving yourself unconditionally on Love. Period.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image Credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 10-12 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

The creative team at CAC sent a single-use camera to Brian McLaren as part of an exploration into contemplative photography. His photos are featured here in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image Inspiration: The two outside photos in this triptych can appear spare, bare, or apart. The photo in the middle brings together a collection of unique items supported by the table. What happens when we are intentional about connection, or together-ing, rather than other-ing?

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.

Fellowship for All

Brian McLaren invites readers to imagine that they are among the disciples in John’s Gospel, gathering together in Jerusalem after Jesus’ death:

We were afraid that first Sunday night, just three days after Jesus died. Really afraid. We were afraid to go outside in case someone might recognize us as Jesus’ friends and notify the authorities. . . .

So there we remained, tense, jumpy, simmering with anxiety. What happened Friday had been ugly, and we didn’t want it to happen to the rest of us. Every sound startled us. Suddenly, we all felt something, a presence, familiar yet . . . impossible. How could Jesus be among us? . . .

And from that night, we learned something essential about what this uprising is going to be about.

[This uprising of the gospel] isn’t just for brave people, but for scared folks like us who are willing to become brave. It isn’t just for believers, but for doubting folks like Thomas who want to believe in spite of their skepticism. It isn’t just for good people, but for normal, flawed people like you and me and Thomas and Peter.

And I should add that it isn’t just for men, either. It’s no secret that men in our culture often treat women as inferior. Even on resurrection morning, when Mary Magdalene breathlessly claimed that the Lord was risen, the men among us didn’t offer her much in the way of respect. There were all sorts of ignorant comments about “the way women are.” Now we realize the Lord was telling us something by bypassing all of the male disciples and appearing first to a woman. As we look back, we realize he’s been treating women with more respect than the rest of us have right from the start.

We have a term for what we began to experience that night: fellowship. Fellowship is a kind of belonging that isn’t based on status, achievement, or gender, but instead is based on a deep belief that everyone matters, everyone is welcome, and everyone is loved, no conditions, no exceptions. It’s not the kind of belonging you find at the top of the ladder among those who think they are the best, but at the bottom among all the rest, with all the other failures and losers who have either climbed the ladder and fallen, or never gotten up enough gumption to climb in the first place.

Whatever else this uprising will become, from that night we’ve known it is an uprising of fellowship, a community where anyone who wants to be part of us will be welcome. Jesus showed us his scars, and we’re starting to realize we don’t have to hide ours.

So fellowship is for scarred people, and for scared people, and for people who want to believe but aren’t sure what or how to believe. When we come together just as we are, we begin to rise again, to believe again, to hope again, to live again.

Reference:

Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (New York: Jericho Books, 2014), 173, 174–175.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to Brian McLaren and members of the CAC staff discuss overcoming bias on the podcast Learning How to See.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image Credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 10-12 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

Deep political polarization in my 38-year marriage left me untethered, broken, and lonely. We were a microcosm of our country’s division. . . One evening, we threw a “Hail Mary” deciding to put our relationship above all else, and we slowly began the messy process of healing and reconciliation. During the darkest days of my life, these daily meditations have brought me the light, clarity, and courage I needed to take care of myself. They also opened my heart enough to find the humility and compassion I needed to do my part in healing our marriage. I discovered that I, too, was guilty of “othering.” I finally feel like I’m emerging from a chrysalis to a more joyful life of love and connection.
—Julie C.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Integrity of Love

CAC friend Reverend Dr. Jacqui Lewis shares how a broad examination of scripture emboldened her to trust in God’s expansive love for all people, even when the church excludes them:

In my first semester at Princeton Theological Seminary, I was confronted with questions I had never pondered—most especially, just how literally was the Bible the word of God? This question buzzed around everything: from women and preaching to manifest destiny and chosenness to economic justice to homosexuality. . . . Since I had no idea what to think of all this [regarding gay ordination], my first question was, “What does the Bible say?” . . .

As a Christian, I had learned only ten commandments, none of which said anything about being or not being gay. In the gospels, Jesus hadn’t said anything about being gay. Puzzled, I went to the part of the scriptures these colleagues [against gay people] were referring to—the texts about purity codes. I read about keeping kosher, about not eating shellfish or pork, about avoiding mixed fabrics and not touching a woman during menstruation. And there, too, was the mention that a man shouldn’t lie down with a man as he would a woman. But it made no sense to me that we were singling out the texts relating to gay sex while still wearing different fabrics . . . and still eating shrimp and barbecue ribs! All of this was so maddening to me. . . .

My own view came into clearer focus when, at the suggestion of one of my teachers, I read a book by Chris Glaser. . . . Reading his story, it was clear that Chris was born gay—thus was gay by design—and so he hadn’t broken any laws! As the psalmist wrote, every human being is “awesomely and wonderfully made” [Psalm 139:14] just as they are. To me, this meant that if any of us are created in the divine image, my gay friends are, too. I found a sense of kinship with my LGBTQIA+ colleagues, and my heart expanded. They deserved justice, welcome, and acceptance. These were my people, my posse; I would not leave them behind.

Their stories and their struggles converted me from “What does the Bible say?” to new questions: What is the context in which the Bible says that? And does that make sense? And is that right? And does it square with Love? [1]

Minister and activist William Sloane Coffin Jr. (1924–2006) urges readers to rely on the integrity of love rather than our own limited and limiting judgments:

[There] are those who prefer certainty to truth, those in church who put the purity of dogma ahead of the integrity of love. And what a distortion of the gospel it is to have limited sympathies and unlimited certainties, when the very reverse, to have limited certainties but unlimited sympathies, is not only more tolerant but far more Christian. For “who has known the mind of God?” [Romans 11:34] And didn’t Paul also insist that if we fail in love we fail in all other things? [2]

References:

[1] Jacqui Lewis, Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World (New York: Harmony, 2021), 140–142.

[2] William Sloane Coffin, “Liberty to the Captives and Good Tidings to the Afflicted,” in Homosexuality and Christian Faith: Questions of Conscience for the Churches, ed. Walter Wink (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 106–107.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on contemplative seeing beyond gender and sexuality binaries.
Listen to Jacqui Lewis interview gender non-conforming, mixed-media artist ALOK.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image Credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 10-12 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

No One Is Expendable

“Don’t laugh, folks: Jesus was a poor man.” —Phrase written on a canvas covering on the mule train of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign

Jessica C. Williams, an activist with the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, invites us to consider the practical implications of the poverty of Jesus.

What if we take seriously the proclamation of the Mule Train organizers—that “Jesus was a poor man”? . . . [1]

In the time and place in which Jesus ministered, most people lived under the subjugation of the Roman Empire and were considered expendable. Elite rulers extracted wealth from all the lands they conquered, pushing people to hunger, homelessness, and the brink of starvation—and sometimes over the edge into slavery and death. The Bible tells us that Jesus had no place to lay his head (Luke 9:58), which is another way to say he was homeless. Jesus was trained in carpentry—a form of manual labor akin to low-wage work today—and he relied on the hospitality of friends, many of whom were also poor, to share meals and lodging with him. Jesus, the disciples, and those to whom they ministered were poor, subjected, and oppressed. They were the expendables. . . .

“Jesus was a poor man” is a theological statement. It is more than saying “Jesus cares about the poor,”—how Matthew 25:31–46 is often interpreted. In Matthew 25, what is usually translated as “the least of these” is the Greek word elachistoi, which literally means “the smallest or most insignificant ones”: in other words, the expendables. Jesus’s identity as one of the least of these is not a romantic, charitable notion; it is Jesus’s reality. He is saying that the social class of expendables are his people. The homeless, the poor, the incarcerated are Jesus’s friends, family, disciples, and followers, and Jesus himself. . . .

Interpretations of Matthew 25:31–46 that diminish Jesus’s ministry to that of charity miss the gospel message and actually help to maintain inequality. But when we understand that the Roman Empire considered Jesus to be expendable—much the same way the United States considers poor and low-income people, nearly half of the population, to be expendable—we see that being a follower of Jesus means something deeper than charity. Being Christlike means joining a movement, led by the poor and dispossessed, to lift the load of poverty. [2]

Father Richard comments on Matthew 25, reminding us that: Jesus teaches there is a moral equivalency between himself and other people. Jesus says, “Whatever you do to others, you do to me” (Matthew 25:40). How you treat other human beings is how you treat Jesus. That’s nondual thinking. Many Christians would read this statement and firmly say, “This is the Word of the Lord.” But it isn’t their actual practice. As long as they remain at the dualistic level, they can go to church and worship Jesus and be greedy, selfish, and racist an hour later, not seeing any conflict with that at all. [3]

References:
[1] The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, which Martin Luther King Jr. organized right before his death, led a caravan of mules to carry people to the nation’s capital to draw attention to the plight of poverty.

[2] Jessica C. Williams, “Jesus Was a Poor Man,” in We Cry Justice: Reading the Bible with the Poor People’s Campaign, ed. Liz Theoharis (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2021), 17–18, 19.

[3] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That Which I Am Seeking, disc 3 (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2012), CD, MP3 download.

Explore Further. . .

Read Dorothy Day and Pope Francis on solidarity with the poor.
Read Bryan Stevenson on love and proximity to one’s neighbor.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image Credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 10-12 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

With the current conditions of our political climate, I found myself put off by many of the conversations, posts and polarization on social media. Therefore, I found Father Richard Rohr’s daily meditation on Jesus’ teaching to “love your enemies” especially poignant. . . I practiced intentionally sending love from my heart to one or two specific others in which I disagreed. I felt the tension in my own body as I did this. It was not easy, as I also felt a wave of my own fear come up to be released. The struggle of this practice reminds me that real love is not an idea, but an anchor point within myself that I have to access, return to regularly and rest. It helps remove the “log in my own eye” so to speak and heal the relationship with the other.
—Lauren A.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

A Welcoming Table

Father Richard understands Jesus’ eating habits as a model for the kind of “open table” fellowship we might practice as Christians:

God’s major problem in liberating humanity has become apparent to me as I consider the undying recurrence of hatred of the other, century after century, in culture after culture and religion after religion.

Can you think of an era or nation or culture that did not oppose otherness? I doubt there has ever been such a sustained group. There have been enlightened individuals, thank God, but seldom established groups—not even in churches, I’m sorry to say. The Christian Eucharist was supposed to model equality and inclusivity, but we turned the Holy Meal into an exclusionary game, a religiously sanctioned declaration and division into groups of the worthy and the unworthy—as if we were worthy!

Before Christianity developed the relatively safe ritual meal we call the Eucharist, Jesus’ most consistent social action was eating in new ways and with new people, encountering those who were oppressed or excluded from the system. It seems Jesus didn’t please anybody by breaking rules to make a bigger table. Notice how his contemporaries accused Jesus: one side criticized him for eating with tax collectors and sinners (see Matthew 9:10–11). The other side judged him for eating too much (Luke 7:34) or dining with the Pharisees and lawyers (Luke 7:36–50; 11:37–54; 14:1). Jesus ate with all sides. He ate with lepers (Mark 14:3), he received a woman with a poor reputation at a men’s dinner (Luke 7:36–39), and he even invited himself to a “sinner’s” house (Luke 19:1–10). How do we not see that?

It seems we ordinary humans must have our other! It appears we don’t know who we are except by opposition and exclusion. “Where can my negative energy go?” is the enduring human question; it must be exported somewhere. Sadly, it never occurs to us that we are the negative energy, which then sees and also creates that negative energy in others. The ego refuses to see this in itself. Seeing takes foundational conversion from the egoic self and most have not undergone that transformation. We can only give away the goodness (or the sadness) that we ourselves have experienced and become.

Eucharist is meant to identify us in a positive, inclusionary way, but we are not yet well-practiced at this. We honestly do not know how to do unity. Many today want to make the Holy Meal into a “prize for the perfect,” as Pope Francis observed. [1] Most Christians still do not know how to receive a positive identity from God—that they belong and are loved by their very nature! The Eucharistic meal is meant to be a microcosmic event, summarizing at one table what is true in the whole macrocosm: we are one, we are equal in dignity, we all eat of the same divine food, and Jesus still and always “eats with sinners,” just as he did when on Earth.

Reference:
[1] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), 47.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, “Introduction,” “Unity and Diversity,” Oneing, vol. 6, no. 2 (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2018), 13–14, PDF, print; and

Jesus’ Plan for a New World: The Sermon on the Mount (Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1996), 81.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on Eucharist as a bigger, inclusive table.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image Credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 10-12 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Image Inspiration:The two outside photos in this triptych can appear spare, bare, or apart. The photo in the middle brings together a collection of unique items supported by the table. What happens when we are intentional about connection, or together-ing, rather than other-ing?

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Goodness Exposed

Father Richard believes that Jesus’ life and teachings offer us a foundational example of God’s all-inclusive love that we are asked to emulate:

The absolute religious genius of Jesus is that he utterly refuses all debt codes, purity codes, religious quarantines, and the searching for sinners. He refuses the very starting point of historic religions. He refuses to divide the world into the pure and the impure, much to the chagrin of almost everybody—then and now.

Jesus is shockingly not upset with sinners. This is a shock so total that most Christians, to this day, refuse to see it. He is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners: these denying, fearful, and illusory individuals are the actual blockage. They are much more likely to hate and feel no compunction. Formerly, religion thought its mission was to expel sin and evil. Through Jesus, we learn that sin lies in the very act of expelling. There is no place to expel it to. We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us. We either carry and transform the evil of human history as our own problem, or we increase its efficiency and power by hating and punishing it “over there.” The Jesus pattern was put precisely and concisely by Paul: “for our sake he made the sinless one a victim for sin, so that in him we might become the uprightness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). I admit, that is counterintuitive for most people. Only mystics and sinners seem to get it.

In the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30–37), Jesus tells of a man by the side of the road waking up in enemy territory, realizing that he has been loved by the very one who is supposed to hate him and whom he is supposed to fear. Could this be everybody’s awakening? Could this be an accurate image of discovering God and truth? Jesus is clearly presenting the foreign Samaritan as an image of God. He ends the shocking parable by saying, “Go and do the same” (Luke 10:37). The human task has become the very imitation of God, which seems almost unthinkable. God, the one that history has been taught to fear, is in fact the utter Goodness that enfolds us and creates a safe and nonthreatening universe for us—a renewed universe that we can now pass on to others. For Jesus, there are no postures, group memberships, behaviors, prayer rituals, dietary rules, asceticism, or social awareness that, of themselves, transform us or make us enlightened, saved, or superior. There are no contaminating elements or people to expel or exclude. These answers are exposed as inadequate only when goodness is exposed as the divine field of action. Everyone and everything belongs.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2001, 2020), 168–170.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on God’s inclusive solidarity instead of judgment.
Listen to Jacqui Lewis and Brian McLaren discuss thinking inclusively on the CAC podcast Love. Period.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image Credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 10-12 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

Through my own practice of contemplative photography, I enter a state of wonder and open all my senses to seeking and receiving the divine in the thin spaces that surround us. Through my camera lens, I witness the sparks of grace that reside in the mundane. Photography has given me the gift of mission and glimpses of grace and divinity.
—Mary Beth W.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

God Loves Imperfect Things

Father Richard shares that both Genesis and the Gospels point us to the truth that “everyone belongs.” He believes several of his meditations this week are the very heart and foundation of his teaching. Read them twice!

Try to think of the Reign of God as Jesus’ way of saying “the Big Picture” or “in the Largest Frame.” It is not a place as much as the ultimate perspective, the perspective of God. Whenever we open ourselves to the Big Frame, our little frame of reference shrinks into proper perspective or even falls away entirely.

Life can’t be based on what is passing; it can’t be based on transitory images. Instead, we have to base it on the lasting truth, on the truth of who we are, on the truth of this creation, which God says is “very good” (Genesis 1:31).

Our problem seems to consist in the fact that we’re convinced of not being good. And we need a great deal of trust to believe God’s pronouncement that everything God created is very good—even in its imperfect state. We seem to believe that only perfect things are lovable. Yet the Gospels say very clearly that God loves imperfect things, which is really everything! Perfection is invariably our own self-created notion, manufactured largely in our own thinking mind or by our culture; thus, it is both delusional and, finally, self-defeating—as well as a major enemy and obstacle to loving what is right in front of us.

Only God can lay claim to perfection. Yet we keep plowing ahead, demanding a desired and expected response from ourselves and from the world, even when we seldom get it. We then use this disappointing information to notice everyone else’s imperfection! Such a false crusade only gets more compulsive and demanding the older we get.

Those who don’t have anything to prove or protect believe they are loved as they are. But we who have spent our lives ascending the spiritual ladder have a harder time hearing this truth. For the truth isn’t found up at the top of our striving, but down at the bottom in our deepest nature. By trying to climb the ladder upward we miss Christ, who comes down through the Incarnation.

The proclamation of the Reign of God is a radical political and theological statement. It has nothing to do with being perfect. It has to do with living inside the Big Frame, the final and full state of affairs, the lasting perspective. The gospel is before all else a call to live differently, so that life can be shared with others. In other words, the gospel is ultimately calling us to a stance of simplicity, vulnerability, dialogue, powerlessness, and humility. These are the only virtues that make communion and community and intimacy possible.

References:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Simplicity: The Freedom of Letting Go, rev. ed. (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2003), 56, 57, 58; and

“The Trap of Perfectionism: Two Needed Vulnerabilities,” “Perfection,” Oneing, vol. 4, no. 1 (Albuquerque, NM: CAC Publishing, 2016), 74, print, PDF.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard and Brian McLaren on God’s justice and the Reign of God.
Read Richard on the Reign of God as an alternative to domination systems.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image Credit: Brian McLaren, Untitled 10-12 (detail), 2021, photograph, United States. Jenna Keiper and Leslye Colvin, 2021, triptych art, United States.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Everyone Belongs: Weekly Summary

Fellowship for All

The Integrity of Love

No One Is Expendable

A Welcoming Table

Goodness Exposed

God Loves Imperfect Things

Category Archive

come visit

Stay connected

explore more

Everyone Belongs: Weekly Summary

Fellowship for All

The Integrity of Love

No One Is Expendable

A Welcoming Table

Goodness Exposed

God Loves Imperfect Things

Category Archive

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