"The Church and Civil Rights"

"The Church and Civil Rights"

Our people, by and large, haven’t developed a sense of social conscience. It’s amazing when we look at the 1960’s. You know what attitudes were rather blandly accepted by all of us in the early 1960’s, let’s say, in regard to race relations. Here and there stood out a man or woman of obvious conscience, one who dealt with good and evil, with truth. But they were few and far between. To our forever shame, it was by and large the movement of history, the movement of culture that raised our consciousness to the evil involved in denying people civil rights. Most of us didn’t een know this stuff was going on! It was the Spirit in history (what the Germans call the zeitgeist), that for the most part formed our consciences. And the Church cam along, caught the wind and said, Yeah, we believe in that too, that’s right, that’s the gospel! It is the same for militarism, slavery, human rights, sexism and respect for the earth. We have been “Peter-come-latelys” on all of these. Notice in the twentieth chapter of John: Peter (the Church) gets to the tomb late (after the lover, John) and finally believes. It’s always been that way, I guess. Simple love sees and believes even before the Church. But at least we finally get there and back it up!

from The Price of Peoplehood

"The Church and Civil Rights"

"The Church and Civil Rights"

Our people, by and large, haven’t developed a sense of social conscience. It’s amazing when we look at the 1960’s. You know what attitudes were rather blandly accepted by all of us in the early 1960’s, let’s say, in regard to race relations. Here and there stood out a man or woman of obvious conscience, one who dealt with good and evil, with truth. But they were few and far between. To our forever shame, it was by and large the movement of history, the movement of culture that raised our consciousness to the evil involved in denying people civil rights. Most of us didn’t een know this stuff was going on! It was the Spirit in history (what the Germans call the zeitgeist), that for the most part formed our consciences. And the Church cam along, caught the wind and said, Yeah, we believe in that too, that’s right, that’s the gospel! It is the same for militarism, slavery, human rights, sexism and respect for the earth. We have been “Peter-come-latelys” on all of these. Notice in the twentieth chapter of John: Peter (the Church) gets to the tomb late (after the lover, John) and finally believes. It’s always been that way, I guess. Simple love sees and believes even before the Church. But at least we finally get there and back it up!

from The Price of Peoplehood

"We Need to Waste Time"

"We Need to Waste Time"

I want to look at the experiences in your lives of people who’ve deeply touched you, who’ve deeply changed you. They’re always people who are not afraid to be personal. Ideas really don’t change people. People change people. Those who are truly bringing good news are people who know how to be in relationship, who know how to waste time with you. We need to waste time with the Lord, too. This is the foundation of our prayer lives. You’re not being unproductive when you wait for God, when you listen for and seek the Holy One. The Judeo-Christian tradition gives us the Sabbath, a sense of sacred time in which to be, to listen, to be personal and not to “work at it.” The Sabbath idea is that at least one-seventh of your life needs to be fallow, useless, empty and expectant-person to person. Cardinal Newman wrote, “So much sanctity is lost to the Church because brothers [sic] refuse to share the secrets of their hearts one with another.” He put that in his coat of arms (“cor ad cor loquitur”), which doesn’t sound like what a cardinal should put on his coat of arms. He’s no sloppy sentimentalist, but a great intellectual. But it’s obvious Newman was a man who put it together. He was speaking from an educated heart. He knew the power of sharing the personal. The truly personal is usually the most universal.

from The Price of Peoplehood

"A Way To Happiness"

"A Way To Happiness"

(Recorded at the Mount of the Beatitudes) Beatitude means happiness. The Beatitudes could also be called the ways to happiness. But they are not prescriptions for happiness in the next world, as much as a daring description of happiness in this world. So notice that the first and last Beatitudes are in the present tense. He says for those who are poor in spirit, the Kingdom of Heaven is now (Matthew 5:3). For those of you who are persecuted in the cause of justice, the Kingdom of Heaven is now (5:10). The people must have been sitting here on this very hillside with their mouths open. They say, well, that’s not what they teach us. They teach us to be cunning and to be strong and to be self-assured. He says, oh yes, I’m telling you to be self-assured, but self-assured from within because of your awareness of who-you-are-in-God. Jesus knew that happiness is an inside job, to borrow a phrase. And then he points up to these trees and these birds that you hear chirping above you and he says, be like them. They’re not worried, so “Stop all your worrying. Tomorrow will take care of itself” (Matthew 6:34). It sounds a lot like the advice for happiness from the recovery movement: “One day at a time.”

from On Pilgrimage With Father Richard Rohr

"New Eyes for Truth"

"New Eyes for Truth"



“Stop judging, that you may not be judged. For as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you. Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from you eye?’ You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.” (Matthew 7:1-5, NAB)

Carl Jung, after many years as a psychologist, said this is how he’d sum up everything he’d learned: Humanity tends to project its inner world onto the outer world. If you’re always seeing people out there, let’s say, as two-faced, then very likely you’re two-faced. If you’re always seeing people as hard and demanding, I bet you’re hard and demanding on yourself and you believe God is hard and demanding on you.

We see out there what’s already in our minds. Yet the healing ministry of Jesus was to give us new eyes so we could begin to live in the truth and see the real. With the eyes of Christ we accept and forgive our real self instead of hating it in others.

from The Price of Peoplehood

"Positive Sexuality"

"Positive Sexuality"

If I can fault Catholic tradition in one area, it’s that there’s never been a single century in two thousand years when we have had positive teaching on our sexuality, or on our emotional and bodily selves. Despite the Song of Songs and a few enlightened saints, there’s never been general positive teaching on how to integrate our bodies, minds and feelings. So a lot of us, even the clergy, are emotional babies. We’re reacting and over-reacting, feeling, not knowing how to feel, repressing feelings, and therefore getting lots of ulcers, alcoholism and depression. We had Logic 101 in seminary; we had Metaphysics 101. Where was Emotions 101?

Affection, intellect and will: All three of these must be open to God. God can speak to us through our affections, through our emotions, through our experience of our bodiliness. We’ve allowed ourselves continuously to name our bodily functions, our passions, as humanity’s “fallen” part. Yet our emotions are no more fallen than intellect or will! Maybe we good Christians don’t sleep around, but a lot of us – priests and lay – go to bed with power, greed and superiority. That keeps us just as far from God as any sin of the flesh.

from The Price of Peoplehood

"Grin and Bear It"

"Grin and Bear It"

Real holiness doesn’t feel like holiness; it just feels like you’re dying. It feels like you’re losing it. And yet, you’re losing it from the center, from a place where all things are One, where you can joyously, graciously let go of it. You know God’s doing it when you can smile, when you can trust the letting go.

I’m not suggesting stoic, teeth-gritting tolerance; I mean grin and bear it. Unless the grin is there, unless the joy is there, it isn’t God’s work.

Many of us were taught the no without the yes, the joy. We were trained just to put up with it, to take it on the chin. That destroyed a lot of people in the Church. Saying no to the self does not necessarily please God. When God, by love and freedom, can create a joyous yes inside of you – so much so that you can absorb the no’s – then it’s God’s work.

from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

"St. John of the Cross"

"St. John of the Cross"

True spirituality is utterly countercultural because it’s non-merchandisable, non-measurable, non-provable. It is precisely nothing. Who wants to be nothing in this world? This culture’s goal is for us to be something, to be everything, to “win friends and influence people.”

St. John of the Cross puts it this way: “In order to come to pleasure you have not, you must go by a way that you will enjoy not. To come to the knowledge that you have not, you must go by a way that you know not. To come to the possession that you have not, you must go by a way in which you possess not. To come to be what you are not, you must go by a way that you are not” (Ascent of Mount Carmel, I, 13, #10).

We fear nothingness, of course. That’s why we fear death, too. I suspect that death is the shocking realization that everything I thought was me, everything I held onto so desperately, was precisely nothing. The nothingness we fear so much is, in fact, the treasure that we long for. We long for the space where there is nothing to prove and nothing to protect; where I am who I am, and it’s enough. Spirituality teaches us how to get naked ahead of time, so God can make love to us as we really are.

from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

Self Respect

"Self-Respect"

You cannot give yourself away until you have a self. That’s why the gospel was meant primarily for adults. The most we can do with children is love them and touch them; cuddle, hug and believe in them. You can’t preach a full-fledged, heavy gospel to children because everything in their psyche and soul is saying grow, experience, develop, run, prove myself, be ambitious. A child’s psyche cannot understand the way of the cross.

Only adults are ready for the gospel. And, in fact, if we aren’t ready for it around age thirty we haven’t grown up. Thirty years should teach us that life is both merging and also separating, loving and letting go, yes and no. Both are sacred and necessary. It seems to me the people who have the best sense of self, who don’t constantly need to have it affirmed or stroked, are people with self-respecting boundaries. They are always people who, in some way or another, know how to set limits to their lives and know, quite simply, how to say no to themselves. They have an appropriate sense of boundaries and an instinctive sense of their own center.

That is precisely the way the ego is formed: not by pandering to the self, but in fact by setting limits to its voracious appetites. That gives ego the boundaries and the center that it needs. You are something, it tells you, because there is something there you can say no to. The “sacred no” to the self, ironically, gives us a sense of self-respect. Continual yeses to the self are actually a humiliation to the ego.

from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

"Spiritual Spectators"

"Spiritual Spectators"

Western civilization has had such victory in terms of science, technology – the outer world – because we are able to objectify everything. But the price we’ve paid is our state of alienation. We’re over here apart from it. We analyze the world as an object over there.

Once consciousness surrenders to that subject/object split, quite frankly, prayer becomes very difficult, if not next to impossible. Prayer is unitive experience. Yet for us prayer has sometimes become confused with mere inner awarenesses, me analyzing my own inner states and feelings about God. Those of us who were raised in religious contexts, for example, are often inclined to give a value judgment to everything and to ourselves. That’s the guilt middle-class folks have. We have it because we are alienated from our own souls. We’re standing over here, apart from ourselves, analyzing: Is it good, better, best? It is venial sin, is it mortal sin?

When you’re in that stance of analyzing the self, you’re a spectator and you’re necessarily divided from your own soul. Maybe that’s why Jesus said, “Do not judge and you will not be judged” (Matthew 7:1). Our judgments separate us, alienate us and, therefore, condemn us.

from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

"Spiritual Fixes"

"Spiritual Fixes"

So many people I met in Africa walk around with a calmness and a self-assurance and a sense of presence that many of our people no longer have. And you say, This doesn’t make any sense. We’ve tried so hard to be OK, to affirm one another and give ourselves “positive personal regard.” The self-esteem movement is a national business.

If what I’m seeing in the American Church is the fruit of all that stroking, I don’t think it’s working at all. In fact, it seems like these folks need a fix every few days. Many seem incapable of really grasping the good news, taking it into their hearts, standing with it and moving forward with it to lives of surrender, service or silence. Instead, it’s a world of noise and weak identity, where we need constant reassurance, someone to be holding our hand all the time and telling us, “You’re good. God loves you.”

from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

"We Need New Ways to Worship"

"We Need New Ways to Worship"

As much as I love liturgy, it still reflects the pyramid structure of the Church. It suggests an official religious experience, from the pulpit to the people. There isn’t much chance for the community to feed on itself, to enrich and nurture itself. The priest’s religious experience becomes the only source. One result of this narrow sense of liturgy is a very limited view of the Scriptures. It is a celibate, male, clerical, sometimes academic reading of the Scriptures.

Part of the reason New Jerusalem Community grew strong is that we had formats for worshiping and praying other than priest-led liturgy. I think the Church of the future is going to have to discover these formats. You see the power of other prayer gatherings, for instance, in the communidades de base, or base communities, which began in Latin America. They have sharing of lay religious experience. They ask, What is Jesus saying to us through the Scriptures and our daily lives? There is an opportunity to share faith experiences. It’s non-academic; it’s non-male; it’s non-clerical. It’s much more homey and folksy; it’s much more alive, even if it’s also harder to control. But that shouldn’t be our main concern, should it?

from U.S. Catholic, “Recipes of a Gourmet Pray-er”

"The Power of the Cross"

"The Power of the Cross"



The language of the cross may be illogical to those who are not on the way to salvation, but those of us who are on the way see it as God’s power to save. (1 Corinthians 1:18, JB)

When Christianity loses the doctrine and power of the cross as its central strategy, it becomes a false and impotent religion. When this happens, as it has again and again, Jesus renews his people by calling them back – usually in spite of themselves – to the “way of the cross.”

This is dramatically happening in our time in the Churches of the poor and persecuted, particularly those of Central and South America. Their lives and deaths appear to be a crisis and grace for the Churches of North America and Europe. Through their faith and forgiveness, Jesus is calling all of this Church back to the doctrine and power of his cross, “to tell us what God has guaranteed … only the knowledge of him as the crucified Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:1-2).

from Coalition for Public Sanctuary pamphlet “The Cross of Jesus and Human Suffering”

"Guadalupe: Evangelizing Woman"

"Guadalupe: Evangelizing Woman"

In 1531 exactly ten years after the Spanish conquest of the native people of Mexico, there was an unprecedented “constellation of signs” that came at once from the heavens of Catholic Spain and the mythologies of the indigenous Americans: We call it the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Like all ongoing revelation, it has taken us four hundred years to being to unravel the depth of loving mystery that was revealed in this encounter between “a dear brown woman from heaven” (La Morenita) and Juan Diego, a poor Christianized Nahuatl Indian.

The oppressed Indians had lost everything: their land, their honor, their freedom, but most of all their gods. There was nothing left to do except die. But true to the biblical pattern, God’s way is not just to punish or destroy the misguided oppressors, but to surprise and subvert their explanation by creating a new and better reality through which they themselves could be converted and transformed. As always, God seems to be an expert in beating people at their own game.

In this case, the Lord speaks through the “Mother of the true God through whom one lives,” whom the Spanish call Mary. But she is dressed in the clothes of the Indians, speaks their Nahuatl language and uses Juan Diego, one of the poorest, to “repreach” the gospel back to the people who thought they had the gospel in the first place. It’s a classic example of God taking unexpected sides to usher in a new civilization – just when the Nahuatl thought it was all over!

In one generation, under this mother symbol, almost all of the native peoples accept Christianity. A new mestizo people, and I might say a new mestizo Christianity, unfolds. We are slowly, hesitatingly learning that there is no other kind. Christ always takes on the face and features of each people he loves. In this case God knew that the face and features had to be feminine and compassionate. There was no other sign that could convert both the Spanish machismo and the matriarchal religion of the Indians at the same time.

from Radical Grace, “Our Lady of Guadelupe”

"St. Therese"

"St. Therese"

Saint Therese of Lisieux, toward the end of her life, had a beautiful image of salvation. It’s not in her autobiography so many have not heard of it. She describes salvation thus: All of her life she is a little girl. She is proud and happy to be a little girl. Her heavenly Father is standing at the top of the great staircase, always beckoning her, “Come Therese! Come! I ask more of you!” She lifts her little foot again and again by all the actions of her Catholic faith and religious life, trying to please God. She is trying to climb up to God.

God watches Therese and sees her desire to come. Then in one moment that we call grace, God rushes down the staircase, picks her up and takes her. She knows afterward by hindsight that God has done it, from beginning to end. But it was important for her to keep lifting up her little foot. Our struggle, our desire, our yes is significant and necessary. But in the end it is always grace that carries us up the staircase.

from The Great Themes of Scripture

"The Virtue of Obedience"

"The Virtue of Obedience"

You can see all relationships and events in our Christian life as a training of the will, preparing it to say yes, to let go of itself. The utterly important thing is union, and this can only happen when the will is ready to let go of its ego boundaries. The virtue of obedience, and I use the word intentionally, is supremely important for the training of the will. All the great spiritual pastors, religious founders and mystics, without exception, spoke of the “virtue” of obedience. Now I don’t mean blind obedience. I don’t mean lying down and playing dead. But I do think that all Christians have to practice saying yes before they dare to say no.

In that sense the Church makes saints of us, although it’s somewhat different from the way we expected! We exist in a creative tension with the Body of Christ which challenges us, stretches us, calls us, makes demands on us and forces us into conflicts of conscience. This refines our conscience, “kicking against the goad” (Acts 26:14) until we realize we don’t need to kick. Church and obedience operate as a foil, against which our own Christian integrity is measured and too often found wanting.

Obedience is important. But I also believe in ways of listening for and hearing the Spirit beyond looking to the hierarchy or the Bible. No one else can do our homework for us.

from Catholic Agitator, “Creative Dissent”

Risk All for Love

"Risk All for Love"

The Pharisee is one who demands a sign (Mark 8:11). The poor person is one who believes “that the promise made her by the Lord will be fulfilled” (Luke 1:45). The Pharisee is the one who takes pride in being virtuous (Luke 18:9); the poor person is the one who cries to God day and night, even when God delays to help (Luke 18:7). The beggar who continues to pester the Lord is more pleasing than the dutiful and self-sufficient servant.

Jesus has reversed our human scale of values. He would rather have us live in the insecurity of traded money (Matthew 25:14-30) while trusting in the Master, than to place our hope in the sure thing that we have hidden out of fear in the field. Risk all for love, Jesus tells us, even your own life. Give that to me and let me save it. People who seek to save their own lives, doing a good job of saving themselves, are saying that God’s salvation is not needed. People who lose their lives for the sake of the Good News will find their lives. The healthy religious person is the one who allows God to save.

If this is the ideal Christian attitude toward God, then Mary is the ideal Christian of the Gospels. She sums up in herself the attitude of the poor one whom God is able to save. She is deeply aware of her own emptiness without God (Luke 1:52). She longs for the fulfillment of God’s promise (1:54); she has left her self open, available for God’s work (1:45, 49). And when the call comes, she makes a full personal surrender: “Let it be!” (1:38).

from The Great Themes of Scripture

"Action Please"

"Action Please"

If the Bible is anything, it’s the word of God’s involvement in the action of history. A great image of this is Mary’s Visitation, as recorded in the first chapter of Luke. Last year I gave a retreat in the Holy Land to the Franciscans in Ain Karem, the town of John the Baptist. Right across the valley is the Church of the Visitation. Every night after I’d talk to the friars all day, I’d walk across the valley and sit on a beautiful wall and look over the area and try to picture Mary coming from Nazareth (which is quite a walk, by the way, and would have certainly taken some days) up through this valley and to this place where she met Elizabeth.

As I read this story, I was struck by how different her response was to what my response probably would have been. If I found out I was to be the mother of God, the first thing I would plan would be a thirty-day retreat or something. I’d say to myself, “I gotta go into solitude and get it together and purify my motives and work this out theologically.” I would go inside my head.

Yet read the passage. She is out of herself; she is free of her need to get it together. Immediately she set out for the hill country of Judea to help her cousin, whom she heard was pregnant, too (Luke 1:36-39).

Marian images are so simple that we can listen. They’re so right on; they’re so clear-cut and defined. And here it is, the primacy of action. God can reach me in my taking care of my pregnant cousin, in moving toward the world as it is. I think when we respond to need as it is right in front of us, usually we are not as susceptible to our egos. Life in front of us pulls us out of ourselves and we have to do it because it’s there. That’s how I see people being purified. That kind of spirituality I can trust.

If your life is not moving toward practical action in this real, living world, with other people, with the not-me, don’t trust your spirituality. But your engagement must happen in tandem with contemplation, the inner disengagement with ego and openness to God. Contemplation is the Divine therapy that purifies our work and involvement.

Action and contemplation are the two polarities that regulate and balance the faith-filled life. It saddens me that most Christianity is right in the middle. It’s neither radical interiority nor radical engagement. You don’t learn much in the mediocre middle, and you don’t have much to give.

from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

"Why the Apocalyptic?"

"Why the Apocalyptic?"

The apocalyptic style emerges to free prophets from taking themselves or their role in history too seriously. It says that after all is said and done (the work of the prophet), give history back to God and be at peace in the transcendent truth. Don’t try so hard that you become part of the bigger problem. The prophet might appear to be saying, “Work as if it all depends on you.” The apocalyptic figure says, “Pray and trust as if it all depends on God.” At the end of the day, cool it; forget it, and give history back to the Holy One who is going to achieve the victory anyway.

The apocalyptic prophet has two simultaneous and self-correcting messages: (1) Everything matters immensely; (2) It doesn’t really matter at all. How many people do you know who can live out their lives on that pure and narrow path? I don’t know very many at all. It seems that some are called to take the strongly apocalyptic position and all of the accompanying criticism in order to free the rest of us from our over-engagement with and idolatry of “the way things are.”

Probably the most visible and effective witnesses to this position in our time are Dorothy Day, with her “holy anarchy,” and Thomas Merton, who left it all to sit in a hermitage in the hills of Kentucky. They will always be criticized for not doing more, but their absolute stance, as we have clearly seen, is the home and school for the emergence of true prophets.

Without the apocalyptic “No,” prophets are no more than high-energy and idealistic activists, often working out of their own denied anger or denied self-interest. Apocalypticists are willing to be seen as fanatic, anti-American, anti-anything so that the rest of us can rediscover the Absolute. They are bothered and bored by our relativities and rationalization. They demand an objective ground from which all else is judged and will not be nudged from their uncompromising stance,

I believe one has to be a true and lasting contemplative to maintain apocalyptic firmness and freedom, and to keep from becoming a righteous and defeated prophet.

from Radical Grace, “Christ Against Culture or Christ the Transformer of Culture?”

"Tradition"

"Tradition"

We are called to know God personally, but we are essentially social beings. We only come to know who we are in the context of other people, in the context of living in a family, in a community. Would we be so arrogant to say that all the preceding centuries of Christians and Jews have not also known, listened to and followed the Lord? Did Christian history begin in America? With my conversion? Or in Waco, Texas, around 1962?

That is why the tradition of the Church is so important: We stand on the shoulders of all the wise persons and saints of the past. This is the true Tradition. Some historical accidents have been facilely passed on as universal tradition, yet are not the consistent coherent pattern. So we need the Body to keep us beyond cultural arrogance and tied to all the ancestors. We can’t each start from zero.

So many modern groups – street preachers, “Jesus” people – have lacked a sense of the Body, a sense of standing on the shoulders of the past. They have their God moment, and they try to move forward simply based on their private experience alone and on the “Book.” Often a small group of followers become so like-minded that they lose that sense of the larger wisdom, of histories and cultures of the centuries, they can be expected to support the local government over and against the universal good. We call it civil religion, where Christ becomes a tribal god and the Church a mere echo chamber of the state.

Both Catholics and Protestants have been guilty of this fundamentalism, but you would think Catholics would have known better by now.

from The Great Themes of Scripture

"Faces of Faith"

"Faces of Faith"

Western Christianity has been largely in the head, although the masses never were inspired that way. Institutional Christianity is mistrustful of enthusiasm, although enthusiasm literally means “in God.” Conviction, passion, excitement changes lives much more than logic or theo-logic. If the salvation that we see in our Sunday-morning communities or congregations were the best that God could do, then we don’t have much of a God. If those bored, sad, tired faces that we priests look out at on Sunday – those who rush in late and leave early – if those are the message, then the Good News isn’t very good. Somehow it seems salvation should show in our faces, our lives; in our fire, conviction and zeal. Some kind of Pentecost is still the best way to begin, and the enthusiastic Churches will probably continue to evangelize, heal and gather commitment and resources much better than contemporary Catholicism.

from The Great Themes of Scripture

"The Power at the Bottom"

"The Power at the Bottom"

The spirituality behind the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions is very similar to the phenomenon of the base communities in Latin America. It is a “low Church” approach to evangelization and healing that is probably our only hope in a suffering world of five-and-a-half billion people. Do we really need to verify belief in atonement doctrines and the Immaculate Conception when most of God’s physical, animal and human world is on the verge of mass suicide and extinction?

The Twelve-Step meetings are probably the First World answer to Third World base communities. Our suffering is psychological, relational and addictive: the suffering of people who are comfortable on the outside but oppressed and empty within. It is a crisis of meaninglessness and the false self, which had tried to find meaning in possessions, prestige and power. It doesn’t work. Se we turn to ingesting and buying to fill our empty souls.

The Twelve Steps walk us back out of our addictive society. Like all steps toward truth, they lead downward.

Bill Wilson and his A.A. movement have shown us that the real power is not at the top but at the bottom. Those who admit they are powerless have the only power that matters in the world or in the Church. Saint Bill W., pray for us.

from Radical Grace, “The Twelve Steps: An Amazing Gift of the Spirit”

"Saint Bill W."

"Saint Bill W."

Saint Bill W.? Consider the spiritual fruit that his “Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous” is now bearing throughout the world. In 1939 Bill Wilson codified his program for recovery from alcoholism. It has been so successful that it is now used by overeaters, gamblers, neurotics and those addicted to religion, drugs, sex, money, shopping, relationships and worry. Beneficiaries of these programs are some of the most spiritually open and religiously mature people you will meet.

While denominations haggle over metaphysics and belief systems, argue about who is saved and righteous with God, defend their sacramental and scriptural turf, Bill Wilson and his followers have moved forward with a humble realism that is both rare and convincing. They begin at an honest place and end at the same without arguing, proving, defending or spouting religious jargon. They come together not as a gathering of the saved but wearing their “scarlet letter” for all to see. They don’t have to be talked into a salvation theory or a need for God out there.

Their broken and powerless humanity is all that they are sure of – like parched and weary earth waiting for rain. God is a felt need, no Sugar-Daddy-Answer-Giver but the very ground of their being. To be redeemed – “brought back” – is a daily gut and heart experience, not a liberal or conservative theology.

People in Twelve-Step programs, without knowing or intending it, have every likelihood of renewing the meaning of gospel in our time. The very word “Christian” has been so cheapened that probably the only way God could re-found the Churches was from the outside. But as Scripture says, “Who can know the mind of God or who can teach the Lord?” (Wisdom 9:13).

from Radical Grace, “The Twelve Steps: An Amazing Gift of the Spirit”

"Parents’ Prayer, Everyone’s Prayer: ‘Be Done Unto Me’"

"Parents’ Prayer, Everyone’s Prayer: ‘Be Done Unto Me’"

A family came out to visit me in Albuquerque a few weeks ago, with three little ones sick with croup. The house sounded like barking dogs for three days! I did five full loads of laundry – they had vomited on everything in the house. I couldn’t believe life could be that hard. You couldn’t have one conversation or one meal undisturbed. And I thought we religious had the harder life. It’s not even in the same ballpark! What parents go through to raise children is above and beyond the call of duty. Yet they rise to the occasion, more often than not.

I can see why God ordered the continuation of the human race through parenting: God had to find a way for all of us to get out of ourselves. We need reality checks that are simply there, like a brick wall, that demand a response, with no room for choice or “discernment.” That’s the best way to become holy. It’s not what you do, it’s what you allow to be done to you.

Seeking God and holiness becomes too self-conscious unless you allow it to lead you farter than you intended, holiness comes from what you allow to be done to you by the circumstances of life, by the people who are there right in front of you. We don’t convert ourselves; we are converted.

from Letting Go: A Spirituality of Subtraction

"An Incarnation Analogy"

"An Incarnation Analogy"

We need signs of salvation. We who are well off have been given signs of the cross among us like the poor and the handicapped. We have to enter their world on their terms to live them. And the beautiful thing we discover is that we become free. We come at last to know who we are by looking in their eyes.

There was a television show called Son Rise about a couple who had an autistic child. They wanted their son to change and enter into their space. And they did everything they could to get that child to enter into their world and to be like them, the normal people. And then one day they realized they would have to enter his world.

It was nonsensical and grueling to do so. The mother entered into the child’s world on his terms, day after day sitting on the floor, playing seemingly silly, goal-less games with this child, waving her hands and entering his world.

After years, many days and thousands of hours of this, her son spoke to her! There’s the incarnation. That’s the pattern of redemption. That’s the price that God paid. God entered our world on our terms to feel the grief of being human – so we could speak back to a God who would understand.

Jesus is the suffering of God. Jesus is the pain of God, the pity of God. He is the revelation of the heart of God. Somehow our own feelings, somehow our own pain and our own pleasure is a participation in who God is. God is in agony and delightful expectation until the end of time.

from Days of Renewal

"The Message of Job"

If we meditate about this article, we might think that our times are different. The time Job lived and our time is not the same. That is true there is no time to meditate in our time; with so much marketing ringing in our ears, with so much information flowing in the world, with that desire to get and to have instead of give, we have lost a sense of belonging. We have lost that unity with God, that personal relationship with Him that we find in the old and New Testament. The challenge is to listen to God everywhere, every time and understand that everything belongs.

Have a nice day

"The Message of Job"
Job, from the Hebrew Scriptures, can be for Christians a beautiful symbol of the Calvary that each of us will go through. In the story’s first chapter Job is presented as the innocent man, confronted with evil and suffering. He has obeyed the law of God, he has been faithful. Satan comes before God and says: “Sure, he’s been faithful. You have blessed him. Take everything away from him and see if he still praises you” (1:9-11)
Very well, says Yahweh. So Yahweh takes everything away from him, and still Job says: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked I shall return. Yahweh gave, Yahweh has taken back. Blessed be the name of Yahweh” (1:21, JB).
So Satan goes again before Yahweh and says: “You took away just the external things. But destroy his bone and flesh. Make his body suffer, then see if Job will still not curse you” (2:4-5). So Yahweh gives Job ulcers and diseases of the skin. But still Job refuses to curse Yahweh. Now the stage is set for the drama. Job is tempted to curse his life. He struggles with the absurdity and the meaninglessness of life but finally says, “If we take happiness from God’s hand, must we not take sorrow too?” (2:10, JB).
Brothers and sisters, if you’re seeking to lead a good life, sooner or later every one of you is going to be led to that point. Every one of us is lead, sooner or later, to the ashpit with Job “picking at our own sores” (2:8). At that time you will hear many voices (symbolized by the various advice-giving friends of Job). Pray that you know which friends to listen to and which are being “reasonable” at the price of faith.
The Book of Job probably represents the greatest moral dialogue ever written. The final response of Job does not come from logical moral reasoning but from graced personal experience.
from The Great Themes of Scripture by Richard Rohr

"Gandhi’s Place"

This great article explains the subtle charisma of a rose. The Author challenges all of us to stop for a moment and perceive that greatness of life; trust the world and ourselves. Just like the rose knows that she is magnificent, that way we should know that we are sons of god and we are that same fruit.

"Gandhi’s Place"

If you want to smell the aroma of Christianity, you must copy the rose. The rose irresistibly draws people to itself, and the scent remains with them. Even so, the aroma of Christianity is subtler even than that of the rose and should, therefore, be imparted in an even quieter and more imperceptible manner, if possible. – Mahatma Gandhi
Gandhi’s rose is a magnificent image. The quiet and imperceptible authority of the rose comes from its beauty and lovely fragrance. It does not need to prove itself or convert you to its side. It knows it is a rose, and it knows it is beautiful.
If you have a nose and an eye for beauty, you will recognize the inherent authority of the rose. In face, its inner authority might well be so pressing and demanding that you might say to the rose, as did St. Francis de Sales, “Stop shouting!”
If Christianity relied on its inner authority, the weight of its truth and the sheer power of genuine goodness, the world would also say to Christians, “I hear you – stop shouting!” And we would not have preached a sermon or spoken a single word.
The powers of the world, who are always fighting deadlines, management goals and profit scales, do not expect to be motivated from within. They must produce, fix and accomplish, and this is one helpful part of life.
What about us? The author of life bids us share in divine freedom and authority. This will take longer, but it will also last longer, and this God seems to be building for the long haul. God waits, as only God can wait, because God knows the whole picture. Those with true authority can believe because they know that they know. And the rose can both blossom and die because she knows that she is a rose.
from Sojourners, “Authors of Life Together”