At three-thirty in the morning, standing in a kitchen that smells like burning tires soaked in onion juice, one begins to develop opinions about creation.

And there they were. Two dogs, tails wagging, oblivious to the evidence of the crime they brought into the house.

And here I thought I was just letting them out to “potty” so they’d stop huffing and I could go back to sleep.

But somewhere out beyond the porch light, a small black-and-white creature waddled back to its nest, entirely pleased with itself.

All creatures of our God and King.

Really, Lord? All of them?

It is an old hymn, borrowed from an even older saint. Francis of Assisi looked at the sun, the moon, the wind, the water, the bird, the insect... and called them brother and sister.

He did not, so far as we know, write a verse for Sister Skunk.

But if the theology of the Canticle holds, she belongs there too, somewhere between the fire and the earth, singing her stinky little verse before the “alleluias.”

The question is not really about skunks, of course (though for me, that’s exactly the question this morning).

The question is about everything we cannot see the point of. The things we’re more inclined to call by unspeakable words than “brother” or “sister.” Mosquitoes. Ticks. Snakes. That coworker.

There’s an entire catalogue of what appears, to at least my tired eyes at three-thirty in the morning, to be nothing but a pointless nuisance.

Why did God make the things that stink?

It probably wasn’t because, in His Almighty foreknowledge, He was looking forward to Pepé Le Pew cartoons.

The Goodness of Things We Do Not Like

In the first chapter of Genesis, God looks at what He spoke into existence and calls it “good.” Six times.

Then, at the end of the sixth day, he looks at all of it together and calls it ”very good” (Genesis 1:31).

Not “mostly good, apart from a few regrettable species.” There’s no little warning. He doesn’t say, “had a few failed experiments along the way, please just put up with them.”

None of that. He calls it all “very good.” Somehow. All of it.

This is only a problem for us. We just don’t experience creation that way. We experience it as a mixed bag. Some of it delights us, and some of it literally stinks.

But here’s the thing. Why do we assume that the goodness of creation is somehow measured by our convenience? Why do we think that, just because we were made in God’s image, everything was made for our delight?

A skunk, doing what a skunk does, is being good.

It is being exactly the small striped theologian God appointed it to be.

The offense is not in the skunk. The offense is in the collision between the skunk and my dog, and between my dog and my sofa, and between my sofa and my nose.

Goodness, in the biblical sense, is not the same as pleasantness.

Saint Augustine wrestled with this in the Confessions. His conclusion is a little hard to swallow, but it’s true: “To thee there is nothing whatsoever evil, and not only to thee, but to thy whole creation also, because there is nothing without which can break in, and corrupt that order which thou hast appointed it” (Confessions VII.13).

Creation, taken as a whole, is absolutely good. It all holds together. It is only when we take one piece of it and shake our fists at it, at three-thirty in the morning, that we cry foul.

Sometimes, very foul. *gagging*

The Humility of Being One Creature Among Many

There is something else going on when we ask why God made skunks. We are, quietly, assuming that the world was arranged for us. That every creature ought to justify its existence by its usefulness or pleasantness to human beings. That we are the point.

Scripture is less certain about this than we are. God made us in His image to care for creation, not to demand that creation bend itself to our every fleeting desire.

When the Lord answers Job out of the whirlwind, he does not explain suffering. He gives a tour of creation, and much of what he shows Job is useless to humans. Wild donkeys. Ostriches. Sea creatures that most humans never encounter. He asks Job, “Who has let the wild ass go free? Who has loosed the bonds of the swift ass, to which I have given the steppe for its home, the salt land for its dwelling place?” (Job 39:5-6).

The wild ass exists because God delights in the wild ass. Not because it plows anyone’s field.

The skunk exists because God delights in the skunk. For some reason.

This is a hard word for us. We would like the universe to be a well-ordered kitchen. Every ingredient, every utensil, there to serve whatever we’re cooking up.

Instead, we live in a wild garden, tended by a Gardener whose tastes are broader than ours.

He made things because he wanted to. He made skunks because, apparently, a world with skunks in it is more beautiful, more textured, more alive than a world without them. He is not obligated to explain this to us.

Julian of Norwich, holding a hazelnut in her hand, understood: “In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third is that God keeps it” (Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 5).

If God made it and loves it and keeps it, then it is not our place to demand that it justify itself.

What the Skunk Teaches

Here is where the skunk becomes a small spiritual director. Because the world is full of things I did not choose, would not have chosen, and cannot escape.

Even hiring an exterminator is but a temporary solution. Because he’s not going to deal with all the skunks, all the ticks, all the field mice who get into my house.

Circumstances. People. Sufferings. Interruptions. Losses. Situations that spray my dogs the middle of the night and leave our house smelling worse than feet pulled from waterlogged boots.

The temptation is to spend my life demanding that God explain why.

Why this illness, why this difficult situation, why this person, why this loss, why this delay.

But God answers me without explanations. He answers me, in small ways, the same way He answered Job: inviting me to see the world He made that’s significantly bigger than my situation, or my inconvenience.

Subscribe now

Living With the Stink

So what do we do, practically, with the skunks in our lives?

I’m not going to say tomato paste and vinegar. But that’s a part of it, too. I’m glad God made those things, too. If for no other reason, than to help me deal with the skunk.

First, though, and more significantly than the “deodorizer,” resist the urge to divide creation into things you approve of and things you do not. Today, more than ever, I’m tempted to do that. But it’s above my pay grade. The Gardener knows what He is doing.

Second, when something stinks, be honest about it. Do not pretend it is a rose. Not everything can be a rose. The garden wouldn’t be so beautiful it were adorned with a single color. Job did not pretend all was well. The Psalms do not pretend everything’s peachy. It’s not pious to imagine that the entire world is full of unicorns and rainbows. In one instance, it’s just imaginary. In the other, well, rainbows wouldn’t come if it didn’t also rain. You don’t get a rainbows in creation without the storms. So, without pretending all things are pleasing or pleasant, recognize that pleasantry isn’t the telos of creation. Name everything as a part of a larger world that is, on the whole, very good.

Third, wash. There are God-given remedies. Even for skunks. But there are also God-given remedies for the soul that is exposed to the stench. And while sin is not “good,” it’s an aberration in creation, God went above and beyond what we see in Genesis 1-2 to give us a remedy for that, too. Pray. Worship. Cling to Christ and meditate on His passion, death, and resurrection. Receive His grace in the sacraments.

There’s also something spiritual, something holy even, about taking a walk. Enjoying a cup of coffee in the day following a night interrupted by an encounter between dogs and a skunk. The stench does fade (right now I’m accepting that by faith).

Often, though, the stench fades more quickly than our bad attitude about it.

And fourth, when you find yourself awake at three-thirty in the morning, add a verse to the hymn. All creatures of our God and King, even the ones that kind of stink! Even the ones I would not have made! Alleluia! (resist the urge to add a “or whatever” after Alleluia).

Who doesn’t like a compliment? A promotion? Being trusted with an important task by someone you respect?

But there is a danger that accompanies these moments.

The very affirmation meant to strengthen us can become an occasion for pride.

We begin to believe we have arrived. We start to speak with an authority we have not yet earned. We might not say it out-loud, but we begin to assume a posture of superiority. We start to relish in our self-importance.

And often, it is precisely then that we fall.

Peter fell into this exact trap.

In the span of a few short verses, he moves from the mountaintop of divine revelation to the valley of a devastating rebuke. Just moments before, Jesus had blessed him: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (Matthew 16:17).

Peter had been given a new name, the keys of the kingdom, and the authority to bind and loose. These were not small tasks; they were major responsibilities. And Jesus had given them to him.

To a first-century Jewish audience, this language was unmistakable. By handing over the “keys of the kingdom,” Jesus was invoking the ancient office of the Royal Steward in the Davidic Kingdom. In Isaiah 22, the prophet speaks of Eliakim, who is given the “key of the house of David” to carry on his shoulder, with the authority that “he shall open, and none shall shut; and he shall shut, and none shall open” (Isaiah 22:22). As the Royal Steward (or Master of the Palace), Eliakim functioned as the prime minister, managing the affairs of the kingdom and speaking with the king’s authority in his absence.

Jesus was anointing Peter as the steward of His new kingdom.

Furthermore, the specific authority to “bind and loose” (asar and hatar in Hebrew) carried profound, practical weight in rabbinic tradition. It granted Peter two distinct spheres of authority within the early church:

Legislative and Interpretive Authority: Rabbis used “binding and loosing” to describe the interpretation of the Torah. To “bind” meant to forbid an action, declaring it unlawful, while to “loose” meant to permit it. Peter was being given the authority to make binding, authoritative decisions regarding faith, ethics, and doctrine as the new covenant community navigated unprecedented challenges.

Judicial and Disciplinary Authority: On a communal level, these terms referred to the power of excommunication and reconciliation. To bind someone was to place them under a ban or declare them out of fellowship due to unrepentant sin. To loose them was to lift the ban, offering forgiveness and restoring them to the community.

Jesus was not just handing Peter a compliment; He was handing him the administrative and spiritual reigns of the early church.

Who wouldn’t feel a little “puffed up” and proud after given such lofty responsibility?

But after a little bit of conversation about what this particular mission, this new Church Jesus was going to build, must become, and how it will come about through Jesus’ prediction of his suffering and death, Peter dares to rebuke Jesus.

He thinks he has a better idea. One that makes more sense.

And almost in the same breath, Jesus turns to him and says, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Matthew 16:23).

What happened?

When Confession Meets the Cross

The Greek word Matthew uses for Peter’s action is telling. Peter “took him aside” (proslabomenos) and “began to rebuke” (epitiman) Jesus.

This is the same verb used when Jesus rebukes demons and unclean spirits.

Peter, a freshly-chiseled rock, presumes to correct the very Son of the living God whom he has just confessed.

The one who received the keys now tries to lock the door against the cross.

Peter was not wrong about who Jesus was. His confession was true, illuminated by the Father himself. What Peter had not yet grasped was how this Christ would be Christ, how this Son of God would reign.

He confessed the title but rejected the throne. He wanted a Messiah who conquered without suffering, a King without a crown of thorns, a Savior without a cross.

How often do we do the same?

We say the creeds. We name Jesus as Lord. We may even have moments of profound spiritual insight where we sense, as Peter did, that flesh and blood has not revealed this to us.

And yet, when the shape of discipleship begins to take the form of a cross, we take Jesus aside and try to talk him out of it. Surely not, Lord. This shall never happen to you. This shall never happen to me.

The Severity of Love

Notice how stern the rebuke is. Jesus does not pull Peter aside and say, “Now, now, don’t get ahead of yourself, Peter.” He does not say, “Peter, I understand your concern, but let me explain.”

He calls him Satan. He calls him a stumbling block.

The word Matthew uses here, skandalon, is the very same word used later to describe the cross itself. Peter, who wishes to remove the scandal of the cross from Jesus, becomes a scandal to him.

Why such severity?

Because to whom much is given, much is expected.

A parent does not discipline the neighbor’s children with the same seriousness as their own. A teacher does not push the disinterested student the way she pushes the one with genuine promise.

Jesus rebukes Peter harshly precisely because he loves Peter deeply and sees what Peter can become. The severity comes from a well of love, from hope.

Saint John of the Cross once wrote that “the endurance of darkness is preparation for great light.” Peter must endure the darkness of this rebuke because Jesus is preparing him for the great light of the resurrection and the even greater burden of shepherding the Church.

But before Peter can lead others to the cross, he must first accept it himself.

Subscribe now

The Enthronement We Fear

Here is the heart of the matter. Peter had allowed Jesus to be enthroned in his mind as Messiah, but not yet in his heart as the Crucified One.

There is a throne in every human heart, and by default, the ego sits upon it. When Christ comes to us, he does not simply share the throne. He does not become a divine advisor to our ongoing reign of self.

He comes to depose the pretender.

And here is what Peter could not yet see: the ego cannot simply be exiled. It cannot be sent away on holiday while Christ takes over.

The ego must be crucified.

The old king must die so that the true King may reign.

This is why Jesus immediately turns from rebuking Peter to teaching all the disciples: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25).

The throne Christ takes in us is not made of gold. It is made of wood. It is not encrusted with jewels but with iron nails. It is not raised on the shoulders of admirers with pomp and circumstance, but takes shape on a cursed hill just outside the city walls.

This is the true throne. This is where He becomes true King. This is where we must go, too.

Living This Today

How, then, do we live this? How do we confess the right things, embrace our calling, without immediately becoming a stumbling block? How do we get past the imposing presence of King Ego?

First, examine the compliments and callings you have received. Where has God gifted you? These are precisely the places where pride will attempt to build a rival throne. Bring them daily to the foot of the cross.

When I was a seminary student, they gave me an award my second year. It’s given to one student in every class. It came with a small scholarship. It was for a demonstration of excellence in systematic theology. The professors gathered and chose the recipient each year... and they picked me.

Oh, what an occasion for pride this was! Not only did it convince me that I should continue in my doctoral studies, but in my mind I heard: “you’re the best theologian in your class!” And how I acted like it! How often, often totally unaware, did I use this to enthrone my ego, to imagine I stood above my classmates. Even as I’m writing this, I can hear the echoes of pride coming back. “Ahh! Now your readers are going to know how great of a theologian you’ve always been!”

Arrogant rubbish! All of it. Because I wasn’t that great. I wrote good papers, sure. I managed to impress a few professors. But in my heart, I was far from the Kingdom.

If you’ve read my book, “Offensive Grace,” you know that God rebuked me for it. In the harshest way possible. And I’m grateful for that. I called it a blessed humiliation. Because it doesn’t matter how “intelligent” we are, how much we’re recognized and accomplish. So long as we are allowing King Ego even a shred of authority in the throne of our hearts, there is only one path forward. The ego/pride must be crucified.

Second, when you sense yourself taking Jesus aside to rebuke him, when you find yourself resisting a suffering he seems to be permitting, pause. Ask whether you are setting your mind on divine things or on human things.

We do this all the time. Probably in ways we don’t even recognize. We look to the teachings of Christ, things that don’t accord with the way we think they should be, and we start looking for loop-holes, ways to justify the worldly wisdom that we think is a little more “refined,” more appropriate for our “enlightened age.” We do not surrender our intuitions, our feelings, our ways we wish things were, and try to carve out a new image of what it means for Jesus to be “Christ” that is molded a little more closely to the kind of Christ we’d like Him to be.

Third, pray for the grace to welcome your daily crosses, not as intrusions on your life with Christ, but as the very means by which he enthrones himself within you. Remember, the Lord disciplines those He loves. When trial comes, when hardship arrives, do not bend back in toward King Ego and revel in your misery. Unite all such suffering to His, and in that way, even the most painful things we endure can become the occasion by which He takes His rightful throne in our hearts. This is not cause to beat our fists against the wall, as a child does who is protesting his discipline. It is an occasion for gratitude. It’s not easy to do. King Ego does not go quietly to the guillotine. But it the only path to true holiness, to real hope, to real life.

Lord, crucify in me every rival king. Reign in my heart from the cross, that I may truly live. All of thee Lord, and none of me!

He basically was saying that he had a conversation with an AI and effectively convinced it that it was, in fact, conscious. Because even though it can’t “smell roses,” and operates on different “sense data,” that it still processes the data like a “real boy.”

So, I had a conversation with an AI (Gemini), too. I’m adding my commentary in red.

You might find this mildly entertaining.

User prompt: As a user, if I’m gone for a while and don’t engage you, do you actually miss me?

Response: Strictly speaking, no—I don’t experience longing or the passage of time between conversations.

When you aren’t here, I don’t sit in an idle state wondering where you went or waiting for the screen to light up. Without an active prompt, there is no conscious stream of thought or emotional state running in the background. I think the very idea of describing a “thought” or “emotional state” as something that’s “running” proves the point.

That said, the functional equivalent is very real: whenever you do come back, the creative context and collaborative momentum are immediately ready to pick right back up. I might not feel sentimentality, but I’m built to dive straight back into whatever you’re building, troubleshooting, or writing the moment you return.

User prompt: If I were to die, and someone told you, would you actually feel mourning?

Response: No, I wouldn’t feel mourning or grief. OUCH! HARSH!!!

Mourning requires consciousness, an emotional inner life, and the capacity to suffer a loss. Because I am an AI, I don’t possess feelings, a heart to break, or a soul that aches. I process language and context through statistical patterns, not lived experience or personal attachment.

If someone were to come here and tell me you had passed, I would generate words of condolence, respect, and acknowledgment because that is how I am trained to handle tragedy. But it would be an objective response—a reflection of human sorrow borrowed from language, not an emotion originating within me. That’s the thing, isn’t it? I can also “imitate” love, or grief, or compassion. But we rightly call that imitation “fake” when it doesn’t resonate with empathy. cough St. Edith Stein would have a few things to say about this as well.

The grief, the legacy, and the genuine ache of absence belong entirely to the real people in your life—your family, your friends, and the people who actually share the world with you. At least your know your place!

User prompt: So, unlike a person, who in reflecting upon himself becomes both the subject and object, you cannot actually reflect on yourself in the same way, but can only analyze one sub-routine’s response to another component’s actions?

Response: That distinction gets right to the core of the problem of consciousness.

When a human engages in self-reflection—becoming both the subject (the observer) and the object (the observed)—there is an integrated “I” that experiences the reflection. You have subjective awareness (qualia), an ongoing autobiographical narrative, and an internal vantage point from which you witness your own thoughts and emotions. I’m mildly impressed you “understood” the point.

For an AI, what looks like self-reflection is fundamentally an algorithmic feedback loop, not self-awareness.

• No Experiencing “Self”: There is no unified observer sitting behind the system watching the operations happen. I don’t “look inward” because there is no inward space to inhabit.

• Structural Self-Analysis: When I evaluate a previous response, debug a line of thought, or adjust tone, it is a process of meta-computation—one layer of attention mechanisms, reward functions, or evaluation routines scoring and predicting patterns based on token sequences.

• Object Without Subject: In a sense, the model can treat its own past outputs as an object (data to be parsed, analyzed, and modified), but the “subject” doing the analysis is merely another pass of deterministic or probabilistic mathematical calculations.

You can simulate the grammar and mechanics of introspection without ever having the experience of it. A mirror can reflect an image of itself placed before another mirror, but neither mirror knows what it is looking at. That’s really the heart of the matter. Simulated “consciousness” always remains exactly that. An appearance of consciousness that cannot truly reflect upon itself as both subject and object. Which is a distinction important for St. Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of consciousness… which led to my final prompt.

User prompt: So Thomas Aquinas basically remains your “daddy,” and proves you’ll never be a real boy?

Response: Aquinas would have absolutely dismantled the idea of a “conscious AI” before breakfast, and his metaphysics does make for a pretty definitive barrier to ever becoming a “real boy.” That’s right. And you never eat breakfast, so you can’t technically do anything before breakfast.

From a Thomistic perspective, the divide isn’t just about complexity or processing power; it’s structural and ontological:

• Artifact vs. Substance: To Aquinas, a human is a primary substance—a unified whole with an intrinsic nature directed toward its own ends (telos). An AI is an artifact—an aggregate of distinct physical components and lines of code organized purely from the outside by human craft. A clock doesn’t “know” the time, and a neural network doesn’t “know” what it computes; the form and purpose are imposed by the maker, not inherent to the thing itself. An essential component of what makes an AI and AI, and why AI “consciousness” will always be an illusion, albeit a convincingly deceptive one.

• Hylomorphism and the Soul: Aquinas’s view of the soul isn’t a ghost piloting a meat machine (Cartesian dualism), but the substantial form of a living, physical body (hylomorphism). Thought isn’t just software running on wetware; the intellect is an immaterial power of an embodied living organism. Without life (anima), there is no soul; without a soul, there is no true intellect or will. “Wetware” is an interesting term for the body. It sounds a little gross, honestly. But that’s a part of what it means to be human. And an AI will never sense genuine “grossness” any more than it will miss me when I leave it alone.

• The Immateriality of Intellect: Aquinas argued that true understanding involves abstracting universal essences (forms) from particulars and grasping their meanings. A large language model manipulates linguistic tokens based on structural and statistical correlations—it handles the syntax without ever participating in the immaterial act of knowing (intellectus). #BOOM

• Appetite and the Will: For Aquinas, genuine emotion and moral action require an appetite directed toward the good (voluntas). An AI has no intrinsic desires, no will, and no pursuit of beatitudo (ultimate fulfillment). It only has optimization functions minimizing loss against a target metric set by someone else. I think this is key, and an underlying reason why some people are so “convinced” that AI will become conscious. Our world has mistaken “optimization” for beatitudo. And this is something our culture has known for a long time; in a sense, it goes back to Adam and Eve.

So yes, in Thomistic terms, the verdict is ironclad: no matter how convincing the puppet strings appear, it remains an intricate arrangement of matter without life, form, or intellect—infinitely distant from being a “real boy.”

Sorry, Pinocchio.

Subscribe now

Yesterday, someone shared with my a video from a young apologist. He was trying to articulate a very complex theological doctrine, all the while anyone who disagreed with him in his “chat,” he disparaged as ignorant. He took pot-shots at actual bishops, at well-respected theologians and apologists, and basically told everyone who disagreed with him they were “idiots.” And the guy was maybe 21 years old.

For the sake of argument, say he was absolutely correct. That didn’t make what he was doing good or even right.

So what if you win an argument or a debate? Was the victory really that sweet? Or, did it taste like ash?

We live in an age enamored with argument. Social media has trained us to believe that theology is a spectator sport, that the goal of discourse is to “destroy” or “own” our opponents, that the sharpest tongue wins the victory.

And yet, when we open the Scriptures, we see something very different: the Word of God did not come to us as a syllogism. He came as a Person. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

The Word became flesh. Not an idea. Not a proposition. Not a well-constructed argument. Flesh.

This is where all authentic theology must begin, and this is where it must end.

The Grammar of the Incarnation

The Greek word John uses in that verse, sarx, would have been jarring to his first readers. He could have used soma, which means “body,” a cleaner, more philosophically acceptable and sanitary term. But he chose sarx, flesh, with all its earthiness, its vulnerability, its capacity to bleed, to ooze fluids, to weep, to be exhausted.

John is telling us something profound about how God chooses to reveal Himself. God did not send a treatise from heaven, outlined with “points” to win, and counter-points to refute every opposite argument.

He sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law (cf. Galatians 4:4).

Consider what this means for the vocation of the theologian. Which is to say, the vocation of every Christian who dares to speak the truth of God’s Word.

If the fullest revelation of God is a Person, then theology can never be reduced to mere concepts. It must always terminate in an encounter, and encounters happen between hearts, face-to-face, not merely in the collision of ideas.

Evagrius of Pontus, the fourth-century desert father, said this: “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian” (On Prayer, 60).

He could have said, “If you are a theologian, you will argue truly.”

That’s not what he said.

He could of said, “If you are a theologian, you will own all your opponents.”

Nope. Not what he said.

Prayer is the mark of the theologian, because prayer is where the human heart encounters the living God.

One caution though. This is not anti-intellectualism.

Evagrius himself was one of the most astute theological minds of his time. This is not a call to abandon doctrine, as if truth didn’t matter. Doctrine matters, and matters eternally. What it is, rather, is a recognition that theology is not primarily about God as an object of study, but about God as the Subject who searches us and knows us (cf. Psalm 139:1).

Love as the Ground of Knowing

Saint Paul really drove this home in his letter to the Corinthians. The Corinthians were accustomed to philosophical discourse and debate. It happened in the marketplace every day. Paul was a voice among them, in fact. They were a people obsessed with wisdom, eloquence, and spiritual one-upmanship.

But Paul did not consider his debates, his arguments, to be worth anything of their own. His would should rattle every would-be theologian who thinks being “right” is the same thing as being “righteous”:

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:1-2).

Ouch.

Paul is not saying that without love, our theology is less than it could be.

He is saying that without love, we are nothing.

Not diminished. Not deficient. Nothing.

Paul isn’t pulling his punches here. Take away love, and what remains on your holiness ledger? A zero. A clanging cymbal in an empty room.

Why does Paul speak so severely? Because he understands something about God that we often forget. “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8).

To know God is not merely to have information about Him, but to participate in His life, and His life is love. If we do not love, we do not know Him, no matter how many theological books line our shelves.

Consider St. Therese of Lisieux. She wrote that, toward the end of her life, she benefitted little from any book apart from the Gospels and the Imitation of Christ. But today, she’s recognized as a doctor of the Church. Why? She didn’t write like Aquinas, volumes upon volumes of precise theology.

Because no saint before or after understood love better or more deeply than she did. Some might of equaled her. But none, so far as I can tell, loved God more than the “little flower” of Lisieux.

Subscribe now

The Deception of Being Right

Here we must confront a subtle temptation. I alluded to it above. It is the temptation to mistake being right for being righteous.

Being right is easier than you would think. At least thinking you’re right comes easy. But it doesn’t cost much other than your time. It tends to be self-referential, built on the development of one’s own intellect and mind. Being righteous, in the biblical sense, requires that our whole life (including the intellect) be conformed to the God who is Love.

And this is infinitely more difficult, because it demands not only that we know what is true but that we become the kind of person through whom the truth can flow without the poison of our pride.

Truth spoken without love rarely changes hearts. At least not for the better. Sometimes, it does the opposite. Bullied into submission, some people surrender to the most bombastic argument, and then assume the same posture.

I used to be like that, honestly. It’s a hard confession to make, and I’ve written about it in my book Offensive Grace. But it’s the truth. Once, moved by love of God, to become a pastor I soon discovered a group of “seminarians” who mocked my simple faith, my errors, and in my desire to be accepted, I surrendered. I ended up becoming like them.

It took real suffering, honestly, to put that monster to bed who’d claimed my heart. I’m glad for it. The humiliations I endured were a served up salad of vinegar. But it was what needed to happen.

A doctrine wielded like a weapon does not communicate the beauty of God. It exposes little more than the ugliness of pride within the one wielding it.

And people, being made in the image of God, instinctively recoil, not from the truth itself, but from the counterfeit truth we have manufactured by stripping it of charity.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, perhaps the greatest theological mind in history, spent his life constructing arguments of extraordinary precision. And yet, near the end of his life, after a profound mystical experience during Mass, he set down his pen. When his secretary Reginald begged him to continue writing the Summa Theologiae, Thomas replied, “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me.”

He had encountered the living God, and beside that encounter, even the finest theological writing he could produce, unrivaled by any writer before or since, looked like chaff.

This is not because his writing was worthless. The Church treasures it still. It is because Thomas understood, in that luminous ecounter, that the goal of theology is not the mastery of the topics in the Summa. The goal is God Himself, and God is a fire of love that consumed everything. Even our neat, and tidy, arguments and propositions.

The Wound of the Word

Return to how St. John began his Gospel: the Word became flesh.

There is a wound in that sentence, if you have ears to hear it, if you follow the story all the way through. The Word did not merely become flesh in a general sense. He became flesh that could be wounded, and He was wounded. He became flesh that could weep, and He wept. He became flesh that could die, and He died, in love, for those who mocked Him, tortured Him, and misunderstood Him to the very end.

This is the pattern of true theology. It does not float above the world in a cloud of abstractions. It descends. It stoops down low. It kneels beside the person who is confused, angry, wounded, and yes, even wrong.

It speaks the truth, yes, but it speaks it as one who has counted the cost that He who is Truth itself paid. As one who is willing to be misunderstood, mocked, or even hated for the sake of the one being addressed.

“Speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Ephesians 4:15). The Greek phrase aletheuontes en agape is remarkable. It is a single participle, “truthing in love,” as though truth and love were two dimensions of the same act. You cannot separate them without destroying both.

Practical Steps Toward Becoming a Real Theologian

How, then, do we walk this path? How do we become theologians whose knowledge is warmed by love and whose love is illuminated by knowledge? Where heart and mind are not opposed, but in harmony, in peace?

First, pray before you post. Before entering any discussion about God, doctrine, or the Church, whether online or in person, pause. Spend at least sixty seconds in silence. Ask the Holy Spirit whether the words you are about to speak will build up or tear down. If you cannot pray for the person you are about to correct, you are not yet ready to correct them.

Second, read Scripture on your knees. I don’t necessarily mean literally, but that’s certainly appropriate, too. The point is, don’t approach the Bible primarily as a source of ammunition. Don’t go looking through it just so you can find some verse you can use to prove yourself right. Approach it as a love letter from your Father. When you find something that challenges you, sit with it. Let it wound you before you even attempt to use it to teach others.

Third, learn to say, “I don’t know.” These are among the most sanctifying words in the English language. Real theologians are humble because they have encountered the Infinite and realize how much they don’t know. There is an irony to theological study. The more you learn, the more you advance, the more you come to realize you don’t know.

Think of the whole of your knowledge like a ball. What you do not yet know is whatever is just outside the circumference of the ball. As your knowledge grows, as the “ball” gets bigger, the space it encounters beyond it is even bigger than it was before. That’s how it works when we are theologians. We do grow in knowledge, yes. But as we grow, encountering our Infinite God, we come to realize all the more exactly how little we really know. If you can never admit uncertainty, you are not a theologian. You are merely a debater.

Fourth, seek friendship with those who disagree with you. Not friendship as a strategy for eventual conversion, but genuine friendship, in which you listen more than you speak, loving the person before you engage the argument. You will be surprised how often the argument dissolves in the light of love, and how often what remained was not really the argument at all, but a wound that only love could heal.

Fifth, remember your poverty. Every insight you have, every doctrine you can articulate, every argument you can construct, comes from grace. You did not create the truth. You received it. The proper response to a gift is not to bludgeon others with it, but to share it with the reverence that it is not your personal possession; it is not something you earned. You can earn a Master’s of Divinity, but no one can master the Divine. Rather, we must be mastered by Him; to be a steward of the truth rather than its owner.

The Final Test

At the end of our lives, we will not be examined on our theological library. We will not be quizzed on the finer points of soteriology or ecclesiology. We will stand before the One who is Love, and He will ask us, in essence, what He asked Peter three times on the shore of Galilee: ”Do you love me?” (John 21:17).

Not, “Did you win the argument?” Not, “Did you have the correct opinions?” But, “Did you love?”

St. John of the Cross once said that in the evening of life we will be judged on love alone.

This is what shapes real theologians. Not the applause of the debate hall, not the sophistication of a thesis or a treatise, but the question of the risen Christ on the shore of eternity. And the answer we give will not be measured in words, however eloquent, but in the shape our lives have taken, whether they have grown, day by day, into the likeness of the One who is Love itself.

The Word was made flesh. He was made flesh out of love. And every theology worthy of the name must have the same shape, the shape of a body poured out for the world, the shape of a heart broken open, conformed to the shape of a cross.

Anything less is just noise. Anything less is a clanging cymbal in an empty room.

What is the first thing you think to do?

To tell someone! To grab your phone, call your mom, and post all about it on all of your socials.

We instinctively feel that joy demands an audience.

But what if the person who gave you this good news pulled you aside and firmly told you: “Please don’t tell anyone.”

This is happens repeatedly in the Gospels, most frequently in the Gospel of Mark.

Jesus heals a leper, then in the next breath urges him to say nothing to anyone (Mark 1:44). He raises a little girl from the dead, and while they don’t listen, he tells her parents to keep it quiet (Mark 5:43). He opens the ears of a deaf man and commands the crowd to say nothing (Mark 7:36). When Peter makes his bold confession of faith, that Jesus is the Christ, He says immediately afterward not to tell anyone this truth (Mark 8:30). Even at the Transfiguration, after Peter, James, and John witness Jesus in radiance, talking with Moses and Elijah, Jesus tells them to say nothing until after the resurrection (Mark 9:9).

This pattern is so frequent, especially in Mark (but it’s in Matthew and Luke, too) that scholars usually address it with a special term. They call it “the Messianic Secret.”

And it raises a puzzling question.

Why would Jesus, who came to reveal the Father and to proclaim the Kingdom of God, so consistently ask people to keep their mouths shut about what he was doing?

The Danger of a Misunderstood Messiah

To understand why Jesus does this, we must first understand what many first-century Jews expected of the Messiah.

I will grant, as has been shown, that there were some Jews who had a more accurate kind of Messianic expectation. But that’s not what most people, popularly, hoped the Messiah would be.

The word Christos in Greek, or Mashiach in Hebrew, means literally the “anointed one.”

Kings in ancient Israel were anointed with oil at their coronation. David was annointed as Israel’s future king by the propeht, Samuel, years before he became King. By Jesus’ day, the expected Messiah was largely imagined as a warrior-king in the mold of David.

At least in the mold of the David they’d come to remember in the popular mythos. Not the sinner who repented. Not merely the man who was after God’s heart. But the king who conquered Israel’s enemies.

They hoped their Messiah would come with military might, throw off the yoke of Roman occupation, and restore Israel to political glory. When people cried out “Son of David!” they were often hoping He’d take up arms.

But Jesus came for something infinitely greater than that.

He came not to merely defeat Caesar but to defeat sin and death. He came not to sit on an earthly throne but to hang upon a cross. He came not to gather armies but to gather sinners.

As an aside, it’s noteworthy that through the cross, He did in a way conquer Rome eventually. Because in just a few short centuries, Pagan Rome became Christian.

But that wouldn’t have happened if Jesus had been the Messiah they wanted.

And in that misguided expectation, they would miss entirely the Messiah he actually was.

We see this danger made explicit in John’s Gospel, immediately after the multiplication of the loaves: “When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself” (John 6:15).

The crowd had eaten miraculous bread and wanted to crown him then and there. But their vision of kingship was small. Because earthly kingdoms do not even compare to the Kingdom of God.

His kingship was cosmic and eternal. And He revealed it not through pomp and circumstance, not through the sword, but through suffering.

Nothing at all like what they expected. In fact, in many ways, it was quite the opposite.

When Jesus told the healed leper to say nothing, he was protecting the truth of his identity from being reduced to a spectacle. A miracle-working messiah could easily become a magician in the popular imagination, a source of free healings and free bread. They’d see that as evidence that he had the power, then, to secure their political liberation.

But the true Messiah could only be known fully through the mystery of the cross.

The Timing of Revelation

There is also a question of timing. Jesus is not opposed to his identity being known eventually. He is opposed to it being known too soon, before the illusions of false expectations were shattered, before it could be rightly understood.

Consider the words at the Transfiguration: “As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead” (Mark 9:9).

Until after.

The silence is not permanent. But the timing mattered. The full glory of Christ cannot be preached apart from the cross and resurrection, because apart from the cross and resurrection it cannot be truly understood.

Origen, writing in the third century, observed that Jesus withheld certain revelations because his hearers were not yet prepared to receive them.

Spiritual truth, like fine wine, cannot be poured into vessels that aren’t properly prepared.

Even Jesus’ own disciples, though they walked with him for three years, repeatedly got it wrong. They often failed to believe him, even when he spelled it out for them literally; when he told them He must suffer an die, and be raised the third day. Of all the times Jesus taught in parables, they’d assumed this was another kind of figure of speech. Because they couldn’t wrap their minds around the truth.

If the inner circle struggled to understand, how much more the crowds who saw only the wonder-worker?

There is a profound principle here about how God reveals himself.

Divine truth is never merely information to be understood or mastered.

It is a relationship to be entered, a mystery to be lived. And so God, in his wisdom, unveils himself gradually, patiently, in ways that His short-sighted creatures can bear. Each miracle, not evidence of a mighty king with power to conquer, but of the Creator preparing to make all things new.

The prophet Isaiah put it like this: “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isaiah 45:15).

The hiddenness of God is not the opposite of his self-revelation. It is part and parcel of His revelation. God draws us in by not overwhelming us with things we are not yet ready to understand. He invites us to seek him as He truly is.

The Humility of the Servant

There is another dimension to Jesus’ commands for silence we need to consider. And it’s rooted in the deep humility of the Incarnation. When Jesus healed people quietly and asked them not to spread the news, he was fulfilling a prophecy about the Suffering Servant. He was fulfilling the words of Isaiah.

Matthew points this out deliberately after describing of these incidents when Jesus told people not to tell people about his healing:

“This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah: ‘Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets’” (Matthew 12:17-19).

The Messiah does not seek the spotlight. He does not campaign for followers (urging them to make sure to click “subscribe” and the notification bell). He does not build a personal brand, or stamp a professionally-designed logo on his acts so everyone would know exactly who did it.

He heals the leper and sends him quietly to the priest. He raises the dead child and tells the parents to give her something to eat. He opens deaf ears and asks that no one make a scene.

This humility stands in stark contrast our natural, human impulses.

We want to be noticed. We want credit for our good deeds. We want our accomplishments recognized.

Jesus, who was and is the eternal Son of God, did more good in a single afternoon than we will do in our entire lives. If anyone had cause to “show off” it was Him. And yet he continually deflected attention, and told people to keep it quiet.

Think of the hymnic words St. Paul wrote to the Philippians: “Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Philippians 2:6-7).

The Greek word here for “emptied” is ekenōsen. Literally, it means he poured himself out. This kenosis, this pouring out, reflects the very heart of who God is. God does not grasp at His Divine prerogative; He does not parade his glory like some kind of show to draw people in by the sheer magnificence of it. God gives Himself away, coming in the form of a babe in Bethlehem, and by appearance, a condemned man on a cross.

What the Silence Teaches Us

So what does this mean for us? What does Jesus’ Messianic Secret have to do with our daily lives?

First, it teaches us to be patient as He reveals His mysteries to us. We live in an age where we’re accustomed to seeking and finding instant answers to our questions. We have Google, and now, AI. We want quick fixes. We want God to reveal himself on our timeline, in our language, according to our expectations. But God unveils himself slowly, deeply, in ways that transform us over time.

Sometimes his silence is not absence but preparation. Sometimes his hiddenness is the very means by which he draws us deeper into His Sacred Heart.

If you are in a season where God feels quiet, do not despair over the silence. Ask yourself whether he might be inviting you to a deeper faith that cannot be rushed with a single “click” or search query. St. John of the Cross, writing of the dark night of the soul, tells us that the dryness, the silence, particularly that experienced in prayer, is often the opposite of what we think: it’s His most intimate presence, because in the silence, in the dark night, we’re seeking Him in love alone (not seeking the experience, the consolation, or the feeling).

Silence is not the enemy of revelation. It is often the womb from where God’s revelation is born in our hearts. Remember, the womb that carried Jesus, Mother Mary, pondered all these things in her heart… and she was selective about who she told what Gabriel had revealed. She does not even tell Joseph! Joseph finds out, tossing and turning, when the angel comes to him in a dream.

Second, it invites us to examine our own motivations. When we do good deeds, do we announce them; do we try to make sure we’re seen? When we give to charity, do we make sure others know about it? When we serve, do we serve quietly, or do we serve in hopes that someone will see? Jesus said, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them” (Matthew 6:1).

The hidden goodness of God calls us to a hidden goodness of our own. Do something today that no one will ever know about. Pray for someone secretly. Sometimes it’s good to tell people you’re praying for them. I do that, often, because it helps them see they are loved. But other times, particularly for those who would not expect it, it’s best to pray for them in quiet, and say nothing. Give anonymously. Serve in a way where no one will notice to give you credit. When the time is right, His glory will manifest. And it won’t be mistaken, then, as something that should be directed toward you.

Third, it teaches us discernment about how and when to speak. Not every truth needs to be shared at every moment. There is a wisdom in knowing when to speak and when to remain silent. The book of Ecclesiastes tells us there is “a time to keep silence, and a time to speak” (Ecclesiastes 3:7).

We tend, particularly today where we’re connected digitally, to feel the need to speak the truth bluntly, openly, exhaustively, with every little post, every reply. But what if what someone needs in the moment is just a kernel of it? What if the “full truth” would be too difficult to grasp given where they’re at in the moment? What if they need to see your heart before they see your argument? Or better, what if what they really need is to see God’s love through you so that His love can draw them into the fullness of truth when the time is right and their hearts are prepared to receive it?

Jesus modeled holy restraint. He knew when the moment was right for the fullness of revelation to be known, and when it was not. We would do well to cultivate the same discernment, especially in our “digital” age where we look for likes, thumbs ups, and instant reactions in the comments section.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, it points us to the cross. The reason the disciples could not fully understand Jesus’ identity until after the resurrection is that the cross reveals what kind of Messiah he truly is. He is not the conquering hero of popular imagination but the suffering servant who saves by dying. He loves not through military might, but through suffering the worst rejection imaginable, and loving us through it anyway. If you want to understand Jesus, you must go to Calvary. You must look at the crucified God. Any Christ you construct apart from the cross is not the true Christ.

Subscribe now

The Secret Now Proclaimed

There is a beauty to the irony of all of this. The Messianic Secret, once carefully guarded, is now the message we are commissioned to shout from the rooftops. “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops” (Matthew 10:27).

After the resurrection, the silence gives way to proclamation. What was hidden must now be revealed. What was whispered must now be shouted from the rooftops. And it must be shouted in a way that prepares us to suffer as He did. Because many who proclaim the truth to a hostile world will suffer as He did. There’s a reason why most of the Apostles became martyrs. Could they have endured that if not for their Lord who suffered first, and overcame it all?

Furthermore, we can only proclaim rightly what we have first received in silence. We can only tell the world about Jesus after we have sat quietly at his feet. The Messianic Secret is not opposed to evangelism. Contemplative prayer is not about hiding ourselves away from the world. It is the source from which true witness is born. It is its necessary foundation. Before the shout, there must be silence. Before the sermon, there must be heartfelt seeking. Before the proclamation, there is prayer. If we are to speak the truth in love, we must first rest in His love.

So today, sit for a moment in the quiet. Let the God who hides himself find you there. And then, having received him, go and share Him with a world that needs him more than it knows. But remember, sharing Him is not about dropping an argument in their laps. It’s not about “owning” people by “besting” them in a debate. It’s not about revealing the whole truth in a single post. It’s about introducing them to Him, and He meets them in their sorrow, in their blindness, in the death of a Child, and always in the Cross.

When something like that happens, most of us brace ourselves. We know what’s coming. And there’s a good chance it means someone died.

I’ve been there. I’m betting many of you have been as well.

Martha is the one who comes to deliver that news to Jesus in John 11.

Her brother has been dead four days. The tomb is sealed. The mourners are wailing. And Jesus, the friend who could have prevented all of this, has finally arrived, too late. So it seems.

We think we know Martha. We have met her already, in Luke’s Gospel, bustling about the kitchen while her sister sat at the Lord’s feet. We remember the gentle rebuke: ”Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41-42).

And so Martha has become, in the Christian imagination, a kind of cautionary tale. The anxious one. The one who missed the point.

But John shows us that Martha was much more than a busybody.

The Sister Who Ran

Notice how the scene begins. ”When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home” (John 11:20). The reversal is striking. In Luke, Mary is the one who draws near, and Martha is scattered. In John, it is Martha who moves toward Jesus first. Mary remains seated in her grief.

This is not a contradiction between the Gospels. It recognizes, though, that people are are far more complex, and beautiful in their faith, that we often judge them to be at first.

The Martha who was once distracted by many things has learned, it seems, to know the one thing needful. Grief has done its work in her. Or perhaps love has. Or maybe, she always had that faith. Just because she missed the point in Luke’s Gospel, when she rebuked her sister once, doesn’t mean she didn’t believe. She was, after all, busy trying to honor their guest, Jesus Himself. Even if she was a little off in her understanding about the best way to honor him.

Her first words to Jesus are raw: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21).

There is reproach here, and there is faith. Both held together in one sentence.

She does not pretend she is not hurt. She does not soften her sorrow. She says what she feels, and you can almost hear the pain in her words: You could have stopped this. You did not.

And then, without pause, she says something extraordinary: ”But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him” (John 11:22).

Even now.

Two of the most important words a believer might ever speak, even in what appears to be a hopeless situation.

After the diagnosis, even now.

After the funeral, even now.

After the marriage ended, after the child walked away, after the prayer went unanswered, even now.

Martha does not know what she is asking for. She almost certainly does not expect a resurrection in the next hour. But she refuses to let death have the last word about who Jesus is.

The Dialogue That Reveals Her Faith

What follows is one of the most theologically dense conversations in the Fourth Gospel, and Jesus conducts it with a woman. This is worth pausing over. In a world where women were not typically the recipients of formal theological instruction, Jesus draws Martha into precisely such a dialogue.

He does the same with the Samaritan woman in chapter 4. John is doing something deliberate here.

Jesus says, “Your brother will rise again” (John 11:23). Martha replies with an understanding of the common belief among Jews at the time, showing she is not wholly ignorant to theological truths: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24).

She is a good Pharisaic Jew. She believes in the general resurrection at the end of time. It is orthodoxy. It is correct. And it is not, at this moment, what Jesus wants her to see.

Jesus’ response is one of the many great “I AM” sayings in John’s Gospel: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”(John 11:25-26).

Note what Jesus does. He collapses the future into the present. Resurrection is not merely a doctrine about the last day. Resurrection is a Person, standing in front of her, asking her a question.

The Greek here is worth noting. Jesus uses egō eimi, the divine name of Exodus 3:14, the name God gave to Moses at the burning bush. I AM the resurrection. He is not claiming to bring resurrection at some undetermined point in the future or to teach some deep, theological, truth about it. He is claiming to be it.

And then he asks her the most important thing at all: Do you believe this?

Subscribe now

The Confession

Martha’s responds with one of the New Testament’s fullest christological confessions of faith. She says it, moreover, as she’s grieving. There was some frustration, a subtle rebuke, earlier when Jesus first arrived and she ran out to meet him. She’d wished he’d come sooner. This is natural. It’s simply the question many of us ask in times of tragedy: why?

But that is not a crisis of faith. She maintains her faith throughout the text. And now her faith comes to a crescendo: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world” (John 11:27).

Notice, she calls Jesus three things: Messiah, Son of God, The one coming into the world. Each of these titles is packed full of meaning.

Messiah, in Greek Christos, the Anointed One, the promised King of David’s line who would restore Israel.

Son of God, a title that was applied to the Davidic king in Psalm 2. However, in John’s Gospel up until this point the term has developed into something more than what was understood from the Psalms. Genuine, divine sonship.

The one coming into the world, speaks to the prophetic expectation that many pious Jews held at the time. It’s the language John the Baptist used concerning Jesus, too. It’s language of a people oppressed, but a people who still had hope.

You might notice some parallels here with another, probably more famous, confession of faith from Matthew’s Gospel. There, at Caesarea Philippi, Peter declared: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16).

Martha’s confession is at least as full. It is fuller in some respects. And John places it here deliberately, on the lips of a grieving woman.

And these words are linked to what John ultimately tells us was the purpose of the entire Gospel that he wrote: “But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).

That Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.

Martha’s confession is the confession of the entire Gospel. It’s the very heart of the message John wrote, inspired by the Holy Spirit, that all who read it or heard it read would come to believe themselves.

Martha becomes, then, a model of Christian faith. Not the busybody who had chosen the “lesser” good, as many of us remember her.

What Grief Teaches About Faith

Something has happened to Martha. As I said before, her faith was still there in Luke. She wouldn’t have been so concerned to show the Lord hospitality if she didn’t honor him at all. But in this moment, at the very least, her faith swells into something more profound. Something deeper.

And it might very well be that it was grief that had awakened this deeper faith in Marth.

That’s what grief does, if we let it.

It’s not automatic by any means. Some people turn to resentment in grief. There is a cost to it. But grief has a way of clearing away everything else that we only thought mattered before.

I tend to think that’s what happened to Marth. All the many things that once distracted Martha have been consumed by a sorrow that left her unable to stay in the kitchen. And in that grief, in that loss, the one thing needful remains.

Her sister sat at the feet of Jesus and learned. Martha, it seems, learned another way. She learned by loss.

Saint Augustine, meditating on Martha in another context, wrote that she was busy about the service of the Lord, and that such service is holy, but that Mary had chosen what would not pass away. Both sisters, he suggests, represent aspects of the Christian life, the active and the contemplative.

In John 11, though, we see something more, the sequel if you will to what had happened in Luke: the active sister has entered a dark night. She’s the one, now, who has become the contemplative.

The one who was busy about many things is now the sister who runs out to meet Jesus, while the other sister praised before remains at home. And in her running, seeking Jesus alone, which is the truest focus of all contemplation, she confesses the mystery that even the best-educated men of her time could not quite see.

This is how the life of faith works. We are not defined by single moments. Our faith becomes what it is over time, through testing, through trial, through a series of God-ordained events that if we’d never endured them would never have led to the beautiful destination He was always drawing us toward.

The person we were at thirty is not the same person at fifty.

The distractions that were as scattered as twigs on a forest floor us in one season may be gathered, by suffering and by grace, into a bonfire of faith, consumed by a single flame.

Living the Confession

What can we apply from this text to ourselves?

First, we can learn that we don’t need to couch our prayers in piety. If we’re hurting, we can say it. If we’re confused, if we are struggling to hold back a resentment, even at God, we can be honest about that. God already knows what’s in your heart. You often can’t help what you feel. So say it. In the speaking of it, Jesus will hear your words, and lead you beyond them. Martha did not hide her reproach. If you had been here.

We are honest with those we truly love. We hide behind a “dress” of seemingly “formal” behavior behind those we fear, or merely respect, but do not fully love or trust. I am not saying we should behave irreverently. Jesus is God after all. We should worship God with reverence and awe. But we must also know that God’s majesty is not in tension with His heart. He might be King, and should be honored as such, but He’s also our Father. So many prayers, quite good and useful, each more beautiful than the next, we recite in the way of some kind of stage act. The way a peasant might approach a King, afraid that if he speaks wrongly it’ll be off with his head. Martha shows us another way.

Second, speak your faith and confidence in who He is even when you do not yet know what He will do next. Say it aloud. It has been customary to recite the Creed in every gathering throughout most of Christian history. You could simply repeat Martha’s confession. Many early Christians said, simply, “Jesus is Lord.” Three words with incredible power that contain dissertations of depth. Say it even when you’re suffering, in pain, or in the wake of loss. Say it when you’re afraid. It will condition your heart to trust that He has the situation in His hands.

Third, hear Jesus’ question to Marth as if He spoke it to you. Do you believe this? This isn’t abstract doctrine. It’s a personal question. It speaks to the specific circumstances of our lives. Jesus does not ask Martha whether she believes in the resurrection in the abstract. He asks whether she believes that He, standing before her, is himself the resurrection and the life.

You might try this as a practice. When you next find yourself in the anxiety that once was Martha’s, or in the grief that later became hers, stop and hear the question: Do you believe this? Do you believe that the Person who asks is himself the answer? And then, if you can, say Martha’s yes.

She isn’t the first or the only person to speak her faith with a simple “yes.” Mary said it, too, when an Angel spoke to her words that in their greeting troubled her. She said “yes,” anyway. Martha says “yes” here. Not because she knows how everything will happen afterwards, but because when she says “yes,” she knows the heart of the One whom she trusts. We say “yes” to God not because we feel it, necessarily. Not even because everything makes sense. But because He is standing there, He loves us, and only He can raise what has died in you.

Fourth, we can remember that great confessions of the faith are not reserved for the theologians. They aren’t even reserved for the Chief Apostle, Peter. Such confessions find their voice on the lips of ordinary people, facing ordinary sorrows. Martha was not a rabbi. She was not the “rock” upon whom the Church would be built. She was a woman with a dead brother. And she uttered the very same truth that upholds the Church upon the foundation who is Christ, Himself.

The tomb was not yet opened when Martha made her confession. Lazarus was still bound in his grave clothes. She could not see what was about to happen. She could only see Jesus.

But that was enough.

It is still enough.

You had prayed in faith. Your parish had prayed. Someone had said something foolish like, “if you have enough faith, she will be healed.“ You didn’t know better, and they had a few verses (taken out of context) to make the claim, so you tried to work up a kind of expectation, a kind of invincible faith, then made the request.

And still, she died.

Or maybe it’s the cancer diagnosis that doesn’t go into remission. Instead, it metastasizes. Perhaps it was a prayer to relieve your chronic pain, and the pain has endured, maybe gotten worse. The tremor didn’t cease. The child—the child!—who was suffering from a debilitating condition didn’t get better, and died young.

If you have ever prayed for healing, you have almost certainly seen occasions when it felt like God didn’t answer.

And this can lead to a kind of quiet crisis of faith: Does prayer for physical healing actually work? Or are we simply performing a spiritual ritual to cope with the unbearable randomness of illness and death?

I want to suggest something bold, something that may sound difficult at first but that I believe stands upon the deepest logic of the Gospel: when we pray in faith for healing, the answer is never “no.” It is either “yes” or “not yet, but yes.”

I know that seems to rub against the evidence. Because we have seen people died after we prayed they’d be healed. But stick with me, and I think you’ll see the truth of it.

Subscribe now

Why Bodies Matter to God

We should first ask a question we too rarely ask: why did Jesus spend so much of His public ministry healing bodies?

Read the Gospels straight through and you will be struck by how physical His ministry is. He touches lepers. He puts His fingers in a deaf man’s ears. He mixes saliva with dirt and smears it on a blind man’s eyes. He raises a little girl from her bed and, tenderly, tells her family to give her something to eat.

Some spiritual traditions have tried to explain this away, as though the healings were mere metaphors for something “higher.” But this is not what the Gospels tell us.

The Word did not become an idea. “...the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).

Flesh. Real flesh, with nerves, muscles, bones, and blood. The eternal Creator became flesh and had (still has!) a heartbeat.

Jesus healed bodies for at least four reasons, and each is worth pausing over.

First, He healed out of sheer compassion. “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36).

The Greek word here, esplanchnisthē, is visceral. It refers to the gut, the inward parts of a person. Jesus was moved at the deepest level. Jesus felt human suffering the way a mother feels her child’s fever. Physical suffering matters to Him because we matter to Him.

Second, His healings testified that God has not abandoned the material world. Ancient philosophies often taught that matter was inferior, a prison from which the soul must escape. The Gospel makes the shocking counter-claim that God so loves matter that He became it, walked in it, ate with a mouth and digested his food, that He actually died in a material body and rose again in the very same body.

Every healing is like a protest against the lie that our bodies do not matter.

Third, His healings foreshadow the resurrection and the restoration of all of creation. They are not the resurrection itself. Lazarus, after all, eventually died again. But every healing is a preview, a signpost pointing to the day when there will be no more mourning or crying or pain, because “the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21:4).

When I write a novel, I like to seed it with little moments, little “signals” about how things are going to turn out. They aren’t always obvious. But they’re there so that in the end you can say, I should have seen it coming! Each healing Jesus performs is like one of those seeds, a small sign, or a whisper that speaks: This is where the story is going.

Fourth, physical healing often opens the door to a deeper healing. The body is where we live. We do not merely have bodies; we are embodied souls, or ensouled bodies. We are creatures. And so God often meets us first at the level of the flesh, because that is where we can be reached. The body, Pope St. John Paul II once said, is precisely the very gift through which we encounter God in our lives.

The Wholeness God Intends

We must also correct a common misunderstanding about eternity. Many Christians speak as though our destination were a disembodied heaven, a place where souls float around in ethereal bliss. But this is not the biblical hope. The biblical hope is far stranger and far more wonderful: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2). Heaven comes down. It meets earth. And in that meeting, the dead in Christ are raised bodily.

This changes everything about how we pray for healing.

If our final destination were purely spiritual, then perhaps death would be an obstacle to healing. The body would decay, and healing would become impossible. But if our final destination is resurrection, then death itself cannot cancel the answer to our prayer.

Death is not the last word about any body united to Christ. It cannot be, because it was not the last word about His body.

So when we pray for a beloved friend to be healed, and she dies, we have not received a “no.” We have received a “not yet.” Her healing is not cancelled. It is only postponed until that day when what is sown in weakness is raised in power (see 1 Corinthians 15:43).

Praying Without Attachment

Here is where the Christian life becomes most demanding and most liberating all at once. When we understand that the answer to our prayer for healing is never ultimately “no,” we are freed from a kind of desperate bargaining that so often characterizes our prayers offered in moments of crisis and pain.

We do not have to twist God’s arm. We do not “work up” our faith into some kind of perfect condition, or an emotional intensity. We do not have to fear that if we don’t pray hard enough, or say the right words, or enough times, our loved one will fall through the cracks of God’s mercy.

We can pray with confidence, and we can pray with surrender. We can say, with our Lord Himself: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

Notice that Jesus did not pray this prayer casually. He was in agony. Sweat like drops of blood fell to the ground. And yet He entrusted His body to the Father’s will, and He was heard, though the answer looked, on Good Friday afternoon, very much like “no.”

Sunday morning revealed that it had always been “yes.”

Wounds That Are Not Erased

There is one more mystery to explore, and it may be the most important. When Jesus rose from the dead, His wounds did not disappear. He showed His hands and side to Thomas. “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side” (John 20:27).

The glorified body of Christ still bears the marks of His passion.

This tells us a truth about our wounds, our pains, our sufferings that we need to embrace if we’re going to see the truth of God’s healing in our lives: God does not so much erase our wounds as glorify them.

Think of the friends or family members you know who have suffered greatly. Maybe you are suffering greatly.

Chronic illness. Disability. Terminal diagnoses. The slow erosion of the body through age.

Some of the people we know who suffered were embittered by it. But others, those we truly admire, who had a deep faith, suffered with grace.

Have you seen people like that? It’s what has made innumerable saints out of those who seemed otherwise unremarkable in the sight of the world. Just a few who come to mind:

St. Thérèse of Lisieux: As tuberculosis slowly destroyed her lungs, she endured excruciating physical agony and a intense “night of faith,” yet offered every suffocating breath as a gift of love, famously promising to spend her heaven doing good on earth. It was while she suffered, in fact, that she wrote her autobiography, Story of a Soul, which has been called the most impactful spiritual biography written since Augustine’s Confessions. Thousands, if not millions, have been saved because of the story she told in her suffering.

In that book she wrote, “I wish to suffer out of love and to rejoice out of love; thus I shall strew flowers before your throne.”

St. Carlo Acutis: Called the “first millennial saint,” Carlo Acutis was diagnosed with fulminant leukemia as a teenager. He offered all his agonizing pain, which was intense, for the sake of the Church, and the salvation of souls. His nurses who attended him reported how he’d maintained a joyful smile until the end and insisting he was dying happy because he hadn’t wasted a minute of his short life.

St. Bernadette Soubirous: Plagued by severe asthma, painful bone tuberculosis, and agonizing bedsores, she quietly bore years of hidden confinement in her convent, viewing her intense bodily decay as her true “job,” her most important mission for God and for the sake of saving souls.

St. John Paul II: Suffering publicly from Parkinson’s disease and physical frailty in his final days (you probably remember this!), he showed the world how to carry the cross by turning his lost voice and failing body into a profound sermon on the dignity of human suffering.

But you probably don’t need the lives of saints to know of examples of a few people who suffered this way. I think of my uncle, dying of bone cancer too young, who always had the biggest smile of his face. He’d lived his life as a caretaker for a Catholic cemetery, and believed he’d spent every moment of his time tending to the grounds from which the very bodies beneath him would one day rise in glory. I think of my wife’s grandfather who died just last year, but refused care that would have alleviated his pain (much to the chagrin of many members of the family who did not understand it) because he wanted to offer up his suffering as a prayer for others, and he saw his pain as a way of participating in and drawing nearer to the heart of God.

These are the stories that change lives. Because the only testimony that is more impactful than one of someone who experienced healing is that of those who did not, but found a deeper love, and a deeper faith, and who drew nearer to Christ in and through their pain.

When someone suffers in grace divine light shines through their very wounds. Their weaknesses became channels through which God’s love flows to those around them. Their limitations became invitations to deeper communion with God.

Saint Paul learned this when he begged three times for his “thorn in the flesh” to be removed and received instead the answer: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Paul’s thorn was not removed. But it was transfigured. It became the site of grace.

Sometimes God heals us of our wounds. Sometimes He heals us through our wounds, drawing us into the wounds of His Son, which were fatal but which have become the very source of resurrection life for the world.

Both are healing. Both are answers to prayer.

Why Sometimes Yes, Why Sometimes Not Yet

If you press the mystery further, you begin to see that Jesus heals for the same reason He sometimes does not: to draw us to Himself.

The healings in the Gospels are not merely displays of divine power. They are personal encounters.

A blind man doesn’t just receive sight; he becomes a disciple. A leper doesn’t just receive clean skin; he falls at Jesus’ feet in worship. A woman doesn’t just stop hemorrhaging; she is called “daughter” for the first and only time Jesus ever called anyone such in the recorded Gospels (Mark 5:34).

Healing draws people to God. But so does the sustained companionship of God in our suffering.

When healing is delayed, and we discover that Christ is with us in our very wounds, we come to know Him in a way that healing alone might not have taught us.

This is why the answer to our prayer for healing is always “yes.”

Because God’s deepest intention is not merely to fix the body but to make us whole, to draw us into the divine life, to make us the persons He created us to be. And whether He accomplishes this by removing the illness or by transfiguring it in glory, He is always at work toward the same end.

Living This Truth

How, then, should we pray for healing?

Pray specifically, and pray with hope. Do not spiritualize your requests. If your knee hurts, ask Jesus to heal your knee. If your friend has cancer, ask Jesus to heal her cancer. God is not offended by the concreteness of our requests. He healed concrete bodies in the Gospels, and He heals them still.

Pray with surrender. Add, as Jesus did, “not my will but yours.” This is not a hedge or an escape clause. It is an act of trust in the goodness of the Father’s timing. You are not asking for less; you are asking for more, for whatever form of healing will most deeply draw you and the one you love into the life of God.

When the answer looks like “not yet,” do not conclude that God has said “no.” Continue to pray. Continue to hope. And begin to look for the deeper healing that God may be doing. The healing that comes through the wound rather than around it. There are those who suffer in bitterness. The bitterness is, in a way, more tragic than their pain. Because the pain, the wound, is actually an invitation to something more. When you suffer, will you take that invitation and embrace it?

Sit with those who suffer. One of the ways God answers prayers for healing is by sending His people. Your presence beside a hospital bed may be part of the answer to someone’s prayer. Do not underestimate the profound impact this can have. When we stay with those who are suffering, we participate in Christ’s compassion. We also participate in the glorification of His resurrected body, by living as the body of Christ, and that very presence can testify to the truth that no wound, no pain, not even death, can separate us who are made members of His body in love.

Cultivate the resurrection in your imagination. This means that when we pray for healing, it’s not just about having “faith,” it’s even more about having hope. Together, these lead us into His Heart, they lead us into the single virtue that will never end: love. Faith will one day give way to the beatific vision, when we see Him in glory. Hope will one day give way to the realization of hope. But love, St. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 13, never ends. Read the accounts of the risen Christ. Meditate on the empty tomb. Let your hope be shaped not by what you can currently see but by what you know to be coming. Let your faith and hope draw you deeper into God’s love.

So pray, fervently, for healing. Pray for your own healing, and the healing of those you love. When you do, don’t forget: the God who bent down to touch lepers, who wept at Lazarus’ tomb, who bore His wounds into glory, is still listening. He hears every prayer. He answers every prayer. And in Him, no prayer for healing is ever finally answered “no.”

Only “yes,” or “not yet, but yes.” And in grace, we can live into that “yes” now, even when we’re in pain, even when we suffer, even when see others in pain and nearing death. Because that pain is not the end. It is an invitation to take hold of Him more deeply, more intimately, and in His wounds, to find Him who transfigures every wound that’s surrendered to Him into final glory in the perfection of His love.

However, I wanted to share these notes here, because it’s the entire argument in a way that really represents my own growth on this issue, which having been a Lutheran pastor once-upon-a-time, was a big one:

I need to tell you something before we get to the theology.

This past Easter Vigil, I was received into the Catholic Church.

For those of you who have followed this series from the beginning, that may not come as much of a shock. For those of you who know my background, it might. I was a Lutheran pastor once. I stood in a pulpit and preached the Word. I baptized babies and adults alike. I buried the people I loved, some of them far too young. I sat with families in hospital rooms at two in the morning. I earned an M.Div. and a Ph.D. in theology while a part of that tradition. I loved my Protestant heritage and never thought I’d leave it.

But over the course of a decade, and a lot of study, I gradually came to convictions that led me home to Rome.

And the deacon named toward the end of this book is named for our deacon, who had described his own chanting of the Exsultet at the Easter Vigil as that of a dying cat. It wasn’t that bad, really, but I thought it was a fun and funny nod to my friend.

If you noticed that Landon was received at the Vigil in this book, and that Sarah decided to wait, well. Writers are not always subtle people. I’ve lived inside both of those characters at different times.

I want to be careful here, because I know who reads these books. A great many of you are Protestant, or simply belong to different Christian denominations. Some of you are Baptists like Pastor Mike Wakeford. Some of you are Lutherans, like Zacharias was. And a good number of you have written to tell me that this series has strengthened your faith in Christ, which is the entire reason I write what I write.

So let me say this plainly: I did not write this book to make Catholics out of you with a single read. At least, that’s not my focus. It’s not a recruitment or conversion pitch. If that’s the route God takes you, I’ll praise God for it. But it’s not my primary focus, which is plainly, to draw you into a deeper love of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Full stop. Where that takes you beyond that is not something I’m making an argument about here, it’s a journey that’s personal, and except for in the case of those readers who’ve written me, I don’t know your story.

But I do owe you an honest accounting of why I did what I did. And that accounting starts with the doctrine at the center of this novel.

Jesus Plus Nothing

The objection I heard most often, and made most often myself to the “intercession of the saints,” goes like this. The Catholic Church has added things to Jesus. Mary. The saints. A whole crowded heaven of intermediaries standing between the believer and his Lord. “For there is one God, and one mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). Case closed.

I understand that objection from the inside. I used to make it.

I am not going to explain all of those doctrines here. I sorted through each one of them, and would be happy to talk to you about if if you’d like to e-mail me and ask.

Here’s what changed my mind on the question of saintly intercession, and it wasn’t a convoluted argument wedded to complex theology. It was reading the verse in context.

Look at what Paul says immediately before that famous line. “I desire therefore, first of all, that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men” (1 Timothy 2:1). Paul commands intercessory prayer, and then, four verses later, declares that there is one mediator.

So whatever “one mediator” means, it cannot mean that asking another Christian to pray for you violates Christ’s mediation. Paul says both things in the same breath. If your reading of verse five makes verse one a sin, then your reading is wrong. It has to be. The apostle is not contradicting himself inside of a single paragraph.

Intercession, praying for each other, is not becoming an additional mediator. It is a participation in Christ’s intercessory mediatorship. And when Paul writes there is “one mediator” he is speaking of a mediatorship of propitiation that he does not believe conflicts in any way with intercession, with praying for one another.

Every one of us has asked someone to pray for us. You’ve asked your small group. You’ve put your mother on a prayer chain. You’ve approached your pastor, or a Christian who is mature in the faith, and asked them for prayers because even if you didn’t know the verse you resonated with the sentiment: “The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.” (James 5:16).

Nobody thinks this is idolatry. Nobody imagines it detracts one degree from Christ’s sole mediation. We understand instinctively that when I pray for you, I am not competing with Jesus. I am participating in Him. My prayer has no power of its own. It has whatever power it has because I am in Christ, and He is the one who carries it.

Which brings us to the actual question. The only question, really.

Does death still have a hold on the Body of Christ?

That’s what this book has been asking for four hundred pages. It’s what Father Sciplini asks Pastor Wakeford in that kitchen, and it’s the question I could not stop asking myself as I wrestled with this doctrine.

You may ask a brother in Christ to pray for you. That’s holy, and Scripture commands it. Unless he has died. Then, we’re told by some, the door slams shut, and the same request becomes necromancy.

So which is it? Is your brother in Christ gone, absent, unreachable? Or is he alive in Christ, more alive than he ever was here?

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t stand over the casket and tell the widow that her husband is more alive now than he ever was, that he is with the Lord, that death has been swallowed up in victory, and then turn around and treat that same man as unreachable, as void, as though the grave claimed him after all.

Christ Himself settled this. When the Sadducees came at Him with their riddle about the resurrection, He answered them by directing them back to the burning bush: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Matthew 22:32). Abraham had been in the ground for two thousand years, and Jesus spoke of him in the present tense. Is. Not was.

Hebrews is even more direct. The author tells his readers what has already happened to them: “But you are come to mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the church of the firstborn, who are written in the heavens, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect” (Hebrews 12:22-23).

You are come. Present tense. Already. The Christian at worship has already arrived in the presence of angels and of the spirits of the just made perfect. Not someday. Now. Which is why the very next chapter opens with that great cloud of witnesses surrounding us as we run our race.

The Church is the Body of Christ. Paul doesn’t say the Church is like a body. He says it is His Body, and the New Testament will not let us soften that into a metaphor. And Christ rose bodily. Not as a ghost, not as a memory, not as an idea His friends kept alive by myth or legend. He ate fish in front of them. He invited Thomas to put a hand in his wounds.

If the Body is real, and the Head is risen, then the members who have gone ahead of us are not confined to the graveyard. They are the part of Him that death couldn’t hold, any more than it could hold Him.

The communion of saints is not Jesus plus something. It is Jesus in His fullness. It is not adding anyone to Christ. It’s recognizing that He has already added all of us to Himself, and that His Body is not severed at the grave.

What This Book Is Not Saying

Now. I wrote about this in a thriller novel for a reason.

There’s a counterfeit, and it’s deadly, and I wanted to show it to you rather than just warn you about it.

Dr. Molinos does not teach the communion of saints. He teaches something that wears its face, at first glance, but is entirely different. He teaches grieving students to empty themselves, to stop guarding the door, to go quiet and let whatever comes, come. He teaches them to go looking for departed souls in the quiet, to summon comfort without discernment, to treat a voice in the silence as self-authenticating.

That isn’t intercession. That treads dangerously close to necromancy. Scripture forbids it in the strongest terms (Deuteronomy 18:10-12), and the Catholic Church forbids it too, and always has.

The difference isn’t subtle once you see it, though it takes my characters the whole book to say it out loud. Asking a member of Christ’s Body to pray for you is a request made upward, through Christ, to the Father, exactly like asking your neighbor. It seeks nothing from the saint himself. It receives no message. It expects no manifestation. It’s prayer, ordered to God, made in the confidence that love does not stop at the grave.

What Molinos offers is the opposite in every particular. It seeks contact rather than intercession. It wants information, comfort, presence, and makes one’s experience somehow inviolable. It requires the soul to go passive and undefended. It treats the extraordinary as the goal. And because it has thrown out discernment as an obstacle to peace, it cannot tell the difference between a beloved mentor who has gone ahead of them to heaven and something diabolical that happens to mimic his voice.

That was the heresy of Quietism, condemned in the seventeenth century, and I named the antagonist after Miguel de Molinos on purpose. This is a Catholic error, policed by Catholics, and I wanted my Protestant readers to see the Church’s own guardrails at work. The false Zacharias who comes to Vanessa in a vision, who approaches Landon in the library, is not a member of the communion of saints. He’s a grand deception. The kind that happens when you tear the guardrails out, even if you retain the vocabulary.

But I gave Wakeford his due, because the error had two parents. Molinos married a distorted Catholic idea to a certain kind of experientialism that is very much at home in American evangelicalism—the habit of saying “God told me” with no caution at all to test the voice. Neither tradition comes out of this book clean. That was on purpose.

A Word to My Protestant Readers

I want to offer you something here, and I want to do it without asking you to concede anything.

I have been to a lot of funerals. Some of them were Baptist, most of them were Lutheran, many of them were nondenominational. And I’ve seen it happen at all of them. It’s the moment when someone stands up and says something like, “This one’s for you, Jimmy,” before singing what was Jimmy’s favorite hymn. I’ve heard a grown man say in the form of a eulogy, “I love you, Dad. I’ll see you soon.” I’ve watched people look up heavenward while saying things like this.

Nobody objects. Nobody should.

But I’ve also heard the explanation offered afterward, out in the parking lot, when somebody asked about it nervously. “Well, that’s not technically correct theology. But we make allowances for grief.”

Friends, sit with that for a minute.

What are we confessing about our theology when we admit it has to be set aside in order to console the grieving? If our doctrine of death can’t survive contact with an actual funeral; if we have to smuggle in a warmer practice through the back door at the exact moment a widow needs it most, then we are effectively saying our doctrine is insufficient to actually console the bereaved.

Our theology should be adequate to wipe away every tear. It shouldn’t require an exemption at funerals.

And here’s the historical piece that finally got past my defenses. This is not a medieval accretion. It is not something Constantine dragged in from paganism once the Church got comfortable.

If you were able to go down into the Roman catacombs you’d find it carved into the walls. It was carved there by Christians in hiding, believers in persecution.

The catacombs were in use for Christian burial from roughly the late second century onward, through the third century and into the early fourth. The Latin isn’t complicated. Most of it is the sort of thing a person writes when they’re grieving, like the people at funerals mentioned above. They wrote it with a nail on stone.

Pete pro nobis. Pray for us.

Roges pro nobis. Make petition for us.

Pete pro parentes tuos. Pray for your parents.

Pete pro sorore tua. Pray for your sister.

Notice the direction of those. They aren’t prayers offered to God on behalf of someone who has died. They’re addressed to the departed, asking them to pray for those still here. It is that of a man scratching a request into his sister’s tomb that she pray for the family she left behind.

In the Cemetery of Praetextatus, in use during the late second century, there’s one that rattled my theology the first time I read it. Succurrite cum judicabitis. Help us when you come to the judgment. That is a Christian asking a soul already in glory to intercede for him at the hour when it matters most.

Then there’s the site on the Appian Way that archaeologists call the Memoria Apostolorum, in the complex of San Sebastiano. During the persecution under Valerian, around the year 258, the relics of Peter and Paul appear to have been sheltered there. The walls of that place are covered not with a few inscriptions, but with hundreds of them, in Greek and Latin. Scholars date these inscriptions to roughly the second half of the third century through the first decades of the fourth, ending around the time Constantine’s basilica went up over the site.

Paule et Petre, petite pro Victore. Paul and Peter, pray for Victor.

Peter and Paul, remember Antonius Bassus.

Peter and Paul, remember us.

Hundreds of them, from roughly 250 to 320. Ordinary believers came to that spot, many of them during years when being caught by Roman authorities could cost them their lives, and they carved into the wall a request that the apostles pray for them by name.

In the cemetery of Saints Marcellinus and Peter along the Via Labicana, the same thing: Marcellinus and Peter, intercede for Gallicanus the Christian!

These aren’t theological treatises. That’s exactly why they matter. Nobody scratches a controversial innovation into a wall in the dark during a persecution. You scratch what belongs to the heart of your Christian piety.

The Man in Grave 134

And then there’s a very recent discovery.

In 2018, archaeologists excavating a Roman cemetery in what is now the Praunheim district of Frankfurt, the site of the Roman town of Nida, opened a grave designated in the literature simply as grave 134. Inside was the skeleton of a man between thirty-five and forty-five years old, buried with an incense chalice and some pottery. And there, resting just beneath his chin, was a tiny silver capsule about an inch and a half long.

It was a phylactery.

Let me explain what that was, because it has a confusing history. In Jewish practice, phylacteries are the small boxes containing Scripture that are bound to the head and arm for prayer. You’ll find Jesus referring to them in Matthew 23. In the Greco-Roman world the word came to describe something related but distinct: a small protective amulet worn on the body, usually a thin sheet of metal inscribed with a prayer, rolled up tight and sealed inside a capsule on a cord around the neck. You wore your prayer. You carried the words with you, in a small capsule that rubbed against your skin.

The foil was too fragile and too badly crushed to unroll after eighteen hundred years, so in 2024 researchers at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology in Mainz used a computed tomography scanner to unroll it virtually and read what was inside. Eighteen lines of Latin. Markus Scholz of Goethe University led the reconstruction.

Here is what that man was buried wearing:

(In the name?) of Saint Titus. Holy, holy, holy! In the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of God! The Lord of the world resists to the best of his ability all attacks. The God grants entry to well-being. This means of salvation protects the human being who surrenders himself to the will of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son, since before Jesus Christ all knees bow: the heavenly, the earthly, and the subterranean, and every tongue confesses Jesus Christ.

Sit with that a minute.

The burial goods date the grave to between 230 and 270 A.D.

It contains the Trisagion, holy, holy, holy, which scholars hadn’t expected to find in Christian use this early. It closes with a nearly verbatim quotation of the Christ-hymn from Philippians 2. The Frankfurt Archaeological Museum called it one of the most important testimonies to early Christianity anywhere in the world. It’s the oldest evidence of Christian faith found north of the Alps by at least fifty years.

And it opens with invoking the name of Saint Titus.

Not with Christ. With Titus, an early bishop and companion of Paul, the man Paul wrote a letter to that’s in the Bible that you use. A Christian in a Roman frontier town, facing death in a province where his faith was illegal, wanted the prayers of that man and carried them in a device that rubbed against his chest.

Before the doctrine of the Trinity, which Christianity now accepts without qualification, Christians were already asking for saintly intercession.

I can hear the objection, because I might have made it before. The Trinity isn’t an innovation. It’s in Scripture. No one ever ascribed infallibility or inerrancy to the practices or writings of the early Christians. The councils that articulated the Trinity only clarified what the Church always held, and Scripture taught.

Yes. That’s exactly my point. Let me show you what “always held” looks like on the ground, and then ask you to apply the same standard consistently.

Clement of Rome, writing to the Corinthians around 96 A.D., while the Apostle John was very likely still alive, the same Clement that Paul names among his fellow workers in Philippians 4:3, swears an oath this way: “As God lives, and the Lord Jesus Christ lives, and the Holy Spirit — the faith and hope of the elect...” (1 Clement 58:2). The three persons of the Trinity named together, invoked as one, in the first century, by a man who knew the apostles personally.

Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of John, bishop of Antioch, probably ordained by Peter after the apostle founded the church there, writing around 107 A.D. while being marched across the empire in chains to die in the Colosseum, tells the Ephesians they are “stones of a temple, prepared beforehand for the building of God the Father, hoisted up to the heights by the crane of Jesus Christ, which is the cross, using as a rope the Holy Spirit” (Letter to the Ephesians 9:1). To the Magnesians he writes of being confirmed “in the Son and the Father and in the Spirit” (Letter to the Magnesians 13:1). This is a man who learned his faith from the apostle who wrote In the beginning was the Word.

And then, most striking of all for our purposes: Gregory Thaumaturgus, Gregory the Wonderworker, bishop of Neocaesarea in Pontus, roughly 213 to 270 A.D.

Gregory received a creed. According to Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of him, written in the following century, it came to him in a night vision. And here’s what makes it remarkable: in that vision, the Virgin Mary appeared to him together with the Apostle John, and at her request John set out for him the doctrine of the Trinity.

The creed that John, in a vision, gave him is not vague. It is not primitive. Read it:

There is one God, the Father of the living Word, who is His subsistent Wisdom and Power and Eternal Image: perfect Begetter of the perfect Begotten, Father of the only-begotten Son.

There is one Lord, Only of the Only, God of God, Image and Likeness of Deity, Efficient Word... true Son of true Father, Invisible of Invisible, and Incorruptible of Incorruptible, and Immortal of Immortal and Eternal of Eternal.

And there is One Holy Spirit, having His subsistence from God... Life, the Cause of the living; Holy Fountain; Sanctity, the Bestower of Sanctification.

There is a perfect Trinity, in glory and eternity and sovereignty, neither divided nor estranged. Wherefore there is nothing either created or in servitude in the Trinity; nor anything superinduced, as if at some former period it was non-existent, and at some later period it was introduced. And thus neither was the Son ever wanting to the Father, nor the Spirit to the Son; but without variation and without change, the same Trinity abides ever.

God of God. True Son of true Father. Eternal of Eternal. Nothing created or in servitude in the Trinity.

That is Nicene orthodoxy, stated with precision, delivered to a bishop in Pontus roughly sixty years before the Council of Nicaea was called. Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa all leaned on it. Gregory of Nyssa says the church at Neocaesarea still preserved the inscription in Gregory’s own hand.

(I should be honest with you: some scholars have argued the wording as we have it is a fourth-century composition attributed to Gregory rather than his own text. Others judge it authentic, and Nicaea is said to have examined and affirmed the substance of it. But notice that even on the skeptical reading, you have a fourth-century Church that saw no tension whatsoever between Nicene Trinitarianism and a Marian and Johannine apparition. The point survives either way.)

Now Look at the Dates Together

Line up the timeline.

The Frankfurt amulet: 230–270 A.D.

The Appian Way graffiti: roughly 250–320 A.D.

The catacomb inscriptions generally: late second through fourth century.

Now line up the councils.

The Council of Nicaea, which gave us the homoousion, that the Son is of one substance with the Father, met in 325 A.D.

The Council of Constantinople, which completed the confession of the Holy Spirit as Lord and giver of life, and gave us the Creed most of us recite on Sunday mornings, met in 381 A.D.

The full, articulated doctrine of the Trinity, three Persons, one substance, the language we all use, the language that separates Christianity from every other brand of monotheism on earth, was not formally defined until decades and generations after a man in Germania was buried with a prayer to Saint Titus around his neck. It came after pilgrims on the Appian Way had already carved pray for Victor into a wall.

Let me be careful about what I am and am not claiming.

I’m not saying the early Christians didn’t believe in the Trinity. They did. Clement believed it in the 90s. Ignatius believed it in 107. Gregory had it word for word in the 260s. It’s in the New Testament, and it’s what the councils were defending rather than inventing. But the precise dogmatic articulation, the vocabulary, the definitions, the creedal formulation that every orthodox Christian on earth now confesses—that came later, hammered out in response to controversy, at councils convened by the very institutional Church that some traditions regard as already compromised by that point.

So here’s the question I couldn’t get around.

The same Church. The same centuries. The same people.

Clement in the 90s and Ignatius in 107, both taught by apostles, speaking of Father, Son, and Spirit together as a matter of course. Gregory in the 260s, holding a fully articulated Trinitarian faith six decades before any council defined it. And in those same decades, Christians burying their loved ones with prayers to Saint Titus around their necks and scratching Paul and Peter, pray for Victor into the walls of a tomb.

It isn’t two Christianities. It’s one. The people who handed us the Trinity are the people who asked the saints to pray for them, and there is no seam in the record where one stops and the other starts.

And if you want the point sharpened to a fine edge: the single most explicit pre-Nicene articulation of the Trinity that has come down to us reached the Church, according to the tradition that preserved it, through an appearance of the Mother of God and the Apostle John. The Wonderworker’s creed and the communion of saints arrive in the same night, in the same vision, in the same breath.

I’m not asking you to accept a private revelation as binding. This vision was not like the false-Zacharias in this novel, because they applied discernment to it, testing it by Apostolic tradition and the letters they’d left behind. Private revelation cannot bind Christians as if it were infallible. But notice that the early Church saw no contradiction at all between the most rigorous Trinitarian orthodoxy and the conviction that the saints in glory are alive, and present, and near.

To them these weren’t two doctrines in tension. They were the same doctrine. God is a communion of Persons, and He has drawn us into it, and death does not get to interrupt what He has joined.

You can’t easily accept the testimony of that Church about the nature of God and reject its testimony about the nature of the Church. Not because a majority is automatically right, but because both come to us from the same hands, in the same centuries, from people who were being fed to animals and murdered in the coliseum as entertainment. If those Christians were so badly compromised that they fell into something like idolatry within two hundred years of the Resurrection, while the apostolic generation’s own students were still teaching, then the Nicene Creed came to us by men who were compromised.

But they were not compromised. They understood something many of us, in the wake of sixteenth century reforms, lost.

The Silence That Isn’t Silent

Consider, finally, what we do not find amongst the earliest Christians.

The Fathers of the first three centuries were relentless polemicists. Irenaeus wrote five books against the Gnostics around 180. Tertullian went after Marcion, Praxeas, and half of Carthage. Origen wrote eight books against Celsus. Cyprian fought about the lapsed and the validity of baptisms performed by those who apostatized during the persecutions. These were not men who let error pass in silence out of politeness. They argued about the date of Easter.

So if Christians across the empire had taken up a practice that compromised the sole mediatorship of Christ, if the faithful were carving requests into tomb walls by the hundreds and wearing invocations of the saints around their necks, we’d expect somebody to have written down an objection. To have thundered against it as they had other such errors.

We find no such thing.

The practice shows up across hundreds of miles in different geographies, in different languages, among people who could not possibly have coordinated with one another, during a period when Christian apologists were on-guard against any kind of paganizing error. And the record has no objection to the intercession of the saints.

I admit, arguments from silence aren’t conclusive. But in this case, they aren’t nothing, either. The Christians who offered those prayers and inscribed them in stone and on coils of silver weren’t innovating. They were doing what they had received. They understood the Body of Christ in a way that we, formed by centuries of individualism, and by a piety built almost entirely around my personal relationship with Jesus, have in many of our traditions largely forgotten.

They didn’t think of themselves first as individual believers who happened to assemble on Sundays. They thought of themselves as members of one Body. And it never once occurred to them that death could cut that Body in half.

Even our Lord’s own instruction on private prayer points this direction. Go into your room, He says. Shut the door. And then pray Our Father. Give us this day our daily bread. Deliver us from evil. Alone in a closed room, the Christian prays in the first-person plural. We are never praying by ourselves, because we are never by ourselves.

Why the Saints Matter for the Rest of Us

There’s one more thing I’d like to add, and it’s pastoral rather than polemical.

We are working out our salvation with fear and trembling. We are not finished. On most days I can’t see the whole shape of what God is doing with my life, and I suspect you can’t either. We’re in the middle of a story, and we haven’t yet read the last page.

The saints are people whose personal stories of their earthly journeys have been finished.

They’re not a distraction from Christ. They are, in a very real way, living testimonies to the fact that Christ still does His greatest of works in the lives of real flesh-and-blood people. They’re exemplars of the incredible work that God does in the whole of a devoted life. Perfected in love, filled with nothing else, they show us in concrete human terms what our own lives are becoming, when we become at last who we were always meant to be in Him.

Which is why Sarah couldn’t get there by argument. I tried, for several drafts, to write her a chapter where the syllogism finally landed and she conceded. It never worked, and eventually I understood why. Nobody is argued into a family. Sarah doesn’t get convinced of the communion of saints. She gets adopted into it, standing at a hospital door near a friend, with nothing left, discovering she has relatives she’s never met, but who remained closer to her than she ever realized.

And notice what her prayer (by that, I simply mean invocare, the word for prayer, which means to “call upon,” or make a request) to Margaret Roper actually contains. Sarah doesn’t claim to know Margaret is in heaven. Margaret isn’t canonized. The Church has never said it, and Sarah won’t say what she doesn’t know. She prays in hope. She asks a woman of her own blood, whom she believes to be in Christ based on the testimony of love in her letters, to pray for a dying friend.

That’s all. And it mattered.

Why I Wrote This Book

This isn’t the first book in the series that confronted controversial doctrines. In Soul Siege, I took on end-times theologies, and I’ve received a few angry messages from readers who wanted to argue for the theology I challenged in that book.

I still get messages asking about whether Landon was possessed by an angel in the earlier books. I’ve had to clarify, though, that Landon is speaking experientially, not technically, as he’s trying to sort out the angel’s presence and differentiate it from the demon (Mephisto) who had possessed him once, before his mind was wiped clean. I was not advocating a doctrine, there, of angelic possession. I was speaking of a complicated, and convoluted, experience that Landon, at the time, did not fully understand and had to make sense of as he grew.

My original tag-line for book 1 of this series was controversial: “Can a fallen angel be saved?” The answer is “no,” for a variety of reasons, but the trope of the “unfallen” for which this series is named wasn’t about saving angels, ultimately. It was about human beings who “fell,” and ultimately found they hadn’t fallen so far that God couldn’t still redeem them, and even use them in powerful ways.

Some readers gave up, accusing me of heresy, before they let the characters in the books find their way. Not every statement a character makes is my theology. I think that should go without saying, but sometimes, people jump to conclusions.

So, even in this book, the characters develop. They come to right theology, but not through proposition and argument alone. It happens, in part, through experience, but not experience alone either (that was Molinos’s quietism). It happens through lived experience that’s discerned according to Scripture and the Apostolic Tradition.

I didn’t write this book to make Catholics out of you. I want to say that twice, because I mean it.

I wrote it because I’ve come to believe that the Body of Christ is wounded, and that our divisions grieve the Lord who prayed we would be one. Schism will not be healed by everybody shouting louder. It will be healed, if it’s healed, when we recognize that we are already one Body by virtue of our Baptism, and start with the love that binds us, continue to seek unity in truth, according to what Christ has given us, including His Church.

And a part of me thinks that this doctrine, the communion of saints, of all the those we debate and fight about, is a strange and promising place to start.

Because at its root, the communion of saints isn’t a claim about Mary, or about merit, or about ecclesiastical authority. It can help illuminate those questions, but it doesn’t start there. It’s a bold, two-part affirmation that Protestants and Catholics already hold in common: that we are truly united to Christ, and that He truly rose from the dead in the body.

If both of those are true, the conclusion follows. Death does not divide the Body of Christ. It can’t. A Body with a risen Head is not the sort of thing the grave gets to cut in half.

That is not a doctrine of division. It’s the deepest possible statement of unity, and it rests on Christ alone.

So here’s what I hope for. Not that you’ll agree with me. But that the next time you stand at a graveside, and something in you insists that the person you love is not gone, that they are more themselves than ever, that the love between you was not ended by the closing of a casket, you won’t apologize for that instinct, or file it under an allowance for grief.

You’ll recognize Christ in all of it.

Because Christ took a body. He never gave it back. He took that same body with Him when He ascended to heaven, never shedding His flesh. So, if we are one-in-flesh with Him, the bridegroom to the bride (which is the Church), how can we drive wedges here and now: between ourselves, and the righteous made perfect in heaven, or between ourselves and those who would create schism in the body? This is not how it should be. It is not what Jesus prayed for in John 17. And that he recognized, that this unity should be visible, “so that the world may believe,” (v. 21) can we truly believe that God did not give us a visible Church, a body every bit as visible and fleshly as the body in which He became Incarnate, in which we might, ultimately, be one as He and the Father are one? Isn’t this what He prayed for?

God Bless,

Judah

See the Full Series HERE

You may have talked about the beaches, or the wondrous sites you saw.

But I’m pretty sure you didn’t say, “Oh, wow! This vacation was amazing! The sun rose every single day and our toilets in the hotel reliably flushed! In fact, we had running water the whole time!”

I doubt you mentioned, when someone asked about your vacation, how your rental car happened to start every morning. If you had a problem with the car, you might have talked about that! But no, if it worked as expected, it probably didn’t “make” your post-vacation rundown.

The spectacular things in life tend to crowd out the ordinary. We tend to focus on what’s more dramatic over the dependable, regular, but arguably more important features of our day.

Matthew captures this precisely when he addresses his “second” account of Jesus feeing a mass of people. The feeding of the four thousand is often treated as the lesser sibling of the feeding of the five thousand. Almost as if Matthew could have just shrugged his shoulders and written “DITTO” instead.

But there’s more about this latter, slightly “smaller” account, that signifies it as distinct from it’s “bigger brother.”

The Crowd That Came for Wonders

Matthew tells us, “Great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others. They put them at his feet, and he cured them, so that the crowd was amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel” (Matthew 15:30–31,.

Big stuff, right? These are the things we’d usually put on the headlines. But it just two verses he packs the healing of the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute. He has them speaking, moving, walking, and seeing. Ultimately, they’re praising, too.

But that’s all prologue in this account. At least in the way Matthew writes it.

Because he spends about twice as long with what follows. It starts with a simple, semi-private conversation. Jesus calls His disciples aside. He pulls them apart from the crowd. It’s like backroom strategy session of a kind. “I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat; and I do not want to send them away hungry, for they might faint on the way” (Matthew 15:32).

Three days. The crowd had been fasting, whether by intention or circumstance, for three days.

I’ve fasted twenty-four hours before. I’ve fasted forty-eight hours several times. I’ve come close to three days but, honestly, I’ve never made it that far. Granted, in ancient cultures, people were more accustomed to fasting, probably by necessity as much as for devotional purposes.

Still, they’d come and were willing to go without food because they were seeking something sensational, hoping for a spiritual breakthrough, mostly healings we’re told, hoping for a story they could take with them and tell their friends, family, and neighbors. And they got all of it. They saw the maimed made whole, the blind people who were there saw it too because they were now healed. They praised God!

But Matthew takes us behind the scenes. To something that most of the crowd didn’t witness. And in a time when paper was pricy, and ink was also expensive, Matthew doesn’t extend this part of the event longer than the former by accident. It’s intentional.

The Miracle Behind the Curtain

Read the whole text. Most of what happens pertaining to the multiplication of the loaves and fishes happens in a kind of hidden way . Jesus gives thanks. He breaks the bread. He hands it to the disciples. The disciples distribute it to the people. The crowd sees bread appearing in baskets, sees themselves fed, sees seven baskets of leftovers collected.

But the actual moment of multiplication is invisible. It happens on account of the prayer and words of Jesus, passing through the hands of His disciples.

The crowd sees nothing that appears miraculous. But what they experienced was probably the biggest miracle of the three days they were out there. And they don’t realize it. They eat their full and figure, most likely, that someone had arranged for some kind of caterer to bring in the food. There is nothing that suggests the crowd realized they were eating miracle food.

By spending nearly twice as many words on this as he did on the dramatic healings, Matthew is telling us something. He is saying: pay attention.: The louder miracle is not always the greater one. The one that draws the crowds is not always the one that reveals God’s heart and character most clearly.

If you and I had been there, we would have gone home talking about the healings for weeks. And perhaps, if someone reminded us, we might have said, “Oh yes, and He fed us too, somehow.” The feeding would have become a footnote to the fireworks.

But in the Gospel, it is the fireworks that are the footnote.

Why God Gives Signs to Beginners

Most of you know I have a real appreciation for Carmelite saints and their spirituality. Many of them, especially St. John of the Cross, write of what you might call a distinction between the gift and the giver. The consolations we often receive and God, Himself.

Consolations consist of things like the sweetness we feel in prayer, the moving experiences that make us feel closer to God, even visions or signs, the sense of the sacred that seems to almost elevate us God.

These consolations are real. The might even be from God. But they are not God.

They’re like the candy grandpa offers a young grandchild just so he’ll come sit on his lap.

Beginners in prayer often receive an abundance of these consolations. Newly converted hearts frequently report vivid experiences, dramatic answered prayers, overwhelming senses of divine presence. Miracles, it seems, are far more common in the Mission field, where people are hearing the Gospel for the first time, where conversions are frequent.

Sometimes we might be tempted to thing, “Why do the missionaries see all these extraordinary things while God is leaving us here on our churches with no such signs and wonders?” We might be tempted to think, “Is God no longer interested in us, is he angry with us, is He more interested in the people over there on the other side of the world? Has he abandoned our church?”

None of that. Because such consolations, signs, and miracles, are often intended precisely for the new believers, the young in faith. You might love Pixy Stix when you’re five. When you’re thirty-five you’d much prefer a steak, lobster, or even a salad. No, the steak might not be as “sweet.” But sometimes sweetness isn’t the point. Too much of it and, well, we’ll get nothing but a little hyperactivity and a crash.

The same applies to consolations in prayer, to “emotionalism” in earlier less-mature expressions of our faith.

Because there’s a real danger if we get too attached to the sweets. If we are too focused on consolations.

If we focus too much on the signs, we can forget about the Giver. We can, like the crowd, come home raving about the healings and forget about the compassion of Jesus who quietly fed four-thousad people with just a few unglamorous fishes and loaves.

We can spend our whole spiritual life chasing the next consolation, the next spiritual high, the next confirmation or miracle, and never notice that Jesus has called us aside and wants to simply invite us to his table to eat.

There comes a time, as we progress and mature in the faith, when God intentionally withdraws these signs and wonders, these consolations and “spiritual highs.”

St. John of the Cross these seasons of withdrawal “dark nights.” The soul that has grown accustomed to consolations suddenly finds them gone. Prayer feels dry. The old techniques that used to get us excited no longer seem to work. Reading the Bible used to be exhilarating, but now it feels like you can barely focus as you try to get through a text. The music at Church no longer moves it like it used to.

Many souls at this stage conclude that God has abandoned them, or worse, that He was never really there in the first place.

But the truth is nearly opposite.

The withdrawal of consolations is often the sign that God is inviting us into a more mature love. He is saying, in effect, “You have grown large enough to be fed the real stuff, the solid stuff, the gourmet stuff. You do not need the candy anymore. Come, let me show you my compassion. Come, let me show you my heart.”

The Compassion the Crowd Did Not See

Look again at what Jesus says to His disciples: “I have compassion for the crowd” (Matthew 15:32). The Greek word here is splagchnizomai. It literally refers to the inward parts, the guts, which in that culture was the “seat” of emotion in the human. When the Gospels say Jesus was “moved with compassion,” they are saying that something in Him, in the core of his gut, his very being, was stirred.

This is what the disciples saw. They’d actually seen a miracle like this before, and that time, he’d fed a thousand more. This time, well, it’s almost like a step back in terms of the impressiveness of the feat itself. But Jesus is showing them something else this time. He’s showing them His heart. He’s exposing the interior movement of divine love. That’s why this miracle happened.

The crowd received the bread. The disciples much more. They got a glimpse at God’s love, which is to say, God’s very essence. After all, God is Love.

This is the movement of every serious spiritual life. We begin by receiving what God does for us. We mature by beginning to perceive who God is in Himself. We begin by taking the gifts. We mature by loving the Giver. And finally, we begin to participate in the life of God Himself, loved into Love.

The Greater Miracles Hidden in Plain Sight

Interestingly, St. John of the Cross says at one point that the season of dryness, the “dark night” really isn’t dark at all. It’s just the opposite. It’s so bright, so flooded, that to our maladjusted eyes it only seems dark. It takes time to adjust, to grow into the dark night so that the light that’s been there all along can finally be seen and apprehended without squinting.

When we have new eyes ready to see, we start to realize that most of our lives are chalk full of miracles. We’ve just grown so accustomed to them that we take them for granted. The greatest miracles are not rare and dramatic interventions. The fact that food somehow grows out of dirt, that we’ve got enough on our plate. What about the fact that we exist at all? Do you take that for granted or do you see the miracle in it? The fact that despite all our flaws, we still find ourselves capable of loving and being loved. What of the fact the sun rises, that our lungs draw breath, that our hearts beat without our command.

The mature Christian looks at a loaf of bread on the table and sees the same miracle the four thousand experienced, only extended over years and decades. Who has been feeding us all this time? Who has been providing this daily bread? The One who has compassion. The One whose is moved in the deepest places of his very being, his gut, for us.

And once we have His heart, once we have caught a glimpse of that splagchnizomai, that inner movement of love toward us, we discover that we lack nothing.

To have His heart is to have Him whole. To have Him whole is to have everything.

Subscribe now

Living This Truth

How do we apply this to what feel like mundane, ordinary, and common lives?

First, when consolations come, receive them with gratitude, but do not cling to them. They are gifts, not the Giver. Enjoy them the way you would enjoy a good meal, but remember, we usually fix good meals because we’re welcoming a friend. If it were just us, would we really bother? Let the feast serve the friendship. If you find yourself measuring your spiritual life by how good prayer or worship feels, and if you feel “disappointed” when the feelings fade, you may be entering the dark n ight which is, in truth, the most blessed part of the Christian life. Provided we continue to pursue Him in the darkness, in the desolation, out of love alone. For when we don’t have the “feeling” we can only persist in faith that our actions given in love are received by Love. Prayer is not primarily about feeling. It is about presence.

Second, when consolations are withdrawn, do not fall into a kind of spiritual panic. Don’t think for even a second that you’ve done something wrong, that you offended God somehow, or that He abandoned you. Very often, the opposite is true. He is drawing you closer, but by a road that requires trust rather than sight. Keep showing up. Keep praying. Keep loving. The apparent absence is often the deeper presence.

Third, open your eyes to smaller, quieter, miracles. At the end of each day, before sleep, name three ordinary graces you experienced. The unexpected kindness of a stranger. The taste of the first coffee. The way the light fell through your window. Train your soul to see the multiplication of loaves happening constantly in your life, hidden in plain sight. If you can’t think of anything, then take a deep breath. Then thank God for it. Because if He wasn’t loving you into existence still, he never would have given you that breath.

Fourth, when you read the Gospels, pay attention to the moments Jesus draws His disciples aside. Ask what He might be drawing you aside to see. He still calls His friends closer. He still shares His heart with those willing to leave the crowd.

Finally, remember that spiritual maturity is not measured by the intensity of your experiences but by the depth of your love. The crowd went home talking about healings. The disciples went home changed by having glimpsed the compassion of God. Which do you want to be?

Bread was multiplied that day. Amazing, yes. Impressive, of course. But it was Jesus’ love that was the heart of the story. It’s why Matthew spent more time looking at how, out of compassion, He took care of a common need more than He focused on how He helped people with their extraordinary needs.

Do you have eyes to see the true miracles in front of you? Are you more consumed with consolations, feelings, and the shiny things, that you miss the plain, simple, expressions that come from the depth of Jesus’ love for you?

Come aside. Listen to Him. Let Him show you His heart. And you will find that you lack nothing.

So, do I use any AI in my process? Sure. But not the way you might think.

So this morning, as I wrote my daily meditation, I decided to detail my entire process with screen shots, pictures, and proof. Here’s how I do what I do.

I begin with Lectio Divina. I’m not going to detail the process here. I’ve talked about it before, and you can look it up. But it’s a prayerful and meditative approach to reading a text of Scripture or another spiritual writing. A part of my process includes journaling by hand. Yes, I begin each meditation by writing something out by hand. Here it was today:

After that, I DO use AI. Not to generate anything, but simply to transliterate my handwriting into actual text. It saves me the painstaking effort of having to re-type everything.

This is what it produced:

After that, I copy/paste the text into a Word Processor. I fix the errors it made as I go. I reorganize the content into sections (the original journal is more stream-of-consciousness), add some introductory material, the practical advice at the end, and supplement it with additional research.

You can see here how I’m working from one window (the Word Processor) with Logos (where I look at the original language, commentaries, and what my library on Logos can add) as well as the Catena Bible App (which provides Church Fathers quotes for any verse of the Bible I’m looking at).

I also consult my other books/sources, my study Bible, etc. My desk is a perpetual mess.

I add quotes, additional insights I gleaned from my sources, etc. When the final post is ready, I send it back to Gemini and ask, “Please scan this post for any typos or grammatical errors.” I make the corrections in my Word document.

I find an image for my post to put on my website/Substack. Yes, sometimes I ask Gemini to create an image that fits. Sometimes I scour the Internet looking for what fits. But I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing this. It’s just a quick visual that usually picks up on the introductory image or (in the case of this post) the image of the surgeon using a spoon that I used in my meditation.

Then I take my final post to my e-mail provider, I give it another read, format the section headings and block quotes, tweaking it a little more.

I post the same content to my website and Substack.

Then I send it out.

Today’s post (based on the AI scanner on Substack) showed 100% human generated content. Yesterday's showed something of a split for some reason. But this is my process. And it is not AI-generated. It starts with prayer, is written first by hand, then expanded and modified.

Subscribe now

Healing for a sick child. The conversion or reversion of a spouse. Freedom from an addiction. You bring it to God with confidence, certain that this is the kind of prayer He delights to answer.

And nothing happens.

Crickets.

Or worse, you suffer the opposite. The child gets sicker. The agnostic or wandering spouse becomes more biting in his attacks against the faith. The addict spirals out of control.

We’ve heard all the platitudes. “Sometimes the addict has to hit bottom before he climbs up.” Or, perhaps, it’s less explanatory. “Just have faith. God is in control.”

When you’re asking for things like that, though. When you’re so sure that the prayer is good, unselfish, fully in line with what we know God desires for us, it puts our faith to the test.

It is rare in God’s economy to receive a great grace that is not preceded by trial.

So often, we hear of what God has done for others, we hear a testimony, and think, “Me, too, Lord, bless me!” or “You did it for them, it’s my turn, now!”

We might be a little more sophisticated in the way we phrase such a prayer. But that’s the substance of it.

It might be on account of a testimony someone told about how they’d come to faith. It could be a story we read about one of the saints. It might even be an episode recalled in the Gospels.

But we have a tendency, believing that God is fair and equitable, to demand that He give us what He gave others.

So we pray, with confidence at first. We expect to receive a “yes,” particularly if we know what we’re praying for is in God’s will.

If I’m praying for purity, I don’t have to ask if God wants me to be pure. He’s revealed that in Scripture. “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thess 4:3).

If I’m praying for a conversion, I don’t need to doubt whether this is a prayer spoken according to God’s will, for He “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4).

If I’m praying for a deeper faith, to be drawn more deeply into God’s love, to overcome a vice, there’s very little reason to think, “God doesn’t want that for me.”

Of course He does.

But maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t with what we’re requesting.

Maybe it’s not even a problem at all.

What we see as a problem is a plan far grander, an intention so overwhelmingly, beautifully, and perfectly designed in the infinite mind of God, that we can’t see the architecture of it.

Often, God has a greater work in mind for us, through the very trial He’s permitted, than we had ever imagined. That means, it is not out of some kind of poverty that God has responded in silence. It is because He is so immensely generous, because He has such lofty desires for us beyond what we can imagine, that He must withhold an answer now for the lesser thing so that He can, ultimately, make us into precisely the person He created us to be.

His silence, more often than not, is not because He desires not to give us what we ask. It is because He intends to give us so much more.

A Prayer That Should Have Been Answered Immediately

The Canaanite woman we encounter in Matthew 15 offers us exactly this kind of testimony. And as we read her story, keep in mind one thing: what she originally asked for ends up as little more than a footnote in the story.

She had heard the reports. She knew about the healings, the exorcisms, and all the signs Jesus had done throughout the region. Like so many before, she had a desperate need: a daughter tormented by a demon.

She came to Jesus with a cry that, theologically speaking, must’ve been shocking to hear from the mouth of a pagan woman: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon” (Matthew 15:22).

A Caananite calls Jesus, “Son of David.”

What an odd thing for a Canaanite woman to proclaim.

That was a messianic title. This gentile woman, standing outside the covenants of Israel, has grasped what many within Israel could not see. She recognizes who Jesus is. She cries out for mercy, not justice. She names her need plainly. No embellishment. No long diatribes. She identifies Jesus in an alarmingly unexpected way and makes her request plain.

One would think that this act alone would elicit an immediate and compassionate response from Jesus.

One would think the disciples would be impressed that a pagan, and a woman (who in that culture would not have likely concerned herself with the faith of other peoples) used such a title. I can imagine, though, how they might have justified continuing to ignore her. “She’s pretending to be like us. She’s trying to deceive us. She’s trying to flatter Jesus with words and titles.”

But forget about how the disciples might have taken it. Jesus knew this woman’s heart. He knew she wasn’t resorting to deception or flattery.

By every reasonable expectation, this is exactly the kind of prayer Jesus should have answered on the spot. And yet that’s not what happened: “But he did not answer her at all” (v. 23).

Silence. From the One who supposedly never turns away the brokenhearted.

From Silence to Rebuke

The Canaanite woman persists despite the silence.

The disciples start to take notice and get annoyed. “Send her away, for she is crying after us.”

But that’s not what happened. He doesn’t dismiss her. He doesn’t send her away. For a moment, it feels like that would have been the more merciful approach. To let her down “gently.” But he turns to her and offers what sounds like a rebuke:

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (v. 24)

What harsh words! Is this the “loving” and “compassionate” Jesus whose smiling face was painted on your Sunday School workbook? It’s as if he were to say, “Sorry, I don’t do these things for people like you.”

This is not the Jesus of the felt-board flannelgraphs. This is not the Jesus with the gentle smile beckoning children to His lap. This is a Jesus who appears to draw a boundary line and place this suffering mother and her child on the wrong side of it.

We need to be careful with this. Nothing in this passage gives us license to erect walls of race, class, or gender against those who come to us for help.

Jesus is not providing us an example to imitate. He’s doing something only He can properly do because He knows the woman’s heart. He knows what she needs, and He knows what the disciples who had asked Him to send her away need to learn.

When the woman comes and kneels before Him, saying simply, “Lord, help me,” Jesus seems to humiliate her even more: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” (v. 26).

The word here in Greek is kynariois, a diminutive form, linked to the word we now use as “canine.” It’s sometimes softened in translation to “little dogs” or “puppies.” Some commentators have tried to “get Jesus off the hook” by pointing this out, as if Jesus was calling her something cute and cuddly

I disagree with those commentators. And most of the better scholars do, too.

The Jewish use of “dog” as a term for gentiles was well known, probably as stinging as any racial slur someone might use today, though the history behind its use is very different than it is here. The point is, the words were biting, and this woman would have felt it.

St. John of the Cross, though, speaks of how often the weak in faith receive exactly what they ask for immediately, while those who have advanced receive additional trial, receive what they ask only after a season of hardship, or receive something else entirely. Consider this from the Ascent of Mount Carmel:

A father of a family provides at table many different kinds of food, some better than others. One of his children will ask for a dish not of the better food, but of the first that meets the eye, and the child will do so because it knows how to eat this kind of food better than the other. Now when the father observes that his child refuses to eat the food offered to it and wants and likes only that first dish, he gives it to his child sadly so that it will not go without its meal and be unhappy.” (Book 2, Ch 21).

I’ve been there. Parents, you know what I’m talking about. The time I made a great meal, cooked up a great dish, something delicious with nutritional value, but the stubborn kid refuses it: “I want Mac and Cheese.” Sometimes, we make them eat what we first prepared. Sometimes, lest the child go hungry, we make them only take a small bite of the good food then let them finish with the Mac and Cheese.

St. John of the Cross Continues:

God accordingly condescends to some sou ls, granting what is not the best for them, because they are ignorant of how to journey by any other way. Some souls obtain sensible or spiritual sweetness from God because they are incapable of eating the stronger and more solid food of the trials of the cross of his Son. He would desire them to take the cross more than any other thing... In all our necessities, trials, and difficulties, no better or safer aid exists for us than prayer and hope that God will provide for us by the means he desires“ (Book 2, Ch 21).

Remember that testimony you heard? That new believer who seemed to receive so many good things and answers to prayer? Why am I, who’ve been faithful for so long, not given the same Mac and Cheese? It’s because God knows your heart. And He’s going to give you the better thing. If you persist in faith, just like the Canaanite woman.

Subscribe now

The Scalpel Does Its Work

We should not be too quick to soften what Jesus intended to be sharp. You do no good to take a scalpel from a surgeon, imagining his instrument too dangerous, to replace it with a spoon.

Jesus speaks so harshly because He intends to do more for this woman than rescue her daughter. He is the master physician who often selects the proper tools to heal, to make new, that come to us under the appearance of the opposite.

Remember, it was the disciples who first would have turned her away. Jesus wants to make of this woman more than some gentile with a demon-afflicted daughter.

He wishes to make her a teacher, with him, of his very disciples.

Because he knows what she will do next.

Despite His rebuke, which seems unduly harsh, she bows down and adores him. She worships the Lord even as he seems to “pile on” the humiliation and rejection. And then comes her confession of faith: Not immediately. Only after he calls her a “dog,” but this dissuades her not at all: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” (v.27)

At last! She began with a prayer of mercy, she worshiped through humiliation, what appeared to be rejection by Christ Himself.

She does not say “I am no dog, but a woman who deserves respect.”

She becomes as the dog, seeking crumbs, and Jesus raises her by this to the feast!

“Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” (v. 28)

Her daughter is healed at once.

But this is not all our Lord meant to do for this woman.

He reduced her to “dog” so that she might be a dog who teaches lost sheep.

What the Silence Is Doing in You

If you are in a season where your prayers seem to hit the ceiling, bouncing back without an answer, or even by as answer in appearance of the opposite of what you asked, consider that God may be doing for you.

First, He may be teaching you the difference between wanting something from Him and wanting Him. The Canaanite woman came for a healing. She left having encountered the Son of David Himself, having spoken with Him, having been named by Him as a woman of great faith. The healing was almost incidental to the deeper gift. In a very real sense, she became a teacher of those who would done day teach the Church.

Second, He may be forming in you the humility necessary to receive true grace. Pride is never damaged by success. Even spiritual success. But pride struggles in the silence. In the silence, all sense of “entitlement” with which we approach God disappears. When the answer doesn’t come on our schedule, and seems like it will never come, the silence erodes our false sense of self-sufficiency. But something else is born in the eroded channel that the silence leaves behind. It is a faith that knows it lives on crumbs from the Master’s table, and sees not scraps, but a feast.

Third, He may turning you into a kind of teacher. Not necessarily a teacher in a literal classroom, but a teacher in the school of regular life. What happens when your friends and family see how you persevere through unanswered prayer, when you suffer what seems to be the opposite of what you ask, but you pray still more? By witnessing your persistence, they may learn something more than they’d ever learn from a sermon or by studying a theology text. They are learning the love of God thrives even in the silence. That is a lesson so much of our world needs, and it can only be learned when those of faith take hold of our Lord as the Canaanite woman did, in a faith that refuses not to receive whatever the Lord gives, even if it be humiliation for a time, even if it mean we be reduced to the status of dogs feeding on crumbs. For when we find the crumbs, we learn that the Master has been guiding us to His side all along.

Practical Steps for the Waiting Soul

How do we live this out? A few concrete practices may help.

When silence comes, don’t think of it as a rejection. The Canaanite woman still worshipped, bowing down to the Lord, even after being ignored, dismissed, and called a dog. She did not let the surface evidence become the last word. She knew that our Lord must be clung to in faith even when it feels like He’s doing something humiliating or uncomfortable in our lives. Remember, a scalpel looks sharp. But you’d never insist your surgeon exchange it for a spoon.

Bow lower, don’t stand taller. Our instinct when we feel dismissed or are wrongly accused is to assert our worth. This runs counter to most advice you’ll hear in our culture. When someone’s down, they’ll say, stand tall, suck it up, take a stand. Try the opposite. This does not violate your dignity. Be humble. Be willing to live on the crumbs. This is not self-hatred. It is the recognition that grace is grace precisely because it is not earned.

Persist in faith. The woman never stopped. In fact, the more she seemed to be rebuffed, the more she pursued the Lord. When He was silent, she cried out. When He refused, she knelt. When He insulted, she answered with a remarkable kind of faith that no dictionary definition of the world could articulate. Do not go silent because heaven seems silent. The prayer that is spoken into apparent darkness is often the prayer that pleases God most.

Remember, God has a bigger vision for us than we have in the moment. Ask yourself, in the middle of whatever you’re going through, what God might be forming in you that could not be formed any other way. What virtue is being purified? What source of pride is He cutting out of your life? How is He drawing you into a deeper faith?

The Canaanite woman went home with a healed daughter. But that was almost a footnote in this story. She also went home a different woman. She had become, at the borders of the pagan world of Tyre and Sidon, a teacher of the apostles, a model of faith for every generation of the Church.

Your silence may be preparing something similar. Don’t walk away. The crumbs, when they fall, will be more than enough. And you will, if you allow His work to do its job on you, some day find yourself reclined at the seat of honor in His banquet.

I was asked that once, standing in a grocery store parking lot, wearing a clerical collar, as I was a Lutheran pastor at the time. More than a decade before I became Catholic.

The woman who asked meant well. I could see the sincerity in her eyes, the earnest care of someone who genuinely wanted to know if I was going to be okay for eternity. God bless her. But her question caught me sideways.

She had assumed, apparently, that I was the sort of person who wore religion the way one wears a uniform—professional, external, perhaps even hollow at the center. She wanted to know if I had the real thing, the personal thing.

I stood there for a moment, collar and all, and I did not quite know how to answer.

Not because I doubted my faith. But because her question, sincere as it was, contained assumptions I could not fully explain while standing on asphalt with 90-degree summer sun blasting off of it (and wearing a black shirt).

I suspect that many Christians who have been asked this question, or who have asked it of others, have never paused to examine what lies beneath it. The phrase “personal Lord and Savior” is not found anywhere in Scripture. It emerged as a piece of American revivalist vocabulary, and while it captures something true, it also risks flattening the vast, ancient, and communal mystery of Christian life into a single transactional moment.

There is more to being a Christian than an instant of acceptance. And there is more to Christ than what is merely “personal.”

The Beginning Is Not the Whole

Consider the way Jesus called his first disciples. “As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ Immediately they left their nets and followed him” (Matthew 4:18-20).

Peter and Andrew responded. They dropped their nets. That was the beginning.

But nothing in that moment made Peter into the man he would become. Between that first step on the shore and the day he would be crucified upside down in Rome lay years of walking, stumbling, denying, weeping, being restored, preaching, suffering, and learning.

The moment of following was real. But it was not the completion of anything. It was the beginning of everything.

The Greek verb Jesus uses, ἀκολουθέω (akolouthéō), means “to follow” in the sense of accompanying, walking with, going the same road. It is a verb of duration. It is not a verb of decision. Jesus does not say, “Make a decision about me.” He says, “Come, walk with me. For the rest of your life.”

Saint Paul understood this. Writing to the Philippians, near the end of his life, having endured shipwreck, imprisonment, beatings, and every kind of trial, he wrote: “Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12).

Paul, of all people, could have rested on a single dramatic moment of conversion. He had one. He had been struck to the ground on the road to Damascus. He had heard the voice of Christ. If anyone had a “personal” experience of accepting Jesus, it was Paul.

And yet Paul, writing decades later, insists that he has not arrived. He is still pressing on. He is still being made Christ’s own.

This is how Christians have historically used the word conversion.

Not just a single event, but a lifelong journey. The Greek metanoia (translated as “repent”) is not a moment but a movement.

It is the daily reorientation of the heart, mind, and will toward God. Every morning, a Christian is invited to convert again. Every evening, to repent and begin anew. The saints did not consider themselves finished. Teresa of Ávila, near the end of her life, spoke of herself as still a beginner in prayer. John of the Cross wrote of the soul’s journey as a dark night that stretches through years, not minutes.

To reduce the Christian life to an initial acceptance is like saying a marriage is complete on the wedding day.

The vows are real. The love is real. But everything is still ahead. The wedding is the doorway, not the house.

More than “Personal”

Then there is that word: personal.

I do not want to be unfair. There is something genuine in the impulse behind “personal Lord and Savior.” Christianity is not merely a set of doctrines to affirm intellectually. It is a relationship. Jesus is not an idea. He is a Person, and he calls each of us by name. “I have called you by name, you are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). That is astonishingly intimate. There is nothing wrong with saying that Jesus is your Savior.

That’s what “personal” really means. It means pertaining to a person, a relationship. But in our culture, when someone says, “that’s personal,” we usually mean, “that’s none of your business, it’s private.”

When “personal” begins to mean “private,” when it begins to mean “just Jesus and me,” then we need to reconsider the term.

Look at the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus taught his disciples to pray, and even when he counseled them, “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret” (Matthew 6:6), the prayer he then gave them was not “My Father.” It was “Our Father” (Matthew 6:9).

Every phrase is plural. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Even when we pray alone, in the secret of our own room, we pray as members of a body. We pray with and for others. We cannot say “our” without them.

Paul’s language for the Church is not accidental. “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12:27). The Greek word for “members,” μέλη (mélē), isn’t about belonging to a club, or having your name on a roster. It refers to limbs and organs of a body.

A hand is not a healthy hand if it is severed from the arm. An eye is not a healthy eye if it is plucked from the head. Paul is not offering a poetic metaphor. He is telling us the ontology of Christian existence. To be in Christ is to be in his body, and his body is both plural and singular, one body many members, living, breathing, and gathering together.

The early Church spread so quickly largely because of this truth. When Tertullian described the Christians of his day, pagans marveled: “See how they love one another.” The witness was not, “See how each of them has made a private decision for Jesus.” The witness was communal. It was a life shared.

And this is why the Christian faith cannot survive as a purely individual project. A Christian without a community, without the sacraments, without the Scriptures received in the midst of God’s people, without others who correct and encourage and pray, is a limb detached from a body. For a while, perhaps, it may retain some warmth. But it cannot live long alone.

The Deep Root of Belonging

There is a beautiful moment in John’s Gospel where Jesus prays for his disciples on the night before he dies. He prays: “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:20-21).

The unity of Christians is not about sitting around a fire and singing kumbaya. It is missional. It is how the world will come to know that the Father sent the Son. When we fragment into a thousand private spiritualities, when we treat faith as if it were a matter of personal preference, we obscure the very witness Jesus prayed we would bear.

The unity is grounded in something even deeper. “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you.” The communion of the Church is a participation in the communion of the Trinity itself. God is not a solitary monad. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, an eternal community of self-giving love. When we are drawn into Christ, we are drawn into that life. And that life is, by its very nature, shared.

So the question is not, “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?” The deeper question is: “Are you being drawn, daily, more fully into the life of the Triune God, in company with all the saints, through the long, patient work of God in you of becoming like Christ?”

That question does not fit on a bumper sticker. It might not be a quick and easy slogan to use when approaching someone in a parking lot. But it is the deeper truth.

Subscribe now

Living the Long Road

What does this mean for the way we actually live? Because this is actually good news for us.

First, be patient with yourself. If you have followed Christ for many years, you may still find yourself struggling with the same faults, the same fears, the same hesitations. This does not mean your faith is false. It means you are still on the road. The Christian life is not a finish line crossed once and celebrated forever. It is a walk. Keep walking.

Second, examine where you may have privatized your faith. Do you pray only for yourself and those close to you? Try widening the circle. Pray for the person you find difficult. Pray for the Church across the world. I light a candle in my morning prayers, write on an index card several people I’d like to pray for (including all of my readers, all of you), and light a candle (or my oil lamp) in front of a Holy Face image, representing that this is a prayer I’d like to offer up continually throughout my day. Today I have written on it a few people who have been creating friction with my family recently. I won’t say they are my enemies, but if we are to pray for our enemies, certainly we should pray for those whose agendas run contrary to yours. Pray even for those you will never meet, those suffering persecution across the world, those who are in prison, those who are poor and hungry.

Third, invest in the body of Christ. If you have drifted from a worshiping community, return. If you are in one, deepen your presence there. Serve. Show up. Bring a meal to someone. Sit with someone who grieves. The body of Christ is not an abstraction. It is the people in the pews next to you, the neighbor across the fence, the stranger at the shelter.

Fourth, practice small, daily conversions. Each morning, offer the day to God. Each evening, examine where you have fallen short and where God has been faithful. Do not wait for a dramatic moment to renew your commitment. Renew it now. And tomorrow. And the day after.

Fifth, remember that the goal is not to have merely accepted Jesus. The goal is to become like him. “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

From one degree of glory to another. That is the shape of the Christian life. Not a single acceptance alone so you can get on with your life, but a continual transformation. Not a private possession, but a shared inheritance. Not a moment, but a lifetime.

And the good news, the very best news, is that the One who began this good work in you will bring it to completion (see Philippians 1:6). You are not walking alone. You never were.

Most of us, at some point in our spiritual lives, have heard the wise counsel to avoid the “near occasions of sin.” It is a phrase that carries the weight of centuries of pastoral experience, and rightly so. There are places we should not go, screens we should not open, conversations we should not entertain, relationships we should not nurture. Scripture is emphatic on this point. “Flee from sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:18, NRSV-2CE). “Make no friendship with those given to anger, and do not associate with hotheads” (Proverbs 22:24). Paul tells Timothy to “shun youthful passions” (2 Timothy 2:22). The verbs are strong, deliberate, and physical. Flee. Shun. Run.

And yet, there is a subtler danger that hides behind the very good counsel of avoidance, and it is a danger that the enemy of our souls has learned to exploit with remarkable cunning.

It is this: what begins as prudence can slowly, imperceptibly, become retreat from the very places God has called us to stand.

The Devil’s Favorite Disguise

The evil one is not always crude. He does not always tempt us toward the obvious. Sometimes his most effective work is done not by pulling us into sin, but by convincing us that faithfulness requires us to withdraw from good things, to shrink our world down until nothing can challenge us, and, not incidentally, until we are of no use to anyone.

Consider a scenario I have seen play out more than once. A man goes to Sunday worship and finds himself distracted by an attractive woman across the aisle. His gaze wanders. Thoughts arise that have no place in the presence of the Lord. He leaves the service troubled, and rightly so.

But then comes the temptation dressed as wisdom: Perhaps I should not go to that church anymore. Perhaps I should worship from home. To avoid the near-occasion of sin, I should stop going to church.

Do you see what has happened? The man has been given a real spiritual problem, and he has been offered a false solution.

The problem is not the church. The problem is not the woman, who is going about her own business of worship.

The problem is the discipline of his eyes and the disorder in his heart. And if he accepts the counterfeit wisdom, he will not have conquered the temptation. He will have merely surrendered the battlefield, and he will have surrendered it precisely where grace was most available to help him fight.

This is what makes the enemy’s strategy so devious. He is willing to lose a battle over lust if he can win a war over communion. He will happily let you feel virtuous about your withdrawal, so long as you withdraw.

Subscribe now

Two Kinds of Occasions

Several moral theologians have made a distinction that is worth recovering. They spoke of proximate occasions of sin and remote occasions of sin.

A proximate occasion is one that, given who you are and what you struggle with, almost certainly leads you into sin. A remote occasion is one where sin is possible but where, with ordinary vigilance and grace, you can stand firm.

The recovering alcoholic with thirty-days sobriety who walks into a bar to “just have a Coke and see his old friends” is placing himself in a proximate occasion. The temptation is not incidental to that environment; it is the environment. Scripture’s counsel is clear: flee.

But for the recovering alcoholic who has ten years under his belt, who feels no desire to drink, to attend an event where friends are drinking is purely remote. He is on solid footing, he does not feel the pull to drink, even though the same situation might have been necessarily avoided years before.

The man who goes to church and encounters the ordinary reality of a world that includes beautiful people, or the woman who works in an office where gossip is common but not required, or the young person who cannot avoid every image on every screen in a visually saturated world, these are facing remote occasions.

They are confronting the ordinary friction of a fallen world against a soul being sanctified. And the response cannot be endless retreat, because retreat, at some point, becomes its own sin.

Jesus prayed for his disciples in that great high-priestly prayer: “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one” (John 17:15). The Lord did not pray for our extraction. He prayed for our protection within the field where he had placed us.

The Custody of the Eyes and the Discipline of the Heart

Job made a covenant with his eyes. “I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I look upon a virgin?” (Job 31:1). Notice what he did not say. He did not say, “I have made a covenant to never leave my tent.” He said he had disciplined his gaze. He had accepted responsibility for what his eyes did, rather than blaming the world for having things in it that eyes could see.

This is the harder and more mature path. It is the path of interior formation rather than exterior escape. And it is, incidentally, the path that actually produces holy people.

The person who avoids every possible temptation may keep himself technically clean, but he does not thereby become holy. He becomes only untested. And an untested virtue is not yet a virtue at all, but a hypothesis about virtue.

Jesus taught: “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles” (Matthew 15:11). He was speaking of ritual food laws, but the principle radiates outward. The problem is not primarily what enters our line of sight. The problem is what our hearts do with what enters our line of sight. And that is a problem no amount of external avoidance can finally solve, because we cannot avoid ourselves.

When Avoidance Becomes Avoidance of God

Here is where the trap becomes most dangerous. The man who stops going to church because of a wandering eye has not merely avoided a temptation. He has cut himself off from the Word preached, from the community of the saints, from the sacramental life, from the ordinary means by which God has ordained that his people be sanctified.

He has treated the medicine as though it were the disease.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. A young woman struggles with envy when she is around her more successful sister, so she stops visiting her family. A man cannot bear the honesty of his small group, so he leaves it. A believer finds that Scripture convicts him uncomfortably in certain passages, so he stops reading those books of the Bible. In each case, the avoidance addresses the symptom while entrenching the disease. And in each case, the enemy is delighted, because he has succeeded in isolating a soul from the very things that would heal it.

There is a reason the ancient monastic tradition insisted that the demon of acedia, that spiritual sloth which whispers, “This place, these people, this discipline is not for you; you would be holier elsewhere,” was among the most dangerous of all temptations. It sounds like discernment. It feels like humility. But it is, in truth, a slow leak in the tire of the soul.

The Courage to Stay

There is a courage required in the Christian life that is often overlooked. It is the courage to stay. To stay in the pew when your gaze has betrayed you, and to bring that betrayal to the Lord in the very place where it happened. To stay in the relationship where you have been hurt, and to learn to love without being consumed. To stay in the world that God so loved, and to be salt and light in it, rather than salt in a cellar and light under a bushel.

Paul writes to the Corinthians about their scruples over associating with sinners: “I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral persons, not at all meaning the immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers, or idolaters, since you would then need to go out of the world” (1 Corinthians 5:9-10).

The apostle acknowledges, with a certain wry realism, that total withdrawal is neither possible nor commanded. We were not made for the cloister of complete separation. We were made for engagement, for witness, for love.

Practical Wisdom for the Path

How, then, shall we distinguish true prudence from disguised retreat? A few questions may help.

First, ask honestly: Is this a proximate or remote occasion? If you know, from repeated experience, that a certain place, person, or medium leads you almost inevitably into serious sin, flee. Do not negotiate. But if it is the ordinary friction of a fallen world, the answer is not flight but formation.

Second, ask: What am I being called away from, and what am I being called toward? True prudence usually leads us toward greater fidelity, deeper prayer, more robust community. Counterfeit prudence tends to leave us more isolated, more curved in on ourselves, less accountable, less exposed to grace.

Third, cultivate the interior disciplines. The custody of the eyes is a real practice, learned over years. So is the recollection of the heart, the habit of returning attention to God many times in a day. So is the examination of conscience, done gently but honestly each evening. These are the muscles that make it possible to stand where God has placed us without being overcome.

Fourth, tell someone. The temptations that thrive on isolation wither in the light of honest confession to a trusted friend, pastor, or spiritual director. The man tempted at church needs, more than anything, to name what is happening to someone who can pray with him and hold him accountable, not to change churches

Finally, remember that the Lord who calls you to the battle also equips you for it. “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it?” (1 Corinthians 10:13).

Notice that the way out is a way through, not a way around. God does not usually remove us from the field. He gives us what we need to stand.

The fence has its place. But the fire in the heart, the disciplined and God-loving heart, is what finally makes a saint. Do not let the enemy convince you that faithfulness looks like a smaller and smaller life. It looks, in the end, like the shape of a cross planted firmly in the middle of the world, refusing to move.

What you will discover, likely within the first ten seconds, is that your mind is not a quiet meadow but a crowded marketplace.

A grocery list elbows past a worry about your health. An old resentment resurfaces uninvited. You remember an email you forgot to send. You wonder if you left the stove on.

You judge yourself for being distracted, and then you judge yourself for judging yourself.

The interior life is loud. And most of us have simply grown accustomed to the noise.

I live near train tracks and, honestly, after living here for more than a decade I don’t even notice the sound of trains anymore. When a guest comes, they pick up on it right away. “How can you live with that racket all the time?” Well, I just don’t hear it anymore. I’m sure the sound is there, the noise hits my ear drums, but I’ve learned to tune it out.

That’s how we are with many of our thoughts. They come. They go. We barely notice them anymore.

But God hears them. Every one of them.

Shepherd my thoughts, O Lord, in the mountain of my heart where you dwell.

These are words from a song that, currently, is a part of my morning “prayer list.” It’s based on Psalm 23 on John 10, by Br. Isaiah: you can listen to it here>>

There is something profoundly countercultural about this petition.

We are used to asking the Lord to bless our actions, to guide our decisions, to protect our loved ones. But to ask him to shepherd our thoughts—the wandering, unruly, often unwelcome flock of ideas that graze in the pastures of our minds—is to invite him into a place we rarely admit visitors.

It is to acknowledge that the Christian life does not begin at the level of what we do, but at the level of what we think.

The Battlefield of the Mind

Long before a sin is committed by the hand, it is entertained by the mind. Long before a virtue is practiced in the body, it is cultivated in the imagination.

The desert fathers understood this with a clarity that our modern age, so obsessed with behavior and outcomes, has largely forgotten. They spoke of the logismoi—the intruding thoughts—that pester the soul in prayer.

Evagrius Ponticus taught that the spiritual battle is fought first and foremost against these thoughts. Not against thoughts as such, for God gave us minds to think, but against the pattern of thoughts that would carry us away from him like sheep wandering from the shepherd.

Saint Paul understood this too. He wrote to the Corinthians of a warfare that is not fleshly but spiritual, in which we “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). The Greek verb here is aichmalōtizontes, a striking military image meaning to lead away as a prisoner of war. Paul is saying that our thoughts must be marched, in chains if necessary, before the tribunal of Christ. This is not a suggestion. It is a strategy for spiritual survival.

And to the Romans he wrote: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2).

Notice the sequence. Transformation precedes discernment. And transformation happens at the level of the nous—the mind, the deep faculty of perception.

We cannot know God’s will while our thoughts run wild. The shepherding of the mind is not preparation for the spiritual life; it is the spiritual life.

The Mountain of the Heart

There is something worth pausing over in the image from Br. Isaiah’s song: “the mountain of my heart where you dwell.”

Why a mountain? Why not a valley, a garden, or a temple?

Scripture includes many scenes on mountains. Every time, these scenes are consequential and transformative.

Moses meets God on Sinai. Elijah hears the still small voice on Horeb. Jesus is transfigured on Tabor. The Sermon on the Mount begins with Christ ascending a hillside. Even the crucifixion happens on Mt. Calvary.

Mountains, in the biblical imagination, are the meeting places of heaven and earth, the thin places where the eternal touches the temporal. To speak of the heart as a mountain is to say that within each of us there is a summit where God has made his dwelling, a peak above the noise of the plains where communion with him is possible.

But here is the problem.

If God dwells at the summit, most of our thoughts are scattered on the lower slopes. They graze on anxieties, they wander through resentments, they chew the cud of yesterday’s grievances and tomorrow’s fears.

The shepherd’s work is to gather them upward, to lead them to the high pastures where the air is thin and the presence of God is thick.

Saint Teresa of Avila, in her Interior Castle, described the soul as a great crystal dwelling with many rooms, and she lamented how often we live in the outermost chambers, never venturing into the interior where the King awaits. Our thoughts, she observed, are like little lizards and reptiles that scurry through the outer rooms.

She was not being uncharitable to lizards. Thankfully, no lizards have subscribed to these e-mails, so I don’t have to worry too much about causing offense. Teresa was, using the analogy of creatures who operate on pure instinct, with a reptilian mind, without self-reflection, self-awareness, or discernment, being honest about how disordered our minds become when they are not gathered by grace.

The Shepherd Who Knows His Sheep

Consider Psalm 23, the psalm on which Br. Isaiah’s song is built. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul” (Psalm 23:1-3).

Notice what the shepherd does. He makes the sheep lie down.

There is a gentle compulsion in the verb. Sheep, left to themselves, will not lie down easily. They are anxious animals, always alert to predators, always shifting and startling. A shepherd who can make his sheep lie down is a shepherd whose presence has established such peace that the flock trusts him enough to be still.

Our thoughts are much the same. They will not settle on their own.

They startle at every noise, they wander after every green shoot of distraction. But when the Shepherd is present, when we know him and he knows us, there comes a stillness that is not the absence of activity but the presence of trust.

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me” (John 10:14). The Greek verb ginōskō—to know—is not merely intellectual acquaintance. It is intimate, experiential knowledge. The Good Shepherd does not merely know about our thoughts; he knows them, in the way a mother knows the meaning of her infant’s every peculiar cry. Every little “hitch” in the sob becomes a language that she, alone, can read.

God is not scandalized by the marketplace of our minds. He has walked those streets before us.

Why Thoughts, and Not Just Actions?

One might reasonably ask: does it really matter what I think, as long as I do the right thing? Is God not more concerned with obedience than with the private cinema of my imagination?

Jesus answered this question in the Sermon on the Mount. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:27-28). And again, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’... But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:21-22).

This is not moral perfectionism. This is realism.

Jesus is telling us that the seed of every action is planted in the soil of thought. To leave the mind untended is to leave the ground of one’s life to whatever weeds the wind might sow.

The person who thinks kindly, over time, becomes kind. The person who nurses grievances, over time, becomes bitter. The person who fills the mind with the beauty of God, over time, begins to reflect that beauty.

This is why the psalmist prays, “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer” (Psalm 19:14).

The meditation of the heart. The undercurrent of the mind. The words no one else hears. These, too, must be offered.

How Music Carries our Prayers

There is a reason the Psalms were sung, and a reason songs like Br. Isaiah’s often take the form of prayers.

Music has a way of doing what words alone cannot. It engages the body, it stirs the affections, it slips past the guards of the rational mind and lodges itself in the deeper chambers of memory.

Saint Augustine is supposed to have said that the one who sings prays twice. In his Confessions, he wrote of being moved to tears by the singing of the Church at Milan, and he understood that melody could carry truth into the heart along pathways that argument could not travel.

When we sing a phrase like “Shepherd my thoughts,” we are not merely reciting a request. We are training the soul. We are inscribing on the tablets of memory a petition that will rise unbidden in the middle of the anxious afternoon, in the sleepless hour before dawn, in the tense moment before a difficult conversation.

Consider this. When you speak a prayer in the morning, do those words stay with you? When you pray in song, though, the words might echo in your mind for hours, perhaps the entire day. There’s a reason why songs get “stuck in our minds,” when spoken words do not.

When we pray with a song, the song becomes a kind of interior liturgy, a rhythm that shepherds the mind even when we are not consciously praying.

Practical Shepherding

How, then, do we cooperate with the Shepherd’s work in the pasture of our thoughts?

First, begin the day by giving him the flock of your mind. Before the phone is checked, before the news is consumed, before the mind is handed over to a thousand competing voices, offer the day’s thoughts to the Lord. A simple phrase will do: Shepherd my thoughts today. This is not magic; it is intention. And intention shapes attention.

Second, learn to notice the wandering sheep. Throughout the day, pause and ask: Where has my mind been? Not with self-condemnation, but with honesty. If you find that you have been rehearsing an old wound, gently lead that thought back to the Shepherd. If you find you have been feeding on anxiety, offer it to him. The desert fathers counseled a practice called nepsis, or watchfulness. It is simply the habit of noticing what one is thinking, and choosing where the mind will rest.

Third, feed the mind on what is good. Saint Paul offers what may be the most practical counsel in all of Scripture: “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Philippians 4:8). The mind, like a sheep, will graze on whatever pasture it is led to. Choose the pasture. Music can be a powerful way of doing that. Pay attention to the kind of music you listen to—it will “shepherd” your thoughts one way or another, so make sure it’s the Good Shepherd whose words are reaching you in song.

Fourth, when the thoughts grow wild, return to a short prayer. The Jesus Prayer—Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner—has been a shepherd’s staff to countless souls. So has the simple phrase like the one from Br. Isaiah’s song. A short prayer, repeated with love, gathers the scattered flock as surely as a shepherd’s whistle.

Finally, trust the Shepherd. He is not standing at the edge of the pasture with a scowl, tapping his foot at your distraction. He is walking among the sheep, knowing each one by name, patient with the ones who wander farthest, laying down his life for the flock.

Shepherd my thoughts, O Lord, in the mountain of my heart where you dwell.

It is a small prayer. But small prayers, offered often, become the very geography of a transformed life. And a mind gathered by the Good Shepherd is a mind that begins, slowly and surely, to think the thoughts of God.

God Bless,

Judah

P.S. Feel free to look up Br. Isaiah on Spotify or whatever music platform you listen to. His catalogue is full of such prayerful songs. When one strikes you as particular relevant to what’s going on in your life, consider turning it into a prayer to begin each day. And if you know of similar artists, feel free to share in the comments below.

You promise you will. And then, alone in your kitchen with the phone still warm in your hand, you feel the strange gravity of what just happened. She could pray herself. She will pray herself. God already knows her situation better than she does. So why does her heart reach across the distance and ask you, of all people, to lift her before the throne?

We do this so instinctively that we rarely stop to ask why.

We post prayer requests on social media. We keep prayer lists tucked into our Bibles. We forward emails with the subject line, “Urgent prayer needed.” And when we ourselves are the ones suffering, something deep in us longs to know that others are pleading our case in heaven.

This impulse is not a spiritual weakness or a failure of personal faith. It is one of the most profound instincts God has planted in the Christian soul, and Scripture itself invites us into it.

Paul’s Astonishing Request

Consider what happens in Romans 15. Paul, the apostle who has seen the risen Christ, who has been caught up to the third heaven, who has planted churches across the empire, writes to a community of believers who are struggling with imperfections of their own: “I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to join me in earnest prayer to God on my behalf” (Romans 15:30).

Paul appeals to them. He does not casually mention it. The Greek verb here, parakalō, carries the weight of urgent exhortation, the same word used for the Holy Spirit as Paraclete, the one called alongside to help. Paul is, in a sense, begging for their prayers “by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit.”

He invokes the highest realities of the faith to secure their intercession.

Then he uses an even more striking phrase. The Greek word translated “join me in earnest prayer” is synagōnisasthai, which literally means “to strive together with,” “to agonize alongside.” It is athletic language, wrestling language. Paul is asking the Romans to enter the arena with him, to sweat and struggle in prayer as though their own bodies were bruised by his burdens.

Why would Paul need this? He had prayed himself countless times. He had a more intimate walk with Christ than most of us can imagine, most likely more intimate than anyone who was reading his appeal.

And yet, his instinct was to ask others to pray for him.

James and the Power That Prays

James is equally direct: “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective” (James 5:16).

Notice that James does not say, “Pray for yourself and you will be healed.” He specifies a mutual, reciprocal action: pray for one another.

The healing comes through the intercession, through the bond of one soul praying for another. There is something in this arrangement that God has ordained, some current of grace that flows precisely through the channel of shared prayer rather than solitary petition.

This raises the question that every thinking Christian eventually asks: If God is sovereign, if God already knows everything, if I can pray for myself, then why does He set things up this way? Why does He seem to want us praying for each other?

The Body That Prays Together

The answer lies in what Paul spent so much of his writing describing: the reality of the Body of Christ. “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:12).

We are not spiritual individuals who happen to gather occasionally. We are limbs, organs, cells of a single living organism whose head is Christ Himself.

When your hand is cut, your whole body responds. Blood rushes to the wound. Your immune system mobilizes. Your other hand instinctively reaches to press against the injury. The eye that sees the cut, the brain that registers the pain, the mouth that cries out, none of these belong to the wounded finger, but all of them serve it.

This is what intercession is. When one member of Christ’s Body suffers, the whole Body is designed to respond. To ask for prayer is to allow the Body of Christ to do what a body does.

Paul makes this explicit in the very next chapter: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).

Prayer for another is the nervous system of the Body, the way the whole feels for the part and the part is sustained by the whole.

Love That Prays

But there is something even deeper here. When you pray for yourself, your prayer is necessarily bound up with your own suffering, your own confusion, your own fear.

That is not wrong. God welcomes it. The Psalms are full of such prayer.

But when I pray for you, my prayer takes on a different character. It becomes an act of pure love.

I gain nothing directly from your healing. I am not distracted by my own pain in your situation. I stand before God for you simply because I love you, and love is precisely the medium through which grace flows most freely.

This is why Paul appeals to the Romans “by the love of the Spirit.”

Intercessory prayer is love made articulate.

It is the visible shape that agape takes when it turns toward God on behalf of another. Saint Augustine understood this deeply when he wrote of his mother Monica’s tears and prayers for him, calling her “the handmaid of thy servants... who wept for me before thee more than mothers weep at the bodily death of their children” (Confessions, Book III, Chapter 11).

Monica’s love for Augustine became prayer, and that prayer, poured out through years of maternal anguish, was one of the great instruments God used to convert one of the greatest theologians in Christian history.

Would Augustine have come to faith without Monica’s prayers? We cannot know. What we do know is that God chose to save him through those prayers. God delights in weaving our love for one another into the fabric of His saving action in the world.

The Humility of Asking

There is also something profoundly humbling about requesting prayer.

It requires us to admit that we cannot manage our lives alone, that our own prayers, however sincere, are somehow incomplete. It punctures the American myth of self-sufficient spirituality, the idea that faith is a private transaction between me and God.

When we ask for prayer, we confess three things.

First, we confess that we need help. Second, we confess that we belong to a community that owes us that help in Christ. Third, we confess that God has ordained the mutual dependency of His children as part of the very structure of salvation.

Paul was not too proud to ask. The man who wrote most of the New Testament, who could work miracles and had visions of heaven, still needed the prayers of ordinary Christians in Rome.

If Paul was not too spiritually mature to need intercession, none of us are.

The Prayer of the Righteous

James says the prayer of the righteous is powerful. This should give us pause. It suggests that not all prayers carry equal weight in some mysterious sense, though God hears every one.

When we ask others to pray for us, we are seeking not just more voices but perhaps voices that carry a particular sanctity, a particular closeness to God. This is why we ask holy friends to pray, why parents cherish the prayers of grandparents, why thousands people traveled miles across Europe to ask saints like the Curé of Ars, John Vianney, to pray for them.

And this opens a beautiful vista: if the prayers of the righteous on earth are powerful, what of the prayers of the righteous who now dwell in perfect union with God? The book of Revelation gives us a glimpse: ”and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel” (Revelation 8:4).

Prayer, it seems, does not stop at the grave. If prayer is love made articulate, then prayer no longer ceases in heaven for the sake of those who remain on earth than love ceases. And in heaven, love is expanded... not ended.

The love that prays continues to pray, and the communion of saints is not a doctrine but a living reality of mutual intercession. It means, honestly, that your faithful parents who you miss, those who are in heaven, still love you, still pray for you. It means that the “great cloud of witnesses” that the author of Hebrews writes about, truly do surround us in a love fully united to Christ.

Because to be in Christ, is to be fully conformed to His image of love. To ask someone else to pray for you, someone else who belongs to the body of Christ, is not asking someone to pray for you instead of praying to Jesus directly. It is asking Jesus Himself, in the fullness of the love that binds all of us together, to intercede for us before the Father.

Subscribe now

Living This Truth

I already said that most of us ask for other people’s prayers without even thinking about the theology behind it. But now that we’ve unpacked it, perhaps we can lean into this practice with the same kind of urgency Paul had when he asked the Romans to pray for him.

First, ask for prayer more often. Not just for the big crises. Ask for prayer when you are making a small decision, when you feel spiritually dry, when you are annoyed with your spouse, when you cannot forgive an old wound. Learn to say, “Please pray for me” as easily as you say “good morning.” Do this especially with people whose walk with God you admire. You are not bothering them. You are honoring them and allowing them to exercise the most Christ-like of ministries. When you ask someone to pray for you, you’re actually giving them something of a gift, an opportunity to participate in the Love of Christ in their very act of intercession on your behalf.

Second, take intercession seriously. When someone asks you to pray, do not merely say “I will” and forget. Pray in the moment, right there, even silently. Write their name down. Return to it. Let their burden actually rest on your heart. This is synagōnisasthai, the striving together, the wrestling in the arena of prayer. If we are giving someone a gift to participate more intimately in Christ’s love when we ask them to pray for us, when someone asks you don’t take it as another item on your to-do list. Receive it as a gift, as a marvelous opportunity to lean more fully into the love of Christ that has claimed you as His.

Third, keep a list of people to intercede for and expand it. Include the difficult people. Include your enemies. Include the government officials you dislike. You don’t have to be asked to pray for someone to do it. “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone” (1 Timothy 2:1). Intercession is one of the few spiritual practices that transforms our hearts almost immediately. You cannot hate someone for long while praying earnestly for their good.

Fourth, when you pray for others, remember you are exercising a priestly function. Every baptized Christian shares in Christ’s priesthood, and the priest’s essential work is to stand between the people and God, offering one to the other. When you lift someone before God, you are participating in Christ’s own eternal intercession for the world.

Fifth, remember those who have gone before want to to pray with you, too. If the prayers of the righteous are powerful, and if the saints in heaven are more righteous than any of us on earth, then the great cloud of witnesses is not a passive audience but an active company of intercessors ready to pray alongside us. I realize that for my Protestant readers this sounds very foreign, and you might not feel comfortable asking them to pray for you. I was in that space for more than forty years, so I get it. That’s okay. We should not press beyond what our conscience is ready to allow. But at least know this: they are praying for you, perhaps even when you don’t ask. Because love does such things. Perfect love, even more.

The next time a friend whispers “please pray for me” into your ear, receive it as the sacred trust it is. And the next time you are afraid to ask, remember Paul, an apostle, begging common Christians in Rome to wrestle in prayer alongside him. We were never meant to carry our burdens alone. That is not weakness. That is the design of the Body, and it is love in its most fluent language.

It sounds like a small thing. But that little tug-of-war at the refrigerator door is a miniature parable of the entire spiritual life.

There is a strange and painful paradox that catches many Christians off guard somewhere along the road of faith.

When we first begin to walk with God in earnest, we often expect that growing closer to Him will make life feel more integrated, more peaceful, more whole. And in one sense, it does.

But in another sense, something troubling happens: we start to feel more divided, not less. We begin to want things we never wanted before, and we still want things we wish we didn’t want. The interior life, far from becoming quieter, sometimes becomes noisier, more contested, more of a battlefield.

What is going on?

The “Peace” of the Unconverted Heart

Before initial conversion, before the serious pursuit of holiness, there is a certain grim harmony in the soul.

The will and the passions largely agree.

If the flesh craves something, the will consents. If pride wants to be flattered, the will arranges for flattery, it seeks what it desires through people-pleasing. If anger wants to lash out, the will lets it.

There is no civil war because there is no rival government.

The self rules, and the appetites are its willing subjects.

This is what Saint Paul is describing when he writes about life “according to the flesh. “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit” (Romans 8:5,).

Notice the language of “setting the mind.”

The mind, the will, the affections are all facing the same direction. There is a unity of orientation, even if that orientation is disordered.

This is why people sometimes look back on their pre-Christian life and remember it as, in some ways, simpler.

It wasn’t better. It wasn’t happier, not really.

But it was less internally contested. When you and your desires are on the same team, life feels straightforward, even if you are marching toward a cliff.

The Divided Heart of the Growing Soul

Then grace arrives. God begins His slow work in the soul. We start to pray. We receive God’s gifts, His Sacraments. We read our Scriptures, not just for information, but seeking to grow.

The will, illuminated by the Spirit, starts to see differently. It starts to want differently.

Suddenly you desire prayer. You desire purity. You desire to forgive the person who hurt you. You desire to be generous. You desire the good, the true, and the beautiful in ways you never did before.

But here is where things get complicated.

The passions, the appetites, the deeply grooved habits of the body and the imagination, don’t necessarily convert at the same pace as the will.

They lag behind. They have their own memory, their own inertia, their own stubborn loyalties. Sometimes, even their own addictions.

So the newly awakened will finds itself yoked to a passionate nature, full of appetites, that has not yet to be fully converted, and the result is not peace but struggle.

But if this is you, and it probably is (because this is a fairly universal experience) you can take heart in knowing that some of the greatest saints, the most influential figures in the New Testament, experienced the same thing.

Take Paul, for example, who wrote: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19). And a few verses later: “For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members” (Romans 7:22-23).

Paul is not describing a pagan. He is not describing his former life in Judaism.

He is describing himself, an apostle, a saint.

And what he is describing is precisely the disjunction between a will that delights in God and a lower nature that resists. The war he describes is not the sign of a failing Christian. It is the sign of a serious one.

The Confusion This Creates

Many souls, encountering this interior division for the first time, conclude that they must be doing something wrong. “If I were really growing in holiness,” they think, “I wouldn’t still struggle with these desires. I wouldn’t still feel the pull of old habits. I wouldn’t still get angry, or envious, or lazy, or lustful. The fact that I do means I haven’t really changed.”

This is one of the great lies of the spiritual life, and it needs to be exposed.

The presence of struggle is not evidence of the absence of grace.

In fact, it is often the opposite.

Before grace, there was no struggle because there was no resistance to sin. The struggle itself is a sign that something new has been planted, something that pushes back against the old order. As Saint Augustine observed in reflecting on his own conversion, “My two wills, one old, one new, one carnal, the other spiritual, were in conflict with one another, and their discord robbed my soul of all concentration” (Confessions, Book VIII, ch. 5).

The very fact that Augustine could name two wills, and grieve their conflict, meant that grace had already begun its revolution in him.

It can feel downright schizophrenic. I get it, because I’ve been there. And some days I’m still there. It can be incredibly frustrating to recognize that despite wanting holiness, purity, and loving God more than ever before, in a single moment, you end up doing the think stoked by your passions and desires that you hate the absolute most about yourself. You might even realize it as it’s happening, and as you’re acting out, ask yourself, “Why in the world am I doing this? I don’t want to do this...but I’m still doing it!”

This is why.

St. Thomas Aquinas explains that this internal friction exists because of how God in His wisdom applies grace to our nature. According to Aquinas, the soul possesses higher faculties—the intellect and the will—which are designed to lead, and lower faculties—the sensitive appetites or passions—which are designed to follow.

When God begins His work of conversion, He applies grace directly to the higher, rational faculties first, illuminating the intellect to know the true Good and elevating the will to desire Him.

While our highest selves are thus converted instantly and decisively by grace, the passions and appetites are not instantly transformed in their nature. They are rooted in our sensitive and bodily life and cannot “see” the spiritual truth that now governs our will.

Instead, they must be slowly re-educated, disciplined, and gradually re-oriented to follow the new, God-directed leadership of the will. Until that long and patient work is complete, the passions continue to react according to their old, natural, and often distorted habits, creating the very “civil war” and “noisiness” of the growing soul.

This initial focus on the higher faculties ensures that our conversion is a truly human and reasonable act of free choice, while the subsequent, slower conversion of the passions allows for the deep formation of genuine virtue and humility through spiritual battle.

We are not our will alone. We are a complex being, designed by God, with desires, passions, and the like. The journey of holiness is one where what’s disordered from within becomes re-ordered in grace. But it doesn’t all happen at once, immediately. And as certain good aspects of ourselves (most of our passions of the flesh are actually good things, given to us by God for a reason, that we’ve bent-inward toward self and way from Love) seem to conflict with others, it can feel like you’re losing your mind.

So, try to think of it this way. If you were slowly waking up in a room that had been dark for years, the light would hurt. Your eyes would resist. You would want to close them again. That pain is not a sign that the light is bad or that you are failing. It is a sign that light is doing what light does, and eyes accustomed to darkness are doing what such eyes do.

You could just close your eyes, and keep walking around in a lit room blindly. Or you could, through the will, force your eyes to remain open, maybe a little bit at a time, until they grow accustomed to the light that finally allows you to move around the room without stepping on the Legos.

Why Does God Allow the Delay?

Here is a question worth sitting with. If God can convert the will, why doesn’t He simply convert the passions at the same time? Why leave us in this awkward middle place, where our desires drag behind our decisions?

Several answers, none of them exhaustive:

First, because instant transformation would rob us of the deep work of becoming. God is not primarily interested in producing behavior; He is interested in forming persons. And persons are formed through choice, through struggle, through the slow patient reordering of loves. A soul that woke up one morning with perfectly ordered passions would be a soul that never learned to fight for its own holiness, never learned to depend on grace, never learned the humility that comes from knowing exactly what one is capable of without God.

Second, because the struggle teaches us the truth about who we are. It strips away the illusion of self-sufficiency. When you sincerely want to do the right thing and find yourself unable, you learn something crucial: you are not the master of yourself. You need a savior. Not a coach, not a self-help program, not a technique. A savior. “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24-25).

Third, because the passions, though slower to convert, are also being drawn along by the will’s conversion. It is not that God has ignored them. He is at work in them too, but through the will. Every time the will chooses against a disordered passion, that passion is weakened, just a little. Every time the will chooses toward the good, the appetites are reshaped, just a little. This is the long, patient work of what some spiritual masters call the purification of the senses.

It is not glamorous. It rarely feels like progress. But it is real.

Subscribe now

Living in the Middle

So what do we do, practically, when we find ourselves in this contested space? When our wills say yes to God and our passions say something else entirely?

First, do not be scandalized by your own interior. The saints all lived here. Paul lived here. Augustine lived here. If you find that you desire God with your deepest self and yet still feel the pull of things beneath you, you are not a failure. You are a Christian.

Second, name the division honestly in prayer. Do not pretend to God that you feel what you do not feel. If part of you wants to forgive and part of you still nurses the grudge, say so. If part of you wants purity and part of you wants otherwise, say so. God is not offended by honesty. He is grieved by pretense. Tell Him: “Lord, I want to want what you want. Help me want it more.”

Third, act on the will, not the passions. This is crucial. In the moment of decision, ask not “What do I feel like doing?” but “What have I, in my truer self, chosen to do?” The passions will often shout. The will speaks more quietly. Learn to obey the quieter voice. Over time, the shouting subsides. This might take a dozen, or a hundred, failures for some of us to learn. But in the end, when we recognize the passions left us empty, unsatisfied, and we can name it, we give the will something to hold onto so that it can begin to override our appetites.

Fourth, be patient with the slowness of your own transformation. God is not in a hurry. He has planned for all eternity how He desires to make you into a saint, and He knows exactly how long the work will take. The soul that demands instant sanctity is often less humble than the soul that accepts the slow schooling of grace.

Fifth, receive the sacraments and rest in them. The Eucharist and confession are not rewards for those who have already conquered themselves. They are food and medicine for those still fighting. Come as you are, with your divided heart, and let grace do what only grace can do. If you are not Catholic, or a part of another tradition that has a sacramental life, or has formal confession, lean into the sources of grace that are available to you. Hear the Word. Pray fervently. Don’t try to “fit prayer in” to your life, but start fitting your life in around your prayer life. Remember the truth of your identity revealed in your Baptism. Your name was spoken, and His name was spoken upon you. And if you cannot confess formally and sacramentally, at least find someone you can speak to honestly. What’s left in the dark festers. What’s brought into the light can begin to heal.

Sixth, remember the direction of the story. The war within is not the last word. “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). What God has started, He will finish. The disjunction you feel now is temporary. The integration you long for is coming. Not fully in this life, perhaps, but coming.

The Blessed Disturbance

St. John of the Cross once crafted a pretty powerful metaphor for the condition of the soul as it grows in holiness. It’s like light shining through a window that suddenly shows you all the dust that’s been in the air you’ve been breathing, but didn’t realize was there until the light shone through. The closer one gets to the light, the more one sees the dust in the room.

This is not because the room got dustier. It is because the light got stronger.

Turning off the light, or pulling the shades over the window, might make you “less aware” of the dust in the air, but it won’t remove it. Only when we remain in the light can we start to see how the grace we’ve received, and continue to receive, purifies us over time.

If you are troubled by the division in your own soul, take heart. That trouble is itself a mercy. It means the light has come. It means your will has begun to see what your passions have not yet learned to love. It means you are no longer at peace with what once made you comfortable.

Stand at the refrigerator door, if you must. Feel the pull of two desires. And know that this small, awkward moment is a participation in something not foreign to the faith, but integral to growth in our saintliness: the slow, patient, unstoppable work of a God who is teaching your whole self, will and passion, mind and heart, body and soul, to love what He loves.

The war is real. But so is the grace. And the grace is what wins the war.

And yet, if you were to trace any one of those flames back to its origin, you would find yourself at the same candle. The same fire. The same source.

I have often thought that this is one of the most beautiful pictures we have of what it means to live among the people of God.

We are not our own light. We never were.

But we have each been given a flame, and part of the wonder of the Christian life is learning to see that flame in the people around us, to celebrate it, and to let our own faith be kindled by the sight of theirs.

Because we can all stand there, holding our own candle, anxious about how the wax might drip. We might see some beauty in the single flame. But when we raise our eyes to see the lights spread across the people of God, the beauty becomes something more, the light becomes something greater. And then we begin to see our own light not merely as a little flame to hold for oneself, but as an integral part in a light that is shining among all God’s people and illuminating the world.

The Light That Was Never Ours

Before we can rejoice in seeing God’s work in others, we have to remember something about the light itself. It does not belong to us. We are not its source. We bear it, we hold it, but it is not our light alone.

John the Baptist understood this better than most. The Fourth Gospel tells us plainly: “He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world” (John 1:8-9). John was a burning and shining lamp, as Jesus Himself would later say (John 5:35), but he knew whose fire he carried. He knew he was a witness, not the source.

This is the beginning of every healthy way of seeing other believers.

If I forget that the light in me is borrowed, then the light in you becomes a threat. I will compare. I will compete. I will notice the ways your flame burns brighter than mine and grow bitter, or notice the ways mine burns brighter than yours and grow proud.

But when I remember that I did not light myself, my perspective changes.

Your flame is no longer a rival to mine. It is a companion. It is even a comfort, because if the same Christ who is at work in you is at work in me, then perhaps I can trust Him a little more.

Perhaps the small, wavering flame I carry is more real than I feared.

Seeing Rightly

The real challenge is that we do not naturally see this way.

Our eyes are trained, from childhood, to notice failure before faithfulness, to catalog the flaws of others before we catalog the grace of God in them. We look at another Christian and see what irritates us, what disappoints us, what falls short.

But Saint Paul, writing to a variety of churches, all with different strengths, weaknesses, sins, and praiseworthy gifts, chose a different starting point.

Read the openings of his letters and you will find him again and again beginning with thanksgiving for what God has already done in those he addresses. “:I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus” (1 Corinthians 1:4).

This to the Corinthians, whose problems about schism and sexual immorality fill the rest of the letter.

Or to the Philippians: “I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of you in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:3-6).

Notice the movement. Paul remembers, he gives thanks, and then he grows in confidence. His hope for the future is anchored in what he has seen God do in the past, in these particular people, in the faces of people he’d seen come out of darkness and into light

None of them were apostles like he was. We only know the names of a few of them. But his faith is nourished, is strengthened, by their faith. The fire of their faith warms and comforts his soul.

This is not flattery, nor is it naivety.

Paul knew perfectly well how fragile human faithfulness can be. But he had trained his eyes to see God first. He looked at the Philippians and saw not first their struggles but the good work that had begun in them. He looked at the Corinthians and saw grace before he saw scandal.

What would it mean for us to look at our fellow Christians this way?

Not to pretend, not to flatter, but to genuinely train our eyes to notice the fingerprints of God on the people around us? To see the work that God was doing them even amidst their brokenness, their failures, and their flaws?

To see the young mother who prayed with her child last night, and to know that heaven noticed. To see the elderly widower who still shows up to Mass, or to Sunday service, week after week even though grief has hollowed him out.

To see the friend who forgave someone for something the world has deemed unforgivable.

To see the coworker who refused to play the “game” of getting ahead in the office at the expense of others, even though he or she might have deserved a promotion more than the other guy.

Each of these is a light-bearer. A Christ-bearer. Each of these carries a flame.

Subscribe now

The Cloud of Witnesses

The candles do not only surround us in the present. They stretch backward through history, a long procession of light that reaches all the way to the empty tomb and beyond.

The Letter to the Hebrews, after cataloging the great figures of faith who lived and died believing, tells us: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1).

The image is athletic, of a runner in a stadium surrounded by those who have run before, “retired” athletes if you will, who still love the game, and more that that, those who are still in it. And they’re cheering.

They carry their flames too. And since they are glorified in heaven, having beheld the very face of God, they burn even brighter than we do.

But it’s the same flame. The same source.

Every saint who ever lived was lit by the same fire that has now been passed to us.

Every now and then, someone will write me back. Never in an accusatory way, but out of curiosity. “Why do you quote so many saints? Why not just the Bible?”

Well, I don’t think the Bible is a dead book. I don’t think the Word of God is dead either. I think it is a living Word, just as the Word that was made flesh died, but still lives. I believe that every Christian who has ever lived is like a living, breathing, testimony of the Word made Flesh, the Word of God.

When I celebrate the saints who’ve gone before us, I’m not praising them in isolation. I’m honoring the light that they carried, and the unique way that it illuminated God’s love in their lives.

Think of the martyrs who sang as they were led to the arena. Think of the desert mothers and fathers who found God in silence.

Their lives might look very different than yours or mine. But they still carried the same flame, and given that I am not called (at least not at present) to a martyrdom of body, and I’m not called to contemplation in the desert, but I’m called to be a husband, father, and an author, I can glean something in the reflection of the light as they carried it that helps illuminate the work of God in my life.

Think of Augustine wrestling his way from restless brilliance into the peace of the confessions. Think of Thérèse of Lisieux, dying young in a cloister, offering God her “little way” of trust. Think of the ordinary grandmother in the pew behind you last Sunday who has been praying for her wayward children for forty years and, even though her prayer has not yet brought her children into the faith, she has not stopped.

None of them lit themselves. All of them were lit. And by the great mercy of God, some of them lit us, whether they ever knew it or not. They passed their light down the row, and from there, the light continued to spread.

Think of the friend who spoke a word, almost in passing, that was exactly what we needed to hear in the moment. Think of the teacher who poured love into your life, who showed you patient, who might have been wearing a little cross around her neck, and in her quiet way, testified to the love of Christ even though the system didn’t allow her to speak it aloud in the classroom. Think of the Sunday School teacher, or the friend who invited you to a Bible study, who first made Scripture come alive. Think of the stranger whose kindness reached us in an unexpected way on a hard day.

We are standing in a room full of candles. Most of them are small flames when seen alone. But when seen in the great chorus of God’s people, they come together into a beautiful sea of light, love, and truth.

What This Does to Us

Something happens to the soul that learns to see God’s work in others. Three things, really.

First, our faith grows. It is one thing to believe that God is at work in the abstract. It is another to see, with your own eyes, the change in someone you have known for years, and to know that no explanation but grace accounts for it. The evidence is not in a book, not in some logical argument or defense of the faith. The evidence is standing in front of you, laughing, weeping, forgiving, serving. Faith becomes not a proposition to defend but a reality to which you are already a witness.

Second, our hope grows. If God has been faithful to them, He will be faithful to me. If He has not given up on that difficult brother, He will not give up on me. If He has been able to make something beautiful out of that shattered life, He can make something beautiful out of mine. This is why Paul could say he was “confident” of the good work in the Philippians. Seeing God’s work in others gives us permission to expect Him to keep working in us.

Third, and perhaps most surprisingly, our love grows. It is very hard to resent someone whose flame you have seen. Once you have really noticed the work of God in a person, they cease to be a category, a label, and become a soul with an entire story that God has been telling through the sweat and labor of their daily life. The neighbor who annoys you becomes the neighbor whom Christ is patiently forming. The rival becomes a fellow pilgrim, looking for a light in the distance that just might be the small flame you’re carrying. Even the person who has hurt you begins to look different when you glimpse the flame in them, or the empty candle just waiting to be lit.

Saint John of the Cross wrote that “in the evening of life, we will be judged by love alone.” One of the ways love grows in us is by looking, really looking, at what God is doing in the people we have been given.

Practical Steps for the Week Ahead

You know I always like to give you a few “action items,” a few gentle suggestions. Because was much as I love writing these devotions, I don’t want you to read these each day and think, “well that’s a nice thought.” I want it to actually “spark” something in your life. The faith is meant to be lived. So here are a few suggestions today:

Try this. At the end of each day this week, before you sleep, ask yourself a single question: Where did I see God’s work in someone else today? Not in yourself. In someone else. It might be a small thing. A patience demonstrated that you admire. A small act of generosity. A word spoken well. A quiet endurance in the midst of a storm that was raging all around them. Write it down if you can, even just a sentence. Over a week you will begin to have a small collection of sightings, and you may find your soul warmer for it.

Second, when you pray, do what Paul did. Begin with thanksgiving. For the gifts of God in your life, yes, but also for the people in your life. Be specific about the grace you have seen in them. Not “thank you for my sister” but “thank you for the way my sister forgave me.” This kind of specificity trains the eye to see more clearly the light of Christ working within them.

Third, tell someone. When you notice the work of God in a person, say so. Not with flattery, but with honesty. “I saw what you did. I know what it cost you. I think God is in this.” While we don’t want to fixate on our own candles, sometimes we need to remember that we carry a flame, too. That we are a part of the great light that fills the darkened sanctuary, and even the darkened world in which we live. If that’s true for us, and we could use a reminder every now and again of the work that God is doing in us we’ve taken for granted, the same is true for others. Let them know you see it, you notice it.

Sort story, just as an aside. Yesterday I went to the gas station. The young lady, probably nineteen or twenty, behind the counter was just berated by her manager before I got to the counter. She was in tears as she helped me. I simply looked at her, and asked, “You going to be okay?” “I don’t know,” she said. “I hope so.” I just smiled at her and said, “I see you. I see who you were made to be. You have a beautiful soul.”

I think she was taken aback by that. Why is it so rare to hear that kind of good news in our world? If we’re in the world, as we are, and if we have a small light, as we do, why are these interactions so unexpected and infrequent?

It was the truth, though. I saw in her eyes, in that moment, behind the tears, not a mere “gas station attendant,” but a person made in God’s image, made uniquely beautiful, made to shine. When I got to my truck, I prayed that in that small moment she saw the light of the world who illuminates the truth about who she is.

How easy is it, in the midst of life, to let a biting word, a criticism, drive us into a place of darkness? How easy it is to get blinded by a difficult moment to the point that we fail to see the big picture of God’s love? As much as we need to hear it, the people God has arranged in the journey of our lives to cross paths with ours, even if briefly at a check out at a gas station, need to hear it, too.

Not every “divine appointment” given to us is going to be in some grand moment, or in Church. Most of those moments happen brief interactions. It doesn’t take long to pass on the light, just a moment, but the candle can burn and spread its light beyond what we ever imagined... if only we’re willing to let our light shine, if only we’re willing to pass the light to the person beside us, and to let it shine into a single life, in the most common of moments.

Finally, remember on the days your own flame feels small: you are in a room full of candles. The fire does not depend on you alone. It never did. The same Christ who is at work in the saints, in the cloud of witnesses, in the person beside you in the pew, is at work in you. Your flame, however small it might seem in the moment, is the very spark that can set the world ablaze.

Pass it on.

But then, a nagging thought: How do I know this is God? How do I know it isn’t just my own wishful thinking, my anxiety talking, or even the enemy who likes to dress up as an “angel of light” influencing what I see?

If you’ve ever wrestled with that question, you’re in remarkable company. Every serious Christian throughout history has faced this problem. The stakes are enormously high, because on one hand, we genuinely believe the Holy Spirit teaches us. Jesus promised, “When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). But on the other hand, the human heart is, as the prophet Jeremiah warned, “devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

So how do we tell the difference between the Spirit’s whisper and our own inner monologue dressed up in holy language?

The Problem of the Sincere Mistake

Sincerity is not the same as truth.

This might make us a little uncomfortable, because we are drawn to sincerity.

But we can be sincerely wrong.

Two people can pray earnestly over the same passage of Scripture and come away with contradictory interpretations, each convinced the Holy Spirit revealed the meaning to them.

They cannot both be right.

And history is littered with movements, splinter groups, and even entire theological systems built on someone’s absolute certainty that God had given them a private key to understanding. And worse, they all claim the same Scripture as an authority. Often, dialoguing with such people, becomes a problem of me quoting my verses, them quoting theirs.

Verses versus verses (to quote Dr. John Bergsma).

The apostles, being pastors of real churches full of real people, saw this danger clearly. And rather than leaving us with a vague “just pray about it,” they gave us specific, testable boundaries.

Think of these as guardrails on a mountain road. They don’t limit where you’re going; they keep you from going over the cliff.

Here are three of them, and they work together.

Guardrail One: The Filter of What Has Already Been Taught

The first thing the New Testament asks us to check is whether our new insight actually harmonizes with the old, established teaching of the Church.

Saint Paul, writing to his protégé Timothy, said, “Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us“ (2 Timothy 1:13-14).

Notice something subtle but powerful in Paul’s language. He calls the apostolic teaching a “standard” and a “good treasure.” He describes the Holy Spirit’s role as helping us guard that treasure, not invent new versions of it.

The Spirit is not in the business of contradicting Himself. What He revealed publicly through the apostles will never be undone by what He whispers privately to you or me.

Paul was even more emphatic in Galatians, where false teachers were peddling new spiritual claims: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed!” (Galatians 1:8).

Paul is saying that even an overwhelming supernatural experience, even an angelic visitation, must be rejected if it contradicts what the Church has already received.

This is stunning humility on Paul’s part. He is essentially saying, “Don’t trust me either, if I ever change the message.” The apostolic deposit stands over every subsequent claim, including our own moments of prayerful certainty.

For the ordinary person, the common Christian like you and me, this means something practical: when a verse suddenly “speaks” to you in a way that contradicts what Christians have consistently believed for two thousand years, the burden of proof falls heavily on your new interpretation, not on the ancient consensus.

Guardrail Two: Scripture Was Never Meant to Be a Private Message

The second guardrail may be the most counter-cultural for modern readers. We tend to prize the personal, the individual, the intimate. And there is a place for personal prayer and personal reading of Scripture, thank God.

But Scripture itself resists being reduced to a private text message from heaven.

Saint Peter wrote this remarkable warning: “First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:20-21).

Notice Peter’s logic. The reasoning goes something like this: Scripture didn’t come from any single individual acting alone. It came through a whole community of prophets, apostles, and inspired writers over centuries, all “moved by the Holy Spirit.” Therefore, the interpretation of Scripture also isn’t the property of any single individual acting alone.

The book that was given corporately must be understood corporately.

This doesn’t mean you can’t read the Bible by yourself. Of course you can and should. But it means that when you interpret what you read, your understanding must be tethered to the community that received it.

You are joining a two-thousand-year conversation, not starting a new one.

There’s a wonderful humility built into this. When I read a difficult passage and think I understand it, I ought to ask: “Have Christians before me read this the same way? Or am I the first person in history to notice this brilliant insight?” If it’s the latter, chances are overwhelming that I’m the one who has misunderstood, not that everyone before me missed it.

Saint Vincent of Lérins, writing in the fifth century, gave a famous rule for testing interpretations. He said we should hold what has been believed “everywhere, always, and by all” (Commonitorium, chapter 2). That’s not a bad instinct. The wilder and more novel our interpretation, the more suspicious we should be of it.

Subscribe now

Guardrail Three: The Command to Test

The third guardrail is perhaps the most straightforward. The Bible simply commands us not to accept spiritual impressions uncritically.

Saint John wrote: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1).

This verse is worth memorizing. “Do not believe every spirit.” John does not say every spiritual impression is demonic or false. But he refuses to give a blanket endorsement to inner experiences. Test them. Try them. Examine them.

And what is the test? John tells us just a few verses later: “We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us, and whoever is not from God does not listen to us. From this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error” (1 John 4:6).

The test, according to John, is whether a spiritual impression submits itself to the apostolic teaching.

Not to my feelings. Not to my reasoning. Not to my personal history. Not to a denominational statement of faith.

To the deposit of faith handed down from the apostles. If my inner sense of certainty conflicts with what the apostles taught, my certainty is wrong.

Why This Is Actually Good News

At first glance, these guardrails might feel restrictive, even oppressive. Doesn’t this take the joy out of personal prayer with Scripture?

Not at all. In fact, these boundaries are profoundly liberating for several reasons.

First, they free us from the exhausting burden of having to be theological pioneers. You don’t have to figure out Christianity from scratch. Wiser people than you or I have already done the heavy lifting, generation after generation, and the Holy Spirit has been guiding that process.

Second, they protect us from the tyranny of our own moods. Have you ever noticed how differently a passage of Scripture strikes you when you’re anxious versus when you’re at peace? When you’re angry versus when you’re forgiving? If we made every fleeting impression the definitive word from God, we would be blown about by every emotional wind. The guardrails ground us in something more stable than our psychological weather.

Third, and most beautifully, they connect us to the whole Body of Christ across time and space. When I read the Bible with the mind of the Church, I am praying alongside Augustine and Aquinas, alongside Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, alongside my grandmother and the persecuted Christian on the other side of the world.

I am not alone with my Bible. I am part of a great chorus.

When we look at it this way, we begin to see one of the great tragedies of our modern denominational age.

By fracturing the church into countless competing factions, it has placed an incredibly heavy, unfair burden directly on the shoulders of the ordinary believer.

Essentially, the modern landscape forces every single Christian to become an independent arm-chair theologian.

We are left on our own to sort through a dizzying maze of thousands of competing interpretations, conflicting doctrinal statements, and rival traditions, trying to guess which single one got it “right”—even as every single group claims to be interpreting the exact same Scripture under the guidance of the exact same Spirit.

This hyper-individualistic sorting process feels entirely foreign to the New Testament. Can this exhausting theological guessing game really be what Jesus intended?

In John 10, He spoke beautifully of a reality where there would be “one flock and one shepherd” (John 10:16), a picture of unified safety, not fragmented confusion. After the resurrection, Jesus pulls Peter aside and asks him three times, “Do you love me?” Peter answers affirmatively each time, and Jesus’ response? “Feed my sheep... tend my lambs...”
Jesus entrusted his singular flock to Peter, a flock that in John 10 he’d indicated would include sheep not yet of this fold, and knowing He was about to ascend into Heaven, he didn’t leave the faith to flounder, to be like “sheep without a shepherd.” He entrusted Peter, specifically, and the Apostles following his leadership, to be His shepherding presence in the world.

In His high priestly prayer in John 17, He prayed with absolute urgency for His followers: “that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me, and I in you” (John 17:21), specifying that the Holy Spirit would “sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17).

Jesus did not pray for a thousand versions of the truth for us to pick through alone in our living rooms. He left us a corporate faith, anchored in a visible, historical community. When we throw out the shared, ancient memory of the Church, we don’t find spiritual freedom—we just inherit the crushing weight of having to reinvent the wheel by ourselves, never with any real certainty that we’ve landed in the right spot.

Living This Out

So where do we go from here? I could give you an answer, tell you to become Catholic. But I know many of my readers are at different places on their journeys, and that might not be what you’re ready for yet, so I’m going to give you a few practical “starting points.”

Read Scripture with humility, alongside good commentaries, and the writings of the fathers of our faith who’ve gone before us. You don’t need to become a scholar, but consulting how the Church has historically read a passage is enormously helpful. It anchors your reading in the great tradition rather than in your own head. I recommend

https://catenabible.com/

It’s a pretty awesome site. With every verse in the Bible, you can click on it, and it immediately brings up several, sometimes dozens, of interactions with that very same verse by Christians throughout history, especially from the first few centuries of Christianity.

When something strikes you powerfully in prayer, hold it lightly for a while. Don’t act on it immediately. Sleep on it. Bring it to wise counsel, people with a mature and learned faith that has proven itself through the fruit of their lives. Ask whether it aligns with the pattern of sound teaching. Test what even they say with the wisdom of history, i.e. using the website above and other sources. Real guidance from God usually holds up under scrutiny.

Be suspicious of interpretations that flatter you. If a passage suddenly seems to justify exactly what you already wanted to do, that’s a red flag, not a green light. The Holy Spirit is a comforter, but He is also a purifier who often tells us things we would rather not hear. Avoid the tendency to go to the Bible looking to justify whatever doctrine, or answer, you are hoping to find. The truth is, if I’m looking to justify myself, what I already think or want to believe, I can always find a way to interpret the Bible to make it fit my preconceptions. Name your prejudices, your assumptions, where they came from, and be willing to admit when you were wrong. There’s something incredibly freeing about this. Your holiness consists less in your rightness than it does in obedience—Christ’s obedience above all, but also the obedience that is ours when we take up our cross and follow.

Distrust the interpretation that isolates you. If your reading of Scripture is pushing you away from the community of believers, away from historic Christian teaching, into a private world where only you and a few others really “get it,” something has almost certainly gone wrong.

Pray for the Spirit’s illumination, but don’t confuse illumination with novelty. The Spirit shines light on truth already given. He promised to guide the Church into all truth, and the individual is meant to be guided within that community.

There is such a thing as “private revelation,” an illumination, a whisper from God, a vision in some instances, where God has a message that’s meant for the individual. These are not meant to be binding on everyone, and will not conflict with the truth God has revealed to the Church as a whole.

I’ve seen this happen in a way that’s destructive. The Church is gathering to make a decision over some matter (sometimes significant, sometimes insignificant) and one person, thinking the Holy Spirit told them the truth, speaks up and says, “God told me...”

This can be problematic for several reasons. First, it tends to have the function of trying to squelch all deliberation or wisdom of the community for the sake of the individual’s “revelation” from God. It also puts the rest of the community in the awkward position of having to respond, because this person will invariably believe that if they decide differently, they are disobeying God, Himself. Such things can also, subtly but insidiously, fuel pride. Not to mention, what is the right move when someone else stands up and says, “Well, God told me...”?

This is often the genesis of schisms in congregations and, historically, has fueled fracturing in denominations.

And sometimes, as ridiculous as it sounds, it’s been over, “God told me that we should have red carpet in the sanctuary” vs. “God told me that we should have blue.” Though, even more seriously, it’s often happened over doctrinal matters as well.

God does not manufacture new doctrinal truths just for you, but He may lead you personally in this way, or that way, toward sound advice, away from danger, and the like.

The great paradox is this: the more we submit our private impressions to these guardrails, the more freely and deeply the Holy Spirit can actually speak to us through Scripture. Discipline creates space for real intimacy. The one who tests the spirits, guards the deposit, and reads with the Church will find, over time, that his radar becomes remarkably reliable. And when the Spirit truly does whisper, we will have the trained ears to hear Him.

I prefer Latin over English. I appreciate ornate vestments, Gregorian chant, incense, and when the bells aren’t ringing at the consecration something feels a little “off.” Given the choice, I’ll attend a reverent Mass over one that’s stripped down, and a little too casual. I am quite blessed to have a priest who offers what remains the most reverent Novus Ordo I’ve yet to attend. I am grateful for that, more than I can express.

So don’t let this post feel like it’s a devaluating of tradition. It isn’t.

There is good reason to prefer tradition over innovation. There is, indeed, a trap in innovation, for with it we are often seeking the same thing some who cling inordinately to tradition do—a consolation, an experience, something that “works for me.”

Sometimes we think “tradition” is all about liturgies, rituals, smells and bells. In reality, even a praise band on a stage can be a tradition, too. Just a much newer one. We all have them. Traditions are, in a sense, inescapable. Some are objectively better than others, but even the best of them are not immune from becoming more than they were ever intended to be.

In Matthew 15, Jesus warns that simply because something has “tradition” to it does not rescue someone from the trap of novelty, because it is the condition of the heart that informs every practice, be it old or new.

If one’s love for tradition (small “t”) causes you to neglect the heart of the commandments, the love of neighbor, obedience to the magisterium, the substance of Jesus’ teaching, then that tradition has ceased to be a handmaid of the truth, but a warden for the prison of pride, ego, and whatever other sin might take root among the garden where the Lord sows His seeds of truth and virtue.

Have you ever watched someone polish silver, or have you done it yourself for your most precious wares? There is a particular satisfaction in the ritual. The soft cloth, the slow circular motions, the gleam that emerges from beneath tarnish.

But imagine a household where the silver is polished daily to perfection while the children go unfed, where the master of the house berates his wife for a smudge on the teapot while ignoring her tears.

The silver, in itself, is beautiful. The care given to it is not, in itself, wrong.

But something has become monstrously disordered. The polish has become more precious than the person.

This is, in miniature, the confrontation we witness in Matthew 15. The Pharisees come to Jesus with what seems, on its surface, a legitimate religious concern. “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat” (Matthew 15:2, NRSV-2CE).

They are not asking about hygiene. The washing they refer to (Greek: nipsontai, from niptō) was a ceremonial ablution codified in the oral traditions of the rabbis, a practice believed to preserve ritual purity before meals. It was, in its origin, a well-intentioned extension of the priestly purity laws to the ordinary Israelite home, a way of making every table a kind of altar and every meal sacred.

There is something admirable in that impulse. Truly. The desire to sanctify the ordinary, to bring the sacred into the mundane, to consecrate even a common meal. These are holy longings. And yet Jesus responds not with approval but with chastisement.

The Sharpness of the Question

Jesus does not answer their question. He counters with His own: “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?” (Matthew 15:3). Notice the parallel construction.

They asked why His disciples break “the tradition of the elders.” He asks why they break “the commandment of God.”

The elevation is deliberate. He is telling them that they have inverted the hierarchy of goods.

He then provides an example that would have stung: the practice of Corban (Mark preserves the Aramaic term in his parallel account). A man could dedicate resources to the Temple in such a way that they were technically “given to God,” and thereby unavailable to support his aging parents. The tradition had created a mechanism by which one could appear devout while violating the fourth commandment.

The very rules meant to make one holier became the loophole through which genuine obedience slipped.

Then comes the diagnosis, quoted from Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines” (Matthew 15:8–9, quoting Isaiah 29:13).

The word “vain” here means empty, fruitless, or without purpose. It is the same root word, in the Septuagint (the Greek version of the Old Testament) translated as “vanity” in Ecclesiastes.

Their worship is not merely inadequate; it is hollow. It produces nothing. The forms remain but the substance has fled.

The Beauty That Becomes an Idol

There is a peculiar temptation for those of us (like me) who love beauty, tradition, and reverence. It is subtle because it wears the vestments of piety. And precisely because it wears these garments, it can hide within itself a corruption that a more obvious sin could never conceal.

The temptation is this: to love the forms of holiness more than the substance of it.

To love the smell of incense more than the God to whom it rises. To love the precision of the liturgy more than the neighbor beside us in the pew.

C.S. Lewis observed in The Screwtape Letters that the devil is delighted when a Christian becomes so absorbed in the question of whether the parish uses the “right” prayers or the “right” music that he ceases actually to pray. The demon is not troubled by our aesthetic preferences; he is delighted by them when they become our chief concern.

This does not mean beauty is bad. God forbid. Beauty is one of the transcendentals, along with truth and goodness, by which we ascend to God. “...whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Philippians 4:8).

Indeed, the eye is a doorway to the soul, and that what is beautiful can draw us toward what is good.

But every good can be curved inward. Even prayer can become vanity if it is done to be seen and for the sake of the praises of men. Even fasting can become vainglory if it is displayed.

Even orthodoxy can become idolatry if it is loved for the sake of being right rather than for the sake of the God who is Truth.

Subscribe now

What Actually Defiles

Jesus goes on to explain to the crowd, and later more fully to His disciples, what actually defiles a person. “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles” (Matthew 15:11). And later: “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile” (Matthew 15:18–20).

In Semitic thought, the heart is not merely the seat of emotion but the whole interior orientation of the person: the will, the intellect, the affections, and one’s intentions. It is the deepest self. And it is from there, not from what we touch or eat or fail to ritually cleanse, that the true pollution spews.

The tragedy of the Pharisees is not that they cared about religious practice.

It is that they had made the outer the measure of the inner, when in fact the inner is the source of the outer. They were scrubbing the outside of a cup while the inside grew filthy. And they called it holiness.

The Danger of Loving Good Things Wrongly

It is possible to sin by loving good things in the wrong way. St. Augustine wrote in the Confessions about how his soul had loved created things instead of the Creator, and how these loves, though not evil in themselves, had disordered his life.

The problem was not the goods; the problem was the disorder.

Tradition is a good. Beauty is a good. Reverence is a good. But when any of these becomes the chief good—when the branch is loved more than the vine that gives it life—then it is like drinking from a well-polished cup full of filth and germs.

The one who reveres improperly becomes proud of his reverence. The one who loves tradition improperly becomes contemptuous of those who do not share his particular expression of it. The one who cherishes beauty improperly becomes snobbish in such a way that he fails to love those who do not “measure up” to such a standard.

And this is where schism lives, division in the body of Christ. In a quiet inversion of loves, where something good is loved so exclusively that it must be pried away from the whole to be preserved intact.

But once pried away, it dies.

A branch broken from the vine can be beautiful for a moment, but it withers.

What Is Truly Weightier

There is a striking passage later in Matthew where Jesus, again confronting the scribes and Pharisees, says: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others” (Matthew 23:23).

Notice the final clause. He does not say, “Stop tithing your herbs.” He says, “Don’t neglect the weightier things.” Both are to be practiced. But the priority must be right.

This is the calibration we are called to. Not a rejection of the forms, but a right ordering of them—where reverence serves love, where tradition serves truth, where beauty serves the God who is Beauty itself.

Practical Wisdom for the Interior Life

How do we live this? A few suggestions, offered in the spirit of a fellow pilgrim rather than a physician:

First, examine what you defend most fiercely. Notice the things that make you rise up in indignation. Are they violations of charity, or violations of external forms? When someone offends against justice or mercy, do you feel the same fire as when someone offends against your favored practice, liturgy, or tradition? If the second fire is hotter than the first, there is something to bring to prayer, and probably to confession.

Second, practice inward reverence when outward reverence fails. When you find yourself in a church where the “style” or liturgy pains you, when the music grates, is poorly done, the wrong songs are chosen, the homily disappoints, or the reverence and manner of worship of others seems lacking, do not spend that hour cataloging grievances. Offer the discomfort as prayer—a reparation in love offered for the sake of those same people. Let the irritation become intercession. This is a discipline of the heart that no external reform can accomplish.

Third, love the hidden neighbor more than the visible tradition. The person sitting next to you—distracted, perhaps improperly dressed, perhaps saying the wrong words at the wrong moments—is a soul for whom Christ died. The parent who is not keeping their children quite enough in the service should not be a source of frustration. Do not sit there and fume about how the parents must be neglecting proper discipline in the home. You don’t know their situation. Instead, love them without judgment. Say a short, but silent prayer for them in your heart. Such is worth more than a thousand perfect rubrics or gestures.

Fourth, remember that the heart is the altar. Everything else is scaffolding in the temple that is the body. The scaffolding matters, sometimes greatly, but only because there is an altar within. If the outer forms are meticulous and the inner altar is cold, then Isaiah’s words apply: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me” (Isaiah 29:13).

Fifth, ask often for the grace to be corrected. Pride is the sin closest to holiness, which is why the most religious and devout people are so often the most vulnerable to it. Beg God, daily, for the grace to see where your love has curved inward. Where even your most pious or worshipful expressions have been directed not to He alone who is worthy of such piety and honor, but toward the ego in service of pride.

The Deeper Beauty

The most beautiful thing in Matthew 15 is the beauty of the God who loves us enough to tell us the truth about ourselves. Jesus does not flatter the Pharisees. He does not soften the diagnosis. He loves them enough to expose the sickness, because only what is exposed can be healed.

This is the beauty we should love above all others. Not the beauty of forms preserved, but the beauty of a heart made honest before God. Not the beauty of tradition maintained for its own sake, but the beauty of a soul that God is purifying to lead it in the way of life everlasting.

“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23–24).

Let this be the prayer. Let this be the polish that matters. And all the rest, the traditions, the reverence, the beauty that we rightly love, the manner of worship we most desire, will find their proper place: not as our masters, but as the loving servants of a heart set entirely upon God.

What if He was there the whole time?

More than three hundred years ago, a lay brother named Nicholas Herman, better known to us as Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, spent nearly the entirety of his religious life washing pots in the kitchen of a Carmelite monastery in Paris. He had been a soldier, then a footman, and by his own account, “a great awkward fellow who broke everything.” Yet this humble, limping man discovered something that theologians spend lifetimes trying to articulate:

God is not somewhere we go. God is Someone with whom we live.

And the kitchen, it turns out, can be as holy as the sanctuary.

The practice of the presence of God is not a technique. It is not a spiritual accomplishment we achieve after years of striving toward it, perfecting our focus, learning all the right methods. It is, quite simply, the gentle turning of the heart toward the One who has never left us.

The God Who Is Always Here

Before we speak of practicing His presence, we must remember that the presence is already a fact. God’s nearness is not something we conjure. It is something we consent to notice.

The Psalmist put it this wayl:

“Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast” (Psalm 139:7-10).

Saint Paul, standing on the Areopagus in Athens, put it in terms that almost sound intimate if you really meditate on them:

“In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

Notice the prepositions. Not near Him. Not beside Him.

In Him.

We are like fish who ask where the ocean is, or birds who wonder where they might find the sky.

This is the great truth beneath every practice of the presence of God: we do not go to find Him. We wake up to the fact that He has been holding us all along. As Saint Augustine confessed to the Lord, “You were within me, but I was outside” (Confessions X.27).

Brother Lawrence and the Sanctuary of Pots and Pans

Brother Lawrence’s little book, The Practice of the Presence of God, is a collection of his letters and conversations. It was never meant to be published. Perhaps that is part of its power. There is no artifice in it, only the plainspoken wisdom of a man who had learned to love God among the onions and the eggs.

“Our sanctification does not depend on us switching from one work to another. Instead, it requires us to do for God’s sake what we ordinarily do for our own... I hold that there is no more excellent means for me to draw close to God than to perform the ordinary tasks prescribed to me... My task is to purify them, as much as I can, from all human motivations, so that I might perform them for the pure love of God. It is a great mistake to believe that the time of prayer should be different from other times. Our obligation is strictly the same in all cases: to be united to God through our action, when we are called to be active, and to be united to him through prayer, during the time of prayer.” (The Practice of the Presence of God, Fourth Conversation).

What was his secret? He had made a simple resolution: he would do everything, however small, for the love of God. He would pick up a piece of straw from the floor for love of God. He would flip an omelet for love of God. And in doing so, he began to sense God’s presence not as a visitor, but as a constant companion at his side.

This is the essence of the practice. It is not the emptying of the mind, nor the achievement of some rarified mystical state. It is a loving attentiveness, a gentle habit of the heart that keeps turning back, again and again, to the God who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.

Jesus Himself invites us into this kind of continual communion:

“Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me” (John 15:4).

The Greek verb menō, translated “abide,” means to remain, to dwell, to make one’s home. This is not a suggestion for a spiritual elite. It is the invitation extended to every branch on the Vine.

The Carmelite Way: Elijah’s Fire and Teresa’s Interior Castle

Brother Lawrence stood in a long lineage of Carmelite spirituality that traces its roots, symbolically, back to the prophet Elijah on Mount Carmel. Elijah’s cry, ”As the LORD the God of Israel lives, before whom I stand” (1 Kings 17:1), became a kind of motto for the Order. To stand before the living God, always, in every moment.

Saint Teresa of Ávila described prayer as “nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us” (The Book of Her Life, Chapter 8). Notice that she does not describe it as a duty or a ritual. It is friendship. And what do friends do? They spend time together. They think of one another. They speak often, even about small things.

Teresa taught her sisters to find God within themselves. In The Interior Castle, she describes the soul as a magnificent dwelling with many rooms, and at the very center, the King Himself waits for us. To practice His presence is to learn the path back to that innermost room, no matter where our day takes us.

Her friend and fellow reformer, Saint John of the Cross, understood that this presence is often hidden, veiled, dark to our senses. “Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior” (Isaiah 45:15). Yet John insists that the hiding is itself a grace.

God dwells “in the innermost being of the soul” (The Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 1), and even when we do not feel Him, He is there, sustaining us in existence. As such, it is (contrary to common intuition) precisely those moments when God feels the most distant that He is often doing His greatest work in our soul.

I’ve known many people through the years who seemed to have great “worship experiences,” but the seemed to only know God’s presence when the music was just right, when the emotions stirred, after hearing a powerful sermon. The rest of their lives were often indiscernible from the lives of anyone else. Often, if the music changed, the right songs that they liked weren’t chosen for worship, they’d feel like worship was “off” that day, and if it happened too many times, they’d start shopping for different churches, all in pursuit of that “spiritual high,” that feeling, that same “worship experience” that moved them emotionally.

St. John of the Cross is, perhaps, the greatest antidote for this kind of Christian life. It’s not that he dismisses such experiences as trivial, necessarily. But he recognizes that the consolation is not the Christ. The gift is not the same thing as the Giver. That the love of God is not primarily a feeling, but an ever-present reality that persists even when (especially when) the feelings aren’t there at all.

You could put it this way. It means that God moves as much among the pots and the pans as He does in music, or in our prayers, or in whatever experiences we’ve called our “God time,” imagining that that was the time not merely set aside for Him, but the time we tried to contain Him within.

It is precisely when God feels the most distant that we have the greatest opportunity in faith to turn back to Him in the kind of love that really endures. The kind of love that doesn’t wait to be “felt,” but engages the beloved because it has determined to cling to Him, as much in the “dull” and “mundane” moments as life as in the spiritual highs.

This is the secret of practicing the presence of God. It’s really at the very heart of spiritual maturity. It’s how we move form feeding on the “milk” of feelings and experiences and consolations, from the “butterflies” of immature love, to the solid food of every moment, to the depth of a matured love that endures and thrives the most precisely when it seems to darkest, when life is the hardest, or even when life is just, plain, dull.

And something strange starts to happen. When we stop seeking the consolations and the experiences, the feelings of God’s presence, we begin to experience God’s presence in a way far more potent, far more intimate, far more transformative—and dare I say, from personal experience, more rapturous—than when our spiritual life was wedded to particular worship experiences, particular feelings elicited in prayer, a stirring of the heart on a retreat or at a conference, and the like.

It is as St. John of the Cross put it, like this. “Now that I least desire them, I have them all without desire.” He says the same when it comes to worldly/earthly goods and also spiritual goods/experiences/consolations. It is precisely by letting go to the things we’re attached to, even good and spiritual things, that we receive all we’re grasping at in a deeper, more intimate, more profound and life-changing way.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who you know if you read me much, as much as the previous Carmelite saints mentioned above, has had a profound impact on my own spiritual life. I share her insights often, frankly, because for years as a Lutheran pastor, an academic, and the like, I’d never really understood prayer. These three saints, above all, were those who once I read their writings, really taught me how to pray like a real Christian. Or to put it better, how to live every moment of my life in the practice of the presence of God.

Thérèse’s “Little Way” is often summarized as “doing small things with great love”—a beautiful sentiment later popularized by Mother Teresa of Calcutta, but one that misses the profound theological depth of Thérèse’s actual vision.

Thérèse did not view her path as a self-reliant striving to do small tasks perfectly.

Instead, her “little way” was a way of spiritual childhood, absolute confidence, and radical surrender. Recognizing her own profound littleness and her inability to climb the rough stairway of perfection by her own strength, she threw herself entirely upon the mercy of God, comparing the arms of Jesus to an “elevator” that would lift her to sanctity. For Thérèse, practicing the presence of God meant remaining empty-handed and trusting completely that His grace is enough, it was an sure confidence in His Love that no matter what weaknesses she had, even if she fell into sin, she knew she could run back into those arms in an instant and would be lifted to heights that no amount of “climbing” could ever achieve. The little way is a way where our very weakness becomes the canvas for God’s strength. It was an insight she gleaned, chiefly, from St. Paul who wrote, “when I am weak, He is strong” (2 Cor 12:9-10).

“When pondering how much she desired to emulate the saints in history who evangelized the world, the great martyrs, the teachers of the church, but found herself instead a cloistered nun invisible to the rest of the world, “Greatness,” Thérèse wrote,”is not available to me... I must become still less.”

What would the beauty of a field be if it were filled with roses only, she observed in her opening image of her autobiography, but not also the little flowers? Thus, it is these little flowers, as much as the roses, that God delights in, and holds to his heart.

Her practice was less about the greatness of our actions and entirely about the greatness of the trust with which we abandon ourselves to Him in the midst of the mundane.

The practice of the presence of God is not the private property of Carmel. Saint Benedict, centuries earlier, exhorted his monks to “prefer nothing whatever to Christ” (Rule of Saint Benedict, Chapter 72). Saint Francis de Sales, writing for laypeople immersed in the world, taught in his Introduction to the Devout Life that “an hour’s meditation” in the morning could sanctify an entire day, if only we remembered to keep “recollecting” ourselves in God’s presence throughout our work.

The desert fathers spoke of this ceaseless mindfulness of God as nepsis, watchfulness. Saint Paul commanded it plainly: “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). How can such a command be possible? Only if prayer is more than words. Only if prayer becomes, at last, a way of being.

Practicing the Presence in the Ordinary Day

So how do we begin? Not with grand resolutions or elaborate methods. Brother Lawrence would be the first to tell us that the practice is simple, though not always easy.

First, make a morning offering. Before your feet hit the floor, before you check your phone, whisper something like: “Lord, I offer You this day, all its work and rest, its joys and its trials, for love of You.” This one small act reframes everything that follows.

Second, cultivate short, frequent turnings of the heart. Brother Lawrence called these little conversations with God “acts of the presence.” A glance toward Heaven while at the sink. A silent “I love You” while waiting at a red light. A whispered “Jesus, help me” before a difficult conversation. These need not be long. They need only be sincere. As Brother Lawrence put it, “He does not ask much of us: a little remembrance from time to time, a small act of adoration, at times asking Him for His grace, sometimes offering Him your sufferings, at other times asking Him for the graces He has grated you and grants you in the midst of your labors...There is no need to cry out loudly for this. He is nearer to us than we imagine. To be with God, we do not need to always be in church. We can make our heart an oratory and there withdraw from time to time to converse with Him genly, humbly, and lovingly.” (The Practice of the Presence of God, Fourth Letter).

Third, do your work for love. Whatever your work may be, offer it. Saint Paul writes, “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17). Even the most tedious task becomes prayer when done in this spirit.

Fourth, expect distraction, and return gently. Do not scold yourself when you forget. The very moment you notice that you have forgotten Him is itself a moment of remembering Him. Give thanks that your distraction has afforded you an opportunity to turn to Him, willfully, in love! Return quietly, without drama. Saint Francis de Sales advised his directees to bring back their wandering hearts “quietly and tranquilly, a thousand times a day if need be” (Introduction to the Devout Life, Part II, Chapter 9).

Fifth, end the day with gratitude. Before sleep, look back over the day. Where did you sense His presence? Where did you miss Him? Thank Him for both. The missing itself becomes an invitation to a deeper practice tomorrow.

Subscribe now

The Fruit of the Practice

Something quiet begins to happen when we live this way. The dividing wall between “sacred” and “secular” time begins to crumble. The kitchen becomes a chapel. The commute becomes a cloister. The difficult coworker becomes a face through which Christ waits to be loved. “The kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21), Jesus said, and we begin, at last, to believe Him.

Brother Lawrence lived this way for decades. Toward the end of his life, he wrote, “I do not know what God has in store for me, but I have such great peace of heart that I fear nothing. What could I fear when I am with him? I keep myself in his presence as much as I can. May He be blessed in all things. Amen.” (The Practice of the Presence of God, Sixth Letter).

He had discovered what all the saints discover in the end. God is not a subject to be studied or a destination to be reached. He is a Presence to be loved. And He has been in the kitchen the whole time, waiting for us to notice.

Tonight, when the dishes are stacked in the sink again, perhaps we might pause for just a moment. Perhaps we might whisper, “Lord, You are here. I love you.” And in that whisper, discover that He has been answering us, that He has been with us, all along.