Practice of the Better: Weekly Summary

Sunday
Francis of Assisi is the inspiration for this core principle of the CAC: The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. —Richard Rohr

Monday
There is nothing to be against. Just keep concentrating on the Big Thing you are for! —Richard Rohr

Tuesday
“Resurrected” people are the ones who have found a better way by prayerfully bearing witness against injustice and evil—while also agreeing compassionately to hold their own complicity in that same evil. —Richard Rohr

Wednesday
The whole of Jesus’ ministry was to establish a community so convinced of their Belovedness to God that they proclaim the Belovedness of others. Belovedness is a massive act of owning and accepting your humanness as a gift from a God who deeply loves you. —Osheta Moore

Thursday
Initially, it seemed a bit ridiculous to me to think that by starting a small community, we could somehow change the world, but now, it seems more ridiculous to me to think that somehow the world will change if we don’t do something. —Becca Stevens

Friday
What if all of Creation is the most palpable expression of our Creator’s generosity, sense of wonder, and commitment to diversity? What happens if we begin to include the fungi, the flowers, the fritillary butterflies, and the flocks of wild geese as our neighbors, our family, and our Creator’s expressive face? —Gary Paul Nabhan

Creating Trustworthy Space

In their book The Courage Way, Shelly Francis and the Center for Courage and Renewal share ideas about creating spaces of trust among people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs. They have identified eleven “touchstones” or “ground rules” to help move groups into greater trust, belonging, and understanding:

Give and Receive Welcome
Extend hospitality, and presume welcome, too. This includes welcome and support for diverse perspectives, opinions, and approaches. . . .

Be Present as Fully as Possible
. . . Bring all of yourself—your doubts, fears, and failings as well as your convictions, joys, and successes, your listening as well as your speaking—to the work. . . .

Extend Invitation, Not Demand
. . . Participation by listening with care is no less a contribution than participation by speaking with care. . . .

Speak Your Truth in Ways That Respect Other People’s Truth
. . . When you’re getting to know people, it’s vital to share stories across lines of difference, not to debate who’s right or wrong, and not to cast blame or shame. . . .

No Fixing, Saving, Advising, or Correcting Each Other
. . . Good leaders point their team in a direction where they can find answers, and also instill the belief that team members have the gifts and capacity to make good decisions the leaders will support. . . .

When the Going Gets Rough, Turn to Wonder
If you feel judgmental, or defensive . . . ask yourself, “I wonder what brought her to this belief?” “I wonder what he’s feeling right now?” “I wonder what my reaction teaches me about myself?” . . .

Practice Asking Open, Honest Questions
. . . Open, honest questions are the ones you cannot possibly know the answer to in advance; they are meant to elicit insights, to help people access their own resourcefulness. . . .

Attend to Your Own Inner Teacher
As you listen to and interact with others, pay close attention to your own reactions and responses. . . .

Trust and Learn from the Silence
Silence, or stillness, is a gift in our noisy world, and a way of knowing in itself. . . .

Commit to and Maintain Confidentiality
People are more likely to trust each other . . . when they know that their words and stories will remain with those with whom they choose to share them, and will never be passed on to others without permission. . . .

Know That It’s Possible for the Seeds Planted Here to Keep Growing

. . . We stand in many tragic gaps in life, and recognize that our vocation lies somewhere between what is real and what can be.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Reference:

Center for Courage & Renewal and Shelly L. Francis, The Courage Way: Leading and Living with Integrity (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2018), 27–35.

Explore Further. . .

Read Parker Palmer on the role of the heart in public life.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Claudia Retter, Three Fish (details), photograph, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge the image.

This week’s image appears in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: We might find ourselves swimming against the current, but we’ve made a conscious decision to practice something different in response to an inner call.

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.

Loving the Earth

Gary Paul Nabhan is a graduate of the CAC’s Living School and a professed member of the Ecumenical Order of Franciscans. A conservation biologist, orchard-keeper, and storyteller, he shares about his involvement in the first Earth Day celebration in 1970:

What if getting our relationship right with the Earth and all its creatures is not the scenic backdrop of some circus sideshow but as crucial as getting our relations right with our Creator, our family, and our neighbors? What if all of Creation is the most palpable expression of our Creator’s generosity, sense of wonder, and commitment to diversity? What happens if we begin to include the fungi, the flowers, the fritillary butterflies, and the flocks of wild geese as our neighbors, our family, and our Creator’s expressive face?

Nearly fifty years ago, as a seventeen-year-old, I worked as a volunteer doing articles, graphics, and cartoons for the Environmental Action news magazine at the headquarters for the initial Earth Day. I was one of a dozen youth and young adults who worked there, preparing for the participation of twenty million people around the world in the first-ever global recognition of the Earth’s sacredness and its vulnerability. Some of the staff were veterans of Civil Rights Summer in the South; others were conscientious objectors who wanted to “study war no more.” We were out to do something affirmative, something inclusive—not a protest, but a celebration.

On Earth Day itself, I was sent to a small Catholic college near the Mississippi River to be the youngest presenter at a campus-wide convocation. . . .

I have no idea what I said that day. I simply looked out the windows above the assembly, watching eagles move among the towering trees growing along the banks of a tributary of the Mississippi as the water moved forward and blended into the Big Muddy itself.

Whatever words I spoke were directed toward those eagles as much as they were to the humans assembled there that day; to the catfish in the river as much as to the Christian community; a call of the wild as much as a call for a communion of all races, faiths, and classes.

Actually, I can’t recall that any words spilled out my mouth that morning. I am not at all sure that my voice was heard—let alone remembered—by anyone present that first Earth Day morning, but that did not matter much to me. I felt as though I was present at the dawning of Creation, at the first sanctioned gathering of two-leggeds, four-leggeds, winged ones, and rooted ones where all came to express their joy in being part of this sacred place that was careening through space and time.

It is true: whenever any of us feels gratitude for all of Earth’s creatures, we have become fully Present, fully alive ourselves.

That may be what Saint Francis of Assisi meant when he urged us to “go out and preach the Good News and only when necessary use words.”

Reference:

Gary Paul Nabhan, “Getting the Earth’s Sacredness Right Every Earth Day,” Living School Alumni Quarterly, issue 2 (Spring 2019): 28–29.

Explore Further. . .

Read Mirabai Starr on the Earth as Mother.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Claudia Retter, Three Fish (details), photograph, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge the image.

This week’s image appears in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: We might find ourselves swimming against the current, but we’ve made a conscious decision to practice something different in response to an inner call.

Story from Our Community:

Reflecting on ‘ways of seeing’ reminds me that, as we move out of pandemic, it will be helpful if we all try to see reality from a different perspective. We need new ways of looking at things. Weighing up traditional pros and cons, liberal vs. conservative, etc., will not bring about change. We need a third force, a third way that can amalgamate all three forces and produce a better way. —Ross P.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Starting Small

Episcopal priest Becca Stevens is founder of Thistle Farms, a social enterprise run by survivors of sexual abuse, trafficking, and addiction. We share part of her story:

My mother’s example of showing love through practical means gave me the wherewithal to open a home for women survivors of trafficking, prostitution, and addiction more than twenty-five years ago in Nashville, Tennessee. It was a small house for five women. I said: “Come live free for two years with no authority living with you. Live free.” . . . I figured that’s what I would want if I were coming in off the streets or out of prison. . . . I did it because sanctuary is the most practical ideal of all.

I wasn’t interested in repackaging charity in shiny, new boxes with the latest words. I was bored by trendy cause-hawking that left me feeling disconnected. I was disillusioned by a bifurcated political system that numbs compassion. I wanted to do the work of healing from the inside out. And that begins with a safe home. . . .

From its humble beginning, Thistle Farms now has thirty global partners that employ more than 1,600 women. . . . The mission to be a global movement for women’s freedom is broad and is growing exponentially.

Rev. Stevens’s story reminds us of Jesus’ parable (Luke 13:18–19) about the kingdom of God and a mustard seed’s growth from tiny plant to large tree:

Initially, it seemed a bit ridiculous to me to think that by starting a small community, we could somehow change the world, but now, it seems more ridiculous to me to think that somehow the world will change if we don’t do something.

Now, I can see that one loving gesture is practically divine. We have to do small things and believe a big difference is coming. It’s like the miraculous drops of water that seep through mountain limestone. They gather themselves into springs that flow into creeks that merge into rivers that find their way to oceans. Our work is to envision the drops as oceans. We do our small parts and know a powerful ocean of love and compassion is downstream. Each small gesture can lead to liberation. The bravest thing we can do in this world is not cling to old ideas or fear of judgment, but step out and just do something for love’s sake. . . .

There is no secret formula to experiencing the sacred in our lives. It just takes practice and practicality. The deep truth of our lives and the fullness we are striving for don’t happen with someone giving us the code to deep knowledge. Meaning and faith are not secret things. Sometimes what we need most is to remind one another of how the divine is all around us, calling us to see and taste it for ourselves.

Reference:

Becca Stevens, Practically Divine (Nashville, TN: Harper Horizon, 2021), xv–xviii.

Explore Further. . .

Read about the medieval Beguines as a movement of faithful and courageous women.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Claudia Retter, Three Fish (details), photograph, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge the image.

This week’s image appears in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: We might find ourselves swimming against the current, but we’ve made a conscious decision to practice something different in response to an inner call.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

God’s Shalom and Racial Justice

Osheta Moore is a pastor and peacemaker committed to following the nonviolent path of Jesus in her work for racial justice.

I’ve spent the last decade calling in the peacemakers to view their peacemaking in light of the Hebraic concept of shalom. I define it as God’s dream for the world as it should be, nothing missing, nothing broken, everything made whole. Because shalom is God’s dream and God is love, our shalom practices must be rooted in love. Therefore, I’ve invited peacemakers to resist peacemaking that is rooted in anxiety and to choose peacemaking out of a posture of love. When love enters the equation, everything changes. We begin to ask ourselves what we’re for instead of what we’re against.

Moore makes a distinction between “keeping the peace,” which often allows injustice to flourish, and actively “making peace”:

The call to be an anti-racism peacemaker is not easy, because the shalom of God does not come easy. This kind of peace that lasts was shown to us in Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection, and then we as peacemakers are called to live it out. Anything that does not require us to sacrifice for each other is another form of peacekeeping, not peacemaking. I’m interested in dismantling white supremacy in order to build up something better for you and for me. I’m interested in the peacemaking North Star of the Beloved Community . . . that holds us accountable to be in right relatedness to each other and create an environment where we can all thrive.

The whole of Jesus’ ministry was to establish a community so convinced of their Belovedness to God that they proclaim the Belovedness of others. [Richard: Chosenness is for the sake of letting all others know they are chosen too!] Belovedness is a massive act of owning and accepting your humanness as a gift from a God who deeply loves you. As we adjust our thinking of this work as rehumanizing those who have been dehumanized, Belovedness is essential in our anti-racism peacemaking. Which is why nonviolence in thought, word, and deed is a pillar in my anti-racism work. . . .

This is the way of the Beloved Community:
Claim your Belovedness: love God, love self.
Then proclaim it: love others, love the world. . . .

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was the primary way students joined the civil rights movement and learned how to practice its nonviolent technique. In 1962, at a staff meeting they reaffirmed their commitment to nonviolence by describing it this way, “Love [is] the central motif of nonviolence,” the “force by which God binds man to himself and man to man.” [1] . . .

Daily I tell myself this when I choose to engage with anti-racism peacemaking work from a nonviolent, peacemaking posture:

I, a Black Peacemaker, am Beloved, and you, a White Peacemaker, are Beloved, and we belong to each other. . . .

Everything else will disappoint and overwhelm, but the love of God owned and reflected is the living water we need along the journey.

References:

[1] Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 3.

Osheta Moore, Dear White Peacemakers: Dismantling Racism with Grit and Grace (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2021), 30, 95–96, 97, 98.

Explore Further. . .

Listen to The Cosmic We hosts Barbara Holmes and Donny Bryant discuss “The Ethics of Love” with Dorsey Blake.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Claudia Retter, Three Fish (details), photograph, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge the image.

This week’s image appears in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: We might find ourselves swimming against the current, but we’ve made a conscious decision to practice something different in response to an inner call.

Story from Our Community:

The other day I was in my backyard with my 15 month old granddaughter. As she was exploring the yard a blackbird landed on a tree branch above her. She squatted down and looked up and said “Hi.” In that moment I saw it through her eyes not as just a bird but as a fellow living being with as big a part in this world as she and I. I thought of all I have learned from Center for Action and Contemplation in these daily readings. —Robin S.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Zealots and the Pharisees

Father Richard expands upon the Center for Action and Contemplation’s Third Core Principle: “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. Oppositional energy only creates more of the same.”

There seem to be two typical ways to avoid conversion or transformation, two diversionary tactics that we use to avoid holding pain: fight and flight.

“Fight” is what I’ll call the way of Simon the Zealot. It describes people who want to change, fix, control, and reform other people and events. The zealot always looks for the political sinner, the unjust one, the oppressor, the bad person over there. Zealots consider themselves righteous when attacking them (whoever they are at a given time), hating them, even killing them. When they do, they believe they are “doing a holy duty for God” (John 16:2).

Zealots often have good conclusions, but their tactics and motives can be filled with ego, power, control, and the same righteousness they hate in others. They want to do something to avoid holding pain until it transforms them. Such people present Christianity as “a cult of innocence” as opposed to a movement for solidarity.

As long as they are the problem (whoever they are), and we keep our focus on changing them and correcting them, then we can sit in a reasonably comfortable position. But it’s a position that the saints call pax perniciosa, a dangerous and false peace. It feels like peace, but instead is the false peace of avoidance, denial, and projection. The Peace of the Crucified comes from holding the tension.

This brings us to flight, the second diversionary tactic. This is the common path of the “Pharisee,” the uninformed, and the falsely innocent. Such people deny pain altogether and refuse to carry the shadow side of anything in themselves or in their chosen groups. They allow no uncertainty nor ambiguity as they scapegoat and project their own wounded side somewhere else! There will be no problems. It is a form of narcotic, and at times probably necessary to get some people through the day.

Both fight people and flight people are subject to hypocrisy, projection, or just plain illusion: “We are right; you are wrong. The world is divided into black and white, and we alone know who is good and who is bad.”

“Resurrected” people are the ones who have found a better way by prayerfully bearing witness against injustice and evil—while also agreeing compassionately to hold their own complicity in that same evil. It is not over there—it is here. It is our problem, not theirs. The Risen Christ, not accidentally, still carries the wounds in his hands and side. The question becomes: How can I know the greater truth, work through the anger, and still be a life-giving presence?

That is the Third Way beyond fight or flight, which in a certain sense includes both. It’s fighting in a new way from a God-centered place within, and fleeing from the quick, egocentric response. Only God can hold such an act together within us.

Reference:

Adapted from “Zealots and Pharisees,” Third Core Principle of the Center for Action and Contemplation.

Explore Further. . .

Read Walter Wink on Jesus’ third way of nonviolence.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Claudia Retter, Three Fish (details), photograph, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge the image.

This week’s image appears in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: We might find ourselves swimming against the current, but we’ve made a conscious decision to practice something different in response to an inner call.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Living What We Are “For”

Father Richard teaches that we can only practice new ways of being in the world if we maintain some degree of nonattachment from the systems around us:

I would insist the foundation of Jesus’ social program is what I will call non-idolatry, or the withdrawing of our enthrallment from all kingdoms except the Kingdom of God. This supports a much better agenda than feeling the need to attack things directly. Nonattachment (freedom from loyalties to human-made, domination systems) is the best way I know of protecting people from religious zealotry or any kind of antagonistic thinking or behavior. There is nothing to be against. Just keep concentrating on the Big Thing you are for!

Paul tries to create some “audiovisual aids” for this big message, which he calls “churches” (a term Jesus used only twice and in only one Gospel (Matthew 16:18 and 18:17). He needs living, visible models of this new kind of life to make evident that Christ’s people really follow a way different from mass consciousness. They are people who “can be innocent and genuine . . . and can shine like stars among a deceitful and underhanded brood” (Philippians 2:15). To people who asked, “Why should we believe there’s a new or better life possible?” Paul could say, “Look at these people. They’re different. This is a new social order.” In Christ, “there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

In Paul’s thinking, we were supposed to live inside of an alternative society, almost a utopia, and from such fullness “go to the world.” Instead, we created a model whereby people live almost entirely in the world, fully invested in its attitudes toward money, war, power, and gender—and sometimes “go to church.” This doesn’t seem to be working! Groups like the Amish, the Bruderhof, Black churches, and members of some Catholic religious orders probably have a better chance of actually maintaining an alternative consciousness. Most of the rest of us end up thinking and operating pretty much like our surrounding culture.

Many people, however, now find this solidarity in think tanks, support groups, prayer groups, study groups, house-building projects, healing circles, or community-focused organizations. Perhaps without fully recognizing it, we are often heading in the right direction. Some new studies indicate that Christians are not as much leaving Christianity as they are realigning with groups that live Christian values in the world—instead of just gathering again to hear the readings, recite the creed, and sing songs on Sunday. Jesus does not need our singing; we need instead to act like a community. Actual Christian behavior might just be growing more than we realize. Behavior has a very different emphasis than belonging.

Remember, it is not the brand name that matters.

It is that God’s heart be made available and active on this earth.

Reference:

Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope for, and Believe (New York: Convergent, 2019, 2021), 197, 200–201.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on community, common ground, and purpose.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Claudia Retter, Three Fish (details), photograph, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge the image.

This week’s image appears in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: We might find ourselves swimming against the current, but we’ve made a conscious decision to practice something different in response to an inner call.

Story from Our Community:

Through Richard Rohr’s meditations, the Franciscan alternative orthodoxy, the Enneagram, and the Cobb Institute’s webinars, I have started an Eco-Sister Farms project. This pairs USA farms with China farms in organic diplomacy and a move toward an ecological civilization (moving from industrial monoculture farming toward small biodiversity organic farming). This sisterhood across boundaries of nation-states is an expression of Francis “beyond the birdbath.” — Nancy M.

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

The Joy of Not Counting

For Father Richard, Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) is a shining example of someone who “practiced the better.” Instead of relying on judgment and criticism, Francis understood the power of simply living a better way:

God gave St. Francis to history in the pivotal period when Western civilization began to move into rationality, functionality, consumerism, and perpetual war. Francis was himself a soldier, and the son of a cloth merchant; he came from the culture he critiqued, and he challenged these emerging systems at the beginning of their now eight centuries of world dominance. Rather than fighting the systems directly and risk becoming their mirror image, Francis just did things differently. He is the inspiration for this core principle of the Center for Action and Contemplation: The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better. [1]

As theologian Adolf Holl (1930–2020) observed, Francis was born as people started measuring time by clocks instead of church bells. [2] When Christian leaders started counting, Francis stopped counting. He moved from the common economy of merit to the wondrous economy of grace, where God does not do any counting, but only gives unreservedly.

As Europe began to centralize and organize everything at high levels of control, Francis said, like a divine trickster, “Who cares?!” When Roman Catholicism under Pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216) reached heights of papal and worldly power, Francis answered, “There is another way that is much better!” When we began a style of production and consumption that would eventually ravage planet Earth, he decided to love Mother Earth and live simply and barefoot upon her. And Francis did it all with a “perfect joy” that comes from letting go of the ego.

Francis didn’t bother questioning Church doctrines and dogmas. He just took the imitation of Christ seriously and tried to live the way that Jesus lived. In The Legend of Perugia, one of the earliest accounts about Francis, he reminds the first friars that they only know as much as they do. [3] His emphasis on action, practice, and lifestyle was foundational and revolutionary for its time and is at the root of Franciscan alternative orthodoxy. Francis and Clare fell in love with the humanity and humility of Jesus. For them, Jesus was someone actually to imitate and not just to worship as divine.

The early Franciscan friars and Poor Clares wanted to be gospel practitioners instead of merely “word police,” “inspectors,” or “museum curators” as Pope Francis calls some clergy. Both Francis and Clare offered their rules as a forma vitae, or form of life. They saw orthopraxy (correct practice) as a necessary parallel, and maybe even precedent, to verbal orthodoxy (correct teaching). History has shown that many Christians never get to the practical implications of their beliefs. “Why aren’t you doing what you say you believe?” the prophet invariably asks. As the popular paraphrase of a line from Francis’s Rule goes, “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.”

References:
[1] See “The Eight Core Principles of the Center for Action and Contemplation.”

[2] Adolf Holl, The Last Christian, trans. Peter Heinegg (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 1.

[3] The Assisi Compilation, [105], in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 2, The Founder (New York: New City Press, 2000), 210. This compilation of early Franciscan texts includes The Legend of Perugia.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2014), 86–87, 200–201; and

Returning to Essentials: Teaching an Alternative Orthodoxy (Albuquerque, NM: Center for Action and Contemplation, 2015). Available as CD and MP3 download.

Explore Further. . .

Read Richard on the Jesus movement and Francis of Assisi.
Learn more about this year’s theme Nothing Stands Alone.
Meet the team behind the Daily Meditations.

Image credit: Claudia Retter, Three Fish (details), photograph, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge the image.

This week’s image appears in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.

Image inspiration: We might find ourselves swimming against the current, but we’ve made a conscious decision to practice something different in response to an inner call.

Story from Our Community:

Share your own story with us.

Prayer for our community:

Listen to the prayer.

Practice of the Better: Weekly Summary

Loving the Earth

Starting Small

God’s Shalom and Racial Justice

The Zealots and the Pharisees

Living What We Are “For”

The Joy of Not Counting

Category Archive

come visit

Stay connected

explore more

Practice of the Better: Weekly Summary

Loving the Earth

Starting Small

God’s Shalom and Racial Justice

The Zealots and the Pharisees

Living What We Are “For”

The Joy of Not Counting

Category Archive

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