Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Human One. Talk about an upside-down universe! I’m not happy when people hate me—and some people do hate me. Jesus is saying that we have to...
It’s Christmas! The problem is solved. Now go and utterly enjoy all remaining days. Not only is it “always Advent,” but, now, every day can be Christmas because the one we thought we were just waiting for has come once and for all.
Sadly, most people’s image of God is jolly Santa, making a list and checking it twice, finding out who’s naughty or nice. It’s certainly not this humble, helpless baby who has come to love us in ways that we’re not ready to be loved.
God does not give Divine Love except to people who really want this, choose this, and say "yes" to this. Divine Love is so pure that it never manipulates, shames, or forces itself on anyone. Love waits to be invited and desired, and only then rushes in.
I believe your image of God creates you—or defeats you. There is an absolute connection between how we see God and how we see ourselves and the universe.
I know it’s easy to be cynical, to look at the disastrous effects of Christianity’s complicity with empire and want to give up on the whole endeavor, but I also want to proclaim that the flow of grace is a truly wonderful thing.
While most of us are not yet prophets, we know the presence of a great love, a love that includes the entire world. Awakened by that love, we too are aggrieved in the face of human oppression. A voice within us calls out, “This is wrong and cannot stand.” We yearn for...
Until I went to seminary, no one had taught me how to clean the lens of my awareness and perception. Studying the philosophy of Franciscan John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) for four years had a profound effect on me. Duns Scotus taught (admittedly in rarefied Latin) that...
Before conversion, we tend to think that God is out there. After transformation, God is not out there and we don’t look at reality. We look from reality. We’re in the middle of it now; we’re a part of it. This whole thing is...
The longer you gaze, the more you will see your own complicity in and profitability from the sin of others, even if it is the satisfaction of feeling you are on higher moral ground. Forgiveness is probably the only human action that demands three new "seeings" at the...