I’m invited into play whether I am ready for it or not. To take one of many examples, a spring prior, we had the surprise of an April snow day, which meant that I received an excited kid-invitation to go outside and have a snowball fight at 7:30 a.m. I swallowed some coffee, donned snow gear, and complied. I would not have had the playfulness to suggest it, but my son did, and we created a memory.

I jestingly tell former church folks that I run into around town that I now worship at the altar of youth sports. Instead of in the church pulpit, I can be found most Sunday mornings on a soccer pitch or basketball court. Initially, the spaces of church worship and youth athletics might seem far apart, but I’m convinced that the sacred dimension can be explored on the sports field, too.

The way my life has been immersed in play and sport through my kids has me thinking about prayer as play and sport. The apostle Paul uses sports metaphors sometimes, such as when he compares the life of faith to a runner’s race. He even embraces healthy competition when he says, “Do you not know that in a race all runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize” (1 Corinthians 9:24). But I don’t typically think of prayer as a race—and if it is one, then prayer sounds tiring. Rather, it’s the uselessness of play, not the competition, that seems to have the most to do with contemplation. In prayer, the only prize that can be won is something that can only be given to us and not achieved. And yet we show up each morning—not dissimilar to how some of us show up on treadmills, spin bikes, and yoga mats—so that we can be ready for the gift of grace. We go to “practice” so that we don’t miss the grace when it comes.

Life with God does not have to be so serious. It can be holy and ordinary, as I try to show frequently through this newsletter. And ordinary can be fun, like throwing snowballs with children or cheering on basketballs thrown through nets. Perhaps it’s my theologically inherited Protestant bias toward work, or simply the contours of my psyche, but I’m guilty of often taking myself too seriously. If I’m honest, I do turn prayer into a competition of sorts, even if I’m racing only against myself, with “should do more” as my primary motivator. I also become caught up in conjecturing the meaning and purpose of things, as if thinking about life is the same as experiencing it. But I’m finding that it’s often the purposeless activities and relationships embraced just for the joy of it that mean the most.

Most elite basketball players that I watch on TV, though, seem to be locked into the game’s intensity with grins far from their faces. Not Caitlin Clark, though. One aspect of WNBA first draft pick Clark’s play is that, as fiery and competitive as she is, she also seems to remember the joy of the game. I confess that I haven’t followed her WNBA career closely, but I remember one March Madness competition in which her college team Iowa eeked out a close win over the University of Connecticut in a final four grueling match.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

There’s a moment that perhaps helped turn the game around: Clark shot a three in the third quarter and smiled as she rediscovered a more relaxed confidence. And when she smiled amid the unyielding game, I thought of the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s breath practice that incorporates smiling: “Breathing in, I smile; breathing out, I release.” I often feel the tense pressure of the tough game of life, but it’s practices like intentional smiling that help me feel the effects of a body more at ease.

There’s nothing like a smile and a breath to put me “back into the game” of a more playful life. And God, as a loving coach and playful teammate, cheers me on and joins me.

The German theologian Hugo Rahner wrote a book on play and summarized work from the seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor: “We speak of the playing of God, who through this creative outpouring of himself [the incarnation] makes it possible for the creature to understand him in the wonderful play of his works.” Rahner reminds us, through Maximus, that what the Trinitarian God is up to in the world is playing—and the invitation of our lives is to join the playing God. The incarnation of Christ through creation is a game played to the delight of God the Father/Mother.

The posture of prayer and meditation can also be playful. We are playing with God when we relax, rest, and make ourselves available to God’s presence in prayer.

I think of my meditation sits as taking a moment to luxuriate in God’s Sabbath rest on the seventh day of creation. After all, on the seventh day, God couldn’t have lain in bed all day binging Netflix—I like to picture God dancing or at least playing hide and seek in the garden with the first humans. Prayer can be an allowing of a playful God to enjoy and spend time with us. Such enjoyment is also a picture of the world as it should be: the prophet Zechariah envisions his people’s exile ending and God dwelling perpetually with them, exclaiming that “The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there” (8:5).

Admittedly, prayer is sometimes the equivalent of the grunting and sweating of core and cardio work or navigating the tough defense of an opposing team. Contemplative practice does not feel like play all the time. Sometimes it is hard work, and there are times of dryness when we don’t experience anything, or we’re not sure if we believe anything, but we keep showing up anyway.

But the most trustworthy mystics of the Christian tradition, like Maximus or Thomas Merton, suggest that beyond the willful commitment to practice, we can discover a spacious and playful inner willingness. To slightly paraphrase Thomas Merton:

What is serious to humans is often very trivial in the sight of God. What in God might appear to us as “play” is perhaps what God takes most seriously. At any rate, God plays and diverts God’s divine self in the garden of creation, and if we could let go of our own obsession with what we think is the meaning of it all, we might be able to hear the Divine call and follow Christ in the mysterious, cosmic dance. (New Seeds of Contemplation)

When we pray, we are participating in the sheer delight of the game.

Subscribe now

Leave a comment

I’ve been on spring break, and this is a throwback article from a couple of years ago that appeared in Living City magazine by Focolare Media.

Given that the trail entrance is under half a mile from the local police station, I know these particular gunshots must be local police officers training their aim. But even a couple of Google searches does not confirm it. And I also know that near this moment in time and far from this geographical place, the state of Israel is dropping bombs on civilian areas of Lebanon. The government cites terrorism as cause, as governments do, but the exploded ambulances and dead medics reveal what we all really know: Bombs do not discriminate in their devastation. Meanwhile, the American president employs his type-happy thumbs to announce a ceasefire between the US and Iran.

But where has the fire ceased? The shattering of shooting guns is the problem, and very few of us are free from it.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

In the Action Bible—the graphic novel, plot-driven version of the Bible I can convince my kids to read, barely—Peter pulls his sword out while surrounded by soldiers. He swings and swipes and cuts off the high priest’s ear. But Jesus, standing there with the other followers, will not have it. He says, “Peter! Put your sword away! Do you think I can’t call on God to send thousands of angels to protect me?”

But that’s not only what Jesus says. In Matthew’s Gospel, before Jesus reminds the disciples of the angels at his back, he says, “Put your sword back in its place, for all who take the sword will die by the word.” Violence is not the way, he says, and then shows through his death, which is not a passive, sacrificial death, but a repudiation of violence and a nonviolent choice.

Jesus’s life and death communicate that only nonviolent love will save us from the lie that violence solves or saves, even if it means suffering violence rather than inflicting it.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I’m still unpacking why the movie had the emotional heft it did for me: I found the soundtrack by an Icelandic cellist deeply prayerful, the film pacing deliberate and contemplative, but it was seeing Mary pursue the voice of spiritual longing in her heart, embedded in the patriarchal culture as she was, that riveted me. She is expected to marry and have children, yet she boldly chooses to leave the security and safety of kin to follow the traveling teacher Jesus.

Joining the all-male, roving band of disciples is no walk in the park, either: Peter is skeptical of her, and other than Judas—who turns out to be quite friendly but deluded—most keep their distance. In this movie’s take, all the disciples assume, in spite of the fact that we never hear Jesus saying as much, that their teacher will inaugurate a political kingdom to overthrow the Romans. Only Mary understands that Jesus is initiating an entirely different way of seeing the world through union with God and inner participation with the realm of heaven.

Mary becomes Jesus’s confidante, beloved friend, and trusted mentee. When Jesus has insomnia, Mary does, too. She, not the other disciples, sees the pain he carries when, for instance, he has a vision of profound suffering when they reach Jerusalem. Joaquin Phoenix’s Jesus lives largely in a visionary realm, connected to an expansive spiritual depth and power that allows him to manifest what is typically thought to be the “supernatural.” In the film’s showing, the miracles seem profoundly natural. Mary helps Jesus speak to the women of the communities they visit, and Mary even baptizes them.

Penitent Magdalene, Georges de La Tour, Public Domain

The power of this movie, I think, lies in the representation of Mary as a leading figure in Jesus’s movement. It’s one thing to read this in the Bible, knowing that she is the first witness of the resurrection and “apostle to the apostles”; it’s altogether different to see a narrative told that places her leadership as central. It completely changes the configuration of the typical all-male disciple story, and what’s more, it changes the picture of Jesus. Jesus, in this movie, is not a wonder-working, superhuman teacher guiding a band of comic-relief followers; Jesus is a very human teacher who is vastly misunderstood by nearly everyone, yet who shares a special soul friendship with one whose heart aligned wholly with his message. He is in this movie, a “Son of Man.”

The power of the images of Mary as a leader, soul-friend, and co-teacher with Jesus has great spiritual power to undo the way patriarchal religion has forgotten her story.

Some basic “Mary Magdalene” Bible detective work reveals references. Mary is the first witness to the resurrection (John 24:1-11 and others), present at the burial of Jesus (Mark 15:47 and parallels), watching on while Jesus is crucified (Luke 23:49 and parallels), and in Luke and Mark at least, a woman freed from seven demons. That is all we know about Mary Magdalene from the canonical Gospels—and, contrary to popular assumption, the Bible nowhere deems Mary Magdalene a prostitute!

There is an intimate scene in all Gospels of a woman anointing Jesus with oil. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, this woman is unnamed but in John’s Gospel she is Mary of Bethany. In the process of church tradition, the Mary texts and the anointing texts become synthesized, with an additional layer of what psychoanalysis has dubbed the “Madonna/whore complex,” in which men see women through a saint or sinner dichotomy. Mary Magdalene, in patriarchal interpretation, plays the whore to Mary the Mother of Jesus’s Madonna.

So it is that Pope Gregory the Great preaches a sermon in 591, in which he states:

She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven demons are ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven demons signify if not all the vices? …It is clear, brothers, that this woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts. What she therefore displayed more scandalously, she was no offering to God in a more praiseworthy manner.” (Quotation from Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Meaning of Mary Magdalene)

The process by which Mary Magdalene falls from grace in church tradition involves conflation of biblical texts, papal preaching, and all-male ecclesiastical centralization, turning Mary into a prostitute—instead of the apostle and beloved disciple of Jesus that she was.

This gorgeous, intuitive film restores Mary her rightful place. It’s a bold, feminist take, and it can restore Mary—and Jesus—to our hearts.

Note: This is from a few years back; I’m deep in reading about the whore of Babylon imagery in the book of Revelation, where the Bible does contrast Madonna and whore. What if Mary Magdalene is the key to undoing this false stereotype and affirming a non-patriarchal, embodied spirituality?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

But my panic had a unique shape.

I panicked because I didn’t know if my Christian faith held up to logic. I didn’t know if I could trust God, or if there was a God. But my panic wasn’t primarily rational; it was existential. And so, still sitting in my carrel, I pulled out a weapon of sorts: a Christian apologetics book designed to prove faith beyond doubt.

Except it didn’t work. It didn’t work for a couple of reasons. The first is that I don’t think those books are as convincing as they think they are. Second, I wasn’t actually looking for better arguments or historical information. I was looking for something sacred in the universe to trust. My doubt was not primarily rational, even though it also was rational.

Isn’t the very trust we call faith something that trusts what we do not fully know? I began to read the Danish philosopher-theologian Kierkegaard, who called faith “objective uncertainty” that requires a leap into unknowing.

I discovered two things:

1) Doubt is intrinsic to faith, not its opposite
2) Knowing about God is very different than knowing God

Amid my doubts of those days, even on days when I wasn’t sure if I believed, I still prayed. Even when I didn’t believe in prayer, I found myself praying the Psalms as if a sacred Presence were listening—almost in spite of myself, even when I didn’t have any indication that a sacred Presence was listening. I began to realize there is a type of faith that includes questions and doubts.

This type of unknowing faith is connected to a lineage in Christianity that insists that knowing God is not the same as knowing about God. The 16^th century Spanish mystic John of the Cross described something called the “dark night” as a process of losing our certainties about God, only to fall deeper in love with God. The 14^th century German mystic Meister Eckhart spoke of “not-knowing,” abandoning our ideas of God, and entering into “hiddenness” in order to experience God directly. The 14^th century anonymous author of a classic book, The Cloud of Unknowing, teaches about moving into a cloud of forgetting all that we know and depend on, and entering a cloud of unknowing.

The mystics affirm something simple and utterly complex: to know God, we must pass through unknowing.

Mystics are often misunderstood. Many people think mystics need to be monks or nuns or desert dwellers or mountain hermits or eccentric types, and that a life of contemplation and mysticism isn’t for regular, ordinary people. But the longer I’ve been on a spiritual quest, I’m convinced that these people are not distant or dangerous figures, but deeply human seekers.

And really, mysticism is the direct experience of God that changes how we see everything.

But this requires a unifying vision of religion and spirituality that is often not taught. For example, I spent years in Christian circles that treated “the world” as something potentially harmful or sinful, as if we lived somewhere other than in the world. The 20^th-century Cistercian mystic and writer Thomas Merton was convinced that the world is not something we can separate from us. “The world cannot be fled—only faced in the depths of ourselves.” He lived in a reclusive monastery and as a hermit; by all accounts, he separated himself from “the world”—and his discovery at the end of his life was that contemplation is not escape, but deep connection with the world, with reality, with people, with the earth, and with God.

But that’s different from how I learned about religion. I learned about religion as a way of dividing things. I had to unlearn a division of the world that split reality into sacred and secular.

This is the division of reality that caused me to destroy my teenage music collection—which may not seem very serious now, 30 years later, but I can assure you, it was enormously impactful then.

As a pastor’s kid, a dedicated church attendee, and an enthusiastic youth group participant, I traveled to occasional large-scale Christian youth gatherings. At one event, thousands of youth converged in Washington, D.C. to scream adoringly during music sets by Christian contemporary musicians and attend workshops on the triumphs and trials of being a Christian teenager. The workshop on “The Devil and Popular Music” is the one that convicted me to my core. The presenter’s main point was that popular music is a secret stronghold of the devil. And unfortunately, according to this man, the devil is active in all the best music! There was Christian music, on the one hand—represented by the bands singing about Jesus at the conference, and there was secular music, on the other, represented by all the tapes in my tape deck. If I truly loved Jesus, the presenter told, then all my nineties favorites like the Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, heck, even the Beatles, had to go.

Photo by Manish Das on Unsplash

This workshop inspired an enthusiastic, nighttime ritual of smashing my tapes and CDs. Several of us from our Lansing, Michigan, youth group huddled in a hotel room, my music collection spread out on the floor. We said a few earnest prayers under the dim lamplight, and I demonstrated my commitment to Jesus with all the determined stomping, throwing, scratching, and tape-unspooling I could muster.

For a while, my passionate rejection of secular music worked. We youth group attendees shared a bond—we were not like those other people, those worldly non-Christians. We were saved, which placed us in a special, knowing in-group. I felt a keen sense of belonging with these teens, but as they moved on in their own ways, and I moved across the ocean to France, my heartfelt appreciation of diverse music as art remained steadfast despite my stated beliefs.

One of the hazards of religion is this tendency to relate to God through divided categories.

These categories are always split, and instead of religion as a vehicle for greater connection and union, it becomes a vehicle for division. You are either on one side or the other—sacred and secular, belief and unbelief, church and world, body and soul, matter and spirit, pure and impure. Some people blame it on the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and his firm line between the spirit and the flesh; others blame it on the Geneva reformer John Calvin and his morbid insistence that humanity is “totally depraved.”

Regardless of where it comes from, many who seek God today stumble over a misguided religious vision of separation: the belief that encountering God is not natural for us, and that only certain people or certain groups can hope to taste divine presence, provided they travel to certain places, ascribe to certain beliefs, operate under certain conditions, and separate themselves. Designated beliefs and practices spring up that are divided or “set apart”—which are often called holy. The severe implication being that we must escape from the ordinary, or at the very least destroy a tape deck, to taste the holy.

This type of separation and division is baked into the structures and foundations of religion. In the Judaism of Jesus’ day, the entire religious system oriented itself toward the Jerusalem Temple. The Temple was the religious center or axis of the spiritual imagination, the place where God dwelled, where heaven met earth, and where humans had a chance to meet God. Holiness in the temple was spatial and required requisite boundaries. A Gentile (non-Jewish person) could visit the Temple but had to remain in something called the “outer court.” A Jewish woman who was not menstruating could proceed into the Temple to a dedicated space. Jewish men could go further. The priests offered sacrifices in a separate area called the “court of priests,” and on one day a year, the high priest entered something called the holy of holies, the set-apart, central place where God lived. First-century Judaism was not any more obsessed with purity than other religions of the time. Rather, religion itself functioned according to various degrees of separation or division from God.

A separate God requires separated people. The more separate you become, the nearer you can be to the separate God’s presence. In the childhood church of a friend of mine, the words “Be Ye Separate” were etched into a prominent stained-glass window. The logic of so much religion, most harmfully manifested in various forms of fundamentalism, is that to be close to God is to be separate from the world.

There’s an ancient biblical character named Jacob who encounters God in an ordinary place.

Extolling divine glory in a temple, cathedral, or pristine mountain view is easy, but Jacob does not discover God’s presence at any such places. All that Genesis 28 tells is that Jacob “came to a certain place.” At the sun’s setting, he lies down in the dirt, pulls up a rock for a pillow, falls asleep, and has a vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder to heaven.

But this ladder is no mere modern stepladder: it’s a Babylonian imperial temple, a pyramid or ramp structure that climbs from earth to heaven. The ancient Babylonians called these ziggurats, dwelling places of the gods, and only priests could enter in. YHWH’s boundary-breaking and grace-filled presence does not mind Babylonian religion’s divisions and instead launches Jacob’s swindling self to the temple’s holy gate.

The next morning, Jacob wakes up and exclaims: “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it” (Genesis 28:6). God’s presence is everywhere—can you recognize it? The world is a temple, and everyone can access the holy places.

Jacob builds what preacher-writer Barbara Brown Taylor calls an “altar in the world.” The divine vision is in his bones, and Jacob must respond. He takes the stone that served as his pillow, pours oil on top of it, and fashions an altar to God right then and there. This otherwise unknown altar in an unknown place becomes known and named as Bethel, El Shaddai, the very name for God.

Taylor writes:

Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish—separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

Jacob’s pillar recognizes and praises the sacred nature of all reality and the holy ordinary. The original purpose of religion—influenced etymologically by the Latin ligare, which means to bind or connect—is not to divide, but to unite.

Jacob’s vision, then, shows religion at its best: threading heaven and earth together. Those who seek a similar awakening likewise proclaim that “God is here in this place, and I did not know it.”

“Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it.”

The spiritual life is about seeing and perceiving that the lives we actually have are where heaven and earth meet. Authentic spirituality, mysticism, is about relating to God through the experiences of our lives—our doubts, our struggles, our family lives, our professional pursuits, and especially the in-between moments that shape us: the quiet moments before sleep, the annoyed moments in traffic, the tense moments in an disagreement, the grieving moments when our hearts break, the ebullient joy of dance parties—and the rocking out of 90s grunge music. All of this is ordinary, and all of it is holy.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

I gave a version of this talk at a writing festival at the very same Gordon College yesterday, with a couple of portions adapted from my book The Holy Ordinary. Have a wonderful holy week, everyone.

Then, there are the ritualistic elements of theatrical movie watching, with popcorn and soda (or kombucha, if you’re me) as communion stand-ins. There’s the compassionate curiosity necessitated by the act of watching movies, since a good movie draws us out of ourselves and into the story of another life.

Some movies entertain and thrill, while others require sustained attention. This year I’ve been thinking about Sorry, Baby, a powerful, extremely well-written movie about a teacher navigating healing and recovery after a sexual assault, and the evocative, naturalistic beauty of Train Dreams, a movie about the grief process undergone by a logger and railroad worker in the early 20th century.

So, readers of this Substack won’t be surprised that I’m excited about the Oscars. Sure, the Academy misses great movies, sometimes rewards bad movies, but it’s still a rare cultural moment when we collectively celebrate movies. I’m all in.

Every Christmas vacation, I make it one of my small rituals to watch as many award-season movies as possible. Movies that premiered to acclaim at Cannes, Toronto, and Venice have accumulated the ever-sought “buzz” by then, and many of the year’s best films have made their way to streaming services. (But see them as many as you can at an independent cinema!).

Photo by Krists Luhaers on Unsplash

Here are my various favorites, a few predictions, and a handful of opinions and reflections along the way.

Best Actor:
I loved all of these performances. Timothée Chalamet’s character in Marty Supreme is a grifting, egotistical man who uses everyone he meets to accomplish his sole obsession of winning the best table tennis player in the world. It’s hard to cheer this character on, and that’s the point. His performance is electric and unsettling.

I found Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance in One Battle After Another unforgettable. I laughed often, as he Big-Lebowski’s his way—as an underground, washed-up left-wing revolutionary—through fleeing the law and saving his daughter.

I loved Ethan Hawke’s performance in Blue Moon. It made me uncomfortable in a different way than Chalamet. It’s hard to watch a sinking man. And yet, unlike Marty Supreme, this beautiful film slows down enough for the sadness of Hawke’s character to seep through, along with his genius.

Michael B. Jordan’s performance in Sinners as two brothers opening up a blues juke joint in Jim-Crow Mississippi is a powerhouse performance. It’s got swagger, nuance, and heart. Sinners was my favorite movie of the year. I found it deeply contemplative, celebrating the wisdom of culture, ancestors, bodies, and Spirit. I think my vote would be Hawke for best actor—but Jordan just might take the trophy, and that would be grand.

Then again, Wagner Moura in The Secret Agent is striking in his cautious reserve under the Brazilian dictatorship of 1977. The movie is tense, colorful, and utterly gripping, while still creating moments of joy.

Supporting Actor:
Sean Penn struts through corridors as a military man on a mission to catch Leonardo DiCaprio and daughter Chase Infiniti in One Battle. I’ve always connected to Penn’s intensity in movies, and here he’s dynamic and disturbing.

Stellan Skarsgaard, the exquisitely talented Swedish actor, will likely win for Sentimental Value, a devastating movie about family wounds and place.

Jacob Elordi’s tortured Frankenstein may have a chance at winning.

My vote would go to Delroy Lindo in Sinners. He plays an alcoholic blues piano player marked by the wounds of the lynching era and Jim Crow. Music, along with lots of beer and whiskey, is the balm that keeps his soul alive. It’s a sight to behold and hear.

Best Actress:
The award will and should go to Jessie Buckely in Hamnet. It’s a towering performance of grief that builds tension and eventually bursts into an explosion of feeling. I watched the movie in a small art cinema and the whole theater participated in a cathartic type of collective grieving, with people ugly crying at the end. I’ve never really experienced that in a movie theater before. It was powerful. And this is in New England!

That said, Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is incredible. It’s an extremely difficult movie to watch as a parent, but she carries the movie with her performance of a mother experiencing a mental breakdown.

One of my other favorite movies of the year was Bugonia with Emma Stone. The premise—a conspiracy theorist kidnapping a CEO because he believes she’s an alien—is closer to reality than we would pretend it to be. For me, at this point in her career, Emma Stone’s acting can do no wrong.

Supporting Actress:
I’m not sure. It would be wonderful to see Amy Madigan recognized for her harrowing and weird performance in Weapons as a powerful wielder of witchcraft. Or Teyana Taylor in One Battle. We’ll see.

Best International Feature:
This could go to The Secret Agent or Sentimental Value. It’ll be a tight race. Recently, I saw The Voice of Hind Rajab, and in my view, there may not be a more urgent, gutwrenching movie this year. The movie dramatizes the efforts of rescue workers in the West Bank as they try to rescue a six-year old girl trapped in a car during Israel’s attack on Gaza. It’s interwoven with actual recordings of the calls. I found it essential viewing for our time, even as it rips your heart out.

There are other great categories, of course, such as Cinematography, Best Animated (Kpop Demon Hunters!), Writing, and more.

Best Picture
Best Picture, for me, is a toss-up between One Battle and Sinners. One Battle is a vibrant, pulsing masterpiece from one of the best filmmakers alive. But Sinners is a creative, spiritual, cultural event that blends genre, music, history, and mythology. I hope it wins.

If movies are a spiritual practice, does that make the Academy Awards an annual liturgy?

I know a good number of readers of the Substack are movie lovers, so tell me: What movies stirred your heart and soul this year?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Thank you for your support of The Holy Ordinary Substack!

A few weeks ago, a small group of us enjoyed a Lenten event that included contemplative prayer, a short reflection fro…

Read more

I’m sending an extra email this weekend, in addition to tomorrow’s “Revelations” post, to let you know about an upcoming live opportunity this week to connect, pray, and dialogue together. A small network of you has supported my writing over the years through paid subscriptions, and—while it’s certainly not the reason I write—it is a genuine encouragement and “thank you” that helps me keep writing from week to week. I’ve been wanting to host something for paid subscribers for a couple of years now, but haven’t found the bandwidth to make it happen. That’s why I’m so excited about the three Lent gatherings I’m hosting—I look forward to hearing how you are discovering divine depth in your ordinary moments and to sharing silent prayer together. I’d love to see you there!

Here’s the information:

I’ll be hosting three 60-minute live gatherings during Lent for paid Substack subscribers. These will combine contemplative prayer, reflection from my book The Holy Ordinary, and community sharing and conversation. Sessions will take place on Thursdays from 7-8pm ET on February 26, March 12, and March 26.

If you’d like to join, please register here:
👉 https://forms.gle/En9dLgUy6VHb5LS77

Photo by Thiago Gomes on Unsplash

Desert Christians turned their noses at Roman marble columns in churches, and built solitary huts and dwellings for themselves. Some simply prayed in caves. The effects of theological battles that so captured the fourth century trickled toward these Christians to some degree, but they did not join the feud. They chanted their psalms, wove baskets to sell at markets, and honed their hearts to desire one thing: the presence of God.

Photo by Veronika Biró on Unsplash

I’ve been fascinated and inspired by these mystics for a long time. They represent one authentic path of Christian renewal when Christianity loses its soul in its union with state and moneyed power. Today, in our time of imperial injustice and political hatred, when the most basic acts of loving the stranger have become subversive, what does the call of desert mystics have to offer?

Lisa Colón Delay has written a book exploring their lives and teachings entitled The Way of the Desert Elders. It’s a beautiful and transformative book. She shares their stories, such as that of the memorable Moses the Strong, who—fleeing the authorities for his gang-related looting and violence—hid out in a monastery in Scetis, Egypt. An angry man who had been kidnapped as a youth and eventually joined a marauding group of raiders, Moses was impressed by the peace and kindness exhibited by the desert monks. He decided to join them. Another desert mystic, Mary of Egypt, initially pursued sexual pleasure at all costs, even joining a group of Christian pilgrims with the goal of seducing them. When attempting to enter the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, though, she physically could not enter. The door was open, but somehow the way was blocked, like an energetic force field. She became overwhelmed with grief about her pursuit of fleeting pleasure over lasting love, and dedicated herself to living in the desert, subsisting only on edible plants, her desire for God—and God’s desire for her, too.

Men and women like Moses and Mary did not live in the desert aimlessly. They joined a movement of people for whom the spiritual quest meant everything. Some of them lived alone, and some banded together in communities. These people sought to refine their inner desire and passions into dedication to divine love. For Moses, that meant grappling with the anger that his life of suffering—and of inflicting suffering—had nurtured. For Mary, that meant channeling her sexuality into a force for healing instead of harm. These spiritual forerunners viewed the human heart as a laboratory for transformation into divine love—a quest in which all that is not of God is burned away in the fire of solitude and prayer.

The desert mystics were not theological. Instead, they were spiritually technological, in the sense that they rigorously observed the ripples and tsunamis of the inner life, and came up with practical tools to work with the very real human struggles they faced. One mystic and theologian named Evagrius came up with a list of eight “afflicting thoughts” that desert monks encountered in the raw solitude of sand and sun. Another chronicler of desert spirituality, John Cassian, called them eight “demons.” (They explored psychological insight through cosmological presences of angels and demons.) These demons, or afflicting thoughts, comprise the topics of Colón Delay’s book: gluttony, lust, avarice, wrath, acedia, despondency, vainglory, and pride. These vices are not wrong in themselves but are distorted versions of healthy desire. And the work of spirituality is to grow in ever-deepening awareness of the difference between the two.

To take one example, Colón Delay shows that the spiritual antidote to anger in the desert tradition is meekness. There is healthy anger that rights wrongs, and then there is anger that is stored up, which festers and explodes in rage. Moses the Strong—that same one-time rage-filled marauder—went on to become a nonviolent, humble man who refused to judge another. His time wrestling with anger in the desert resulted in a compassionate and humble man later in life. Here’s a famous story about Moses:

A brother at Scetis committed a fault. A council was called to which Abba Moses was invited, but he refused to go to it. Then the priest sent someone to say to him, “Come, for everyone is waiting for you.” So he got up and went. He took a leaking jug, filled it with water, and carried it with him. The others came out to meet him and said to him, “What is this, Father?” The old man said to them, “My sins run out behind me, and I do not see them, and today I am coming to judge the errors of another.” When they heard that, they said no more to the brother but forgave him.

Evagrius contrasted the fiery “dragon’s wine” of anger with the sustaining “angel’s bread” of meekness. Colón Delay writes that “meekness is not some merger of mildness and weakness. It is the hearty provisions of angels: a courageous and stable humility of heart.”

To venture into the wisdom of these desert elders is to venture toward the ground of transformation. Colón Delay’s book shows contemporary readers how we might begin to approximate their teachings for our own times. These were ordinary men and women with wounds and failures who nevertheless committed themselves to a countercultural practice of deepening their desire in God. Beginning such a journey is costly and unnervingly difficult. Much unlearning, many “dark nights of soul,” and acceptance of imperfection are required. But the desert will change us, if we let it.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Here’s the recommendation “blurb” I wrote supporting this book:

This is a practical, wonderfully written, and transformational book. For those who long grow closer to divine love, Lisa Colón Delay’s The Way of the Desert Elders charts how the work of deep spiritual transformation occurs. The book takes readers into the hearts and lives of fourth-century desert mystics, flawed and ordinary men and women who embarked upon an extraordinary quest to discover and realize the presence of God within them. She shows us their methods of refining misplaced desires at their roots, covering thorny vices such as anger, lust, pride, and envy. But more than spiritual methodology, this book tells the desert mystics’ remarkable stories. Through their own struggles, we dare to believe that such transformation in God might be possible for us, too. I heartily recommend it—this book will not leave you unchanged!

EVENT: Lent Live - The Holy Ordinary (Paid Subscribers)

I’ll be hosting three 60-minute live gatherings during Lent for paid Substack subscribers. These will combine contemplative prayer, reflection from my book The Holy Ordinary, and community sharing and conversation. Sessions will take place on Thursdays from 7-8pm ET on February 26, March 12, and March 26.

If you’d like to join, please register here:
👉 https://forms.gle/En9dLgUy6VHb5LS77

Space is limited. Zoom link will be sent to registered participants.

These homegrown American mystics lived in little towns like New Lebanon, New York, and Hancock, Massachusetts, planting vital outposts of utopia not far from where I live. Their spirituality branched off from mainstream Protestantism by prioritizing direct experience of God over and against dogma and religious institutions. Ecstatic worship, mixed with communitarian living and pacifism, did not make them many friends in traditional Protestant circles. (And they’re often viewed today as more of a historical curiosity than a vibrant spiritual movement from which to learn.)

Conversations I’ve had about mystics do not typically include the Shakers, and that’s too bad, because they are perhaps one of America’s greatest and most interesting contributions to the larger mystical cloud of witnesses. When I served a Congregationalist church in Massachusetts, we once held a Shaker-inspired service. With a staff member’s help from a local Shaker museum, we danced a Shaker dance, sang Shaker songs, and learned about Shaker history and worship. I sought not only to educate the congregation in Shaker ways but to have us experientially taste the vitality of Shaker spirituality.

Photo by Cathy Poland on Unsplash

For the Shakers, Christ was not only coming in the future; Christ had already arrived. They first named themselves, clunkily, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. They shaped their communal existence by this belief in the “Second Appearing.”

The tale starts with “Mother” Ann Lee in the early eighteenth century in Manchester, England. She was one of eight children, born in poverty to a blacksmith father. In the middle of the 1700s, she became involved with a renegade Quaker group called Shakers, or “Shaking Quakers.” Convinced that Jesus’ second coming was imminent, these proto-Pentecostals were so full of the Spirit in their meetings that they shook, spoke in strange languages, saw visions, and danced.

Ann Lee joined with other Shakers in her small town to publicly proclaim that Jesus was coming back. Such world-changing news must be shared, they thought, which led Ann and her compatriots to interrupt a local church service to announce their belief. They were charged with disturbing the peace and thrown in the local jail.

While sitting behind bars, she had an experience of Christ’s presence. She envisioned herself born again into a new life of complete spiritual renewal. It’s such a transformational experience for her that she sees it as nothing less than the Second Coming of Christ.

Ann Lee began speaking about her prison awakening to others, and the message spread. As she told her story, others, too, had a similar experience of the heavens opening and of Christ returning. Through “Mother Ann,” as she was known, their hearts turned to Christ’s arriving presence within and through them, and they were initiated into (for them) the culminating event of history.

The Congregationalist establishment gatekeepers adamantly opposed this new, mystical sect. (No surprise there). Planting roots across the state line in New Lebanon, New York, Massachusetts Congregationalists called Mother Ann a witch, harlot, and heretic—epithets that Puritans often threw at people they did not understand. The Shaker practices of celibacy, gender equality, and pacifism subverted the Congregationalist religious status quo. The Congregationalists ominously called the Shakers a threat to the very foundation of society, which seems ludicrous but, in a way, was true.

The story twisted and turned. In the late eighteenth century, the Congregational Church itself underwent a divisive split across lines drawn by the Holy Spirit. Some churches joined the Great Awakening through the revivalist flames fanned by minister and renowned theologian Jonathan Edwards. Some, like the Shakers, anticipated Christ’s imminent return. Some, also like the Shakers, experienced ecstatic states such as speaking in tongues, visions, and dancing. They tasted a new feeling of freedom in Christ.

These once-staid Congregationalists coalesced with a larger movement called the New Lights, often leaving the churches to join with Baptists and other freewheeling worshippers. Together, such “New Lights” pursued the Holy Spirit’s revival amongst them and prepared to meet Christ at his return, which seemed just around the bend.

In 1780, a group of Protestants experienced a mass conversion to the Shakers. Two nearby ministers visited the Shakers: one a New Light Baptist preacher, the other a New Light Presbyterian minister. These preachers told their followers about their experience—numerous former Congregationalists among them—and about 370 converted to Shakerism. Such Christians already believed that Christ was about to return, and meeting the Shakers confirmed it for them, because the Shakers testified in their own experience that Christ had already returned. As the Presbyterian minister Samuel Johnson put it, “I first attended a meeting in Hancock, praying to God that I might know the truth… [and] the substance of those gifts tended to show that the second appearing of Christ was at hand.” (A note at the film’s credits states that the movement grew to around 6,000 by the 1840s.)

The Shakers believed with all their might that Christ had come again, which led them to live and proclaim that the fullness of life was here and that a dimension of love was available to people now, and not only later. They embodied a passion for collective worship, showing that we do not need to wait until the next life to begin living values of nonviolence, simplicity, and community.

Whether we call it “Christ’s Second Appearance,” a new birth, or utopia, the Shakers discovered humanity’s spiritual birthright of experiencing Christ/divine love now. And that’s worth shaking about.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This post is adapted from an excerpt in my book “The Holy Ordinary.”

I’m relying on the brilliant and inclusive translation of Brother Lawrence’s work by Carmen Acevedo Butcher. Her edition of Practice of the Presence includes his complete works, such as spiritual maxims, letters to fellow monks or nuns, and his friend Joseph of Beaufort’s recollections of conversations with Brother Lawrence. Acevedo Butcher’s introduction provides vivid historical detail that illuminates Brother Lawrence’s life and time. Before becoming a monk, we learn, Nicholas Hermann served as a soldier in the Thirty Year’s War. Taken as a prisoner of war, Lawrence was wounded in his leg, an injury that lasted for the rest of his life and caused significant disability. Hermann experienced the effects of war for many years, with memories and persistent guilt haunting him.

Seventeenth-century France was a time of crisis. The bubonic plague swept through France, and brought death to up to two million people. A climate crisis, in the form of a Little Ice Age, froze ground and then when warm, flooded crops, causing mass starvation. And a dictatorial King Louis XIV viewed himself as the center of the universe and called himself the “Sun King.” All while Brother Lawrence counted food supplies and planned meals for the monastery. Brother Lawrence’s ordinary and repetitive life, his chronic pain, along with his mental health struggles, became the container for his spiritual transformation.

Here’s what he learned:

Brother Lawrence counsels, “During our work and activities… we must stop for a brief moment, as often as we can, to love God, to savor them (God), even though this is brief and in secret.” In the Carmelite tradition of Teresa of Avila, who viewed prayer as “an intimate sharing between friends,” Brother Lawrence practiced awareness of divine love by returning again and again to God, by sharing with God the realities of his day, each day. This created in him a sustaining joy and persistent participation in divine presence. His life and message demonstrate that practicing this presence is nothing fancy, technical, or out of reach. Only the desire to befriend God is needed, and the intent to welcome God in all our moments.

Photo by Xingchen Yan on Unsplash

This is relatively easy when our moments are going as we would like them to go. Saying hello to God while on a country drive or doing the dishes can be a calming, renewing practice. But pausing in our hearts to savor God when life’s edges are jagged and painful is different and exceedingly difficult. I consider myself a beginner at this practice. Instead of staying with pain and inviting the presence of God, I often flee from being present with myself, my feelings, and with God. I flee into productivity, TV, mental stories, reading, ever-pressing kid needs, and more. But Brother Lawrence was no stranger to suffering. His war injury and likely PTSD ensured that practicing the presence of God did not involve bypassing the hurt. Instead, he invited God into it. He welcomed divine love into all circumstances. Such a person, he wrote, “Talks to God about everything, asking for what he needs, and being thankful with them (God) constantly in countless ways.”

Practicing the presence requires the desire to befriend God and the moment. Of course, being present to ourselves enough to be present to God really only comes about through sustained time and practice. We train, as it were, for our hearts to soften for divine presence. But even as the stakes are high, the barrier to entry is willingness. There’s no pressure to fail or get this right. And even if we feel like we are floundering in prayer, we can talk to God about that, too. Acknowledging to God our failure or resistance to savor God is itself a form of praying. God desires us as we are, but often we are too busy pretending to be someone other than who we are that we miss this vital invitation to presence.

Brother Lawrence likely returned again and again to the same kitchen, the same pots, and the same pain in his leg. He faced the monks who brought him joy and the monks who annoyed him. He experienced distractions of mind, just like we do. In the stirring of soup and the clatter of kitchen activity, he practiced consent to divine love. The moment wasn’t anything other than ordinary, but Brother Lawrence was present, and so was God.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Yet Gospel writer Mark’s first verse still gleams, like an arrow piercing through all that is false: “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The season of Advent reminds us that good news is coming.

For such good news to arrive, however, requires preparation. We’re so used to bad news that receiving good news takes cultivation, practice, and defiance. This gospel good news starts with the call to prepare, which is a message straight from the prophet of preparation himself, Isaiah: “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way. The voice of one crying out in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord.”

It must be said, though, that Christmas preparations are not the same as Christ preparations. We ready ourselves for the coming of an adult Christ at Christmas rather than a sweet baby Jesus. Babies, like Christ, bring a whole new world to our lives, but it’s too easy for the birthday of baby Jesus to be sentimentalized. Every Advent, I am reminded of Will Ferrell’s satirical prayer as Ricky Bobby in the movie Talladega Nights, who addresses the Baby Jesus while saying grace at table. “Sweet Baby Jesus,” he says. “We thank you for this bountiful harvest of Dominos, KFC, and the always delicious Taco Bell.” But the coming of Christ is far more than fast-food product placement tacked onto a Pampers commercial. We are readying ourselves for the realm, or dream, of God to arrive right here, smack dab in reality.

Photo by Jana Leu on Unsplash

Yet in the conflicted meaning-making of our moment, the good news of one is the terrible news of another. Who’s to judge what is good, and how can we know it, much less prepare for it? And yet this conflict over truth is not new. It’s ancient. Good news—or gospel—in Mark’s day (in Greek, euangelion) is a loaded term.

Good news is the propaganda slogan of peace and security that the Roman emperor supposedly brings. It is not only Jesus’s birthday toward which we lean, but also Caesar’s birthday. A building inscription circa 6 BCE demonstrates as much: “The birthday of the god (Caesar Augustus) has been for the whole world the beginning of good news concerning him.” (quoted in Jesus for President, page 70). The Gospel writer Mark enters the fray and directly opposes the fake good news of the Empire, not by arguing but by telling a counter-story of the Son of God’s birthday—the one who brings true and lasting peace and joy.

Mark, for one, refuses to accept Caesar’s new normal. And what’s more is that Mark does not counter Caesar and Rome’s grandiosity with rants or arguments. As though sending a tweet changes hearts and minds. Instead, Mark tells a story—a story of life, of healing, of justice for the poor and excluded; it’s a story of a person, Jesus, who represents and reminds us of a new realm from heaven that has always been aligning with earth. Some even think Mark’s use of “good news” creates a new genre: the genre of Gospel.

How does one prepare for a new world, for a new consciousness? I always appreciate the lectionary’s wisdom each First Sunday of Advent, because it begins the season with an apocalyptic passage, as if to declare that if we are not prepared, the in-breaking of Christ will end our worlds. The newness of love and justice cuts that deep—at least if we’re not ready. And this is the reason John the Baptizer is on the Advent scene as a messenger of preparedness. His whole presence—from locusts buzzing to fingers sticky with honey to camel hair curling in all directions—shakes us out of the new normal. He’s not bringing change simply for change’s sake, jumping on the new Messiah bandwagon as if it were the latest iPhone model. Rather, John seeks to prepare the way for Christ, and his method of preparation is through something called, a bit clunkily, I’ll admit, a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

But can we even use these words anymore, laden as they are with religious baggage? Isn’t repentance the favorite theme of the street-corner preacher’s shout? Isn’t repentance code for the salvation-from-hellfire decision to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior? If I thought I was going to burn eternally, I’d choose Jesus, too. And I did, for many years. Isn’t the phrase “forgiveness of sins” a holdover from blood atonement, imagining a God who forgives sins through shed animal or beloved-son blood? Many think salvation is at its heart vengeful, or at least about saying the right words to initiate a soul-destination escape from punishment. But no simple prayer—other than the complex and utterly holy living of a life—can prepare us for whatever mystery is beyond this bodily reality.

Repentance. Forgiveness of sins. These words have been coopted and smeared by people for whom extremist, authoritarian politics masquerade as gospel. Maybe it makes sense to have a moratorium on their English translations, just so we can forge new neural associations? Repentance, in Greek metanoia, is nothing more and nothing less than radical transformation. Repentance is the decisive day you decide to stop drinking. Repentance is when you realize that your life is not about you; when you start volunteering at the food pantry; when you first stand up for the rights of immigrants; when, as a privileged person, you first witness real poverty and realize your life will never be the same. Repentance is turning around the direction of your life and choices and values to be about a larger story—God’s larger story.

Here’s the thorny part of preparation, though: good news comes to those who are ready for it. Preparing for Christ first means identifying those ways in which we have not prepared for Christ—or for love, or for justice, or for peace. It means aligning our inner and outer desires with God’s desires. And we surely have not made a straight path for the new world, the new selves, that God seeks to birth in, around, and through us.

This Christmas, our world needs us to take preparation seriously. And there’s a way in which even the arrival of Christ itself is contingent on our preparation. We don’t cause Christ to come, because God is free, and we’re not that important. But if we do not prepare for this arrival, then we will surely fail to recognize good news when it comes. So whenever we pray the Advent prayer “Come, Lord Jesus,” we are also pledging to prepare, to repent, to turn our lives—and our country, and our world—around for love.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Adapted from a 2017 sermon preached at First Congregational Church, Williamstown, MA.

Often in my contemplative prayer practice, I expect something to happen. On the lofty spectrum of possibilities, I hope to experience oneness with God, if only for a fleeting moment. Or maybe I will feel myself radically embraced by divine love—again, if only for a moment. On the more practical side of things, at the very least, I hope to emerge from 20-30 minutes of silence refreshed, less reactive, and more centered.

Inevitably, though, something smaller and simpler happens. It could be that I sit there in prayer, snagged by an obsessive thought for nearly the whole time. Each time I attempt to let it go, or say a verse of a Psalm to refocus my attention on God, it pops up again, like a game of whack-a-mole. It could be something I’m supposed to do that day at work or a household task like confirming kids’ doctor appointments. I attempt to let it go and recommit to the silent stillness at hand—or, on less-centered days, I even send myself a quick email reminder.

There are days when I feel incredibly buoyed by prayer, when a snippet of Scripture from lectio divina resonates through my heart for the day, and when I know experientially that I am loved and supported by God. But mostly, my contemplative prayer consists of showing up to God as I am, hurried, relaxed, anxious, happy, frustrated, or whatever, intending but not fully succeeding in practicing receptivity to God’s still presence—and then moving on to the next part of my day. What’s more is that at the end of my meditation sit, I am rarely changed in an overt way. Even if I do feel an encouraging peace or an awareness of deep love, it isn’t some magical alchemy that protects me from, say, reacting defensively to my wife or kids ten minutes later.

This lack of observable outcome—at least in the short term—is why I trust the mystery of Thomas Keating’s quote. Maybe it is not mine to know what is going on in the first place?

I experience two temptations in prayer. The first is to treat prayer like a technique. If I perform such and such steps, I will succeed in making God’s love more available to me—as if it could be more available than it already is in every moment. If I chant the right number of Psalms, sit in silence in the right way, witness and detach from my thoughts with the right consciousness, inner peace and divine love will be mine. But that treats prayer as a commodity, as a formula that can be applied and with results that are measurable. And prayer doesn’t work that way, because God doesn’t work that way. I can do all the “right” things in prayer and still not experience equanimity after a prayer session. I can do prayer in all the “wrong” ways and still taste peace. Sometimes when I don’t pray in a formal way at all, such as when I’m at the movies, doing dishes, making food, jogging with my wife, or walking my dog, the expansiveness of divine love and peace opens up before me, and often when I least expect it.

Photo by Elena Kloppenburg on Unsplash

The second temptation in prayer is to expect results, like those I shared above. But to reduce prayer to a technique or to expect certain results is to make prayer about me, and not about God—about self-realization instead of self-transcendence (a distinction made by Benedictine Michael Casey in his book Strangers to the City). It’s to think I can track the movements of the soul, as if I can log it in an app, when the wild mercy of God often leaves no trace. Prayer is not about achieving anything, but about allowing God’s action within us, even when it seems like nothing is happening—and even when I’m not allowing God’s action, but instead want to allow it, but unsuccessfully. As Merton said, “Even the desire to please you does in fact please you.” Even the desire to allow God’s action invites God’s mysterious work in my inner life.

There’s another danger inherent here, too, which is to make contemplative prayer, at least as I practice it in the Christian tradition, into therapeutic self-care. I’m all about therapy, self-care, and self-help. I’ll take all the care and help I can get! But to turn contemplative prayer into a technique or result is also to privatize it, whereas Jesus’ message is all about solidarity, especially with those who are suffering the most. This is why I believe that Christian contemplative prayer also has to end with mystical, political solidarity and not simply my individual happiness. Because otherwise it doesn’t really have much to do with Jesus. (See this post and this post for more on that topic).

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Have a great week, everyone.

John the Baptist was a rebellious preacher’s kid turned rogue prophet who baptized people for transformation. Long before Southern Baptists, or American Baptists, or the 12^th Baptist Black Church in Roxbury, Boston, in whose choir I once sang, there was John, son of Zechariah. In Luke’s Gospel, John grew up in the temple, where he must have dipped into the Jewish purification pools.

Since Luke’s dad, the priest Zechariah, had temple connections, John most likely had his pick of the numerous sectarian cleansing options of the day. The Sadducees had the nicer pools, the luxury pools, which were sometimes housed in private homes. The Pharisees had their own mikvehs, Jewish ritual baths, that they shared with their communities. The esoteric Essenes dipped daily in their pools to be cleansed and prepared for the coming Messiah. John had the inside-Temple track of a preacher’s kid—he could have dunked himself in any number of those nearby pools, but instead he trekked out to the wilderness and dove into the Jordan River’s muddy waters.

Gospel writers Mark and Matthew tell of a John who wore a loincloth and camel’s hair, a real hippy type, probably sporting dreadlocks, whose gaunt frame feasted on locusts and wild honey. John lived out there in the wilderness, wandering all around Jordan’s banks, much like his Israelite ancestors did so many years ago, pilgrimaging towards a promised land that flowed with milk and honey.

John’s baptism on the margins of the religious establishment conveyed a message of lives changed and turned around towards God. The sermon John proclaimed, cried, enacted, and shouted from the river banks was this: “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Luke 3:3). Repentance means to change direction, to turn around, to undergo evolution of consciousness, to transform your life. Sin is what disconnects us, estranges us from God, ourselves, and each other. And so John’s water dunking differed from the Temple’s many purification pools. John’s baptism wasn’t primarily about conversion to Judaism or purity codes; it was about turning the direction of one’s will and life and heart and mind over to God. It was about participating and finding one’s true identity in the new movement God was initiating.

Photo by Ani Adigyozalyan on Unsplash

The Christians in Paul’s day built on the foundation of John’s Jordan River plunges. Paul and early Christians thought baptism was about becoming a new person in Christ. In the early church, when someone was baptized, they descended and ascended from the water as a way of participating in Christ’s death and resurrection. In Romans 6 Paul wrote, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?”

The person being baptized went underwater, buried with Christ, and stood up from the water, “risen with Christ.” What’s more is that they likely did it without most or any clothes on. Galatians 3:27 references this ritual: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” When baptismal candidates stepped into the water, they took off their garments as a way of saying, “I’m done with the habits and ways of living that disconnect me from God. I’m done with selfishness, greed, violence, addiction, love of power, idolatry, shame, and self-loathing.” When they stepped out of the water and put on new clothes they were at the same time dressing in the ways of Christ, putting on love, mutuality, humility, service, peacemaking, and forgiveness.

In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, baptism in Christ unifies. Paul writes to a fledgling community of both Jews and Gentiles who have united through shared faith in Messiah Christ. And yet the letter reveals profound conflict between these two religious-cultural identities. Paul, on one hand, declares that the doors guarding access to God have been thrown open. It was the first inclusive congregation. No longer was it necessary to follow the Jewish law to experience God’s presence and chosenness. Mainstay practices of ancient Judaism, such as circumcision and dietary restrictions, were no longer necessary, Paul said (writing as a Jew), because we have been justified by faith. On the other hand, a divergent group in Galatia begged to differ. Paul’s inclusion went too far, they thought. Gentiles could follow the Messiah Christ, but they had to obey a few basic Torah stipulations. The Law was still necessary for faith in Christ; how dare Paul jettison the whole foundation of their religion? (This analysis of Galatians comes from British commentator James Dunn, by the way).

And so baptism for Paul functioned as the ritual of oneness in Christ, of new identity beyond division. In Christ there is no Jew or Greek. In Christ there is no male or female. In Christ, there is no enslaved or free. These were the ancient and polarized equivalents of today’s divides. Before baptism Paul’s readers once held identities that defined them. They had loyalties and group memberships that helped them make sense of the world, that served to separate who’s in from who’s out, but Paul proclaims that in Christ all those identities are rendered relative. They no longer hold final sway. They no longer divide—because baptism is the marker of reconciled community that is Christ’s body, the church. We are one in Christ Jesus.

There’s one inherent challenge to embodying the oneness of baptism: this oneness at its heart excludes exclusion. It excludes domination, racism, and authoritarian “strong man” politics, because Christ pursued a different way. The baptismal waters do not seek to exclude, because they flow toward everyone, inviting each person, creature, and life form into a unifying embrace. And yet those who trample on union, who attempt to deny diversity with hate, and who exercise their will to power stand against the current of this baptismal liberation. They resist the very waters that would free them, clinging to idols of supremacy and fear. In doing so, they wage war against their created purpose of communion and belovedness and refuse the oneness that is waiting to receive them.

Baptismal water, therefore, is powerful, life-changing water. It’s water that symbolizes the intention to live lives bending in the direction of God. It reminds us to turn back towards that direction when we lose our way. Baptism points to the newness of life in Christ and declares that suffering, death, and domination are not ultimate, and that resurrection is real. Baptism is water that testifies to our true selves and true belonging. It’s water that embraces us, as Jesus was embraced at his baptism, with radical love.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

This article is updated from a 2014 sermon.

Sickness hit our house over the last couple of weeks. It cycled from one body to another, as these things do. Days stretched together and time blurred. Kid screen time limits were out, and TV-streaming for tired parents was in. Amid chicken noodle soup, I regressed to my adolescent sick food comforts of Canada Dry and brown-sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts (do you have an equivalent?). I spent most of my time balancing work, rest, and childcare. Underneath obligations, I danced with a familiar question: How do I pray when I’m sick?

Sometimes when I’ve been sick, I jettison spiritual practice. Anything that resembles effort beyond bare responsibilities can feel overpowering and therefore unnecessary. But sickness is a vulnerable time. The body fights to be well. The psyche opens into a wider space where feelings and longings normally kept at bay seek permission to emerge. Isn’t sickness exactly the time to pray? For me, sickness is decidedly not the time to expend effort praying, but rather the time to practice receiving grace. And isn’t that what prayer is all about?

Here is what my praying while sick experiment looked like this time around. I share my experience with the hopes of hearing from you: Do you pray when you’re sick, and if so, how do you do it?

Sitting cross-legged in a chair in silent meditation seemed Herculean and unhelpful. I chose to lie down instead, allowing my body to rest and my breath to settle. I set my Insight Timer for the typical seated time, but this time a pillow cushioned my head and a blanket warmed me while my thoughts receded into a larger stillness. I closed my eyes. Sleep seemed near, but so did grace.

Photo by Drew Taylor on Unsplash

Morning and evening prayer worked well. I usually pray a simple morning and evening prayer through my community’s prayer book, or adapted “breviary,” and I found the ten-minute Psalms and prayers comforting and doable. I curled in a soft chair, sipped tea while greeting the day or night, and this focused my heart toward a divine direction, even though my hazy mind did not remotely follow, and did not care about, the meaning of each prayer or verse.

Strenuous physical activity would have taxed my recuperating body, so instead I revisited the practice of yin yoga with renewed appreciation. Placing myself in simple yoga postures, and holding them for five minutes or so, allowed me to rest and release tension in my body while also entering into meditative silence. One of my old friends, Josh Summers, runs a beautiful Substack that features yin yoga instruction. I highly recommend it.

I also found the Jesus Prayer immensely helpful, as well as the one-line Psalm that desert mystic chronicler John Cassian recommends: “O Lord, Come to my assistance. O God, make haste to help me” (Psalm 70:1). Weaving these mantra-like prayers throughout my day helped weave an awareness of divine love around me, even if I didn’t feel it. Falling asleep in a yin yoga pose, helping my kid with homework while nearly falling asleep? “Lord, Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”

The Christian mystics have long experienced divine breakthroughs amid times of often serious illness. Hildegard of Bingen received her visions of divine light while enduring excruciating pain. Teresa of Avila, the 16^th-century Spanish mystic who teaches friendship with God, struggled with poor health her entire life. Therese of Lisieux, the 19^th-century French saint who illuminated a humble, small way to God, died of tuberculosis at 24. These, and so many others, offer examples not of spiritual masochism but of passionate seekers who turned to God in their bodily vulnerability and need and found divine love eagerly embracing them in both presence and absence. Experiencing sickness is the time to realize the truth of Therese of Lisieux’s words: “If we cannot go to great lengths for God, God will go to great lengths for us.”

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper leaves his children Murph and Tom behind on a climate-ravaged Earth to join a desperate mission to save the human race by charting a livable planet to colonize. At first glance, the premise sounds like an Elon Musk space-fantasy project—raising the danger of interpreting the film as if Earth were disposable and the march of colonization could simply continue off-planet. And yet, as I’ve written about many times in this newsletter, apocalyptic, world-ending scenarios for me primarily reckon with how we live now rather than in the future. The film’s powerful themes of love, loss, and space travel inspire me not to escape reality, but to live a more loving life amid it—all while trusting that the universe itself might be guided by love. Cooper is driven by a sense of duty to humanity and by the thrill of adventure to accept a last-ditch mission, but it’s love for his family, and Murph in particular, that fuels his grief and eventual heroic quest to return.

At first, Cooper remains firmly on the side of reason, convinced that science can save humanity. But as the journey unfolds, the logic of science begins to clash with the boundless quality of love. Their ship, the Endurance, visits one planet, only to lose a crew member, be crushed by 4,000-foot waves, and discover upon return to their base ship that, due to the gravitational pull of a nearby black hole, 23 years have passed though they spent only three hours on the planet. Two more planets remain for the team to visit, but their fuel resources will only last for a trip to one.

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

A choice needs to be made. Anne Hathaway’s character Amelia Brand wants to visit another planet named “Edmunds,” after an astronaut who traveled there. Edmunds’s planet appears to transmit hopeful data about potential habitability—but Brand is also biased because she is in love with Dr. Edmunds and hopes he might still be alive. Cooper chooses instead to visit a planet where Matt Damon’s character Dr. Mann has been living, but it turns out to be frozen and uninhabitable. When they wake Dr. Mann from decades of cryo-sleep, his behavior quickly becomes murderous. His mission failed, and he has gone insane. Cooper’s love for Murph becomes the thread that connects them across space and time, exemplified in a stunning sequence at the end through a four-dimensional cube called a tesseract. Nolan explores scientifically, on a big-budget adventure screen, what is also inherently a mystical insight: that love might transcend space and time, and connect us even when we feel galaxies apart.

Dr. Brand perceives something that Cooper does not yet: “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends space and time.” Cooper has chosen to leave his family behind hoping to save humanity. Dr. Brand wants to go to Edmunds’s planet because of her love for Edmunds. Cooper, however, chooses logic. Science and love are set as conflicting, yet after the disastrous visit to Dr. Mann’s planet, Brand is vindicated. Now, with fuel reserves low and the mission’s failure imminent, Cooper chooses to sacrifice himself to give Dr. Brand one more chance to reach Edmunds’s planet. Cooper sheds weight from the Endurance ship by detaching himself in the smaller Ranger ship, just in time for Dr. Brand and the Endurance to use the black hole’s gravitational pull to gain the speed needed to continue.

Dr. Brand slingshots toward Edmunds’s planet and Cooper heads into the black hole (along with a robot named TARS). But instead of death, the black hole sends Cooper into a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube with space for Cooper, a three-dimensional being, to communicate across time to Murph. Throughout the film, we’re introduced to a concept of “Them,” future humans who communicate through space-time to guide the characters. “They” constructed the tesseract for Cooper to communicate to Murph. With TARS’s help, he figures out a way to relay NASA’s coordinates, and pass on information retrieved from within the black hole—new codes that will help Murph solve the scientific problem of gravity and save the future of humanity.

The science here is fun and complex. Kip Thorne, the scientist who advised Christopher Nolan, later wrote a book entitled The Science of Interstellar. He explains the idea of a tesseract as a cube in four dimensions, the physics of black holes, the possibility of beings from the future who created the tesseract, and more. I find the science fascinating, but what moves me about this film is that science doesn’t explain everything. In the end, it’s the love that Cooper has for Murph that sets in motion the science to work. It’s the love that Dr. Brand has for Edmunds that convinces her that his planet is the best habitable one. And it’s not love without reason—it’s love and logic combined, with the humility to know the limitations of logic and the transcending power of love.

The Franciscan scientist and theologian Ilia Delio is one of my intellectual heroes, because she boldly insists that our theology must keep pace with science. She insists that the meaning of Christ must be an evolutionary, loving reality. One of Delio’s mystical heroes is the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who affirmed Love as the center of the universe: Love “is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces…. The physical structure of the universe is love.”

But what could this mean? For Delio, following Teilhard, it is the energy of union amid ever greater complexity within the unfolding universe. I don’t pretend to understand this very well, but if evolution is a process of ever greater complexity and unity—whether adapted traits in animals, consciousness itself, or the ongoing expansion of the universe—then one way to describe that energy is to call it love. Here’s a quote to read slowly from Delio: “If love is the principal energy of life, the whole within every whole, and evolution has direction in the unfolding of consciousness, then it is not difficult to see that evolution is the movement toward greater wholeness and consciousness—that is, the rise of love.” From a mystical perspective, then, it is not too much to say that love is the force that holds the universe together.

Love holding the universe together may seem like a lofty concept, and it is, but we don’t need to survive a black hole to discover it. Instead, it’s as accessible as showing up at my local movie theater on a Monday night, sharing a bowl of popcorn with friends, and experiencing an epic space thriller across generations.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

In John’s Gospel, religious leaders bring before Jesus a woman “caught in the act of adultery.” The law of Moses, they remind him, prescribes stoning. But Jesus responds not with judgment, but with silence and mysterious writing in the dust. Then he offers a famous challenge: Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7). Slowly, one by one, the accusers slip away, leaving the woman to live.

It’s amazing how powerful some scribbling on the ground can be. Did Jesus write their sins into the sand? Did he merely doodle? Whatever he wrote, it doesn’t really matter. In a highly charged standoff between the Pharisees and scribes, Jesus defuses the projected violence of the group and turns their attention from the woman back to themselves. No one dares throw a stone.

On the surface, the crowd is law-debating and cerebral, skilled at making speeches. They know how to play to the base and still come off looking respectable. But Jesus’ nonviolent, savvy intervention reveals their brutality. In the name of religion and law, they have caught the woman in the act of adultery, taken her from her bed, and dragged her through a crowd, presumably with little clothing. Where is the man? He is conspicuously absent. The religious leaders have their rocks at the ready, and the feeling of righteousness, mixed in with a veneer of holiness, makes them particularly dangerous.

“Now, what do you say, Jesus?” The law of Moses, in one of those bloody one-liners in Leviticus, decrees death by stoning for the adulterer. Of course, it’s a trap. They know Jesus has a soft spot for outsiders. If he takes her side, he will be disregarding the law of Moses and will appear to support adultery. Instead, Jesus gets both compassionate and strategic. He bends down, avoids eye contact—lest a glance askew turn someone off—and writes with his finger on the ground. I imagine him speaking softly, his steady nervous system helping regulate everyone around: “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And no one dares. The crowd, now de-escalated and exposed in their violence, slinks away one by one.

The Scapegoat Mechanism

The woman is a scapegoat. Scapegoating is connected to the ancient religious tradition of sacrifice. In Leviticus we read: “Take the blasphemer outside the camp, and let all who were within hearing lay their hands on his head, and let the whole congregation stone him” (Leviticus 24:14). There’s a conflict in the community, and reconciliation is achieved by blood. The voice of God tells Moses to bring peace through murder.

Over time in Israelite tradition, stoning evolves into animal sacrifice. Leviticus abounds with instructions about which animals to kill and when. A day of atonement is eventually introduced as a way to make peace with God and the community. Later, the prophets critique those who favor sacrifice but forget justice: “I hate, I despise your festivals,” says Amos (5:21). In the New Testament, the story of Jesus unveils the violent mechanics of this process by showing him scapegoated by Roman and Jewish powers.

Scholars note that John eight is a later addition, not part of the earliest Gospel manuscripts. Yet it fits well within the Bible’s unfolding story of sacrifice and scapegoating.

We might think that we are far beyond the need for rams, lambs, and sin offerings today—but our entire political and cultural moment hinges on the scapegoat mechanism. We build group identity by creating enemies—and people on the margins, such as immigrants and transgender people, suffer the most.

It’s why war and nationalism thrive together, why, as Chris Hedges’ book title says, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning.

Photo by Sean Stratton on Unsplash

An Ancient Story, A Modern Warning

A third-century Greek story illustrates the same pattern. Told by René Girard in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (I’m adapting for readability): People in Ephesus faced a devastating epidemic and turned to a miracle worker named Apollonarius of Tyana. He said, “Take courage, for I will today put a stop to the course of the disease.” When he arrived there, he led the entire population to the city gate. He pointed to an old beggar carrying a piece of bread and clad in rags.

Appolonius told the Ephesians around him to “Pick up as many stones as you can and hurl them at this enemy of the gods.” The Ephesians were initially shocked. The beggar pleaded with them to have mercy, but the miracle worker egged them on. As soon as some began to aim at him with their stones, the beggar gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was not a man, but a demon—so they intensified their stoning until their stones formed a large cairn around him. Then Apollonious instructed them to remove the stones and look at the animal that they had slain. They removed the stones, and the man had disappeared. He had taken the form of a hound the size of a lion, lying there dead as a mad dog. The city believed itself healed.

Appolinarious is celebrated in the annals of myth, in which healing the city’s epidemic and social disintegration by murdering a demon is considered his greatest deed. He brought oneness through the power of blood.

Yet, like the Pharisees and scribes, Apollonius puts the scapegoating process on full display. The different and vulnerable are no longer recognized as human; they become demons. In my country right now, we have ceased to see each other as human, which is a perilous place to be. Recovering our shared humanity and interrupting the scapegoating mechanism is our urgent task. Oneness might come for some through the power of blood, but it leaves a murderous wake. Jesus, on the other hand, undoes the scapegoating process by holding up a courageous and vulnerable mirror—and eventually his own body—back to the scapegoaters. He writes on the ground, takes the side of the victim, and reveals and finds a “third way” beyond violence.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

The Panic of Uncertainty

In college years, my belief system began to crack. The doubt became too difficult to ignore, and I began to have quasi-panic attacks related to the certainty and security of my beliefs. I would settle down in a Gordon College library carrel and open my first laptop—a black Gateway, if memory serves— to write a paper, only to have panic set in about whether a tenet of Christianity was true or not. Was the Bible trustworthy and the infallible word of God? One minute I felt assured, and the next I felt uncertain and imperiled. I read books obsessively on the theme of “apologetics,” or demonstrations of “proof” about Christian beliefs, memorized their arguments, and rehearsed them back to myself to calm my spinning mind. It worked for a while, with certainty functioning like a drug to which I was addicted, until the next time doubt set in.

Photo by Nathaniel Shuman on Unsplash

Survival Theology and Nervous System Response

My body and brain acted as if being right or wrong about Christian beliefs was a matter of survival with eternal consequences. The high control religious environment of evangelicalism in which I was raised ensured that everyone knew where the boundaries of correct belief ended and where heresy, with its accompanying divine banishment and hell-bound torment, began. Questioning the authority of the Bible? Dangerous. Questioning whether Jesus was divine? Dangerous. Struggling with substitionary atonement? Playing with fire. Wondering if LGBTQ+ friends might be saved by Jesus, too? Liberal (which was the same thing as dangerous).

In hindsight, I can say that doubt activated a trauma response in me. My sympathetic nervous system operated as if the mere doubting thought about evangelical orthodoxy was unsafe and a threat. My body and brain responded accordingly: I must persuade pesky doubts of the truth at all costs! Bring out the apologetic army!

Saved by the Breath

First yoga saved me, and then I walked into a spacious field of divine intimacy called contemplation, which saved me some more. To quote a couple of paragraphs of my book “The Holy Ordinary”:

I probably wouldn’t be a Christian today were it not for discovering yoga. I went through a long stretch of being bored with church and Christianity, of not finding any substantive meaning in what I said I believed. This crucible of faith also happened to take place in the middle of my ordination process! I served as a chaplain intern at a Boston hospital, enjoyed sponsorship for ordination by a Boston church, but when my life encountered crisis, the desire to worship and be with other Christians completely left me. It didn’t feel meaningful. And I felt disconnected from the deep grief I was carrying.

I found one place where I could experience an embodied connection to the Holy Spirit, a place where I could be real about my anger and sadness, and where I felt safe in allowing tears to stream down my face. That was yoga class. And so, on many Sunday mornings, I didn’t tell anybody where I was going or apologize to the minister. I just skipped church and rolled out my yoga mat on the hardwood floor of Back Bay Yoga studio in downtown Boston. I did downward dogs and upward dogs and headstands and handstands and wheels and cobras and camel poses. The irony is that as I created distance from church, I found myself longing to belong more fully to my Christian tradition. I started sitting in silence and reading books about prayer and Christian mysticism. I went to a retreat on the true and false self with Richard Rohr. I learned Centering Prayer from Cynthia Bourgeault. I grew thirstier to know and lead from within the depths of spiritual transformation that had existed all along in my home tradition, but which no one in church had ever told me was there.

Photo by Cansu Hangül on Unsplash

Contemplation as Disruption

The practice of contemplation, through sitting in stillness with God, disrupts my need for certainty. Other practices help the effort, too, like solitude, chanting Psalms, Eucharist, being a part of a community, therapy, and spiritual direction. When I sit in stillness, though, my body does not initially experience my meditation practice as welcoming or calming. It is more like a twice-daily intervention in the full and busy nature of my life and the survival tendencies of my paranoid thoughts. It’s uncomfortable. I talk to God about the discomfort. Sometimes my mind wanders. A lot of times my mind wanders. But the stillness persists and usually—not always—I let go, if only for a minute. The stillness and silence become a spacious embrace where I can rest, be, and be loved. There is no need for correct or false beliefs in that space—there is no need for thoughts at all. And then the timer goes off, or the kid asks for help with breakfast, or I catch my wife briefly before she heads out the door for work, and the day is off to the races.

There is no need for correct or false beliefs in that space — there is no need for thoughts at all.

Photo by Doan Anh on Unsplash

Rightness in Every Stage

I’ve since studied mystical theology and been on a contemplative path of dedicated practice for fifteen years (give or take). Contemplation, along with embodied practices like yoga, running, or walking with my dog in the woods, disrupts my certainty and helps me dismantle my need for the “right” beliefs. But the work of contemplation is slow and takes a lifetime. And my addiction to certainty—what Peter Enns calls “the sin of certainty”—nestles in my psyche in indefatigable and gnarly ways. For example: I rather enjoy friendly debate-type conversations with either evangelicals or mainline liberals where I make the case that a socially engaged contemplative theology is “the right” way of being Christian. And that continues my trend of chasing “rightness” and “correct belief”: zeal for being right consumed me when I was an evangelical; I became a “radical Christian” for a stint during which I spoke openly about how I thought Christians who did not give up their property and possessions and work with people in poverty were not really Christians; as a more classic liberal Christian, I turned my nose down at my former evangelical tribe, convinced I had joined the more enlightened ranks; as a Christian contemplative, I can easily fall prey to the same trap: I’ve found an inclusive, evolving and rigorous path of love inspired by mystics—and I’m right!

Theology matters, truth exists, and how we think about God impacts our lives and world. I desire to believe in the most inclusive, compassionate, and loving way of understanding God that I can find, because I hope that such a God will over time do some mirroring in me. But the belief in a universally loving God does not mean that I am any more loving because I believe it. My brain’s security in being right and believing “correctly” can often lead me to greater isolation rather than connection, especially when I grip my rightness tightly, refuse to fully listen to differing perspectives, and don my armor for debate mode. Because debate mode, in spite of my stated certainties, can also be a defensive posture in which my brain and body are trying to minimize threats. I no longer rationally believe in divine punishment in hell or that God’s anger “needed” Jesus to die in my place—but that doesn’t mean that my body has caught up yet.

Certainty as Addiction, Recovery as Practice

I am powerless over my need for certainty, and a Power greater than me can restore me to (true, holistic) sanity that makes friends with unknowing.

Photo by Bùi Hoàng Long on Unsplash

I’ve written about being part of a spiritual community called the “Community of the Incarnation,” and sharing a rhythm of prayer and practice that is adapted for contemporary living. One of the commitments in our “rule of life”—think guiding values and practices, if that term from monasticism is new—is “adopting the 12 steps as a method of conversion of life.” The brilliance of combining 12-step work with spirituality is that it helps each of us come to terms with our powerlessness over our addictions, whether it is alcohol, eating, co-dependency, sex, rigid belief, or even certainty itself. It gives us a tested and ongoing process of growth, without excess theology, and it helps position the journey of contemplative transformation as slow, deep, often seemingly in the wrong direction, and yet ever-unfolding. I am powerless over my need for certainty, and a Power greater than me can restore me to (true, holistic) sanity that makes friends with not knowing and not needing to be right. And as the 12-steppers say, “it works if you work it, you’re worth it”!

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

P.S. At the end of last week’s post I mentioned I would write about Christian Zionism. That research has taken me down rabbit holes—such as the fact that the origins of Christian Zionism predate political Zionism, and that both evangelical fundamentalists and mainline liberal Christians are complicit in colonial theologies that harm Palestinians—so I’m going to let it simmer for a while. In the meantime, my prayer is still haunted by Gaza’s starving and dying, and I know from responses and comments that yours is, too.

The Glenfinnan Viaduct, made famous by the Harry Potter films:

Glencoe in the Highlands:

The stunning Carrick Beach:

Wisdom from Yeats in the window of a glorious Harry Potter shop:

Have a fabulous week, everyone.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

These sacred possibilities occur amid the most mundane and often annoying of circumstances. I might hear the rowdy group of teens at the back of the plane over my turned-up headphones. I might be restless and pace the corridors listening to a podcast. And there’s nothing like that desperate feeling of aching to be home and then hearing the announcer’s voice telling you that your flight is delayed, again. All that said, I still discover something new and vital in airport liminal space. Whatever it is, it glimmers in the stretch of long hours between my initial setting out and my trip’s end, and vacillates undecidedly between solitude and escapism.

Sometimes I ask myself, “How can each itinerary become an invitation to be more present with myself and more alive to God?” And sometimes I don’t ask that at all. Sometimes I sprawl out in a terminal gate over three coveted seats without armrests. Sometimes I enjoy the spacious and world-inhabiting feeling that a good fiction book brings. Sometimes I catch up with a friend that I associate with whatever layover city I find myself in. Sometimes I cross terminals to find the best overpriced coffee. Sometimes I people watch. Sometimes I wander to the outermost terminals to locate the interfaith chapel and plop myself on a meditation cushion. Sometimes the in-between space raises to mind and heart the feelings with which I haven’t yet dealt, the longings I haven’t yet prayed, the resentments and sadnesses that I have kept at bay. And sometimes I chuckle and grin the whole way through.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

I’m also reminded of my mortality. No matter how often I fly, when the plane’s wheels prepare to hit the runway tarmac, I have a little back-and-forth with God, bracing ever-so-slightly for disaster. I say, “I’m not ready to go yet, but if it is my time, I give myself to you.” And when the plane slows down fast and the wind makes that whooshing sound on the wing flaps, I mutter t’ prayer (Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner). It helps center me in a vulnerable moment that has passed before I know it. The cabin lights are now bright again, people are standing up and eager to exit, and, bleary-eyed as I am, it’s time to go home.

What are some practices that you do while traveling to help keep you conscious and present? And what is your preferred escapist travel hobby?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

P.S. This was a travel week for work, so I’m re-posting this one from 2023.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Yet what kind of victory is Easter, exactly? In some places in the Scripture and in Christian tradition, God’s resurrection victory through Jesus can feel a bit inflated. In John’s Gospel, the resurrection can be read as a magic trick that God’s incarnate Word pulled over the eyes of unsuspecting death. John’s risen Jesus appears behind locked doors without any warning and, with a command, multiplies the catch of his disciples’ fishing nets. Matthew’s resurrection story ends with Jesus declaring from a mountaintop that all power in heaven has been given to him. Then he launches an expansion plan of sending his disciples to the ends of the earth as heralds of God’s good news. In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, the resurrection is a victory that elicits overpowering praise: “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:54). And in many mainline churches, we are sometimes guilty of Easter celebrations that resound in only one key. Holy Week is often reduced to an upbeat cheer between the Hosannas of Palm Sunday and the Alleluias of Easter.

Christianity in the West has all too often flexed muscles of overblown triumph, of triumphalism, which means excessive exultation over one’s success or achievements. Especially as Christianity aligned with political powers-that-be, we turned truth into an “either you’re with us or you’re against us” weapon. This tendency to separate insiders from outsiders, winners from losers, only snowballed over time. Before a crucial battle for the Roman throne, so the legend goes, the emperor-to-be Constantine dreamed of a cross in the sky. He believed he heard God speaking to him Latin words that meant “In this sign you will be the victor.” So he placed crosses on his soldiers’ shields. And they won—they vanquished rival Maxentius’s troops and distorted a symbol of suffering love into a tool of triumphalist victory. But zero-sum victory always leaves victims trailing, and the logic of triumphalist religion has inspired countless forced baptisms, hellfire sermons, antisemitic pogroms, violent crusades, and plans to take America back “for God.”

Possibly in reaction to the checkered history of Christianity, the temptation for progressive Christians like myself sways to the opposite extreme. It’s not inflated imperialism that we struggle with so much as deflated defeat. Some of us may be tempted to give up hope that the church can still be a community of transformation in the 21^st century. Some of us may be tempted to give up on the possibility of passionate faith convictions that do not perpetuate oppression. Some of us may be tempted to give up on the meaningfulness of prayer. Some of us may be tempted to give up on Jesus. Many of our reasons for surrender are justified, but the effect is that many progressive Christians often settle for Christianity-lite. A lowest-common-denominator form of Christian identity that doesn’t offend anybody because it doesn’t stand for anything.

Easter is a third path beyond the poles of God’s swagger on the one hand and depressing defeat on the other. The Easter season is a reminder of the paradoxical victory of God triumphing through failure.

We see Christ’s risen presence in the legacy of Pope Francis. Upon his election as Pope in 2013, the former Cardinal Bergoglio turned down the bright red shoes of his predecessor Benedict in favor of practical loafers. He hadn’t even planned on wearing new shoes at all to the big papal celebration; his friends had to talk him into trading in his previous shabby sneakers. Pope Francis set a more humble example than has been seen in his high office for years. In previous Holy Week services, the Pope transformed the traditional foot-washing ceremony of Maundy Thursday into a demonstration of God’s love for people in need. One Holy Week, he washed the feet of twelve prisoners in one of Rome’s prisons. During another Holy Week service, he washed the feet of the elderly and those with disabilities. Pope Francis’s leadership was grounded in authentic humility—when else did Protestants like the folks in one of my former churches do a book study of a papal encyclical (Laudato Si’)?

The truth that the Gospels remind us of every year is that there is no resurrection without the cross. We need the failure of the cross to make sense of the victory of the resurrection. The four Gospels differ in details, but each takes a significant amount of time to tell the Passion story. Paul’s message of God’s victory over death was empowered by the counterintuitive message of Christ crucified. If our celebration of Easter is not tempered by the harrowing reality of Jesus’ death, the proclamation of resurrection can become unmoored and twisted into triumphalist victory.

Mark's resurrection story is anything but triumphalist. Mark’s story tells of a wavering win, an unstable and uncertain triumph. It’s a victory that barely deserves to be called a victory at all. Mark’s Gospel downplays the resurrection. There are three different endings to Mark’s Gospel. Mark’s original ending in 16:8 is so abrupt and unfinished that it makes its hearers squirm: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). This is no algorithmic happy ending packaged for streaming; it’s more like the nuanced last scene of a Paul Thomas Anderson film.

Mark’s resurrected Jesus is, in the original ending, nowhere to be found. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and another woman, Salome, sought to sneak near Jesus’ tomb under cover of night and honor his burial with an anointing of oil. A large stone guarded Jesus’ body, but they had no well-construed plan to remove it; they even discussed the logistics of their stealth anointing as they walked, only to find, on arrival, that the stone had already been rolled back. They peered into the tomb and found, not the body of their dead Rabbi, but a mysterious young man in a white robe.

A young man in a white robe would have been cause for fear and amazement. Earlier Jewish texts recount a similar story, perhaps of an angel, who pays a visit in dramatic, world-shaking moments when heaven unveils itself on earth. This man claimed that Jesus of Nazareth had been raised, but that he was not here, that he had gone ahead of them to Galilee (Mark 16:6-7). The tomb was empty, the stone had been rolled away, heaven had unveiled itself on earth, but the women were too shocked to speak and the men had fled the scene entirely.

The paradoxical victory of resurrection in the Bible is tied to humility and defeat.

Resurrection is a chastened victory born through flawed and all-too-human characters.

God rose through Sarah, who gave birth to Isaac even after years of barrenness.

God rose through Jacob, the swindler, who wrestled all night with an angel, and was left with a limp that he called a blessing from God.

God rose through Joseph, who, before serving as Pharaoh’s top aide, was abandoned by his brothers and left for dead.

God rose through Jonah, who dwelt in the whale’s belly for three days and nights.

God rose through David, the shepherd nobody who became a king.

God rose through Jesus on the third day, after he was crucified on a cross.

God rises today through our lives, our communities, and world, through our doubts, uncertainties and failures, through our terror and amazement.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

My wife and kids went to New Orleans this week during school spring break. We saw alligators and ate beignets. This is an old Easter sermon from the archives. Have a great week.